I just began reading Mark Haddon’s The Red House. Haddon, you might remember, is the author of the highly acclaimed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and the even more brilliant (in my opinion) A Spot of Bother. Haddon is, I believe, one of the best fiction writer’s out there today. I only got three sentences in to The Red House before I had to stop to read and reread and gush over a particular sentence, which is so finely crafted it almost makes me want to just give up writing because I will never be able to write anything this good.

“Seventy miles per hour, the train unzips the fields.”

Boo-yah!

Allow me, if you will, to unpack the beauty of this one sentence. There is, of course, the metaphor in here of a train, which, when combined with its tracks, looks like a zipper connecting the fields on either side. A stunningly apt metaphor, I think. Yes! That is exactly what trains look like.

But a metaphor is only as good as its connotations. What does the metaphor of a train as a zipper add to the text, you might ask. The image of a train as a zipper, unzipping (and not, it is important to note, rezipping) the world around it brings along subtle ideas of something burgeoning beneath the surface, something hidden that is about to be revealed. A pretty perfect opening to a novel, don’t you think?

But this sentence is brilliant for reasons beyond the fitting metaphor it couriers to the reader. This sentence is so elegant, so concise and economic in its language choices that the elegance of the metaphor can shine through. Many novice writers, or even decent but not brilliant ones, would have felt the need to expand the metaphor, to build on it or linger in it a bit longer to make sure the reader really gets it, notices how brilliant the metaphor’s creator is.

Another writer might have written, “The train looks like a zipper, its tracks the zipper’s treads. Quickly, it zooms across the tracks, unfurling the fields on either side,” or something along those lines. But what would that writer have added, for all those extra words? Fourteen extra words—more than twice the length of the original sentence—and no new meaning expressed. Yes, the reader is for sure going to notice the metaphor, but at what cost?

Beside the fact that it’s wordy, and unnecessary wordiness always feels self-indulgent to me, the new sentence is less subtle. Where the original sentence drops the metaphor on the reader and then lets the reader decode it and tease out the subtext, the new sentence tries to force the meaning on you: Look here! A metaphor about things becoming unfurled! That’s what’s going to happen in this novel! (That’s right, this other writer probably likes to use exclamation points.)

In spite of all these newly added words, the new sentence is also less exact. Where the original sentence just stated, explicitly and in four words, the exact speed the train is going, the new sentence rambles around the topic but never gets further than to tell us it’s going “quickly.” This other writer probably thinks the meandering sentences are more “poetic,” but really, they’re just verbose and imprecise.

And while we’re on the topic, should we point out that there are no adverbs in the original sentence? No. Of course there aren’t. Because expert writers rarely use adverbs. I know, I know. I used a lot of adverbs when I was first starting out too. I peppered my sentences with “quietly”s and “firmly”s and “sheepishly”s, and so on. There are a lot of reasons why novice writers overuse adverbs, and there are a lot of reasons why proficient writers don’t, but the main reason adverbs are rarely (I won’t say never, just rarely—and isn’t it funny that “rarely” is itself an adverb?) a good idea is exemplified in these new, sloppy sentences.

How quick is “quickly”? What does this adverb add that we wouldn’t have already assumed (aren’t trains usually driving quickly? And if you want to specify the speed, why not just offer the exact miles per hour?) The writer has included this adverb not because it adds anything to the text but because (most likely) he or she believes the sentence needs more words to read like the texts he or she studied in high school—you know, those canonical works, from back when writers got paid by the word. Those are the texts this writer believes he or she is meant to be emulating, not the ones that are actually, you know, GETTING PUBLISHED TODAY.

But enough ranting about bad writing. Let’s visit once more, shall we, the beauty of Haddon’s words? I’ll give you the sentences that come before and those that follow, and if you like them (and I know you will), I’ll remind you the book is called The Red House by Mark Haddon. Go read it for yourself. Following are the first six lines from the novel:

“Cooling towers and sewage farms. Finstock, Charlbury, Ascott-under-Wychwood. Seventy miles per hour, the train unzips the fields. Two gun-gray lines beside the river’s meander. Flashes of sun on the hammered metal. Something of steam about it, even now.”

BAM!

Okay, time to really get into the meat of our novellas: the rising action. Step four directs you to write several chapters (two to four) and is the same for all tracks because we should be reaching a point in the drafting process where the story is taking control of itself. The story itself will direct you where to go. All you have to do is let it. By the end of this step, you'll be well over halfway through your novella and things will be really cooking, and the climax will be in sight.

All Tracks, Step 4

Write two to four chapters in which the results of the previous chapter’s inciting incident unfold and escalate. Since we will spend two to four chapters in the rising action of the story before we reach the story’s climax, you don’t need to rush things. The rising action will pick up speed naturally as you progress through these chapters.

Imagine the chapters of rising action as a snowball rolling down a hill. As the snowball rolls, it picks up more and more snow, getting larger and more out of control as it goes along. By the time the snowball reaches the bottom of the hill (the climax of the story), there should be a sense of inevitability to the impending crash of the snowball against whatever is waiting at the bottom of the hill.

Requirements:

1.      Each chapter must be 10-30 pages long.

2.      Set aside any plans you have already developed for the story’s ending. You should let the story unfold organically, not try to steer it in a particular direction. This can be difficult if your initial idea for the story came with an ending, but you absolutely MUST let go of any ideas for an ending, or the story will run the risk of feeling contrived. I PROMISE you, however this story ultimately ends, it will be the right ending for the story.

3.      Begin by rereading what you have so far in the story: your character profile(s) and the set-up and inciting event chapters. If it helps, you can try jotting some notes summarizing the important details and events you have to work with. This will help you generate ideas for where the story should go next, and if you get stuck, you can revisit these notes to get ideas.

4.      Now, write the first scene of the first rising action chapter. To write this scene, you only need to revisit what happened at the end of your inciting event chapter. What would be the organic next step in this story? Where will this character go, what will he or she do next, after what happened in the previous chapter?

5.      From there, you will work one scene at a time, using the most recent scene that you wrote to guide you into the action of the next scene. Don’t worry about where the story is headed. Just ask yourself, “Now that X happened, what happens now?” Each scene will lead you to the next, and as things pick up speed and begin to really snowball, you will reach a point where the climax will reveal itself—whatever it is that is waiting at the bottom of that hill will suddenly become visible, and the snowball will be headed right for it.

Since you are not steering the story in any particular direction, it will feel as though you are heading into an abyss, with only enough light to illuminate what is directly in front of you. Don’t panic. That’s the way it should feel. Embrace the not knowing. Remember that writing is not about the destination, but the journey (as trite as it sounds).

This summer, I read what is one of the best memoirs I’ve ever come across: Jen Hirt’s Under Glass:The Girl with a Thousand Christmas Trees. I’m prone to hyperbole, I know (people who’ve eaten Chinese food with me know that every crab rangoon I try is “the best” I’ve ever eaten), but this I say with no exaggeration: I LOVED this book.

I’ll tell you why, but first, a disclaimer: Jen is a friend of mine. That isn’t why I love the book, but it’s something you should know. I’ve worked with Jen at Penn State Harrisburg for a year now—she was on the hiring committee that offered me the job. Ever since I met her—actually, since I first read her Pushcart winning essay, “Lores of Last Unicorns,” which my brother had photocopied for me and passed along because, A) he worked with her (I didn’t yet), and B) I’d been obsessed with unicorns as a little girl and had owned and often poured over a particular book, the sequel of a book Jen talks about in detail in the essay—I’d been wanting to read her memoir, but it took me this long to finally get around to it.

I’m sure I was putting it off for a reason: it’s strange to read creative nonfiction by people you know. I suppose it shouldn’t be, with Facebook these days you can learn intimate details about people’s lives that they’ve never told you face to face. Still, a Facebook post is very immediate—they write it, you read it, they assume you read it, and all is well. With a published essay or book, the lines get muddier. Does she know I know these things about her past? Does she want me to know these things? What might have changed in the years between writing these details and their eventual publication?

As a result, I always feel awkward about bringing up that I’ve read a friend’s creative nonfiction. I want people to know I’ve read their books—I’m a firm believer that writers should support each other, and I make sure to buy and read the books written by people I know. Part of that support, too, means telling them the things I liked about their books. This is easy with poets and fellow fiction writers. Less easy, you see, with nonfiction.

So I suppose, on some level, this is my timid attempt at pouring out all my thoughts about this wonderful book, which made me feel so emotional by the end. Hirt’s prose (I’ll call her Hirt from this point forward—Jen is my friend and colleague; Hirt is the author of this amazing book, and though I know the two are the same, it’s difficult to reconcile them in my mind) is elegant and beautiful. I could pull pretty much any sentence out and display it as its own work of art—this is a writer who knows how to write!

Under Glass is at once both a memoir with a single narrative string and a collection of self-sufficient essays. It’s a style I’ve seen attempted but never quite pulled off in fiction. Books like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit fromthe Goon Squad and Tom Rachman’s TheImperfectionists are labeled as novels, though they’re comprised of individual short stories. The idea is that the individual parts work together to create an overall narrative, complete with beginning, middle, and end, as the cliché goes, but I’ve found that, though the individual stories might be excellent, and as a collection of linked stories, I love both of the example books (especially Rachman’s), I can’t get behind the “novel” label for them. The stories don’t work together to create a single narrative string, in my opinion.

But in Under Glass, the essays stand on their own, but they also work together to paint a full picture of both the history of this family business—from inception to destruction to rebirth as an online store with a new name—and Hirt’s connection to it. There is a definite beginning, middle, and end, an overall narrative arc, and ultimately these essays combine to create something much larger than a collection of linked creative nonfiction—there is a whole here that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final essay, which describes Hirt’s grandmother Onalee’s unfinished journal. In her journal, Ony (ah-nee) chronicled the purchase and development of the swatch of land on which Hirt’s grandparents lived for most of their lives. Hirt describes the pages and pages of description of the different plants and trees Ony and her husband Hobart planted, the years of waiting to eventually have the money to build a house, the backyard swimming pool and greenhouse Hirt remembers from her childhood.

Through Ony’s journal, we can piece together the narrative of the family business, too, the ups and downs and eventual grand success of a thriving set of greenhouses. But Ony’s journal ends before the end of the narrative, and Hirt takes it upon herself to chronicle what followed: the demolition of the carefully planted and nurtured trees to make way for parking lots, businesses, the “city.” The controlled burning of the house, used as practice for the local firefighters. The Pier 1 and Famous Footwear that fill the space where the backyard greenhouse and house once lived, which calls to mind the CVS that now stands where the family business greenhouses once flourished.

This final essay, which would be powerful enough on its own, carries that much more force because of the essays that precede it. We know, by this point in the book, about Hirt’s childhood playing and working in the greenhouses. We know about the destruction of the greenhouses, just like we know about the destruction of Hirt’s parents’ marriage, Hirt’s mother’s health. We know that, as a young adult, Hirt found herself more concerned with the potted houseplant her neighbors had left on their porch to die than the vicious fights her neighbors themselves were having with each other (perhaps, the essays when read in conjunction suggest, because the plant is a problem Hirt knows how to handle). We know, too, about the reincarnation of the once named Strongsville Gardens and later, Hirt’s Greenhouse: Hirt’s Gardens, an online store that is, after it all, blossoming in the cutthroat world of e-commerce with Hirt’s brother, Matt, at the helm. We understand, then, the full meaning of Hirt’s final line: “Those woods are no longer here, but they are not too far away.”

I can’t do this book justice by just telling you about it. You should read it for yourself. Never have I so unreservedly wanted to recommend a book by a friend to everyone that knows how to read. Never have I been so in awe of the writing of someone I know. Read it! Read it! This book will not disappoint.

I’m sorry it’s taken me two weeks to come back and post the prompts for the second chapters of our novellas. How are they coming, guys? I’m feeling good about where I’m at with mine. I’ve been working on the one that will be my “track 1” novella of the four I will eventually write. I’ve got the first chapter complete (15 and a half pages) and after writing out these prompts, I have a good idea of what will happen in chapter two.

So anyway, without further delay, here are the chapter two prompts for all four tracks. You’ll note some overlap between some of the prompts. I tried to keep them different enough that if you are, like me, going to write all four and weave them into a single overarching narrative, you should be able to follow the prompts and still have distinct, unique feeling chapters. But yes, I repeated a few components that I thought were essential and/or worth repeating. Feel free to modify, combine, or flat out ignore the prompts. They’re just meant to jog you into motion. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Track 1, Step 3:

Write a chapter in which the inciting incident of the overall story arc occurs. This chapter will serve to set in motion the events that will create the arc of the entire novella.

Requirements:

1.      The chapter must be 10-20 pages long.

2.      The inciting incident in this chapter should be something small and seemingly insignificant to everyone but the main character. Based on what has been established about the character in the previous chapter, however, it should be immediately obvious to the reader why this incident matters to the character.

3.      The incident should occur when the main character is in an environment in which his or her reaction must be guarded (for example, in a public place, at work, with a loved one who would not understand the reaction, etc.).

4.      The chapter must get across the character’s initial physical reaction to the change

a.       What is the first physical thing the character does when he or she learns of the change?

5.      The chapter should hint at the character’s initial emotional reaction to the change

a.       How does this change affect the character’s perceived need?

b.      How might this change affect the character’s actual need?

Track 2, Step 3:

Write a chapter in which the inciting incident of the overall story arc occurs. This chapter will serve to set in motion the events that will create the arc of the entire novella.

Requirements:

1.      The chapter must be 10-20 pages long.

2.      The inciting incident should not appear until the end of the chapter.

3.      The chapter should consist of a series of small, escalating incidents that pave the way for the larger incident that will set the rest of the story into motion.

4.      The chapter should detail the main character’s physical and emotional responses to each escalating incident, but should leave the character’s reaction to the final, inciting incident unstated (the rest of the novella will deal with this reaction, so essentially we’re ending this chapter on a sort of cliffhanger).

Track 3, Step 3:

Write a chapter in which the inciting incident of the overall story arc occurs. This chapter will serve to set in motion the events that will create the arc of the entire novella.

Requirements:

6.      The chapter must be 10-20 pages long.

7.      The inciting incident must adhere to the following requirements:

a.       It should be out of the main character’s control

b.      It should be a large-scale change that affects many people

c.       It should have a particularly significant effect on the main character

(For example, my inciting incident for this track is that a new law is passed that has a particularly significant effect on my main character.)

8.      The character should learn of the change when he or she is in an environment in which his or her reaction must be guarded (for example, in a public place, at work, with a loved one who would not understand the reaction, etc.).

9.      The chapter must get across the character’s initial physical reaction to the change

a.       What is the first physical thing the character does when he or she learns of the change?

10.  The chapter should hint at the character’s initial emotional reaction to the change

a.       How does this change affect the character’s perceived need?

b.      How might this change affect the character’s actual need?

Track 4, Step 3:

Write a chapter in which the inciting incident of the overall story arc occurs. This chapter will serve to set in motion the events that will create the arc of the entire novella.

Requirements:

1.      The chapter must be 10-20 pages long.

2.      This chapter should follow the rule of threes: three similar incidents should occur throughout the chapter, but the first two should have a similar, fairly trivial result. The third incident should have a largely unexpected, weighty result and will set into motion the events of the rest of the story.

3.      Each of the three incidents should be set in motion by the main character. These should not be external incidents out of the main character’s control, but incidents that result from decisions that character has made.

4.      Because the first two incidents result in similar, inconsequential outcomes, the main character should not yet appreciate the full implications of the final, inciting incident at this point in the story. The reader, however, should be able to tell by the end of this chapter that the final, inciting incident in the series of three incidents will have enormous effects.

a.       This chapter, then, should make some use of foreshadowing (but with a very, very light touch, please). The chapter should end with a very subtle nod to the impending consequences of the inciting incident, but in a way that only the reader, not the main character, notices.

Let’s get started working on these novellas/novels, shall we? If you haven’t worked your way through Step One yet, I strongly urge you to go back to my July 22^nd post and create a character profile for your main character (and if necessary, any important side characters who will play a prominent role in the story). If you don’t want to fill out the worksheet, that’s fine, but I think it’s a good idea, for a longer project like this, to map out who your character is and what his or her driving needs are before you get going on the story. 

In my opinion, it’s more important to start with these details than a mapped out idea of your plot or even a premise because the nature and emotional need(s) of your character will help the story come together organically. If you try to begin with a plot instead, you’ll end up trying to force your character to do or say things that might not be appropriate, and you’ll most likely end up with a stilted, contrived story with a character who feels very artificial to the reader.

So, once you’ve profiled your character and, most importantly, figured out what his or her perceived and actual needs are, you’re ready for Step Two: Writing the First Chapter. My chapter prompts are going to be much sparser than the sentence-by-sentence prompts from Hannah Tinti’s class because it would be far more difficult to work your way through a complete novella or novel one sentence at a time. Plus, I found that by about halfway through the week in Hannah Tinti’s class, I was going well beyond the requirements of the prompts. They were a nice starting point, but if I had actually held myself back to stick to them religiously, I wouldn’t have ended up with a draft as far along as I did.

So instead of the one sentence at a time approach, I’m creating minimalistic prompts that will allow you to go at your own pace and let the story guide you. The prompts offer overall guidelines for the chapter, and my hope is that each chapter prompt will be enough to get you going on the chapter and push you to keep going from one chapter to the next. However, if anyone does get stuck at any point, please feel free to leave a comment on the respective prompt you need help with. I’m happy to offer more detailed, specific prompts and requirements if it will help.

Okay, enough blabber. Here’s Step Two:

All Tracks, Step 2:

Write a chapter introducing your character in his/her world. This chapter will function as the set-up of the overall story arc.

Requirements:

1.      The chapter must be 10-20 pages long.

2.      The chapter must introduce the setting.

a.      In the first three pages of the chapter, you must provide details from at least three of the five senses.

3.      The chapter must get across the following details:

a.       The character’s name.

b.      The character’s starting point (i.e. the character as he or she exists prior to the change or lack of change that will occur in the story).

c.       The character’s perceived need.

d.      The character’s actual need.

4.      The chapter must include a complete story arc:

a.       Set-up (2-3 pages)

b.      Inciting Incident (1-2 pages)

c.       Escalation (5-10 pages)

d.      Climax (1-2 pages)

e.       Resolution/Conclusive Lack of Resolution (1-2 pages)

5.      The story arc in this chapter should represent the typical ups and downs of this character’s life.

Okay, I know I still haven’t talked about my disappearance from the blogosphere and the reason for my sudden return. I will. I promise. Somebody emailed me months ago wanting to know why I had stopped blogging. I saved the email for weeks, trying to decide how to reply, what to say, how to explain it all, how to make sense of it myself, even—and then, finally, I deleted the email without responding. I’m sorry, whoever you are (if you’re even reading this). It wasn’t that I wanted to ignore you or that I felt it was none of your business. It was just that I wasn’t ready, yet, to talk about it all, I guess: the depression, and the depths it took me to this past couple of years.

And I guess I’m not ready still, beyond saying that I’m on a new antidepressant (a generic form of Lexapro) and am feeling a little better (though not back to 100%). The important thing, though, is that I’m writing again, and writing has always been my number one most reliable antidepressant.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today. I have a proposition for you. Anybody want to write a novella (or, hey, why not a whole novel) with me? So here’s my thinking: I had such a great (and productive) time taking Hannah Tinti’s One Story online class this summer, I wanted to keep the creative juices flowing with some more project-specific prompts. After working my way through Tinti’s daily prompts, I ended the class with an (almost) complete draft of a new story. I’d like, next, to get a complete draft of a novel.

Who’s with me?

Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m developing a series of novella-specific prompts intended to take us from character profile to finished draft over the course of—well, I don’t know yet how long it’s going to take. Six weeks? I do know the novella will be parceled up into six chapters: one chapter for the set-up, one for the inciting incident, two for the escalating events following the inciting incident, one for the climax, and one for the resolution (or conclusive lack thereof). I’m going to create a prompt for each chapter, and I’ll post the prompts on my blog, so anyone who wants to follow along with me can do so.

I’m going to actually create four separate tracks of prompt sets, because my goal is to write a full novel that will be comprised of four novellas interwoven together to create a larger story arc. Why do it that way? Because I want to write a novel, but right now, the idea of actually writing 300 pages or so of one story feels overwhelming. My novel involves four key characters, though, so I thought, hey, if I look at it as four stories, one following each character, four stories that, when woven together, will create something larger than the sum of its parts—well, that seems manageable. But I don’t want them all to feel like they’re following the same, I don’t know, template, so I’m going to create four separate sets of prompts for the novellas. I’ll post all four sets here, so you can do all four, or pick and choose as you see fit.

Still undecided? Here, why don’t you take a look at my step one? This is the pre-writing stage of all four tracks. Just give it a try, why don’t you? And if you do, I’d love to hear what you think. I’m open to tweaks or suggestions for this worksheet (and any of the prompts that will follow it), and of course, I’d love to hear how YOUR writing is going. Nothing motivates me more than swapping writing experiences with other writers and holding each other accountable.

 

All Tracks, Step 1:

Character Profile Worksheet:

Physical

Eye Color:

Hair Color/Length:

Body Shape/Size (i.e. skinny, muscular, chubby, etc.):

Defining Physical Characteristics (i.e. scars, freckles, etc.):

Physical Self-Image:

Personal

Interests/Hobbies:

 

Education Level:

 

             Major/Specialization:

Job:

 

Attitude (i.e. optimistic, cynical, etc.):

Emotional

Perceived Need(s):

 

Actual Need:

I fell out of my daily blogging on the very last day of Hannah Tinti’s One Story class, but I did manage to do the class every day for the duration of the week, so I feel good about that. Some final thoughts about the class and the story I wrote for it:

It was very well worth the money, and I definitely will keep my eyes out for future online One Story classes. Tinti’s daily lectures and sentence-by-sentence prompts helped me to plow through any potential writer’s block that might normally take hold while working through a first draft and kept me on track all week. I’m finishing the class with an almost complete first draft of a story, a story that’s already been revised a bit (so it’s further along than my typical first drafts).

I feel good about the story Tinti’s class helped me create. It’s, right now, eight pages (about 2,800 words) long, but is still missing some key elements that I need to add. My goal will be to have the full draft, with all the necessary components and details, completed in the next few days (by the end of the week at the latest). Then I’m going to try to get it polished and reworked in whatever ways I see fit over the following couple of weeks. I’m going to be exchanging stories in early August with some friends and colleagues, so I’m planning on getting this story to that inevitable point where I just don’t know what else to do with it by then, so I can then get some feedback for final revisions. My hope is then to have it ready to start submitting in the fall, when many of the journals who are currently closed for submissions will begin reading again.

It feels good to have writing goals again. It feels even better just to be writing. Hip hip hurray for Hannah Tinti and One Story!

Today, we worked on the resolution of the story—those final, important moments that should leave the reader with some sort of impact. Leave the reader with something to think about, Tinti says. As I was working on the sentence by sentence prompts today, I couldn’t stop myself and kept going beyond each prompt, writing another sentence, and sometimes several more. Then, I would open the next prompt and discover that what I had kept going to write was the same thing we were being asked to write next in the next prompt. I guess it kind of reaffirmed my instincts as a writer, if that makes any sense.

I feel really good about where this story is ending right now, even though I’m already wondering if I need to pull back on the ending a bit, make it a little less dramatic. As of right now, I still don’t have a complete story because I haven’t finished with the climax section of the story. I also thought of some other things I want to go back and work into the beginning of the story. In its current form, the draft is about 2,000 words—roughly 6 pages. I think once I’ve added in all the other things I want to add, it’ll be at least a full 3,000 words or so. That would still be awfully short for a short story, but definitely long enough to go beyond flash fiction.

Tomorrow, we’re going to work on smoothing things out and cleaning them up—one day dedicated to revision. But I know the idea here will be to keep working on it, keep revising and re-revising and re-re-revising. My story is rough; it’ll still need a lot of work after tomorrow, but there’s not a doubt in my mind that I’m onto something here, that this story will have been worth my time. I’m so, so, SO glad I shelled out the $75 to take this class.

I’ve been racing against an impending migraine all day today (the aura started around lunchtime and has been coming off and on since), so I’ll keep this short. Today, we worked on the climax of our stories. I’m not really done with mine. I mean, I worked my way through the sentence by sentence prompts for today, but I have a lot more that I want to expand in this important scene. I spent most of my writing time today building up to the big climactic moment I envisioned for the story yesterday, but as soon as I got to the big moment, I had to stop because I had an appointment. When I got home, I was too tired to get back to work on the story, so instead, I rewatched some old episodes of Bob’s Burgers and just, you know, just laid there. My migraine’ll be here within a few hours, so I know that this will be it for the day. I have a clear sense of what needs to happen from here, though, so probably what I’ll do is I’ll try to work on the rest of this climax scene in the morning before getting into tomorrow’s lesson: resolution.

Things are really starting to heat up in my story (and not just because, as Tinti says, we’re now working on the story’s “sexy parts”). Before I worked my way through today’s lesson, I revisited everything in my story so far and did some tinkering, tried to smooth everything from yesterday into what I had from the first two days. And just like I predicted, it came very easily. It’s amazing how much better I work in the morning!

Today’s lesson was about escalation. Tinti taught us about Kurt Vonnegut’s ideas about story structure. She also has been giving us some really useful ideas about how to deepen what we’ve already got going on in the story rather than adding new stuff—new characters, new conflict, whatever. This really resonates with me because I definitely have that instinct sometimes. What happens next? How do I ramp up the tension? Uh, what about adding a new character or something? Tinti has helped me to realize that there’s already plenty to work with by this point in a story. I need to open up and explore those things I’ve already written in, not add new things to complicate the story on a surface level (but without adding any depth).

So, I actually spent a good three hours or so from start to finish today, but I feel like it was time very well spent. As it is, I even wanted to keep going. As I was finishing up my assignment for the class (developing the escalation of the conflict and deepening the characters), I figured out exactly what should happen for the climax, but I had to stop myself because we’re working on that tomorrow. I think if I’d kept going, I would have run out of steam, and that big, exciting climactic idea I had would have fizzled and dissolved. I can’t WAIT to get going on it in the morning, though.

For day three, we focused on opening up the propelling event, as well as exploring the characters in a bit more detail and adding just a glimpse of backstory. I really struggled with the assignment for today. I’m way less happy with what I came up with today than I was the first two days, but I still feel good about the story overall. I think during revision, I’m going to have to really spend some serious time with how to propel the story forward, how to really set the events into motion and create a sense that something significant is about to happen, that something unavoidable is on its way.

I think, though, that my struggles today resulted from the fact that I really procrastinated getting to work today. I work best first thing in the morning, and my creativity seems to reduce dramatically throughout the day. I didn’t get going on the coursework for today until well into the afternoon, and it’s now almost 7:30 and I only just finished with my assignment. I have the feeling that if I revisit what I have so far first thing tomorrow, before I even get going on tomorrow’s class, I’ll discover that I have all kinds of ideas on how to pull it all together.

Today, day two of Hannah Tinti’s online short story class, we focused on setting up the story. Just like yesterday, Tinti led us through a detailed, sentence by sentence prompt to turn the first sentence we had written from the exercise yesterday into a full, paragraph long set-up of a full story.

I found it much more challenging today than yesterday, but this was largely a result of the fact that I was working on it while my husband, Damien, was in a meeting, so I had our daughter crawling all over me and begging for my attention. I asked her to help me write the story, though, and started reading aloud what I had so far and what I was adding. That way she felt like she was part of it, and it felt like we were doing something together (although, like I said, it was still more difficult, then, than it would have been to just write totally undistracted).

In the end, I’m pretty pleased with what I came up with. It’s still very drafty—needs a lot of work, I know—but I feel the characters beginning to come alive beneath my fingertips, and I know, soon enough, my characters will start writing the story for me, just like they always do when I get on a good roll with a new story. Tomorrow, I think we’re going to be working on the inciting incident, or propelling event, or whatever you want to call it. I’m stoked! I don’t have any idea where this class is going to take this story, but judging from yesterday and today, I have complete faith that I will, indeed, be ending the week with a complete draft of a full short story, just like One Story promised.

My dearest internet, it has been thirty fortnights since last I wrote you. I’m breaking my long silence, at last, and will be posting every day this week—EVERY DAY—about my progress in Hannah Tinti’s One Story short story online class. I’ll explain the reason for my disappearance in a later post, and the reason for my return, but first things first:

I decided to sign up for the One Story class because I have some big writing goals this summer—I want to have a solid draft of all the stories in a new collection before school starts back up again in August. But the first bit of the summer was taken up with two summer classes I was teaching—one a creative writing class (it was so much fun!) and one tech writing. That and buying a house, moving in, trying to figure out what was leaking in the shower and why the air conditioner didn’t seem to work. All that fun stuff. But all that’s finally behind me, and now I have a month and a half (give or take) to dedicate to my writing goals for the summer. This class just happened to coincide exactly with my readiness to get going. Plus, it’s cheap enough that I can afford it without feeling guilty but expensive enough ($75) that I’ll feel obligated to keep up with it for the entire week.

So I’m planning to blog every day after I’ve completed the coursework for that day. I don’t want to step on Tinti’s feet (or set-ups—if you’re taking the class, you’ll get that joke), so I’m not going to regurgitate her lessons and assignments in these posts. Instead, I’ll let you know what the class has gotten me working on and how well the class is helping me get my momentum back up as a writer, that sort of thing.

The first lesson was about structure. Tinti laid out for us five key elements of story structure, from the story’s opening to the climax and resolution. Nothing new, of course, but it’s good, in my opinion, to return to the basics from time to time. Her first assignment was to write a five-sentence story that dedicates one sentence to each of the five structural components from her lesson. She provided us a detailed prompt for each sentence (for example, a particular sentence must include at least one of the five senses and a reference to the setting, things like that), and informed us that these would be the stories we would be working with throughout the rest of the week.

My story came together pretty well, I think. To get past that initial shock of writer’s block when I began the prompt, I decided to write a story I had had the idea for a couple of years ago, back when my daughter, Amalie, was a tiny little thing. Amie used to cry for, like, hours and hours on end, and we’d read somewhere (probably online) that going for a drive can calm a colicky baby down. I remember one night we were frazzled and exhausted and we strapped her into her car seat and drove around until she fell asleep. As I sat in the back with Amie and held her hand, I thought about what a great setting for a story this would be—a couple, who I decided should be fighting, would have to keep their voices down for fear of waking their baby. It seemed like a great backdrop to explore the strangeness of becoming a parent, of being pushed to the limit, of watching your partner make mistakes, knowing you yourself were making mistakes, too, of trying to live with post-partum and wondering if you had made the right choice, having a baby.

I’d started to write the story when I first had the idea, but couldn’t get past the first few pages. I just couldn’t figure out what should actually happen in the darn thing—how to get past the initial premise, which was all I usually have (if even that, to be honest) when I sit down to start writing. Tinti’s sentence by sentence prompts helped the story organically find its form. What I have now is far from finished, of course. It’s five sentences long, for cripe’s sake. It’s just a skeleton of what could (and hopefully will) be. But I feel like the story has found a form, and it will be easier, working with this, to fill in the details and help it come to life.

 

I posted the draft in the discussion board. I don’t know what will happen—if anyone will read it there or give me feedback. There are over 300 people in this class, which makes it seem all the less likely that people will bother reading other people’s discussion board posts. Feels too overwhelming with that many people, and it’s hard to choose which posts to read and which to ignore. But either way, I feel great about what I’ve accomplished so far, and I’m pretty freakin’ pumped about seeing what Tinti will have for us tomorrow.

Last weekend I completely forgot to write a blog post because I was in Columbus doing a presentation for the annual Columbus State Community College Writers’ Conference. I had intended to post about the topic I covered in my presentation, so I’ll talk about it this week. My presentation was titled, “Then What Happens?: Getting Unstuck in Fiction Plotting,” and it was about how to blast through that specific kind of writer’s block that occurs when we just can’t for the life of us figure out what should happen next in a story.

I provided 7 tips to help my fellow fiction writers get unstuck. These are all things that work for me when I face this problem, though no one technique works 100% of the time. At the heart, really, of each tip is the idea that it’s important not to get too caught up in getting your story to its conclusion. Let your story meander a bit; let your characters do things that might not seem to be directly related to the plot. Whatever doesn’t work can be revised out later, but you might find that you discover new, inventive, interesting plot points through letting the story run free for a bit.

Here are my 7 tips for getting unstuck in fiction plotting:

1. Use writing prompts. I’m a big time advocate for writing prompts. Damien and I keep a prompt bowl, which we add to anytime we can think of new prompts. When you just can’t figure out what should happen next (or when you want to write but can’t decide what to write about), a prompt can help point you in a new, unexpected direction.

2. Write a concrete, in the moment scene—have your character DO something, ANYTHING. Avoid writing a scene in which your character is simply thinking. One way to do this is to make a list of possible settings and a list of possible characters. Then have your main character interact with another character in a setting. What happens when he or she runs into So-and-So at X location? What will they talk about? What will happen? Something interesting and worthwhile might come of it, and even if the scene gets revised out of a later draft, writing a concrete scene like this might be just what you needed to break down that writer’s block.

3. Open a blank document to free yourself from the rest of the story, and place your character into a new scene. You might also remove yourself from the computer altogether and start writing a new scene with pen and paper (or if you’re already writing with pen and paper, try moving to a new notebook or start writing on the computer). This method will probably leave inconsistencies between this new scene and whatever you had already written in this story, but that’s okay. As with everything, these things can be fixed later through revision. In the meantime, separating yourself from what you’ve already written might help your mind to look at the story in a new way, and you might think of interesting things that should happen in the story that you wouldn’t have thought of when you were so attached to the entire story as a whole.

4. On the other hand, you could read through what you have so far and try to key in on elements that are already in the story but are not being fully explored. Maybe there are issues, characters, or objects that you’ve mentioned briefly with no intention of pursuing them in a more in-depth way. What would happen if you went ahead and pursued one? As an example, in my story, “This Is Not a Fairy Tale,” from Peter Never Came, in the drafting stage I just briefly mentioned that one of the characters, Stephen’s, hands were rough and dry. This detail ended up getting woven into the story pretty thoroughly, and in its final incarnation, the story relies very heavily on Stephen’s hands and how the other main character, Lucy, reacts to them.

5. Step away from the computer for a while. Go for a walk (but bring a pen and paper!), or listen to music. Watch a movie or read. Taking the pressure off of yourself to write might be all you need to overcome your writer’s block.

6. Combine two stories that you’re stuck on. Obviously, this is only useful if you’re stuck on two stories that have similarities. Personally, I tend to work on several stories at once, and I do often find that X story and Y story have similar main characters, or settings, or situations (or sometimes all three). Combining such stories can result in one, much more complex and interesting story.

7. Finally, if all you can come up with is a cliché, go ahead and write it anyway so you can move forward. During the revision process you can look for and rework clichés.

I recently read an essay in Issue 3 of Kugelmass by Pank editor  (and excellent writer in her own right) Roxane Gay. The essay is called “The Art of the Rejection of Rejection,” and as the title suggests, it’s about Gay’s experiences as an editor receiving angry, bitter responses from writers whose work she rejects.

One of the most interesting responses she shares in the essay came from a fellow editor, with whom it was clear she had established some sort of working relationship prior to rejecting his work. More than anything, it seemed this fellow editor was upset about receiving a form rejection, but one comment he made in his lengthy missive was one I’ve heard many writers make about work that has been rejected, the gist of which is that many of his stories rejected by Pank have gone on to get accepted elsewhere.

If I were Gay, my reaction would be, “And your point is?” Clearly this editor—and many writers who have made similar complaints—believes that because a story is accepted somewhere, it must deserve to get accepted anywhere, and any journal that rejected it was wrong to do so. This argument is so illogical, it’s almost not even worth picking apart, but just for fun, let’s have a go at it anyway.

First of all, a confession: I’ve felt this way before, too. It never would have crossed my mind to email an editor who had rejected me to complain, but I do understand that initial in-your-face-sucka! feeling you get when something somebody said wasn’t good enough gets accepted. One of the first rejections I ever received came from a journal whose policy it was to give personal feedback on every submission. There’s a lot to be said for form rejections, let me tell you. This rejection essentially said the story was uninteresting, the character idiotic, and the writing weak and awkward. Ouch! When the same draft of the story got accepted elsewhere a few weeks later, I felt, I admit, kind of gloaty toward the journal whose editor had said such nasty things about it.

But I was wrong to feel that way, and here’s why: writing is subjective. Yes, some editors seem to forget that when they say things like, “Most of the work that gets submitted is terrible,” but on some level, I think most editors know that just because they don’t engage with something doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad. A rejection doesn’t mean the editor is rejecting you or your ability as a writer. It doesn’t even, really, mean they think what you submitted is bad. All it means is they, personally, don’t like this particular piece quite enough to make room for it in their particular journal.

Each journal usually has its own specific aesthetic, which is often difficult to pin down even after you’ve read multiple issues. Sometimes, as is the case with journals run by grad students, the aesthetic is constantly in flux because the masthead changes from year to year. Sometimes, though, you might think you have a pretty good idea of what this journal publishes, and you might think your story or essay or poem is a good fit, and you might be right—but you might be wrong, too. You can never really be sure if a specific editor is going to like a specific submission, and the fact that an editor from one journal says “no” and an editor from a different journal says “yes” doesn’t say anything about either editor’s ability to recognize a good thing when it’s in front of them. All it means is that the one editor engaged with that particular submission more than the other did.

Snarkily pointing out that a journal has rejected work that was accepted elsewhere—even when the “elsewhere” is, in your opinion, a “better” place to have been accepted—says more about you as the writer and your attitude, ego, and level of bitterness than it does about the journal. Every editor has a right to like or not like whatever he or she wants. You’d think, as an editor, the guy that wrote the letter to Gay would have understood that.

I’m almost positive at this point that I did not get in to the PhD program at OU, the only school to which I applied this year. I knew already that my chances were slim, but with every day that passes and I hear nothing, it’s more and more likely that I’m going to get a form rejection in the mail in a week or two. I know that the OU faculty usually makes their decisions by the end of February, and I know, also, that if you get in, you hear right away, but if you don’t, you hear much later.

I’m incredibly disappointed. I felt like OU was my best chance to get a PhD, for a number of reasons. If I can’t get in here, I don’t think I can get in anywhere.

So who cares, you might be wondering. It’s not like a PhD would have guaranteed me a tenure-track job. True. But aside from the fact that the main reason I wanted to go back to school was simply because I want to be back in school—I like school—I think the MFA is on its way out as a terminal degree.

Because I’ve been realizing I won’t get in to OU, I’ve been frantically looking for jobs that I can apply for. I should have done this in the fall, but I was so overwhelmed with other things, I just never got around to it. At this point, there are few positions that have yet to be filled. There are some, though, and I’ve been pouring over each one that I find, feeling my heart sink a little bit more each time I see PhD listed as a preferred degree, if not required. Many of these are community college jobs, non-tenure-track. Still, still they prefer candidates to have a PhD.  It doesn’t mean I can’t apply, but it DOES mean it’s unlikely my application will be taken too seriously.

In this job search, I haven’t found a single position that doesn’t at least list a PhD as preferred. Not a single one. In the past, I’ve found a handful, but it’s rare. Colleges and universities, it seems, are considering MFA’s only when they have to anymore. Enough people have PhD’s that they don’t really need to accept a master’s degree as terminal. As much as I’d like to say it isn’t fair, I know that, all other things equal—and they often will be—it makes perfect sense to want to hire the person with the highest level of education.

So I’m finding myself feeling kind of stuck. Even if I find a job now with my MFA, it seems unlikely that I’ll be able to move up to anything more permanent without a PhD. I suspect within five years or so, MFA’s won’t be considered terminal at all. Yet the school I felt I had the best chance of getting into doesn’t want me.

So what do I do? I don’t know. Apply for the few jobs for which I’m qualified, I guess, and hope for the best. And in a few years, when my degree isn’t enough to qualify me for any jobs? I really don’t know yet. I’m going to have to really evaluate my career prospects and figure out the right path, and soon.

Even though I said recently that I would not, under any circumstances, be returning to the novel that was my graduate thesis, this past week I went into my trusty old “Failed Attempts” file on my computer and turned what was an 80,000 word novel into a 21,000 word novella. I’ve been thinking about doing this pretty much ever since I sentenced the document to my “Failed Attempts” prison. I guess making that very difficult but important decision freed me up to see the novel for what it really was: about 70 good pages of story and close to 200 pages of filler, of me trying to sustain the length of a novel without really knowing how.

Though this was not the first novel I’d written, as a novel it was more of good practice than a worthwhile piece of literature. It was me learning how to fill in that many pages, me learning how to revise something that lengthy. After multiple revisions, though, it’s still too flawed to be a workable book. I can see that now. There are huge components of the plot, entire characters, that feel flat, unbelievable, over-written.

But there’s some good stuff in there, too. At its core, there’s a nugget of an interesting story, which is what kept me working and trying and believing in this novel for so long. Once I accepted that the novel would never be good enough, I realized that maybe if I pared it down to that nugget of good stuff, maybe then I would have something worth reading.

The impetus to finally give it a try came from the Iron Horse Literary Review newsletter. Iron Horse is currently open for entries in their annual single-author competition, and this year they’re accepting novellas only. I almost never enter contests. With the exception of book contests, the few times I’ve decided to spend the money, I haven’t even gotten so much as an honorable mention. I’m just not good enough, I’ve told myself, so it would be like throwing my money away.

But it isn’t, really. The entry fees for contests help to support the journals you’re paying the fees to, and most entry fees entitle you to a subscription to the journal anyway. Your money is going to something worthwhile, even if your submission doesn’t place.

So I decided to use the Iron Horse contest as motivation to trim this novel to novella length. At a first pass, I got it down to about 95 pages—roughly 30,000 words. The contest guidelines stipulate that entries must be no more than 20,000 words—roughly 65 pages. I did some more tinkering and trimming and got it down to a lean 21,000 words, but I still need to cut another 1,000 if I want to enter the contest. I may not make it—the deadline is less than two weeks away—but I’m certainly going to give it a go.

Even if I can’t get it down to 20,000 words, I feel good about this experience. It was useful for me to see just how much I could cut from the manuscript, and it feels good, too, to see it take shape as something that might be publishable after all. Maybe this novella will eventually end up in the “Failed Attempts” file, too, but right now, I feel really good about how it’s turning out.

After a lengthy, miserable bout with depression, last month I finally went to my doctor and got a prescription for an anti-depressant. I’ve been feeling lousy for quite a while now; I couldn’t even tell you how long, months and months and months. At first I thought I was just having post-partum depression, but I just kept sinking and sinking until I finally reached a point, a couple months ago, where I realized that I had never been so depressed in my entire life and that, more important, I couldn’t bear the thought of living the rest of my life feeling that way.

I hesitated about going to the doctor, though, because I was afraid that nothing would work. Silly, right? I know it is, but I had this intense fear that I would get on medication after medication and just keep feeling the same, until I would finally have to accept that this is all there is for me, now, and that things will never get better. I had to force myself to schedule an appointment by reminding myself that my depression affects not just me but my husband and daughter, too. It’s one thing to choose to wallow in your own misery, but it isn’t fair to make other people wallow with you.

So here’s how I’d been feeling: empty, numb, uninterested in everything. I was eating a lot, but not because eating made me feel better. I suppose I had this idea that if I ate that candy bar or cookie, it might make me feel good, and then when it didn’t, I would eat another, thinking maybe the second time would be the charm. I wasn’t listening to much music. I wasn’t reading. I wasn’t writing. I watched things on Netflix, but with the exception of American Horror Story, which for whatever reason seemed to be the only thing that was able to really engage me during this dark period, I would just sort of sit and zone out to whatever I was watching, not really enjoying any of it.

Obviously, this was very distressing. It’s not like I’m normally little miss sunshine, but I’m usually able to focus on the things in life that I think make life worth living—good literature, good movies, good music, writing. Writing has been like an anti-depressant for me for many years. When everything else feels grim and pointless, I can always count on getting lost in my own creative process as I invent other realities, other people, other lives. In fact, I’ve found in the past that when I go more than a week or so without writing, I tend to start feeling listless and depressed.

But this time, my depression stopped my writing cold. I didn’t have any desire to do it, and when I would try to force myself, it didn’t feel good. Didn’t feel like anything.

It’s not even an issue, really, of productivity. It’s not because I envision myself as a writer, and when I don’t write, I don’t feel like myself (although that’s true), and it’s not because I have all these writing related goals, projects I want to complete, achievements I want to reach. The reason why it matters so much is because writing helps me deal with the world. Writing is my life vest, my buoy. When I’m not writing, I’m drowning.

So I got a prescription for sertraline and started the slow, anxious process of waiting to see if it would work. And you know what? It did, or at least, it’s started to. I don’t feel back to 100% yet. I’m still not writing or reading as much as I usually do, but I’m feeling better. Work doesn’t feel like such a burden anymore, and the little tedious “have to”’s of life don’t feel so all-encompassing. Life is beginning to feel manageable again, in other words, and I am starting to daydream again about my writing. I’ve been pacing around the house, with music playing, and thinking about the novel I’m working on. It’s a good feeling—feeling anything at all is good—and I’m so glad I finally took the step to do something about my depression.

I’m trying something new as a writer, something that requires completely changing my familiar writing habits: dictation. The other day, my friend Jolynn told me about some dictation software her parents gave her for Christmas. I thought it sounded worth a shot, so I looked up dictation apps for my phone and found some free ones I could try.

I work an hour and a half drive away from home, see, so even though I only have to go to campus twice a week, I’m in the car for six hours a week commuting to and from my classes. If I could spend even a small portion of that time “writing,” I would bump my productivity up immensely.

So last week I downloaded Dragon Dictation. The first day, I had trouble trying to get my mind into writer mode. I’m so used to typing as part of my process that I think my mind almost has a Pavlovian response to sitting in front of the computer and opening a document to write. Speaking the story out loud just wasn’t doing it for me, and I ended up just deleting the barely coherent crap I came up with.

But I refused to give in so quickly. Six freakin’ hours a week, I kept telling myself. Six hours to myself, without my little girl climbing all over me. It would be the perfect time to write.

So I tried again the next day I had to go to campus. I waited until a sentence formed in my mind—that’s usually the way I begin any writing session—and I turned on the app and just started going for it. I “wrote” for the rest of the drive to campus and ended up with about 1000 words to add to my novel, words I feel pretty good about, too. Of course, I’m still in the very early stages of trying this out, but I’m going to keep at it, and I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that this is going to help me write way, way, way more.