Arts Institute Blog

When I took a fiction class as an undergraduate one of the things that my professor would always say was that my stories were lacking sufficient CONFLICT. I’m not sure what this says about myself—probably that I avoid conflict too often (although I hope that that has changed with all of the wisdom I’ve acquired in the past 6 years J)—but I remember thinking in workshop that I thought that I was including conflict in my stories. Looking back on it, I think that my conflicts were probably too easily solved (and that was the problem with my narratives and my characters). It’s hard to write about a character and make that person both believable and interesting—and put them in a situation that is believable and interesting.

So, I was wondering what other creative writing exercises people had for developing conflict in a story. How do you, as a writer, develop conflict in your stories…or does it come pretty naturally?

The other day, I was sitting on the sofa in my office, grading student papers, when a slip of paper caught my eye.  “Thank you for submitting your work,” it read, and “we regret to inform you that …”  It was a rejection slip from a literary journal.  Just the sight of it made my heart sink.  Not that I remembered off the top of my head who it was from or when I had gotten it … but there it was, a potent reminder that someone had rejected my work, had rejected me, had … oh.  Wait.  Squinting at the thing a little more closely, I finally realized–it wasn’t a rejection slip that I had received, it was one of the ones I send out to other people, on a regular basis, in my capacity as fiction editor for a literary journal.  I wasn’t being rejected by it; it was the means by which I do the rejecting.

And from my vantage point as someone who has to send out a lot of those rejection slips, the whole rejection process looks really different than it does when I’m on the receiving end of it. As an editor, I have to send out a lot of rejections simply because we don’t have space in the journal for even 5% of what people send us.  Most of it, we just can’t take, no matter how much we like it.  And the truth is, it’s rare that I don’t like, or at least admire, something about the submissions that I read.  Sometimes I like things a lot and still have to reject them.  When that happens–when I really love something but still have to say no–I try to write a little note on the rejection slip, just so the writer at least knows he came close, and that his work was appreciated.  But sometimes I have so many submissions to wade through that I don’t have time even for the note.  So good work comes back from me to its author whith nothing more than the form rejection slip attached.

And if that writer is like me–and based on the conversations I’ve had with my writer friends, most of us are alike in that respect–his first thought upon reading the rejection slip is not, oh, ok, well, I guess they didn’t have room for my story, but I bet it still came really close.  No, his first thought is probably, so, they didn’t want me.  Rejected again.  Who am I to even think my work is worthy of publication?  I bet they all laughed at my story, and gasped at my audacity for sending it to them.  I am such a loser. I should just quit trying to write right now and go to law school.

Most of us take rejection hard.  And that applies not just to those of us who stick our necks out by submitting our work for publication but also those who have no choice but to submit their work to a professor for grading, or to a boss for review.  You work your tail off on a paper, it feels like the best you can do, and then it comes back with a big fat B- on it.  And it’s so easy to feel like, oh, okay, I guess that B- is just who I am.

But of course it’s not.  That B- is a product of so many things:  not just how good your ideas were and how well you expressed them but also how well the professor explained the assignment, and so how well you understood it, and also what kind of mood the professor was in when she graded the paper, and whether your minor stylistic tics happen to be her biggest pet peeves.  You can’t control all that stuff.  And so the best you can do in terms of dealing with it is to not let it control your sense of who you are and what you’re capable of.  We can’t all get As on every assignment.  And we can’t all get accepted every time we submit our work for publication.  What we can do, though, is be just as mindful of our triumphs–the times we did get the A; the “oh, you almost made it”-type comments scribbled on a rejection slip–as we are of our comparative failures.

In my Introduction to Creative Writing class, we are moving from poetry into fiction. I have begun by giving them short short fiction pieces that include the main aspects of fiction: conflict, character, and some sort of resolution. These short short pieces, I think, are a way of easing them into fiction from poetry.  Poetry involves using language very careful and I want my students to realize that fiction, while it includes more words, utilizes language in a similar way. You want to pay attention to the words that you choose and the images you use, as these make up the characters in your story.  I’m wondering what percentage of the class will feel as though they are better writers of fiction than of poetry. What about you all—do you feel like you are better are writing fiction or poetry? Or if you took an introductory writing class, which one do you think you would feel adept?

Guest post by Lisa Lopez Snyder

Disruptions of Circumstance

Recently my laptop went into a spiral: Web sites were re-directing themselves

to other sites and my email was working half the time. Worried I had a virus,

I called a repairman who then came to the house. He did a quick analysis,

grumbled something about the hard drive, and took it home to work out the kinks.

Most of my work was saved on a flash drive, I had access to another computer and

I was without major deadlines. Yet after he left, I suddenly felt paralyzed. I

paced about the house. I was uprooted, without routine. I felt momentary panic.

I was reminded of Carl Sandburg and how he dealt with the disruptions of

circumstance. When Sandburg and his wife Paula moved from the northern

shore of Michigan to Connemara, a spacious home in the mountains of Flat Rock,

North Carolina, he was in the midst of finishing his second biography of Lincoln,

working on a screenplay for MGM, and had not yet started three other pieces of

writing that were two years overdue.

“Moving is a terrific business heavy accumulations of note and manuscripts so

much of it unfinished and irreplaceable,” he groused without punctuation in a

letter to his sister Mary, “and of course it aint the work—it’s all the goddam

decisions that wear a fellow down.”

To minimize any disruptions, Paula, a breeder of prize-winning dairy goats, had

 replicated the layout of her husband’s study from their previous Michigan home

in their new place.

Still, a self-proclaimed “eternal hobo” and a frequent traveler, Sandburg

always went back to his routine of quiet, paper and pen when he hit the road.

He wrote about these times in “Galuppi.”

Give me a quiet garret alone

Where I may sit for a few casual callers

And tell them carelessly, offhandedly,

“This is where I dirty paper.”

Thus each poet prays and dreams.

The eternal hobo asks for a quiet room

   with a little paper he can dirty,

   with birds who sit where he tells ‘em.

In another instance, while in a Hollywood hotel that MGM put him up in,

Sandburg complained, “I’ve been here three days now in all this elegance and

I can’t do a lick of work here.” Shortly thereafter, the poet moved in

temporarily with Lilla Perry, a friend who let him stay at her house in a third

floor room, where she placed two empty wooden apple crates, one on top of the

other, for his typewriter, to make it more “homelike.” Sandburg and Perry

had a good laugh about it, but later Perry noted that Sandburg indeed used the

crates, and that he worked “with tremendous zest and interest.”

So with those stories in mind, I put away my ridiculous worry. I grab my

notebook, I get the flash drive to plug into the other computer. I am not lost.

I have paper, a printer and options. I have choices about “where I dirty paper.”

-- Lisa Lopez Snyder

Guest post by Matt Boedy

“I find that it takes me nearly a year of thinking about my people before I know them well enough to write about them.”

   - Noel Streatfield

This line from the author of “Ballet Shoes” (and “Tennis Shoes” and “Dancing Shoes”, to echo Kathleen in “You’ve Got Mail”) came to me the other day as I scanned though my “ideas” files. I have been listening lately to conversations. I listened to some young boys order Chinese food at our neighborhood take-out joint. I was like some sort of modern stenographer trying to keep up with a draft of their conversation being typed into a text message so I could save it for later. As I went home, I listened to them in my mind, watched their personalities form, their actions invented and then displayed in the streets around our house. I watched them grow but I am far from the time when I can start to write about them. It takes a long simmer, to paraphrase the above line, before I can have a good character.

In academic writing it is the same way. It is why we as instructors have started to push “process” over one-and-done papers. We want people to spend time on them, re-vision them as one theorist puts it.

I do not know yet how to teach someone else to listen or to slow boil an essay or character. But I find that if we linger long enough over a topic, read more about it, imagine it more, think about it more, the more we are able to structure what we want to say about it. This is an argument for starting early on those papers and those stories, but it is also an argument for paying attention to what we have around us, for listening. Because one conversation here, one turn of phrase there and the cooking begins.

That’s perhaps how we are inspired – not so much from a bolt from the blue, but from the repeating turning over of things in our mind. Think about when you stumble on a sentence or on a way into your piece of writing. What are you thinking at that moment, when you turn your pen over in your fingers or pull your hand away from the keyboard? Is it not some form of what I am talking about – some type of churning, as Leslie wrote some time back? She wrote she needed a week to get going again. Perhaps it takes even longer sometimes.

One thing that struck me when I first started teaching writing was the difference in how clearly students communicated with me via email and in their formal papers.  You’d think the quality of writing would be stronger in the paper:  that’s the piece of writing that (at least in theory) each student would have spent more time on, put more thought into.  There’s a lot at stake in writing a paper:  your grade, your professor’s respect, possibly also your classmates’ respect if you’re going to have to share the paper with them.  An email, on the other hand, is usually low-stakes and informal.  You can dash one off.  If it has a few typos in it, even a grammar nazi like me is usually going to be willing to overlook that.

So why is it that, on that basic, grammatical, syntactical level, many of my students—and many of us in general—actually write better in emails than in formal, high-stakes work?

I used to think that just had to do with the stakes involved.  The more there is at stake, the more likely you are to experience writer’s block, to choke, or freeze, or panic, to lose confidence in yourself, to overthink what you’re doing, or underthink it in a blind rush just to be done with it.  An academic paper gives you so many opportunities to screw up in so many ways … and you know that, and that knowledge can be deadly to your ability to express yourself.  An email is different, even when it’s to the same professor to whom you’re handing in those papers.  You’re writing for a clear reason:  to ask for help, to set up a meeting, to explain why you missed class, etc.  Your purpose is straightforward, and that makes the composition process itself a lot easier.

But the longer I teach writing, and think about my own experience as a writer, the more I think there’s another potent level of anxiety that creeps in when you’re doing certain kinds of writing:  anxiety about your audience—who they are and what they want from you.  The thing is that when you write an email to your professor, you are writing to a very specific audience.  You know this person, so you know how to talk to her effectively.  Technically, when you write an essay that you’re handing in to a professor, that professor is also the audience for the essay.  But in a way, she’s never going to feel like the whole audience.  There’s always a sense, I think, that when you write a formal essay, you’re writing into the void, trying to express yourself to who-knows-whom.  No wonder so many people’s prose gets locked up and stilted under those circumstances.  If you don’t know who you’re talking to, it’s pretty hard to know what to say and how to say it.

Novice journalists are often taught to overcome this very problem by imagining that they’re writing for one specific member of their reading public.  Picture your Aunt Jennie and write the story for her, they’re told.  Or make up a model reader of your own and whenever you have to put together a story, make that person your audience.  The idea is that you can’t really communicate effectively unless you can put some kind of manageable parameters around your audience. 

I think that’s useful advice for academic and creative writers too.

“Publish or perish” is shorthand for the imperatives that confront college faculty these days:  if you can’t get your scholarship published, you’re probably out of a job.  For anyone who wants to make any kind of living as a creative writer, the same is obviously true:  if you can’t get your work published, no one will pay you for it.  (Actually, a lot of times when you do get your work published, you still don’t get paid for it, but those unpaid publications in literary journals can help you land a teaching job, so they are still very worthwhile from the making-a-living perspective in the end.) 

The thing is, when you’re trying to get published, you open yourself up for a lot of rejection, and that’s not fun.  Most decent literary journals accept at most about 1% of the stuff that’s submitted to them, so no matter how good your work is, it’s going to be rejected quite a bit.  And no matter how much you understand intellectually that that’s just how it goes, rejection still hurts … and it can get pretty discouraging.

So a few friends and I have started a group this semester called “Publish or Perish.”  Our goal is twofold:  first, to collectively hold all our feet to the fire by committing to each other to submit a certain amount of work (and paying a fine to the group kitty if we don’t meet our pledge); and also to support each other through the whole submission process, in a number of ways.  Naturally, we nurture each other through rejections and cheer each other’s acceptances.  But the group has also been really helpful in other ways.  Collectively, for example, we know a lot more about the market for creative writing than any of us do on our own.  So by sharing all that knowledge, we’ve been able to be smarter about what we send where, when we send it, etc. 

As much as I want to advance my career as a writer, I know I never would have gotten half of the work out that I’ve done recently if it weren’t for the Publish or Perish group.  And even though we’ve only met a handful of times, we’ve already had a number of submissions between us—which really feels great!  I’ve found that, as part of the group, I take pride in my fellow P-or-P’ers success too.  So, as a group, it definitely feels like we’re going places.

Guest post by Matt Boedy 

I believe that writers sometimes have a hard time being teachers of writing. I believe that because, well, I have a hard time. We do well in analyzing, cultivating words, making people understand what they read. But how does one teach a person where to put the next word, where to end the sentence, how to imagine, how to observe, how to see beyond the blank page.
That conflict arose in me when I read The Writing Life by Annie Dillard.
She opens us to the mystery of writing, how hard it is, how freeing it can be. But she hardly gives us a 12-step process for a story.
She does though hit on a few truisms. For example, “Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.” We must be readers first. We must read, read everything, read it again, read more of the same author, read the classics, read it all. Then as like a sponge what has seeped in, what became what Stephen King called resonance in us, seeps out in the page we are trying to fill.
I think the deepest part of the conflict for me is that while I believe I am a good writer, I can’t fully teach someone how to do it because I have yet to fully find my own way. I have yet to fully discover, fully encourage the deepest part of me where writing comes from.
The truth is, right now, I am scared of that place.
But Annie says we have to be open to work on or work at what we fear, be open to “probing with blunt instruments those same secrets no one can describe in any way but with those instruments’ faint tracks.”

So who will teach me how to write? Who will teach you?
Annie Dillard offers this instructor:
“The page, the page, the eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write.”

It’s spring break this week, and I’ve really been looking forward to this time when I didn’t have any classes, regular reading assignments, etc.—which means, in theory, that I should be able to get a lot of writing done this week.  I’m working on both a fiction piece and a creative nonfiction piece that I’m really excited about.  I also recently got some great, and encouraging, feedback on a story I’d like to revise so I can send it out and see if I can publish it.  So that too was something I was really looking forward to doing over the break.

But now that I have all this time to write, am I writing?  No, not so much.  I’ll sit in front of the computer and stare at the nonfiction piece for a while, and then I’ll flip over to the fiction piece, write a sentence, start feeling restless, decide to make some phone calls … and the next thing I know, the day is gone.  It’s pretty depressing.  I mean, I really want to write.  I’m really excited about what I’m writing.  I just don’t seem to want to write at any particular moment.

I’ve been in this position lots of times before.  I even have a name for what I’m doing—I call it churning.  In the abstract, I recognize that, for me, it’s just another step in the writing process.  Whenever I want to immerse myself in a major writing process, I have to work my way into it through this sort of restless and seemingly nonproductive behavior.  Eventually, I’ll settle down and the words will come.  The problem is, I usually need about a week of churning before I can really get going, and in a week, spring break will be over.

Anyway, I’d be curious to know if anyone else has similar experiences.  It’s almost like it’s a physiological thing:  just like I have to read myself to sleep every night if I don’t want to lie awake for hours, I have to churn myself into writing if I don’t want what I do write to suck.  If you have similar issues, I’d love to know about them!