Hi, all! We welcome folks who are participating in our sixth annual Lit Fest to write up notes on their experiences so that members of our remote community can be part of the fun-n-learnin'. The gracious Karen Carter did so after attending her first weekend of the sold-out Short Story Breakthrough intensive with Jennifer Davis (and next weekend, Nic Brown).
Lit Festivus Report: Short Story Breakthrough Intensive with Jennifer S. Davis
My first weekend of Lit Fest 2011 certainly felt like a holiday, with all the fun of the kickoff party followed by two intense, forget-everything-but-what-you-absolutely-must-do-to-not-only-enhance-but-REINVENT-your-fiction morning sessions of the Short Story Breakthrough Intensive with instructor Jennifer S. Davis.
Author of Her Kind of Want (winner of the Iowa Prize for Short Fiction) and Our Former Lives in Art (a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick), both of which are now on the top of my reading wish list, Jennifer is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Denver, where she also serves as coeditor of Copper Nickel.
Since I showed up late (ahem) on the first day of class, I got to sit next to teacher, which turned out to be a definite plus. Within minutes I realized every word Jennifer had to say about writing ought to be etched in stone, or at least scribbled furiously on a legal pad. I was also tempted to try to figure out how to spell her Alabama-inflected “all right?” that regularly punctuated her comments, a Southern version of the urban “a’aight” with a soft ‘r’ somehow rolled into it. Obviously, I was fascinated.
Prior to class, Jennifer had provided a copy of “What’s This Story Really About? True Emotions, Sensory Events” from the textbook Method and Madness by Alice LaPlante. Having attended the Robin Black (author of If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This) workshop (another recent Lighthouse event that helped me pinpoint what’s missing in my fiction), which began with a discussion of not only “what’s this story really about?” but “what’s this story really REALLY about?” I’d thought Jennifer’s class would provide some additional insights. Which it did, and then some. Here are a few things I learned:
- While a story’s actions or series of events defines what the story is about, its subtext is tied directly to sensory details such as objects, behaviors, and events.
- In analyzing or revising a story, look for openings in which the teasing out of the subtext is not attempted or not yet complete.
- The capacity for transformation must be inherent in any story, whether the transformation is realized or the opportunity for change passes by.
- Emotions are most effectively portrayed when they’re connected to concrete things via imagery.
- The use of metaphors or similes brings in all the richness and layers of the thing you’re bringing to mind.
- Experiment with slanting a description. (Try moving a description of face in a mirror, for example, to the thing on the floor or out the window that catches the character’s eye.)
- Use a window (or other) view to inform a moment’s emotion.
- Write around an issue to avoid losing readers via too much focus on your drive to be authentic/factual.
- Attach each symbol to an honest emotion.
- Use events to explore a character rather than using a character to illustrate events.
- Give your reader full access to a character via the way he/she sees things and relates to them.
- Slow down through such techniques to immerse the reader in your character (and reveal much more than a summary of features ever could) via hints of something lurking there.
- Adjust vantage point by pulling away to show movement rather than staying in tight simply to document action.
- Avoid abstraction or explanations by keeping details physical/visual. Allow the reader to extrapolate meaning.
- Not only must your main character/focalizer have something he/she’s lost and/or is at risk of losing, other characters deserve to be developed in this way, to have something they consider critical at stake. Such character development gives a story more tension and a greater sense of urgency.
- Give your characters full lives.
- Give your characters obsessions.
- A character’s growth is revealed in his/her reaction to the turn of the story.
- The magic in magic realism must have its own internal logic. It is usually also tied to realistic details.
- Revise from scratch rather than try to rework a story simply by reordering pieces and/or plugging new material into or between those pieces.
- What we’re trying to get to, as Jennifer put it, is the emotional truth (aka, the real subject) of the story.
During the weekend, Jennifer referred to and recommended Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing; Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction; Rust Hills’s Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular; and authors such as Bobbie Ann Mason, Michael Cunningham (especially his story “White Angel”), Dennis Lehane (especially his story “Until Gwen”), and George Saunders.
Jennifer also used exercises from the book What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter to help us slow down and include more landscape in our stories. We wrote about one physical place in a character’s still moment using at least one metaphor or simile and about another while the character was in movement, using at least one question.
And we discussed point of view—especially when a story includes a child character—and the choices available to us depending on the audience we seek for such a story. Jennifer discussed conflated narration, which brings the third-person narrator and the focalizer/main character so close that they’re almost indistinguishable. And she compared that to the third-person reflective narrator, which has the freedom of distance and allows an adult voice to tell a child’s story, giving the story the gravitas and insights it needs to appeal to an adult audience. While this narrator has direct access to the focalizer/main character, it is not the main character. It is allowed to use adult language and to push the story it’s telling outside the childlike realm. While metaphor thought up by the child character in such a story may need to be appropriate for the child’s level of thinking, the wording used to describe the child’s experience can be more sophisticated because the language belongs to the narrator, not the child.
It’s hard to believe when a class seems to be directed exactly at the things you need to hear most. This class (and yes it’s only the first half; the second weekend of the Short Story Intensive will be taught by Nic Brown), the Robin Black workshop, and last night’s Essay in an Afternoon craft seminar with Shari Caudron (whose collection Who Are You People? has been highly recommended to me and is also on my reading wish list) pretty much convinced me it’s time to make taking as many Lighthouse classes as possible—and putting all this good advice to work—my obsession going forward. I’d say at this stage in the game that’s my emotional truth, and I’m sticking with it.
--Karen DeGroot Carter
