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.

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.

First of all, some news: my book is now available in Kindle format! I couldn’t be more thrilled that the publisher decided to make it available for Kindle. If nothing else, it allows people who might be somewhat interested in reading the book the chance to read a sample before purchasing it. Plus, the Kindle price is much lower. Readers who might be hesitant about spending $17.95 on a book by an unknown author might be much more willing to take the gamble for $9.99.

Now on to what I want to talk about this week. It’s almost time for summer break here—summer break, for me, means one week between the end of spring quarter and the beginning of summer quarter, during which time I have to prepare the Blackboard course for my summer class—and I’ve been excitedly planning my summer writing projects. I haven’t been able to get anywhere near as much writing done as I would have liked for the past year, but the older Amalie gets, the easier it is to get things done around her. On top of that, I’m only teaching one class over the summer, and it’s a creative writing class. I expect to have plenty of time in which to write, and that’s exactly what I plan to do.

Here are my goals for this summer:

1.      I’m going to complete the first draft of a middle grade children’s novel, of which I currently have about half written. This, I decided, is the main writing project I want to be focusing on right now. I talked a few weeks ago about how leapfrogging from project to project was preventing me from really getting anything done, and how I needed to pick one project to just finish, for cripe’s sake. Well this is the project I’ve settled on.

2.      Once I’ve finished the first draft of that novel, which will probably take me no more than a month, I want to write a first draft of the much shorter children’s book I’m collaborating on with my mom. My mom is a scratchboard artist, and she’s creating the illustrations for a children’s story that I’m going to write. We agreed on this a couple of years ago—but I’ve been slacking in my duties. She’s already completed several scratchboard paintings for the book. I’m going to use the paintings she’s already created as inspiration to write the story. We don’t know if we’ll be able to find a publisher for the book once it’s finished, but it’s an incredibly fun project and worth spending time on, nonetheless. Plus, I sort of think we might be able to do a show in a gallery even if it doesn’t end up getting published, or we can create copies of the book ourselves and sell them as art-chapbooks (I learned how to make those in a workshop while I was getting my MFA).

3.      In addition to those two main projects, I want to work on some stories. I have, at present, five stories I’m sending around. I have three more stories in draft form that I’d like to revise and start sending out, and three more half-written drafts of stories that I feel really excited about and would like to finish. I won’t set a concrete goal in terms of stories, but I will say that by the end of the summer I’d like to have a few more stories in circulation, and ideally, I’d like to have complete drafts of the three half-written stories I believe are so promising.

Ohio University, which is home to the graduate creative writing program local to my area, hosts an annual literary festival each spring. Last year the headliner was Tobias Wolff, and the year before, George Saunders. We’re talking big time names. There’s always a lot of excitement in the air during the festival, and since I know several people who are affiliated with the program, I get to hear a lot about the authors who come—what they were like during lunch and the genre specific colloquiums they run with the grad students.

This year, I had never even heard of most of the people coming. Amy Hempel, I was told, was sort of the headliner, but Susan Orlean is hugely famous too (having written, it turns out, The Orchid Thief, the book that’s being adapted into a screenplay in the film Adaptation), as are Denise Duhamel, Richard Rodriguez, and Terrance Hayes, this year’s obligatory sexy male poet, who I actually was previously aware of, but only because he had been a visiting writer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks when I was in the MFA program up there. 

Regardless of the fact that I was shamefully unfamiliar with this year’s amazing cast of writers prior to their coming, this year was, in my opinion, the best Lit Fest I’ve attended—and I say that even though I only, really, was able to go to Amy Hempel’s events (though I caught a little bit of Terrance Hayes and Denise Duhamel—completely missed Susan Orlean and Richard Rodriguez. Rodriguez, I hear, was absolutely REMARKABLE).

I’m not, as you probably know, a student at OU, but my friend Jolynn, who is going for her PhD in fiction there, got me into Amy Hempel’s fiction colloquium. During the colloquium I pretty much kept my mouth shut because I hadn’t read any of Hempel’s work and didn’t, as a result, know what to ask her. I kept my ears open, though, and very much enjoyed listening to her answer the questions the others asked about her writing process, her experiences publishing, and so on. She’s a real sweetheart, Amy Hempel, and incredibly friendly and down-to-Earth.

I picked up a copy of her first book, Reasons to Live (I know, great title!) and had her sign it for me, and I slowly worked my way through the stories last week. I say “slowly” and “worked” because, though these stories are incredibly short—most of them would definitely fall into the category of flash fiction—they are dense, and not in a bad way. They’re the kind of stories you have to sit and reflect on after you finish, the kind you read more than once just to make sure you caught everything, or because the ending sends you back to the beginning with a new filter through which to process the prose.

The most striking thing about Hempel’s writing is her close attention to the rhythm of each sentence. She said she focuses on the sentence, not the story as a whole, and you can definitely see this shining through in her stories. She, like me, is the sort of writer who begins with a line, a killer line that you just have to get down and that you know will inevitably lead to another line, and another. But, unlike me, she is able to feel her way through her language the way a poet can—in fact, many of her stories read as much like prose poems as they do like flash fiction.

She also knows exactly what not to include, how to give the reader just the bare minimum and let him or her put it all together from there. Hempel’s style of writing would be frustrating, I would argue, if she were a novelist. But she isn’t. She has never, she told us, had any interest in writing novels. She wouldn’t know how to go about it, she said. And as a short story writer—particularly a short-short story writer—her bare bones, sentence over story style works fantastically well.

Once, in a workshop, one of my UAF professors, David Crouse, mentioned that he could see his own writing as being on the same plane of existence as Rick Bass’s, but another writer—I can’t remember, now, which one—was on a different plane of existence altogether. He could admire what she was doing (I do remember it was a female writer), but knew he could never do it himself. That’s the way I feel about Amy Hempel. Hempel is, perhaps, the first writer who I felt that way about. Other writers whose work I admire I’ve admired in that, I-can-see-what-you’re-doing-and-I-think-I-can-learn-to-do-it-too sort of way. Not that I think I’m as good, say, as Rick Moody, but I feel like I can understand the mechanism behind Moody’s work, and if I keep at it and keep practicing, maybe someday I’ll be able to pull off what he can. Hempel’s work, though, is so unlike anything I would ever write, could ever write, that it really is like we exist on two completely different planes: I can see her from where I am, but as much as I keep walking forward, I’ll never reach her.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn from her.

I love this idea of focusing on the sentence. It’s, to be honest, a fairly foreign way of writing to me. From the workshops I’ve taken, with the varied and all fabulous workshop instructors I’ve studied under, I’ve grown accustomed to looking at story more than sentence. Character. Scene. All of these things tend to come before sentence. Focusing so much on each sentence is much more of a poet thing, I’ve always thought, but I think there’s a lot to be gained from picking a story apart the way you would a poem—paying careful attention to each individual word, each image, spending as much energy deciding what to leave out as what to put in.

A Tale of Two Movies

Yes, this week’s post has a title. I couldn’t resist. Even though it’s a bit dorksy.

Anyway, as you can probably tell from the (dorksy) title, I want to talk this week about a couple of movies I watched recently, both based on novels I had read previously. The Hunger Games, as everyone not living in a cave probably knows, is the first in an insanely popular (and startlingly good) trilogy by Suzanne Collins. The film adaptation hit the theaters a few weeks ago. The Ruins by Scott Smith is probably the best horror novel I’ve ever read. The movie version was released in 2008, but I only just got around to watching it (I picked it up used for $3 worth of trade at my local music/movie store, Haffa’s. The price should give you an idea of how popular the movie was.)

Both screenplays were at least partially written by the original book authors. Suzanne Collins is credited with three other screenwriters for The Hunger Games, and Scott Smith is listed as the sole screenwriter of The Ruins. It’s no surprise, then, that both movies remain pretty true to their respective books (although in both, the screenwriters had to change some small details to fit the film format).

Watching movie versions of books I love in such short succession of each other really got me thinking about the differences between novels and movies, and the problems that arise when the former is adapted in to the latter. It’s true of most movies based on novels that if you ask just about anyone who read the book and watched the movie both, they’ll tell you the book was better. This is not snooty or pretentious or a means of bragging about having read the book (though sometimes it comes across that way).

The truth is, this reaction is almost universal because when these novels were written, they were written for the literary format. The characters, plot points, etc. were all structured with the knowledge that the reader would likely spend a few days working his or her way through the story. The pace is much slower. In a movie, you have to somehow tell a complete story, develop your characters, establish tension, and so on, and you have to do it all in a couple of hours. The pace feels ridiculously fast in comparison, so the same sort of scope you can work with in a novel simply will not work for a movie, in my opinion. You have to zoom in, narrow your focus. It’s a lot more like a short story.

Case in point, look at The Hunger Games (SPOILER ALERT!): Because the movie stays so faithful to the book, a lot of ground is covered in a very short period of time. In some cases, a feeling of knowing and really caring about the characters is sacrificed. In the book, Katniss and Rue are together for several pages. We spend enough time with Rue to really feel that we know her, and her death is so, so painful as a result. In the movie, Katniss meets Rue, really meets her for the first time, then in the next scene they separate. When they reunite, Rue dies. They spend I would guess not much more than five minutes of screen time together because almost immediately after they meet, Rue dies. There’s no time there to build any kind of a connection with Rue. The movie relies on viewers either A) having read the book, so they already know and love Rue, or B) caring about Rue’s death solely because Rue is young and adorable.

In the book of The Ruins, the majority of the book is really about these kids going stir-crazy, trapped together atop the mound. That doesn’t mean the vine isn’t a genuine threat or that it isn’t scary, but what’s really scary is watching the mental states of these kids get slowly more and more unstable, until it becomes clear that the real danger is the one they’re posing to themselves. The movie stays close enough to the book to maintain some of that, but it’s impossible to really recreate the psychological twists and turns the book takes when we’re not able to climb inside the characters’ heads.

Both movies were good movies, don’t get me wrong. The Ruins in particular really caught me by surprise, I suppose because I went into it with fairly low expectations (although I should point out that the ending to the movie version of The Ruins is lame—I’m not sure why Smith changed it—and as freaky as the vine is in the book, you just can’t make a plant scary in a movie. At times, in fact, it looks sort of silly). But yes, if you asked me, I’d tell you the books were better. Waaaaaay better.

As much as I’m a movie lover and an advocate for the value of short fiction, I do love to get lost in a novel. I love the scope of novels; I love to spend days getting to know the characters, so I can really, really care about the things that happen to them. From a technical perspective, I still think short stories make better use of the craft elements taught in MFA programs. But from an emotional perspective, the longer form is better suited to make the reader really engage with the characters and their plights. There’s something that absolutely cannot be replaced about spending a few days slowly consuming—and in the best cases, being consumed by—a really good novel.

For the past month, I’ve been slowly warming my writing muscles back up again. I had tried to push myself with an insanely easy goal during winter break, and then I promptly gave up after repeatedly not meeting the goal during the very first week of break. For the month of January, then, which was also my first month teaching two classes since having the baby (though they’re both still online), I decided to just sit back and see what would happen. I obviously wasn’t ready yet to set goals. I did, however, have things I wanted to be working on, and not just in that “I really ought to be writing” sort of way; in that more magical, exciting way, where story ideas and sentences to accompany them dance through your head when you’re doing even the most mundane tasks: washing the dishes, taking a shower, rocking your baby to sleep.

So without even making any effort to push myself back into it, I opened the writing file on my computer and started sifting through my drafts. I was pleasantly surprised to remember that I did, in fact, write several drafts of new stories last year. I have the tendency to feel like I’ve hardly written at all since my book came out, but it isn’t really true. I haven’t revised many drafts to the point of being ready to send around, but I actually did write quite a lot of new stuff last year. 

So I got back to work revising a few of those drafts. I had Damien read a couple of them, and some other people read a third (which Damien had already read). I’m now hungrily revising—and maybe, just maybe almost ready to start sending out—the most promising of the new stories I wrote last year. There are still others that I’ll probably get around to tinkering with later, and a few that I moved to my “Failed Attempts” file (what a strangely good feeling it is sometimes to definitively say, “I will not waste any more time on this story.”).

Up next, I want to get working on a new idea I had recently that I think might develop into a novel. Maybe it’ll just be a novella. I don’t know, but I can’t wait to find out. I do feel like I should be pushing myself to try working on longer pieces. I’m a bit hesitant about novel writing these days—my experience trying (and failing) to publish the novel I wrote as my MFA thesis left me both disappointed and feeling very shaky about my abilities as a novelist. I’ve read, then revised, then reread the damn thing who knows how many times. The fact that every time I read it, I think it’s publishable makes me wonder if the problem is, in fact, my own ability to recognize what a good novel should and should not be.  

I’ve had enough success publishing short stories that I sometimes wonder if I’m not just one of those writers—there are many, and many of them are very good—who just is and always will be a short story writer. Period. But sometimes I have these ideas, ideas that I don’t think could fit into the space of a short story. So even though I’m tentative and maybe a bit afraid, I’m going to start working on this new idea, and if it ends up developing into a full novel (gulp), well then. So be it.

In preparation for a presentation I’m doing this week at my local library, I’ve been thinking a lot about short fiction and what it has to offer that full length novels cannot. I always say that, in spite of the fact that I love reading novels as much as anyone, I believe that short fiction is innately superior. This probably seems a bit extreme, and it’s important that I make it clear that I do love novels and I think there are things that can be done with novels that can’t be done inside the boundaries of short fiction. However, in my opinion, fiction in its most perfect form is extremely focused and tight, and because of the length constraints, that’s exactly what you get with short fiction.

Novels, because they have hundreds of pages to take up, almost invariably meander around. They give lots of background information and provide ample details, and they’ll sometimes spend several pages on some aspect of the story or other that is not really important to the overall story arc. Because they have the space, because, in fact, they must fill in the space, novels spend a fair amount of time establishing characters, establishing setting, and so on. Which is to say, not every page is actively moving the story forward.

As a reader, I like novels because I like getting lost in another world for a period of several days—I like that I can live as if in two realities, one foot planted in my own world, the other in the world of whatever novel I’m in the middle of. This is something that short fiction almost by definition cannot offer, since you can read a short story in one sitting. No matter how much you loved being part of that world, once you put the story down you leave the story behind and wholly reenter the real world.

Yet at the same time, as a reader/writer, I almost always feel dissatisfied with novels after I finish them. I enjoy the ride, but find my mind wandering when a novel veers off into territory that doesn’t feel truly important to the overall story. Again, I feel I should reiterate that I do enjoy reading novels, but most of the time when I read a novel, I feel like it would have been better if certain parts of it had been trimmed. To be honest, it’s not even all that rare for me to finish a novel and feel that it should have been trimmed down to short story length. There was enough for about 30 good pages of story in here, I think to myself when I finish, but the rest of the book was just filler.

Not so with short fiction. Because the shorter forms—even novellas—don’t have room for filler, they remain tightly focused on the story at hand. There is very little room for exposition in short fiction, and the majority of the words must be used to actively move the story forward. While some people might argue that this means short fiction is less complex than the novel form, I completely disagree. In short fiction—good short fiction, anyway—the complexity is still there, but all the complicated nuances of these characters and their world must be layered on top of each other, using the same words that are being used to move from plot point to plot point. The writer must choose his or her words very carefully, and each word must carry as much weight and meaning as possible.

The shorter the story is, the more true this becomes, and by the time we get down to flash fiction, we end up with a story that has been so carefully crafted and with such close attention to language that we find ourselves almost at a crossroads between poetry and prose.

So, yes, based on my opinion (this is, of course, a very subjective matter) of what makes for good fiction, I believe that the short form is better than the novel. Does this mean I don’t read novels? Of course not. Does this mean I’m going to stop trying to write them? Never! But I do have a sincere appreciation for short fiction, especially when I come across a really, really, really good one. Though I’ll never stop wanting to immerse myself in another world for a longer amount of time than a piece of short fiction can offer me, I do see the novel as inherently flawed, and the writer side of me can’t help but praise the short form.

Years ago, someone told me (and I haven’t been able to verify the quote, so this is very word-of-mouth, my friends) that in an interview, Kurt Cobain was asked to explain the lyrics to “Smells like Teen Spirit.” Cobain refused, and said that he makes music that people like him will understand. My friend was offering this up to me in an “Isn’t that cool?” sort of way, but my reaction at the time was that it was a lame way of getting around the fact that the lyrics didn’t mean anything. I thought, Shouldn’t good art be comprehensible? If you create a work of art but nobody knows what it means, you failed as an artist. Right???

Thinking back on it now, after years of advanced education in literature and creative writing, it’s an interesting idea to revisit. Do I still feel that way? As a writer myself, what audience am I trying to reach? Can I picture myself telling somebody who doesn’t understand one of my stories that I write stories that people like me will understand?

For the past few years, I feel like I’ve been constantly going back and forth on the question of whether “good” art is art that is appreciated by a lot of people or whether it is art that people educated in that particular artistic genre will be able to appreciate. I think there are strong arguments for both sides. Since there can be no set-in-stone standard for what makes a work of art “good,” or what the word “good” even means, it makes sense to say that a work of art’s quality can only fairly be judged by how popular it is. If people like it, it’s “good.”

However, if I pick up a book by, say, Nicholas Sparks (who is my go-to example of a terrible writer who is nonetheless hugely popular), I’m going to be so utterly outraged by how awful the writing is, how contrived the plot is, how one-dimensional the characters are, that there’s no way that I would be able to enjoy it. If you give me a Nicholas Sparks book and ask me, “Is this good art,” I will assume the question is sarcastic because the answer, to me, is so obviously, “No.”

But. If you must have an advanced education in literature to access a particular writer’s work, does that actually mean that the writer is “better” than a popular writer, whose work is accessible to ordinary people? Some days I think that “good” writers should try to bridge the gap between the educated folks and the masses. Other days I think that “good” writers should just accept that ordinary, everyday people will never be able to appreciate “good” art, that we have to decide between writing something that is actually artistically worthwhile and writing something that the average Joe will be able to understand.

Other days, though, I think it’s just not as cut-and-dry as that. There are some brilliant writers who are very successful (the top of my list includes Rick Moody, Bret Easton Ellis, J. D. Salinger, Zadie Smith, and there are many more). Yet for every one popular writer who I would say is “good,” there are many more popular writers who, in my opinion, are writing stuff that my seven-year-old nephew could have written. Of course, “good” art is in the eye of the beholder. If a reader—many millions of readers, actually—likes Nicholas Sparks, then to that reader, Sparks is “good.”

The question, though, remains, what should I be aiming for as a writer? Do I want to reach as wide an audience as possible, or do I want to write stuff that people with MFA's and PhD's will like? Back before I had a book published, I admit I had an idealistic image of somehow bridging that gap between the two, of being one of those lucky few writers who has managed to write accessible stuff that actually becomes popular while also pleasing those of us who look for subtlety, craft techniques, unique plots, etc. I certainly like to believe that the stories in my book would be accessible to most readers while also being able to withstand the critical magnifying glasses of my peers, but I’ll probably never know, because my book will not reach a very wide audience no matter what. Ordinary people don’t read literary short story collections written by unknown writers and published by small presses, and so I guess I made my decision without even realizing it when I wrote the book and decided to try to publish it.

And the truth is, now that the book is out, I’m glad that I wrote something that I don’t feel ashamed to share with my friends, who are mostly English instructors and writers themselves. I’m not so deluded that I don’t know that some people will read the book and feel that it does not line up with their image of “good” writing, but I do believe that an educated, literary person could read and appreciate what I’ve written. And even though I would have made way more money and be considered, by more people, a “good” writer if I had written, say, a cheesy romance novel, I’m still glad that I wrote the book that I did. Even though I can’t seem to find an agent for the novel that was my thesis, I’m still glad that it’s the novel that it is. I’m fine with being published in small journals that nobody but other writers read and putting out books through small presses that don’t have the funds to market their catalogue to a wide audience.

Because really, even though the much younger, more naïve version of myself would have said this older me is just a bad artist justifying bad art, I’ve decided that I really don’t mind only writing stuff that people like me will understand.

The past two weeks as I’ve been on winter break, I’ve been busily developing a half-online introductory creative writing course for the college where I work. I’ve been spending a good eight hours a day working on the course for the majority of the break, and it has, unfortunately, eaten into my writing time, which I had been so excitedly waiting for as the fall quarter drew to a close. Still, developing the course has been an interesting and useful experience.

As I’ve been preparing lessons and activities to introduce students for the first time to the craft and process of creative writing, I’ve been revisiting the basics myself, which has actually been extremely helpful. I’ve been stressing the importance of revision and suggesting concrete revision methods (like retyping the entire draft or doing several small revisions, each focusing on one specific layer of the text). To help students understand the creative writing process, I’ve compiled quotes from various famous authors talking about how writing is a lot of work, how first drafts are usually terrible, and how writing is, as Ernest Hemingway put it, “a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

It isn’t exactly that I forgot these basic truths, but somewhere along the line I began holding myself to an impossibly high standard. I suppose it came from my image of my creative writing career as a ladder, which I’ve been slowly climbing up, one rung at a time. Now that I’ve signed my first book contract (my book, by the way, will be released on January 15^th—the countdown begins!), I’ve been feeling this immense amount of pressure to somehow move another rung up—the next step, I guess I’ve always assumed, would be to land an agent—but not only does that next rung up the ladder still seem hopelessly out of reach, I’m afraid that I won’t even be able to remain on the current rung for long.

The result has been that I’ve been seized with a sort of debilitating fear. Or perhaps that’s too strong. I was writing for about an hour a day during the fall quarter, and the only reason I’ve hardly been writing at all during the break is because I’ve been so busy with other things (this winter break, oddly enough, has kept me busier than I usually am when school is in session). Still, I’ve felt as though my writing life has been at a standstill, and whatever work I have accomplished since I signed that book contract almost six months ago has felt, well, for lack of a better word, bad. I’ve been feeling like a very bad writer, and I’ve been worrying, I may as well say it out loud (or I should say, type it out . . . inky?), that I will never be able to produce anything as good as the stories in this one book, my first, which would also, then, inevitably be my last.

But what I realized while preparing the online lessons is that most of my final drafts are being published in my book. Which means that right now, every time I sit down to work on a short story, I’m working on a fairly early draft. It all seems like bad writing to me—and it is—but so were the early drafts of every single one of the stories in Peter Never Came. It took a lot of time, hard work, and feedback from others to get them to the point they’re at now, and just because I have a published book out there now doesn’t mean that my first drafts are suddenly going to be perfect, or that the writing process is going to get any easier or less messy.

Most of the quotes I’ve come across from successful writers indicate that writing never becomes easy. Writers never reach a point where their first drafts are solid gold; writers never become skilled enough that they no longer need feedback, or that they no longer need to spend countless hours agonizing over each new draft.

Or, to put it far more concisely and eloquently, I’ll leave you with the words of Thomas Mann, in my favorite of the quotes I came across when preparing my lessons: “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

Writer Kelly Kathleen Ferguson, of the Three P’s of Post-Montana MFA blog, responded to my goal question from a few weeks back in her own blog post. Her take on the issue of goals is fascinating and very true, and I highly recommend you have a look.

And now for something only slightly different: it’s a complete cliché to talk about someone—especially a female someone—finding that first grey hair and being thrown into a state of reflection about his or her life and what little time remains of it. Yet it happens all the time, and it’s precisely what’s been happening to me, in an extended sort of way, for the past few years.

I have exactly one grey hair—one, at least, that I’m aware of. It made its dramatic entrance about a year and a half ago, when I was visiting my parents in sunny San Diego. My parents, my husband, and I were on a walk, and I guess the sunlight hit my hair just right and my mom—who is much taller than I—caught a glimpse of that meddlesome grey hair. She pointed it out to me, and I laughed it off and tried not to panic, and then, for a while, forgot about its existence.

Every now and again since then, I’ve caught sight of it in the mirror and wondered if I should pull it out. It seems if I have one grey hair, more will follow soon, and pulling it out won’t really change anything. It won’t, after all, make me any younger. A few weeks ago, I got a haircut, and the lady once again brought the grey hair to my attention. I laughed and said, “Yep,” like it was no big deal, and secretly wondered if I’m wrong to think it seems like kind of a rude thing to point out to a complete stranger.

I’ll be turning thirty in a few weeks. Thirty. Fairly young to be going grey, if you ask me. The grey hair, really, doesn’t mean I don’t have much time left. I’m pretty healthy; I exercise and count calories; I don’t think I’m going to die at an unreasonably young age—I probably still have at least another thirty years in me, and probably many more.

Yet another thirty or forty, even fifty years doesn’t actually sound like all that much, when I really think about it.

It took me the first thirty to get my first book published. I’m sure the books that follow it will come more and more quickly and easily, but still, the fact remains that the amount of time I have to actually write all the things I want to write does have a concrete boundary. Thirty or forty or fifty more years is a lot of time, but it is not an infinite amount of time. My time will eventually run out, and whatever projects I haven’t gotten to by then will simply die along with me.

This all seems terribly grim, and I don’t mean it to. I’m not actually depressed or anything like that. Instead, I’m eager. To write this stuff now, while I still can. As of right now, I have plans for two more story collections, four novels, and six children’s books. Those are just the ones I already have ideas for. Who knows how many more will come to me over my remaining years? It seems fair to guess that I won’t get to everything before I die, so the best I can hope for is to get to as many as I can. But the only way that’s going to happen is if I (to quote that awful Nike slogan) just do it.

And so today I suppose I’m thinking about goals in a slightly different way. My goal, right now, is to finish the current draft of the novel that was my MFA thesis, so that I can finish the second draft of my next novel, so that I can write however many more drafts will be necessary until that novel is finished, so that I can write the first draft of whatever novel will come after it, and so on and so on. Until my time runs out.

Last week I talked about how much harder it is for me to work on full novels than it is to write short stories. As I was working on the second draft of my current novel today, I figured out, at least partially, where the trouble is coming from. It seems that my writing process is very different when I’m working on shorter pieces than full novels.

When I write a short story, I often have only a very vague idea in my head, or a line, or an image that I want to put into words. When I sit down and begin typing, I rarely have anything even remotely resembling a plot in mind, but that never worries me. I know that it will either come or it won’t. If it does, I’ll end up with a full draft of a story, if it doesn’t, I’ll chalk the experience up to practice.

When I work on novels, though, for some reason I seem to feel less comfortable with the vast question mark lying before me, and before I even begin, I try to map out the plot. This, I’ve realized, is a very bad idea. For me, anyway. This is just not the way I write.

My first attempt at a novel—the first one I actually finished and revised—was stilted and contrived; it was overwritten, overplotted, and thoroughly unoriginal. When I was writing the second novel I ever actually completed, my MFA thesis, I was able to sort of break free of these boundaries. I did map the plot out before the first draft, but when I wrote the second draft I threw it all out and started over from page one, with no clear idea of where it was going to go. I ended up, I feel, with a much better novel than I could have written if I had tried to plot it all out in advance.

On my current novel, though, I have a pretty clear idea of the overall plot in my head. This is partially because this is the second draft, and in the first draft I kind of hammered out all the kinks of what I want to happen in the story. But this is causing me problems when I sit down and actually write. What’s happening is that the pace of the novel is going all wonky. Because I know what’s going to happen next, and what’s going to happen after that, I’m racing through each scene, not taking my time and reveling in the details like I should.

If I don’t know what’s going to happen, see, the only way to find out is by writing it. I have to inch my way blindly through the story by spending a lot of time in the details of each scene. If I look closely enough, they’ll begin to form themselves into something meaningful, and the next key plot point of the story will reveal itself to me. If I already know the next key plot point, though, I tend to get antsy and move too quickly to it, ignoring those details and kind of deflating the entire story in the process.

For future novels, the resolution to this problem is obvious: stop trying to plot them out in advance. If I let my novels evolve organically instead of trying to mold them into something specific, I’m sure I’ll end up a better novelist. For my next novel, I’m going to make sure I begin without a plot in my mind. For my current one, though, the resolution is a bit trickier. I already know the plot of this story, and I like the plot. I think it’s good. I don’t know whether I should chuck it out the window to free up my more organic writing style. Maybe I should. Or maybe there’s some other way, some way I can keep the plot but force myself to revel in the details anyway. 

I’m a little over halfway through the novel right now. For the past few weeks, I’ve been going back through the first 150 pages to revise them as much as possible to enter them into the McSweeney’s Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award at the end of the month. I’m trying to flesh out the scenes, making changes as necessary but also adding details all over the place. It’s much more forced than it would be if I had written the details in to begin with, and I’m not really sure whether it’s working.

Once I get through the beginning again, I’ll work on finishing this second draft, and my goal is to try to forget about the plot as I’m working on each individual scene; I only want to think about the plot when I finish with a scene or chapter and am again looking at how the pieces fit together as a whole. It may be difficult to force the plot out of my mind as I’m actually writing, though, so this is likely to be an ongoing learning experience for me. I’m nervous, but excited, to see how it goes.

As I’ve been getting back to work on my new novel, I’ve been thinking lately about the difference between writing short stories and writing novels. I’ve heard a lot of different opinions about how to know whether you have a story or a novel on your hands, or which craft techniques are best for shorter pieces and which ones are best for book length works. I’ve heard, too, people argue that short stories are more difficult to write than novels, and I’ve heard others argue that novels are more difficult to write than short stories.

Here’s my take: from my experience, it takes a lot longer—and I mean a lot—to write and revise to completion a novel than it takes to bring a short story from inception to publication. I’m talking the difference between a few months for a 20 page story to a few years for a full length novel. Just banging out the first draft of a novel takes, I’d say at minimum, a month—and that’s if you work on it for two or three hours a day. You can throw together a first draft of a story, though, in a day or two, if you really buckle down.

But time doesn’t necessarily equal difficulty. Just because it’s more time consuming to work on a longer piece, does that automatically mean that a longer piece is more difficult? Or is it more difficult to work on a shorter piece, since every word, every single detail, must be very carefully chosen?

The answer I’ve come to recently is perhaps not very satisfying: it depends. It depends on which length the writer in question has had more practice with.

I’ve been mostly working on my novel lately, and I can say with absolutely certainty that novels are much more difficult for me to write than are stories. It’s harder for me to hold 300 pages worth of plot and character development and key details in my mind at once, to keep track of the entire thing as I work on any individual section. I’m also a firm believer in the importance of plot, and I find it much easier to keep the plot moving at a steady clip in a short work. In a full novel, I have to slow the pace down dramatically, and not every second of the story involves a plot point. It’s much harder for me to know what details to include and what to leave out, what tangents are appropriate and what ones will lose the reader?

Many of these problems are problems of early drafts, of course. Part of the reason why novels feel so much harder for me is probably because I can spend months tinkering away on a novel and still know that the final draft lies very far in my future; if I’d spent that time working on a short story, I’d probably have something ready to send out already.

But I think even more than perception, the reason why I find novels so much more difficult is because I’ve had a lot more practice writing short stories. I’ve written countless short stories, many of which were awful and have long since faded into the past. But after writing all those terrible stories, I eventually started getting a feel for how to craft a strong story, and I started publishing the stories that I wrote not long after. I still have more to learn—every new story I write is better than the stories that have come before it, which shows that I’m still learning as I go—but even so, I’m at a point in my story writing career where, when I sit down to work on something new, I feel fairly confident that it will eventually get published.

Not so with novels. I wrote, when I was younger, a handful of unfinished novels, and when I was an undergrad I wrote a first and second draft of what I call my “practice novel.” In grad school, I wrote a novel for my thesis, and have revised it and revised it (and am going to probably revise it again this winter break). And then there’s my new novel, which I wrote a first draft of in between drafts of my thesis, and I’m currently writing the second draft. I’ve had some practice, sure, and I do believe my thesis novel and my current novel have the potential to get published. But I also struggle a lot more in this form than I do in the story form, and of course, I’ve not yet had any publication success as a novelist.

But the nice thing about it is that, once I realized that this was probably the reason why I’m finding it so difficult to make this new novel gel, it kind of took the pressure off a bit. If the problem is simply that I need more practice, then that’s precisely what I intend to get. More practice. And the way to get it is by plowing ahead, by just working on the novel and not worrying so much about how good it is, or how hard it is to make it good. Because the more I work in that form, the more practice I’ll get, and little by little, the better novelist I’ll become.

Once I got back on track with my writing habits (as far as I can tell, my block has officially been kicked—I hope I didn’t just jinx it by saying that!), I was able to write a few new stories, which I then revised and am ready to begin submitting. So, while I talked recently about how I’m going to cool it a bit with the goal setting, I think I am going to try to push myself to meet the 10 submissions a month goal that has become my standard over the past few years.  

I am not, however, going to put pressure on myself to meet any sort of daily time goal right now, nor am I going to push myself to pump out more stories at the moment. The stories that I wrote recently were not the stories I had decided to write. I have a list (as most writers do, I imagine) of story ideas. I had gone through my list and selected two stories to be my next two pieces. When I sat down to work on them, though, I really had to force it. If you were to look through the files on my computer today, you’d find about fifteen not-very-strong pages of each of these two new stories, and you’d also probably note that neither one of the stories seems to be heading in any worthwhile direction. Odd, because I’ve been dying to write these specific stories for some time now. I kept telling myself, “As soon as I have time . . .  I can’t wait until I have time . . .” Yet now that I do have time, these “great” ideas are just not gelling.

But don’t worry. If you were to look at the files on my computer today, you’d also find a couple of new stories that didn’t come from my idea list, and those stories I actually feel pretty good about. It seems that my brain, rather than allowing itself to be bullied to write the stories I wanted to write, decided that it would write the stories it was interested in. With both of these new stories, I was just minding my own business, living my life and not trying to write, when the words for a first line, and then a second, and then a third, just started bouncing around in my mind. I rushed to the computer to pour the words out, and then more came, then more, and by the end, I had a solid draft of a new story I hadn’t meant to write.

This is actually the way pretty much all of my best stories were written. Rarely do the ideas I jot down in the pocket notebook I carry around in my purse end up developing into anything very good. The really good stories are the ones that I write the second I have the idea—and to be honest, they often don’t even start as an idea; they start as a line, which, once I write it down, sparks another line, which sparks another. And pretty soon, I have a full story developing beneath my fingertips, a story I didn’t even know I had inside me.

I quite like my two new stories, and now that I have something to submit to journals, the pressure to be working on short stories is alleviated. I’m now freed up to get back to work on my new novel, which, I’m realizing now that I’m becoming once again immersed in it, is what I really want to be working on right now. No amount of telling myself that my previous novel is still unpublished, or that the best way to attract an agent to possibly sell that unpublished novel is probably to blanket the journal market with as many short stories as possible, is quelling my desire to put everything else aside and live, for a while, in the world of the new novel.

And so I’m going to stop fighting it. I’m not going to worry about writing short stories. If another story comes to me, like these recent two did, that’s great, but the two stories from my idea list that I was trying to force are going to have to remain unfinished for now. Right now I’ve got (to use a cliché) bigger fish to fry.