"Forget about it" |
Since I have just completed my first semester back at college,
I thought I would share with you reflections concerning one class, "Fiction
Writing Workshop."
As John Gardner said in The Art of Fiction, "It's by the whole
process of first planning the fiction and then writing it--elaborating
characters and details of setting, finding the style that seems appropriate
to the feeling, discovering un-anticipated requirements of the plot--that
the writer finds out and communicates the story's significance, intuited
at the start. ...[This is] not just one person's feeling but a universal
human feeling, some recognition or affirmation of a value".
I went to the Fiction Writing Workshop wanting to write fiction, recognizing
that my fiction was weak, but not knowing specifically what was wrong
with it. I learned that I have many things to learn, but I have made a
good beginning.
Gardner said, "The writer's business is to make up convincing human
beings and create for them basic actions by means of which they come to
know themselves and reveal themselves to the reader". My first problem
was that I was putting the action first, then inserting a flat paper-doll
character to carry out the action. I forgot that the most memorable novels
I have read were not the most adventurous ones. Rather, they were the
ones--like my current favorite, Losing Julia by Jonathan Hull--with
characters so deep and engaging that when the story ended, I missed them.
By doing exercises, I practiced characterization by
artifact, dialogue, response and physicality. My characters gradually
became rounder, if not yet robust. More exercises taught me how
to keep
the reader caring what will happen next. In particular, I saw how much
practice I needed in "show, don't tell." I learned to
look at my work more objectively to see if it raised any questions
that I
needed to answer. Other exercises helped me with development of setting,
with similes and metaphors, and with creative rephrasing.
What I came to appreciate by the end of the semester was that the short
assignment was not really meant as an exercise but as "a possible
beginning of some magnificent work of art". I took a one-page
description that I did not care for and turned it into a scene that
was satisfactory.
I developed an eight-page story from a one-page scene. I took work
that was mostly expository, sat with it, wrestled with it, let my imagination
play with it, and produced a better story. Finally--because the course
required it--I stuck with it. I took that decent short story apart
and
reworked it and created a piece of writing that I was proud to claim
as my own.
Throughout the semester, we read good fiction by a variety of writers.
If the above exercises flexed our writing muscles, as the professor
suggested, I believe the reading stretched them. For the first time,
I read fiction not just for the pleasure of reading, and not to analyze
it, but to observe the writer's craft. I enjoyed the work as story
first--I
think I always will--but then I looked at it again with an eye to how
the writer did his work. I saw various settings and points of view.
I noticed how some stories were largely dialogue, while others had
very
little, and how that affected the feeling of the story. In particular,
I paid attention when the writer was showing, not telling, and tried
to learn from that. In more than one instance, I said to myself, "I
like how he did that!" It was as if I were looking at painting
I've always enjoyed, and finally seeing how I might execute those brush
strokes myself.
I will continue reading because I cannot do otherwise. They might have
to tuck a book in my coffin. Also I will write. I will write and rewrite,
then rewrite again--at first because the instructor requires it, I admit--but
then because I want it to show in my work. If it takes me twenty years,
I will write a story that makes someone else feel the way good fiction
makes me feel.
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