I've officially finished my first semester at Pacific University and my head is still spinning.
I have very much enjoyed working with author/teacher/mentor Valerie Miner. I felt Valerie spent a lot of time and effort on my writing. Consistently, she had notes and comments on every page, always addressed my questions/concerns and commented not only on what wasn't working in my fiction, but what was working. Valerie always seemed to enthusiastically enjoy reading my work, which meant a great deal to me. She imparted some wisdom about the writing life (creating physical and mental space for writing, time for revision, etc) which was invaluable. I was asked to write an abstract for my thesis, a short paper about my writing goals and a paragraph about my interests regarding style of fiction. I have learned a lot from these assignments -- a more cognitive understanding of why I write and what kind of writer I want to become. Valerie is an excellent teacher and mentor, I greatly enjoyed our exchanges.
I grew to love revision this semester. Valerie's guidance, her craft talk and Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction has really helped with this. I now schedule the appropriate time I need to sit on a story, revise, edit, and revise again. It’s not a horrible, agonizing, impatient struggle for me anymore. I now wake up thinking, Yay! I get to revise today! I understand my process better now and can schedule my life appropriately.
This semester I focused on point of view and character development, but of course I learned about other elements of form, structure and craft during these last six months. I appreciated reading Burroway's craft book and used it as a guide when I felt I was struggling with any craft or technical aspects of my stories. I learned to introduce characters slowly (as opposed to big, chunky paragraphs) from Flannery O'Conner, Valerie Miner and Pete Fromm (something that has been a struggle for me within the confines of short story, but feel I have improved upon). Ann Beattie taught me a couple new tricks with metaphor that I haven't been able to get out of my head. I've been trying to incorporate techniques of "getting to the heart of a story" that I learned from Joyce Carol Oates. I grew to understand pacing more fully through Claire Davis. I learned a lot about realistic and strong dialogue from Anne Beattie and Pete Fromm. ZZ Packer, Sherman Alexie and Grace Paley taught me how to write effective, sometimes ironic, humor. I was excited to learn more about point of view from Raymond Carver and Randall Kenan, both authors showing the importance of WHO tells the story and HOW they tell it. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Randall Kenan's work (a recommendation of Valerie's, as Kenan shares my interest in playing with the real and unreal in stories). Overall the reading was very engaging and influential towards my writing development this semester.
In the past six months I read 15 books, wrote 12 commentaries on these books, wrote an abstract for my thesis and completed 85 pages of rough work and 60 pages of revised/edited/polished work (3 polished short stories). Not bad.
As of right now, the overall theme in my stories is about characters that are pushed too far, the dark side of transformation. Many of my stories have a magical or unbelievable turn when the character is confronted with demons/angels that push them to their limits. My drafts this semester explored this concept, often times playing with the “real” and “unreal.” One question I ask in these stories is, “What happens to one’s reality after trauma, or death, or birth, or realization, or denial?”
For next semester I will continue writing short stories exploring the dark side of transformation while paying attention to fictional place/time, theme and point of view (aspects I sometimes struggle with in stories). I am very excited about the reading list I've compiled --- lots of moody, scary stuff!
Overall, this first semester has been very stimulating. My writing schedule feels very natural, cemented in the 5-8 hours a day, one day off. I'm enjoying the structure of school, but in all honesty, am nervous about the monetary debt. But as my friend Sarah says, "No one can repo your education." Maybe my next story will be about a shadowy repo man who comes to the door and scoops out the juicy creative insides of a grad students brain. We'll see...
