Intro to Creative Writing: Fiction

SPRING 2017 // ENGL 3150B This workshop provides you with a place to share your fiction, encounter the creative work of others, and offer and receive constructive criticism; it also serves as a weekly reminder that you are not alone in the sometimes solitary endeavor of writing.

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“The Three “L”s You Need to Make Lovely Little Fictions” by Tara Laskowski

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Lisa Ko at Barnes and Noble UES, 5/2/17

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Online Writing Resources

As a writer, your best resources are your dedicated daily writing practice and your writing group. But these might be helpful too.

Finding Places to Submit and Apply: Magazines, Contests, Journals, Conferences, MFA & PhD

Community of Literary Magazines and Presses: http://www.clmp.org/

The CLMP is a directory that catalogues independent literary publishers. These publishers focus on publishing indie poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction; they are mission-driven, meaning that their main concern is long-term, quality relationships with authors and small but devoted audiences, not ads, dollars, or fame. This CLMP directory helps you find these indie and alt publications, so you can determine what their preferences are before sending your work to them.

Writer’s Market & Writer’s Digest: http://www.writersmarket.com/ & http://www.writersdigest.com/

Offers a lot of free online content, but to obtain the detailed directories of lit magazines and markets that pay writers, you must subscribe or go through hard copies at the library. Writer’s Market is a huge reference work, printed each year in several volumes dedicated to specific genres. It is updated annually and includes listings of magazines looking for new writers as well as submission requirements. Writer’s Digest has helpful articles on writing, revision, pitching, queries, etc. Writers can connect with other writers on forums, visit blogs and sign up for free weekly e-newsletter. There are also weekly writing prompts, contests and competitions, conference listings, and articles. It is geared more toward popular writers. Look for their annual feature, “One Hundred Best Sites for Writers.”

*Poets & Writers: http://www.pw.org/

A well-rounded print and online resource for new writers. Online you’ll find an excellent search engine for lit magazines specifically looking for writers. They also offer a biannual magazine that is very popular; local libraries often keep new and back copies. It is a practical, thoughtful, inspiring, and invaluable resources for those interested in researching grants for writers, summer workshops, writing conferences, and contests. Also includes their ranking of MFA and PhD programs.

*AWP & The Writer’s Chronicle: https://www.awpwriter.org/

Both the AWP website and their monthly magazine are essential resources for those interested in creative writing as a discipline, submitting work to new and outstanding journals, and interviews with writers along with in-depth articles on reading and writing literature. A must for those for those wanting to continue their education after undergraduate studies. AWP’s 2016 conference featured over 2,000 presenters and 550 readings, panels, and craft lectures. The bookfair hosted over 800 presses, journals, and literary organizations from around the world.

New Pages: http://www.newpages.com

NP is a respected website that provides information on literary journals and other places seeking submissions. Their call-for-submissions page is updated regularly. They also have several writer’s guides and information on graduate writing programs.

The Review Review: http://www.thereviewreview.net/

Website founded by Becky Tuch to explore the world of 2000+ current literary magazines, foster a “deeper connection” with these journals, and link writers to editors.

Literistic: https://www.literistic.com/

Every month, Literistic sends you a list of deadlines for the next month. If you sign up for their fee-based list, it’ll be based on your subscriber preferences. You can also sign up for their basic, short-list for free.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America: http://www.sfwa.org/

SFFWA features contests to enter, publications, writing instruction, and member discussion forums.

Figuring Out Which Publication to Submit to

*Pushcart Prize Literary Magazine Rankings: http://cliffordgarstang.com/?cat=948

Publishers are ranked based solely on the number of Pushcart Prizes and Special Mentions a magazine has received over a rolling 10-year period in each genre. Helps break magazines down into tiers of magazines, so won’t find yourself having to choose between an excellent magazine and a lesser one.

Ranking of the 100 Best Literary Magazines: http://thejohnfox.com/ranking-of-literary-journals/

This list ranks literary magazines by how often their short stories have appeared (or were honorable mentions) in the Best American Short Stories.

Preparing to Submit and Keeping Track of Submissions

Proper Fiction Manuscript Format: http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html

Tried and true format for short stories when you decide to submit to literary magazines. However, please do not use Courier New font. Editors overwhelming prefer serif fonts like Times New Roman (a heavy favorite) or Georgia or Garamond. I also prefer page numbers and name at the bottom as I find it less distracting.

*Duotrope: https://duotrope.com/

Duotrope is a subscription-based service for writers that offers an extensive, searchable database of current fiction, poetry, and nonfiction markets, a calendar of upcoming deadlines, a personal submissions tracker, and useful statistics compiled from the millions of data points we've gathered on the publishers we list. This website aids writers in the submission process: tracking submissions, deadlines, acceptance ratio, favorite markets. Because users disclose stats from their submitting experience, which provides an insider look at how difficult certain markets are, how often they accept, their expected response time.

*Submittable: https://submittable.com

Many lit magazines depend on online submissions, especially using Submittable. Also helps you keep up with submissions, rejections, and acceptances.

How to Find an Agent

Agent Query: http://www.agentquery.com/

Often recognized by Writer’s Digest as one of the best websites for writers, AQ is an online database of hundreds of literary agents. It also offers several helpful guides on the world of publishing, as well as a list of the best places to send your work, both in print and online.

P&W Literary Agent Database: http://www.pw.org/literary_agents

Agents are listed with contact information and submission guidelines and are organized according to what sort of literature they are interested in representing.

Literary Hubs and Other Wonders

Aerogramme Writers' Studio: http://www.aerogrammestudio.com/ News and resources for emerging and established writers:

Assay Journal: http://www.assayjournal.com/ Articles, news, and conversations about creative nonfiction:

*Electric Literature: https://electricliterature.com/ Essays on writing, author interviews, reading suggestions

*Lit Hub: http://lithub.com/ Lively and ever-changing website and updates for literary news, insider tips, insights, and interviews.

The Millions: http://www.themillions.com/ Great books, reviews, lists, and articles

Literary Magazines (that are online accessible)

*The Believer: http://www.believermag.com/ A literature, arts, and culture magazine.

Brevity: http://brevitymag.com/ Brief essay forms, along with craft essays and book reviews.

Blunderbuss: http://www.blunderbussmag.com/

Diagram: http://thediagram.com/

Fugue: http://www.fuguejournal.com/

Guernica: https://www.guernicamag.com/

Gulf Coast: http://gulfcoastmag.org/

Hippocampus: http://www.hippocampusmagazine.com/

Hobart: http://www.hobartpulp.com/

The Kenyon Review:   http://www.kenyonreview.org/journal/marapr-2016/index/

*Masters Review: Seeking to publish new voices, online and in print. Monthly submission deadlines and essays on writing. https://mastersreview.com/

*McSweeney’s: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/ Online humor, publishing house, The Believer

Nano Fiction: http://nanofiction.org/ Featured story, interviews, reviews, writing prompts:

Narrative Magazine: http://www.narrativemagazine.com/

New Delta Review: http://ndrmag.org/current-issue/

The Normal School: http://thenormalschool.com/

Pleiades Magazine: http://www.pleiadesmag.com/ Featuring poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews.

The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/ Another great lit magazine with interviews and features.

Wigleaf: http://wigleaf.com/ Publishes very short fiction

To MFA or Not to MFA (and Beyond)

“MFA vs NYC:” Both, Probably: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/mfa-vs-nyc-both-probably

What Getting An MFA In Fiction Meant To Me: https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexanderchee/my-parade

The MFA as Calling Card Round-Up: Several essays on the topic https://brevity.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/the-mfa-as-calling-card-round-up/

Post-MFA: http://post-mfa.tumblr.com/

What should I do after my MFA if I need a job to support myself, but would like to continue writing? Links and resources about opportunities that you might pursue.  It includes sections on fellowships, residencies, international opportunities, diversity resources, academic jobs, employment outside of academia, and additional degree programs.  There’s also some advice on requesting letters of recommendation.

Keeping Inspired, Motivated, and Writing

National Novel Writing Month: http://nanowrimo.org/

NaNoWriMo is November and is a thriving movement made up of novel writers who push hard to get a full first “down” draft done in November of each year. The site offers instructions, guidance in forming a support team, and tips for completing a novel (and what to do next).

*Pacemaker Planner: https://pacemaker.press/

Who may find Pacemaker helpful? Anyone needing to plan a writing or reading schedule based on word count or any other quantifiable measure including time in hours or minutes.

*750 Words https://750words.com or Morning Pages http://morningpages.net/

Online journaling sites aimed at writing 750 words every day.

Pomodoro Timer: https://tomato-timer.com/

Write in timed bursts with scheduled breaks

Twitter: http://twitter.com

Follow lit magazines and journals. See open submission periods. Follow your favorite writers. Commiserate about how miserable or great writing can be. @theoffingmag / @NarrativeMag / @mcsweeneys / @submittable

Prompt generators:

Write Real People I & II http://caesaretluna.tumblr.com/post/87091540594/write-real-people

http://caesaretluna.tumblr.com/post/87189950869/write-real

Writing Exercises UK: Generate random story ideas, plots, subjects, scenarios, characters, first lines for stories and more. http://writingexercises.co.uk/index.php

NaNoWriMo Word Sprints: http://nanowrimo.org/word_sprints Timed writing challenge with “Dare Me” prompt generator

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Advice to Myself

by Louise Erdrich

Leave the dishes. Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor. Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster. Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup. Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins. Don't even sew on a button. Let the wind have its way, then the earth that invades as dust and then the dead foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch. Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome. Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry who uses whose toothbrush or if anything matches, at all. Except one word to another. Or a thought. Pursue the authentic-decide first what is authentic, then go after it with all your heart. Your heart, that place you don't even think of cleaning out. That closet stuffed with savage mementos. Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner again. Don't answer the telephone, ever, or weep over anything at all that breaks. Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life and talk to the dead who drift in through the screened windows, who collect patiently on the tops of food jars and books. Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters this ruse you call necessity.

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Paper Darts Micro Fiction Award: Judged by Esmé Weijun Wang

Esmé Weijun Wang wants you to write 200 spotless words on the theme of cleanliness for an award of $100.

DEADLINE TODAY

Award: $100 Entry fee: Free Judge: Esmé Weijun Wang Theme: Cleanliness Word limit: 200 Deadline: 4/17/2017

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Craft Essay: Productive Ambiguity

From The Masters Review: In today's craft essay, we discuss the importance of clarity and making sure your ambiguity is productive: "Good beginnings are satisfying because of a nice balance between what we know and what we want to know."

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Christine Schutt On Writing and Revision

Dialogue: The trick I’ve employed in the last five years is to have characters chatter away and then in the next draft take out every other line [paired lines]. Oddly enough, the speech has more life, more surprise.

Minimalist style: [This style] is borne of my determination to avoid received, word, clichéd language in order to write originally. This means many sentences are struck out for being dull, for being in service of no more than moving a character like a chair, for saying the obvious in the same old, obvious way. “She froze.” To talk about somebody freezing as a way of suggesting surprise or horror or shock seems to me the laziest of practices.

In her writing class: I stress the importance of nouns and verbs, the usefulness of repetition (no matter what teachers have said before about “variety”), the reader-friendly use of nouns over pronouns (so that that the reader need not hunt for the antecedent), high and low diction, and the effect of mixing it up.

Economy of language: We play the editing game: If I can say in three words what took you ten, I win. The composition of one impeachable sentence in work of any length should be considered a victory.  

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More flash magazine, some print and some online.

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Top 24 Magazines for Flash Fiction

Ranking flash fiction journals by how many visitors they get per month.

*Check out 3:AM Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, Brevity, 100 Word Story, Smokelong Quarterly, Word Riot, Every Day Fiction, Pank, NANO Fiction, and more!

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“After Years” by Ted Kooser, Delights & Shadows

*Note how he plays with distance, zooming in, then further and further out, then back to the speaker, traversing a myriad of images in the process. He also turns away from the potentially cliched, abstract detailing of emotions and uses concrete details to give us a response.

Prompt: Take a simple statement and spin it into a complex extended metaphor (similar to “I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone”). Include the name of a mountain range and a contrast in scale > large to small, heavy to light, etc.

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I would say that the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships. The symbolism of an object may be more or less explicit, but it is always there. We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic.

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the New Millennium

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POETRY READING— Annie and Theodore Deppe

Where: Troy Moore Library, 25 Park Place, 23rd Floor

WHEN:  Thursday, April 6th, 2017, 4 p.m.

Annie Deppe is the author of two books of poetry, Wren Cantata (2009), and Sitting in the Sky (2003), both published in Ireland by Summer Palace Press. She is the recipient of writer’s grants from the Irish Arts Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She holds an MFA from Lancaster University, England and is Associate Coordinator of Stonecoast in Ireland. Since 2000, Annie and Ted have for the most part made their home on the west coast of Ireland, and they presently live in Connemara.

Ted Deppe is the author of Children of the Air and The Wanderer King (Alice James Books, 1990 and 1996); Cape Clear: New and Selected Poems (Salmon, Ireland, 2002); Orpheus on the Red Line (Tupelo, 2009); Beautiful Wheel and Liminal Blue (Arlen House, 2014 and 2016). He holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College. Ted is the recipient of two grants from the NEA and a Pushcart Prize. He has taught creative writing in graduate programs in the US, Ireland, and England and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA program and directs Stonecoast in Ireland.

These events are free and open to the public. For more information, contact Heather Russel in the Department of English at [email protected].

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Flash Fiction Exercise #2: Extended Metaphor

Write a close imitation of Richard Brautigan’s “I was Trying to Describe You to Someone.” Your goal is to use an unusual comparison and precise language to describe something that defies simple explanation.

In Brautigan’s story, the narrator has trouble describing what the person he loves looks like. We can feel him resisting clichés; besides, saying “She’s stunning” or “She’s beautiful” or “she’s a freckled country girl with flaxen hair” or “She’s like a sunset” would not tell us much.

What Brautigan does, instead, is compare her to a movie that depicts the discovery of electricity. Such a comparison gives us a new context and language with which to describe beauty. It allows him to be original and specific.

           Here are some thoughts and guidelines to get you started:

1.     This is a “close imitation,” so don’t be afraid to use Brautigan’s structure. Say “I was trying to describe __________ to someone” in the first line. In the next lines, say “I couldn’t say you were __________ because ________.” In the next paragraph or two, introduce your extended metaphor.

2.     The thing you choose to describe must defy simple explanation. I’m exaggerating here, but saying “I was trying to describe what my house looks like” is not going to be as interesting as saying “I was trying to describe the type of depression people get when they reach middle age” or “I was trying to describe what it’s like to get pregnant.”

3.     The more unusual and specific your comparison is, the better it will be. Avoid sunsets, driving in fast cars, alleyways, et cetera. What about the pigeons that get trapped in Wal-Mart? Sure!

4.     Yes, this is more a “prose poem” than it is a story. Nevertheless, avoid poetic diction at all costs. Do not call fields “emerald carpets.” Just call them fields. Don’t say the sun is “the eye of heaven.” Just tell us it is daytime.

5.     Take this time to use language as precise and natural as possible. Make your language similar to ordinary language. Use words that are neither pretentious nor especially formal. Make your story a gathering of words in good order, in simple order, plain and appealing.

6.     When reviewing this exercises, find as many unnecessary or imprecise words as possible, and then to cross them out. Your goal should be to give me nothing to cross out. Make each word count. If you are going to use a big word, it better be the right one (want a challenge? See if you can get a big word past me). Show your love of verbs and concrete nouns. Express your hatred of adjectives and adverbs.

Email me your attempt (no more than 500 words) by 10 AM, Monday, April 10th.  

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NO CLASS TODAY (April 5th)

Stay safe out there!

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need (timed) writing inspiration?

Try NaNoWordSprints!

They post timed writing sprints (usually 20 mins), often with an optional prompt (words or images). There’s even a #1k30min challenge.

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“How to Write Flash Fiction”

Well, according to David Gaffney in “Stories in Your Pocket: How to Write Flash Fiction”:

1. Start in the middle.

You don't have time in this very short form to set scenes and build character.

2. Don't use too many characters.

You won't have time to describe your characters when you're writing ultra-short. Even a name may not be useful in a micro-story unless it conveys a lot of additional story information or saves you words elsewhere.

3. Make sure the ending isn't at the end.

In micro-fiction there's a danger that much of the engagement with the story takes place when the reader has stopped reading. To avoid this, place the denouement in the middle of the story, allowing us time, as the rest of the text spins out, to consider the situation along with the narrator, and ruminate on the decisions his characters have taken. If you're not careful, micro-stories can lean towards punchline-based or "pull back to reveal" endings which have a one-note, gag-a-minute feel – the drum roll and cymbal crash. Avoid this by giving us almost all the information we need in the first few lines, using the next few paragraphs to take us on a journey below the surface.

4. Sweat your title.

Make it work for a living.

5. Make your last line ring like a bell.

The last line is not the ending – we had that in the middle, remember – but it should leave the reader with something which will continue to sound after the story has finished. It should not complete the story but rather take us into a new place; a place where we can continue to think about the ideas in the story and wonder what it all meant. A story that gives itself up in the last line is no story at all, and after reading a piece of good micro-fiction we should be struggling to understand it, and, in this way, will grow to love it as a beautiful enigma. And this is also another of the dangers of micro-fiction; micro-stories can be too rich and offer too much emotion in a powerful one-off injection, overwhelming the reader, flooding the mind. A few micro-shorts now and again will amaze and delight – one after another and you feel like you've been run over by a lorry full of fridges.

6. Write long, then go short.

Create a lump of stone from which you chip out your story sculpture. Stories can live much more cheaply than you realize, with little deterioration in lifestyle...

Off you go!