Notes from Tin House Workshop 2017
Witt: Go through each line and ask, “is this true?”
Witt: Reader needs to be able to trust an author’s structure quickly, to give the author the freedom to be lyric
Manual Gonzales: Concrete details give you the space to make abstractions work; build an architecture that gives the abstractions shape
E.g. Marie-Helene Bertino’s short story about a unicorn, which is actually an allegory about the things parents leave behind. When she got stuck with the story, she went back to the physical details (e.g. what it was like to try to stick a unicorn into the back of a Subaru) to avoid the metaphor/abstraction overwhelming the writer and the narrative
Gonzales: “Don’t write about death. Write about the hard pews, the body, the smell of incense coils which clashes with your aunt’s perfume.” Find moments that are shapeless and give them shape
Gonzales: How do you know you’re choosing the right details? Don’t overwrite—not trying to aim for exactitude, but to show details that are significant. “Don’t talk about the type of table if the table isn’t going to sprout wings and fly.” The goal isn’t to capture the world, it’s to create the world and people so that it seems real to the reader (fiction?)
If you’re having a problem with flow and logic, go back to chronology then figure out how you may or may not want to break it
Unexplained references can help contribute to a sense of localism but may not be understood
Sentence fragments can be a cheap way to create a mood
Query letter: Summarize work in a paragraph and your style
Include bio: who you are, what you’ve been doing
Want to see intentionality in the book you want to write
Mention any genuine referrals/connections upfront
Personalize query letter: refer to something in the agent’s bio or other books
Where you want to be in the world, in conversation with the world and other books
When is the best time to approach an agent?
Fiction: when finished, but partial novel/collection in some exception cases. As polished as possible, preferably not while in career crisis
Nonfiction: as fully formed as possible, but much of nonfiction is still sold on proposals and sample chapters. A proposal is a “business prospectus” so that the publisher can fund you and your research. Note that memoirs tend to operate like .the novel in terms of publishing process.
Talk about: “This is who I am, my project, how I found the project, why it matters, what should it do in the world/where does it sit in the world.”
Divorce ego from the process
When is the best time to send work out? Not when you’re feeling creative (use that time to generate, to write) but when you’re feeling meticulous and business-like
Anthony Doerr: Lecture on similes
See Flannery O’ Connor’s consistent use of imagery “so that you don’t have to at the climactic moment”. E,g, - “line of trees like a gaping mouth”; “wind through the trees like a long satisfying insuck of breath”; “there was nothing but the woods around her”
Emily Witt: Homeric similes are so strange because there wasn’t photography / movies / social media to build a shared ecology of images. They have to do the hard work of explanation.
Successful similes apply pressure to a story with very few words
Effective, un-cliched similes: choose the right incongruity or unexpected bridging, and you will delight the reader.
Rachel Cusk in “Outline” sends out multiple ferrymen across the river so that readers can have multiple visions.
Buluwayo stacks similes, opens up your brain to increase and intermingle what is said and what is implied
Similes should ferry us across the islands of our selves to others.
Margot Livesey’s lecture on dialogue
“Life-like” dialogue—cannot simply copy from life; we repeat ourselves, forget things, are often ineloquent. A reader would simply close the book out of frustration if written dialogues mirrored real life.
Dialogues are written in “fictional English”, pretending to be vague but often all teeth and meaning
Scenes slow things down, narration/prose speeds it up. Dialogue shows what cannot be told.
Nicholson Baker’s “Mezzanine”: example of digression and dialogue
Natural pattern of speech, or can we disrupt that pattern/rhythm?
Having characters respond precisely to each other feels too expository and can deaden the scene
How author’s own voices influence a character’s dialogues
Hilary Mantel: both narration and dialogue can create a single consciousness of how people in the 16th century thought and spoke
Panel on “useful landscapes”
Place: how you/characters respond to the physical world, not necessarily just about situating in a particular geography or environment
Not talking about setting can mean not talking about race or class, topics we’re squeamish about but have shared cultural signifiers
The idea of “not having enough talent to not use all the tools available, like place”
Natalie Diaz’s lecture: “Beyond the Kingdom of the Ear: A Wandering of the Wild Desert of Repetition”
Text on the page should not be treated as static; should treat as a body with physicality
Allan Iverson clip on “practice” (repetition)
Repetition traps us between the eye and the ear
Ocularcentrism: bias that ranks vision over other senses
Juhani Pallasmaa (Finnish architect): “Peripheral vision integrates us with space, while focused vision pushes us out of the space, making us mere spectators”
Once a thing occurs, energy has reorganized i.e. opportunity to infuse new energy every time a word is repeated, happening a new; possibility for violence, for tenderness
Definition of anaphora: the use of a word referring to or replacing a word used earlier in a sentence, to avoid repetition, such as do in I like it and so do they
Danger is taken out of repetition if we’re lulled by repetition. Need to re-engage all of our senses
Basketball analogy: Stephen Curry’s crossovers; does a similar thing each time but always fools his competitors
Repetition does not mean equivalence just because they visually resemble each other on the page. They are non-exchangeable, non-substitutable singularities
Diaz’s approach to poetry: Worry less about where it’s placed on the page, if she can feel it with her body. Look at the page in terms of disruption and possibility
Danielle Evans’ lecture on public and private selves
Interior life still best told in writing than in many other storytelling forms.
Ask what work we’re asking interiority we’re doing in our stories (ambivalence, competing desires)
Politics: the system of values where we get to decide who gets to live and who gets to die. In the context of the page, it takes the form of who we decide to depict on the page as fully human
One way to dehumanize people individually and structurally is by assuming that their interior lives are not as complex as other people’s
The gulf between who we are inside and how we present ourselves: can be about anxiety and insecurity and desire but it’s always about power
Who in the story has the power to make other people in the story perform for them? Or has to think of themselves not only as they see themselves, but as other people in the world see them. Who has to consider double-consciousness or an external gaze or some set of assumptions that has to be labored against?
How to play interiority off of action as a way of creating tension and meaning
Zolaria: Tension between childhood and adult selves that creates possibility and anxiety about what the guilt and regret might drive the character to do. Who the character wishes she had been and what she did.
To ask: Is the inconsistency in voice/language contextual? i.e. character code-switching in a different space in the story.
For a shape-shifting character, how do you know which voice is their real voice? Number of ways to think about the question - including the use of the second person: create an audience that can hear where the voice needs to move
Desire is not that interesting in fiction, we want things all the time—it’s competing desires
Paul Lisicky’s lecture on simultaneity
Inspired by music (the sound of horn players on the subway platform): how do you get simultaneity on the page? Layers, point and counterpoint in music but only one voice at a time on the page
Parantheses (Woolf), footnotes (DFW), but still doesn’t have the grace of a fugue
My thought: Glenn Gould’s “The Idea of the North” on CBC - strange radio essay
E.M. Forster: the idea of emotional time vs. clock time
Simultaneity implied in the life not led?
Emily Witt’s lecture on reportage and self-inquiry
“The New Journalism” - Tom Wolfe. Fact-based reportage that reads like novels:
Scene by scene reconstruction
Third-person POV as if in the character’s mind
Descriptive eye (subject’s manners, clothing, eating habits, as important to be documented as their words)
Kinetic nonfiction e.g. Jon Krakauer, Susan Orleans
“The New New Journalism” - wrote in the third person, postured as being politically neutral, fact-checkers, author erased from the narrative, no longer testing the limits of form
Writing without referring to the first person
Proposal for “The New New New Journalism”: literary experimentation, factual accuracy and ethics, reportage as self-help
Creative nonfiction as a coordinate plane:
y-axis (top: journalism; bottom: memoir)
x-axis: (left: novel; right: essay, criticism, history, biography)
“...Hypocrisies and faultlines of a culture resolve themselves in our personal stories and in our bodies,” and these writers uniquely identify these faultlines in themselves and are able to describe them in the world
