What Jenny Offill Said

By Sarah Gilbert

I won’t mince words. The juried workshops are the best part of Lit Fest. If you haven’t had a chance to participate in one of these, stop reading this post, go back to your desk, and start working on your submission for next year.

Sitting with some of the best writers at Lighthouse and an award-winning author—in my case, Jenny Offill—for three hours a day, five days in a row took my writing to a new level of understanding. We laughed, we learned stuff, we cried. Correction: We didn’t cry because I was not in the memoir workshop, but I’m willing to bet they cried.

[caption id="attachment_8871" align="alignright" width="300"]Photography for Social Media and Marketing | www.amandatipton.com Jenny Offill[/caption]

Jenny is kind, funny and full of good, practical advice about writing. She doled it out all week, along with feedback on a dozen submissions, from a well-worn, Victorian arm chair in the parlor. Here is what she said:

  • Don’t use terrible analogies. Admittedly, this comment was directed less at the whole class than at me, specifically, when I described a character’s beard as being like an octopus. "The size and the texture are all wrong," she said. “No, you don’t understand," I replied. "This is like Alien, when the larva sucks onto the guy’s face.” I’m trying to get a movie deal. This class is just a stepping stone. Or possibly I was just being defensive.
  • Keep only the sentences you love. When you are stuck in the “tar pit” and having a hard time fixing a scene or a paragraph in your work, go through it carefully and pick out only the sentences you absolutely love. Then assemble those together on a separate page. What remains often tells the story in a way that all of the words you had previously could not. This also entirely explains Jenny's minimalist and incredibly rich prose. I once emailed a friend one of her sentences, because I was so astonished that someone could forge four different meanings from a dozen words laid out together. “HOW DOES SHE DO THAT?” I screamed at him in email.
  • Lie about your occupation on airplanes. This is terrific advice, frankly. Anyone traveling by plane is often forced to brush up against other people. This encourages said people to believe that they can converse with you at length, while you wait five and a half hours for your flight to leave the gate. But: Jenny Offill to the rescue. She used to tell airplane strangers that she was a novelist. Almost every time, this resulted in an awkward conversation about whether they had actually heard of her or her books. If they hadn’t, it was clearly because she had not written anything good enough to be “heard of.” After growing weary of this sort of guilt, Jenny changed her story. “I’m a freelance writer,” she now tells people. The stranger then always asks who she freelances for, and Dog Fancy is always her answer. “Then,” she said, “You can spend the next 30 minutes hearing someone’s stories about their dogs.” Delightful.
  • Let your agent write your query letters and don’t read them. If only. Personally, I have come to realize that my entire motivation for finding an agent is not in order to sell my book, but simply to put an end to writing query letters. Jenny’s agent writes hers and she never sees them, because that is the kind of love that she and her agent have for each other. Some people want to win the lottery; I want to win query letters paid out using the annuity option.
  • Don’t workshop your book the last year that you are writing it. Your book, in the last year of its gestation, is a private and coveted object. You should not show it to anyone. This is the time that you are putting the final portions of what is wholly unique and beautiful about your work into the layers of words that you have already written. Bringing it to workshops and letting the masses tell you that “they need more” will destroy it. Keep it in a secret, safe place and care for it tenderly, until it is ready to be born into the world.

Sarah Gilbert is a writer and a student in the Lighthouse Book Project. She has written for daily newspapers and online magazines and is currently working on a science fiction novel.