‘07 contest just announced. Full details.
2007 Wabash Prize for Fiction
Final Judge: Dan Chaon
First Prize: $1000 and winning entry published in Fall 2007 issue. Entries of honorable mention also published in Fall 2007 issue.
Deadline: Entries must be received by March 15, 2007.
$10 reading fee
New fiction on Identity Theory: “Without Biting the Fruit of Knowledge” by Jennifer Trudeau.
I’ve been really proud of the stories that have gone up on IdT in my time there, and there’s another excellent one we just accepted. It’s a fun job. Odd thing though: while the number of top-notch (clearly publishable at just a glance) submissions has remained steady, the number of really good submissions has increased and the number of really awful submissions has decreased. It’s making my and Ali’s and Drew’s jobs a lot harder. It used to be that fully a quarter of all submissions could be dismissed out of hand—they’d be 20,000 words long, have major spelling errors in the first line, be about cancer. That number has dropped to about fifteen percent. The ones we turn down instead are like the majority of our submissions—they’re really pretty good: great settings but flat characters; unique plots but based too much on coincidence; too workshopped.
UPDATE: Some kudos for “Without Biting the Fruit of Knowledge” from Dan Wickett at Emerging Writers Network.
I don’t talk much on Fungible Convictions about my own fiction writing, partly out of superstition but mostly because Fungible Convictions exists to keep me from thinking about how I’m not writing the fiction I task myself with.
But in reflecting more on the whole outlining debate, I dove back into the muck about my own writing method. The fact is, after six years of writerly commitment, I have yet to find a method that doesn’t result in a 90% first-page failure rate. I peter out.
Sometimes failure makes you feel stupid. Here’s this great idea you have—for a scene, an argument, a character—but you get nowhere. You feel energized, then overwhelmed, then frustrated.
Lately, though, I’ve been trying something new that seems to be working. It’s not outlining, which I still don’t trust, but it’s not free-writing either. I’ll describe it this way:
What’s the first thing you do when you start a jigsaw puzzle? You don’t look for matches right away. You turn all the pieces face up first. You separate those faced pieces into groups, based on color, then on shape.
That’s what I’m doing with my fiction method now. Instead of writing blind, I’m making notes on the discrete things I know have to be present: characters and their features and backgrounds, a setting or two and their meaning, points of conflict. I’m turning these things face up. The chaos of the puzzle isn’t as chaotic.
I don’t know where the story I’m working on now will end up, still. But it’s much more manageable. I’m not making up the plot at the same time I’m inventing motives at the same time I’m imagining how someone walks through a scene I haven’t even begun to describe when I should have described it two pages ago. I haven’t finished a single story this way, but for the first time in months I have reason to be confident.
So, what in your writing process keeps you confident? Is it about laying the tracks, about a method that carries you through? Or is it something totally intangible, like the love of the idea of a character?
The pleasure is the rewriting: The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written. This is a koan-like statement, and I don’t mean to sound needlessly obscure or mysterious, but it’s simply true. The completion of any work automatically necessitates its revisioning. —Joyce Carol Oates
When you’re writing fiction—whether a short-short, short story, novella, or novel—do you plan out your work? A little, with some notes? A lot, meticulously, with detailed outlines?
Some writers argue the act of writing is the creative engine for plot and character. Others point out that writing without a concrete (or somewhat flexible) idea of where things are headed guarantees, at best, a lot of rewriting and, at worst, a substandard product.
Lee Goldberg of A Writer’s Life draws attention to this very dilemma and comes down squarely on the side of outlining.
I am a firm believer in the importance of having an outline before you sit down to write. It doesn’t have to be detailed outline—it might only be a page or two. You just need to know where you’re going and, to some degree, how you are going to get there…or what happened to author Sandra Scoppettone could happen to you.
What happened to Scoppettone? She accidentally conflated the lives of characters, and she had to go back and rewrite large swaths of her novel. (see Sandra’s comment below for details)
I have to strongly, though obliquely, disagree with Goldberg. He, like many writers, myself included, make use of outlines as guides, or as he calls them “living outlines”. They change as discoveries are made in the writing process.
But he only acknowledges the chance of significant rewriting, whereas I would argue that major rewriting is an essential part of the writing process. As such, total rewriting should be accepted as a necessity and eventuality, and, as such, a first draft should always be written without an outline, without a net.
A first draft in my process is about generating material. You open your writing to all opportunities. And you end up writing ten disposable pages for every top-notch one. (It’s also the point that you conduct your research, if needed.) It’s only after you have all that material on the page that you create an outline, a retrospective one, that makes use of everything you’ve spit out. Then you write your second draft using that outline and the “unlimited” material.
I don’t write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few
elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn’t work, or what simply is not alive. —Susan Sontag
Of course I’ve shelved a lot of stories that way. It’s hard not to have goals to measure your writing against, and that’s a big negative in not outlining before writing a first draft … and it presupposes you have enough time to write many pages you know you’ll just throw away.
But as the truism goes: only writing is writing.
What do you guys think? What process do you find works best for you?
From Marilynne Robinson and her apologia for fiction “You Need Not Doubt What I Say Because It Is Not True”:
I know of no way to parse that phrase, once upon a time, in terms of English usage—it seems sui generis. In the same way the Latin writers used the word olim, to mean, paradoxically, you need not doubt what I say because it is not true. It may be that, in acknowledging fiction as fiction, the readers or hearers divest themselves of a kind of self-interest. We are normally protective of our sense of reality—we want to see ourselves, and to be seen, as competent judges of the truth of things. This is how we retain a faith in our own sanity, among other things. Fiction relieves us of this defensiveness—in fiction we expect surprise, irony, reversal. In effect, we expect to be fooled.
In the United States, we are a solitary bunch, and we have very few of what can be called purely social values—that, for example, families should live in the same town, that an unmarried daughter should take care of her mother in her mother’s old age, that a church’s mission is to minister to the weakest everywhere, not just those in attendance on Sunday. We Americans lock our doors, and we watch or read the news whose slant we’re prepared to agree with. We’re individualistic, awfully so.
But fiction rallies against individualism. It forces the reader to believe in a world he is not—can never—be fully a part of, because it belongs to the writer, lives in her mind. To read fiction, you must be humble, you must be social. You not only suspend your disbelief; you suspend beliefs. To that effect, fiction, to the militantly individualistic, is a powerful, terrifying weapon.
