Author Archives: Stephanie Carpenter

A slice of Story Logic

I’ve been stumped for a blog idea for a few weeks now—in the thick of teaching three creative writing workshops, I’m hard-pressed for ideas about anything other than pedagogy. Sitting here thinking about what I’ve been thinking about, I find there’s not much that’s ripe for public sharing. I’ve been thinking about the stories of the Wall Street protestors; I’ve been thinking about Friday Night Lights. In either case, I could provide you with a raw gush of emotions—not a coherent blog post.

So instead I offer you this: a craft book review. My favorite creative writing craft books—and honestly, there are many more on my “least favorite” list—are not conversational or cutesy; they don’t urge their readers to write “shitty first drafts” or to imagine the contents of their characters’ garbage cans. Instead, my favorite craft books unsettle some aspect of my writing habits, leading me into different imaginative territories than I typically tread. Among my favorites are Wendy Bishop’s Thirteen Way of Looking for a Poem, Brian Kitely’s two amazing books of fiction-writing exercises (The 3 A.M. Epiphany and The 4 A. M. Breakthrough) and, most recently, Catherine Brady’s Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction. Simply put, I love Brady’s book. I’ve adopted it for use in my graduate-level fiction workshop, and it’s just possible that I love it too well to teach with it effectively. Leading discussions on the book, I’m prone to telling anecdotes about how Brady’s insights have affected my own work. Let’s hope these rhapsodies serve their purpose: what I’m saying is, pay attention to this book.

With the term “story logic,” Brady gives name to the play of literal and figurative tensions at work in fiction. “Stories have a hold on our imaginations—as writers and as readers—because their particulars do not resolve in the form of unequivocal, exact statements. Their value lies in the richness of their implications, their capacity to shed meaning in many directions, not just one. Fiction is full of ideas, but they are the effluence thrown off by specific events, not a premise for which the story is proof” (3). And Brady notes that the richness, the inherent and artful messiness of story logic is a difficult thing to fully honor during the workshop process. When presented with a flawed story, a plot stuck in a “static equation”—in which the literal elements of the story map too neatly onto the figurative—members of a workshop are wont to respond with requests for more information. You’ve heard this, I’m sure—and perhaps responded with more about the mother, more of your protagonist’s backstory, more details with the goal of more depth. And yet such advice may not make the story “work”. Brady urges the writer to look for other means of shaking up the static equation, by “interrogating the sensory reality of the story” rather than weighing it down with more more more (11-12). I love both that advice and that phrasing—not “engage the five senses,” as somebody else might blandly advise you—interrogate the sensory reality. Question your work until it reveals its secrets; regard it as having a sensory reality, or what life can it have?

My use of creative writing craft books is eclectic. In teaching, I take an exercise from here, a diagram from there—sometimes I share whole chapters with my students. Brady’s book is one that strikes me as useful in its entirety, whether for an advanced fiction class or a lone writer, stumped. As I was working through it this summer, I found myself dropping the book and running to my computer, not once but many times, constantly arriving at new ideas. That’s without even glancing at the smart writing exercises Brady includes in her appendix. Story Logic is full of treasures (sentence diagrams! brilliant readings of published fiction! a Venn diagram!). It’s a book that makes me feel like a grateful student, learning—without the least urge to text my friends under the desktop.

We were warned: one more view on graduate programs

From the moment I declared myself an English major, representatives of the academy have been warning me that there would be no jobs in academia for me or my peers. The grad school advisor in my college’s English department presented us with the list of qualifications that we would need to possess in order to get into a viable graduate program—the most daunting to me as a college sophomore was mastery of both a modern and an ancient language. I concluded that he was right: I would not be a competitive candidate for doctoral study in literature, and if I couldn’t get into one of the programs he was describing, there was no way I’d be qualified for one of the very few jobs like his. After college I moped around for a few years as a secretary before realizing that, for a would-be writer like me, there was another kind of graduate school: the MFA. And I wept when I got the acceptance call, at work, months before I was expecting it. The woodland creatures who helped me with my office chores danced for joy. Like Cinderella, I was in!

For me, the MFA was an important period of development, during which I met people whose writing and reading tastes were very different from mine. I’d gone through a pretty traditional English program, encountering contemporary fiction only in the two fiction workshops offered at my school. I’d never heard of Cormac McCarthy, Ben Marcus, Lydia Davis—I’d never heard of lots of the people we studied and more-or-less imitated in those years. And I left my MFA program knowing very well that I wasn’t ready or qualified—or even interested—in teaching creative writing to someone else. That interest emerged gradually, after I returned to school, drawn back as much by the prospect of studying literature as by the prospect of taking more workshops. I learned how to teach in my PhD program and teaching felt like a far better fit with my temperament than had working as a secretary (see post-college years) or as a test-tutor (see post-MFA years). Put another way, my PhD program professionalized me in a way my previous degree programs had not.

Two of the most disconcerting experiences of my PhD years, however, were the campus visits I went on as a participant in my school’s preparing future faculty program. I was paired with creative writing professors at other institutions and I had the opportunity to meet with these individuals and learn about their jobs. Both had what I would consider good positions, with manageable teaching loads (I believe a 2/2, in both cases). Those assignments sounded less peachy when you factored in their advising loads. Both worked at programs with master’s-level degrees in creative writing and were working one-on-one with double-digit numbers of master’s thesis students—doing their best, I am sure, to meet those students’ needs, but almost certainly not providing the level of attention that a smaller or better-staffed program could afford. Neither of the programs I visited was able to fund all of its students, and those students with funding didn’t receive much of it. The students’ choices to attend these programs defied all advice I’ve ever heard about CW degrees. If you read that recent Poets & Writers feature about the MFA, perhaps you read the advice from program directors. Nearly every one of them cautions against going into debt for an MFA. There’s the practical side of the equation—you aren’t increasing your earning potential with this degree—and the symbolic side: with a couple of big-name exceptions, if a creative writing program can’t fund you, it’s either not well-funded itself or it doesn’t want you badly enough to offer you a good package.

That master’s programs are cash cows for their universities was no break-through for me on those campus visits: my own doctoral institution has responded to financial crises by cutting funding to some MA programs. But I was troubled by the ethical implications of becoming a faculty member in an under-funded graduate program. What expectations were students bringing to such programs? What were they doing with their degrees, afterward?

Of course no one can predict where a writer will go. But I know now, as an instructor in a graduate workshop at my own institution (which grants an MA in English), that many of the students in our program want to be college-level writing teachers and/or professional writers. And here is where I become personally conflicted. It was one thing to take this risk for myself. I did, after all, find a job. I don’t know yet whether I’ll be able to keep it; we’ll see what I manage to publish in the next five years. We’ll see whether this relationship of writing and professing makes sense, for me. But as someone who has found an academic job, however temporarily, I don’t really believe in the advice I was given, that this career can’t happen. And yet…facing my graduate students, I sometimes feel a tinge of the same panic I experience at the AWP conference: there’s no way everyone in the room will make it. Am I leading them to believe otherwise? How can there possibly be enough literary acclaim or teaching positions to go around? (But scarcity of resources is hardly news, in this epoch of overpopulation). It’s difficult to encourage students in their work while keeping them realistically informed about the state of the field.

So my issue with graduate degrees in creative writing is with the way they encourage students to limit our prospects, to want what we’ve seen other people get before us, however diminished a version we might wind up with. If we believe that taking workshops and/or studying literature are valuable experiences for a writer, then we ought not to believe that the only valid application of graduate study is in becoming a professor. And yet…I have a very difficult time imagining another day job than teaching for myself. When I do arrive at one that sounds appealing—librarian, docent, environmental scientist—it’s always the kind of thing that would require another degree, if not another personality. I would like to believe that this is a failure of my imagination, rather than a failure of possibility. There’s a poster in the hallway outside my department that offers some encouragement: What can you do with an English major? (Hopefully read, some wise guy has scrawled). But quite a few options are listed here, however far off some of them may be for the recent college graduate (e.g., “become a critic”). We need to work up a poster like this for the MFA (and PhD) crowd. As writers, we identify primarily as creative people—so why is it that we can’t create other career options for ourselves and our students?

Imagining place

Like Rob, I’ve been thinking lately about the influence of place on my writing. My main requirement of the space immediately around me is only that it’s really quiet for hours and hours on end. I’ve had fits and spurts of that kind of quiet this summer. In the past few months I’ve traveled far more than I usually do, making trips to Australia, Norway, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Atlanta, GA. Since the end of May, I’ve spent only two continuous two-week stretches in my apartment (with lots of shorter “visits” interspersed). It’s been a great summer, if exhausting—and while it has perhaps been less immediately productive than a more sedentary summer would have been, it has certainly given me a lot to think about during the next eight months, during which I’ll be once more firmly rooted in Flint.

Since a portion of these trips were made to places where I’ve lived (Williamstown and Boston, MA; my parents’ place in Northern Michigan; and, if we stretch things a bit, my ancestral homes in Wisconsin and Norway), I’ve been thinking in particular about how those places enter into my writing. I’m fairly sure that my identity as a “Michigan writer” played a part in my getting a job here in Michigan, and it’s true that most of the stories I’ve published take place here; the novel that I’m finishing is set here, too. But truth be told, I haven’t yet done any substantial writing while I’ve lived in Michigan. In those first 18 years, there were a lot of half-finished stories and over-blown creative writing assignments. Then came years in Massachusetts, New York, and Missouri—places where I went to school, grew up a little, and wrote more seriously. In the year since I’ve been back in the Great Lakes State, I’ve produced some new stuff, but nothing to suggest that coming back was inspirational. Does this mean I’m not really a Michigan writer?

The problem for me is that I can’t write about a place while I’m there. Setting is for me an abstraction of the real; I write stories set a hundred-odd years ago, or hundreds of miles from where I am. This remove feels necessary to my process of forging fictional space. If the place itself is close at hand, peering through my windows, I feel too beholden to the literal to write with any energy or conviction. This was my shortcoming, too, when as a kid I’d take summer art classes. I loved to draw and my technique was okay, but the best you could have said of my work was that it was accurate. My still-lifes were too still. Then as now, it’s only when the model is out of sight that I feel freed up to invent.

There’s a photo album in the lobby of my hometown library filled with lost photographs—snapshots, wedding proofs, senior portraits and much more—all discovered between the pages of library books. When I write at that library, I always begin with a perusal of the album. I’ve never seen anyone I know there, just as I’ve never seen anyone I know on a found photography website (though there are always quick flashes of almost-recognition). But familiar faces are not what I’m looking for. Instead, the challenge I pose myself after looking at these lost photographs is to see how many of them I can still describe after I’ve found a carrel and set up my computer. Which colors, faces, odd details remain? That’s what place in fiction is to me: dominated by strange features, scaffolded off of something half-remembered, inhabited through the writing of it.

The summer of travel has left me full of New England, fjords, koalas and cows. It’s only by keeping my distance, pursuing my own unsystematic research tactics, that I might get anywhere in writing about such things. My next great Michigan epic will have to wait until I have some distance from the place, if I ever again do. Though it may violate some unwritten term in my contract, I have a feeling that this Michigan writer will become less so, the longer she stays here. Meanwhile, here’s my favorite found photography website, if you’d like to approximate the album exercise for yourself.

The words we use

I’ve been editing my novel this summer. Recently I ran across a phrase that I knew I’d heard before: “the narrow throat of the corridor.” Too purple, perhaps, and worse, when I searched the file, I found I’d already used this exact description some 200 pages earlier. Thanks to a couple of years spent proof-reading environmental reports, I have a pretty good eye for things like this—give me a document and I’ll spot unintentional repetitions, small discrepancies, extra spaces between words. But how to know whether other writers have described corridors in similar terms? In last week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review, Ben Zimmer wrote about a database that lets me search other people’s books, too—something even cooler than Google Books. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is a research tool created by linguistics professor at Brigham Young University to analyze contemporary language usage. According to Zimmer, the corpus includes works from the last 20 years and compiles “425 million words of text…with equally large samples drawn from fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, academic texts and transcripts of spoken English.”

Zimmer’s article describes a number of interesting projects that make use of COCA—researchers looking for patterns in word use and, in some cases, finding phrases or constructions (“collocations”) that are more prevalent in fiction than in spoken English. I was struck by a remark from lexicographer Orin Hargraves, whose study of “hair-related collocations” in fiction reveals that “’fictional characters cannot stop playing with their hair.’” That finding isn’t surprising: playing with the hair is the fictional equivalent of an actor smoking, a familiar means of conveying unease or flirtatiousness. As Zimmer puts it, “The conventions of modern storytelling dictate that fictional characters react to their worlds in certain stock ways and that the storytellers use stock expressions to describe those reactions.” This is something most of us know about our art—but COCA can help us to actually see it. Indexing journals like Callaloo, TriQuarterly, and The Southern Review, and books by writers like Clavell, Cynthia Ozick and Elizabeth Strout, COCA lets us easily examine our tropes. Here we can see both the number of times somebody “plays” with “hair” and read the passages in which these two words occur. Here is quantitative and qualitative evidence that literary fiction is a genre with well-established conventions.

The last time I was in the TMR office, the poetry readers had filled a white board with words they felt had been over- (and unwisely) used in poems. I sympathized deeply. At the head of my own forbidden list is a verb that crops up often in contemporary fiction: to finger. When characters don’t convey unease by playing with their hair, they may well resort to “nervously” or “anxiously” “fingering” nearby objects. A search for “fingered” in COCA’s fiction database returns characters who finger cassette tapes, flashlights, photographs, books, beards, articles of clothing, trophies, scars, jewelry, a scientific journal–and on and on, from Highlights for Children to The New England Review, from Good Housekeeping to The New Yorker: 559 hits found in magazines and books. Surely you’ve seen “fingered” in writing, too, sexualizing even the most innocent sentence. Characters don’t use the word in conversation; writers use it in their narration. According to the OED, this has been going on for many hundreds of years, since women were wont, in Spenser’s Faerie Queen, “to finger the fine needle and nyce thread” or since Philammon, in Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia, spoke while “fingering curiously the first coins he had ever handled in his life”. A more tactile word than “touched”? More suggestive than “rubbed”? Perhaps I am a poor reader for not allowing fingered its multiple meanings—the OED gives eight. But consider the times, if any, that you’ve used or heard the word in conversation: when did it describe anything but a sex act? How can fiction writers be unaware of connotation, when their characters begin fingering a desktop, a business card, or, my favorite because surely self-aware, “a ball and stick molecular model that had been serving as a paperweight” (from Thomas Dulski’s “Guaranteed Not to Turn Pink in the Can”)? Yet according to COCA’s demure database, the only use we make of this verb in spoken English is when describing the actions of a narc, a snitch, a dirty squealing rat. The database’s collection of spoken texts appears to compile transcribed television and radio news programs; it returns 56 instances of reporters using “fingered” to affect a hard-boiled tone. One 2010 episode of Dateline uses the word three times in voiceovers: “They said they lied when they fingered Ryan as the killer.” To point the finger at, to implicate: the fiction writer was fingered as a persnickety reader.

No matter that my initial experiments with COCA were made in pursuit of a pet peeve, I find it interesting that the results yielded such distinct patterns of usage in fiction and what COCA calls speech. I hope you’ll find something equally revealing–a little light research to get you in the back-to-school mood.

I read fast . . . for a 6th grader

In elementary school, I was a Battle of the Books all-star. That annual quiz competition continues to this day. Students must demonstrate that they have read at least a handful of titles from a list of 30 selected books in order to try out for their school’s team. I always read the entire list. This made me a great asset to the team in the writing of trivia questions (to be used in our practice rounds and in scrimmages against other schools) and, of course, in answering them. I still remember some of those questions: the outrage I felt, for example, when another school got a point for the answer “peanut butter and jelly” instead of “peanut butter and Jell-o” (Question: what kind of sandwich does Angeline eat in Louis Sachar’s Someday Angeline?) My rigorous Battle of the Books training perhaps also explains why I still am able to remember minutia from books longer and better than I can more significant details (endings, characters’ names, etc.).

I was reminded of these days recently when I learned about the Melville House Book’s Art of the Novella Reading Challenge. The Challenge was inspired by Nonsuch Book blogger Frances Evangelista, who plans to read and review all 42 of the novellas published by Melville House during the month of August. The rest of us are invited to try to keep up with her. You can claim to be Curious, Obsessed, a Bibliomaniac and anything in between based on the number of titles you’ve read—but Melville House plans to award prizes at random to those bloggers linking to the contest page. I like this aspect of the challenge: reading/buying more Melville House books doesn’t increase your chances of winning a prize.

In my old age, I also appreciate that Melville House Reading Challenge doesn’t materially reward speed-reading. Back in the day, I was a fast reader for a 5^th or 6^th grader. That’s probably still true; I’ll challenge any 12-year-old to a reading race. For an academic, however, I read at a distressingly slow pace. I can tell you right now that there’s no way I’d get through 42 novellas in a month, or at least not without striking all other pursuits from my calendar. I’m not even sure I could read 42 short stories in a month. But earlier this summer, I did go on a brief novella-reading tear of my own. None of those titles—Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, Lan Samantha Chang’s Hunger, Claire Messud’s “A Simple Tale”—gets me anywhere in Melville House’s challenge. However, there was a distinct pleasure, for this slow reader, in polishing off an actual book in one sitting. This isn’t quite the immersive reading experience that Sarah Strong wrote about so evocatively in her Harry Potter post: reading a short novel, you’re always aware that the end is coming soon. Still, I was intrigued to find that all three of the randomly-selected novellas I read condensed a great deal of time into a relatively short number of pages—even when, as in McEwan’s work, a single evening served as the focal point of the book. The compression of the novella creates its own kind of transport.

I carried on my own personal novella challenge yesterday by reading Stuart Dybeck’s “Four Deuces,” in the latest issue of A Public Space. At 42 journal pages, the piece looks more like a long story, which is how it’s now described on the journal’s website—but I swear the word “novella” was up there when I ordered my copy. Regardless, the piece is another example of a short form covering a long swath of time. “Four Deuces” is styled as a one-sided conversation between Rose, a bar owner, and Rafael, a young patron. Rose does all the talking, with Rafael’s questions and actions implied here and there by shifts in her monologue. Set in Chicago, narrated in a voice by turns poetic and crude, the piece has lots of Dybek’s characteristic elements; the most satisfying of these is its ending. The ending of “Four Deuces” brings to a close an increasingly-drunken, one-sided conversation—the kind so difficult to extract one’s self from in real life—while also managing to do justice to the complicated love story that impels Rose’s confession, the complicated character that is Rose. The piece made it instantly onto the reading list for my fall graduate workshop. Slow readers are welcome to sign up.

Your Mental Photograph

Our website may not be the first place you’d turn for quizzes, but if you find yourself this summer, as I recently did, in a moldering motel room with a broken TV and a good friend, the questions below should come in handy. They’re taken from a mid-nineteenth-century album called Mental Photographs: an Album for Confessions of Tastes, Habits, and Convictions—a fascinating piece of ephemera that I examined during a recent trip to the American Antiquarian Society. The owner of such an album would ask his or her friends (and the society owns albums of this sort owned by both a man and a woman) to fill in their answers and insert a carte de visite photograph. You may not have lovely nineteenth-century penmanship or a handy card photo of yourself, but as a reader of TMR, surely you have a favorite poetess? Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire derives from such confession albums: apparently Proust, throughout his life, loved these things. You can read his 1890 answers on (blush) Wikipedia.

Paging through the mental photographs contained in one of the Antiquarian Society’s albums, I could tell that the respondents had been aware of an audience, concocting funny or smart or pious answers not just for the album’s owner, but for whomever else might take the book up after they were through with it. But the intimacy of the album still stood in contrast to our twenty-first-century methods of broadcasting our tastes, habits, and convictions. Not as private as a letter or diary, not as public as Facebook, these mental photographs give tantalizing hints at their subjects’ personalities. What is your idea of happiness? the album asks, and a Mrs. Shoemaker answers, “A good home and a nice little husband.” The story implicit in that underscored little!

These kinds of questionnaires constitute my least favorite sort of creative writing exercise (e.g., “what’s in your character’s garbage can?”), but if you want to ask them of one of your characters, have at it.

Your favorite color?

Flower?

Tree?

Object in nature?

Hour in the day?

Season of the year?

Perfume?

Gem?

Style of Beauty?

Names, Male and Female?

Painters?

Musicians?

Piece of Sculpture?

Poets?

Poetesses?

Prose Authors?

Character in Romance?

____ in History?

Book to take up for an hour?

What Book (not religious) would you part with last?

What epoch would you choose to have lived in?

Where would you like to live?

What is your favorite amusement?

What is your favorite occupation?

What trait of character do you most admire in a man?

What trait of character do you most admire in a woman?

What trait of character do you most detest in each?

If not yourself, who would you rather be?

What is your idea of happiness?

What is your idea of misery?

What is your bête noire?

What is your dream?

What do you most dread?

What do you believe to be your distinguishing characteristics?

If married, what do you believe to be the distinguishing characteristics of your better-half?

What is the sublimest passion of which human nature is capable?

What are the sweetest words in the world?

What are the saddest words?

What is your aim in life?

What is your motto?