Marcus Austin

10 December 2009

Upgrading the Fiction Filter

                What struck me most about being in a roomful of people attempting to learn about fiction, was that it was evident they had spent many hours of their lives contemplating stories, and writing, just like I have done. I often feel like my waking hours are being wasted as I spend more and more time and money getting a literature degree—have you ever heard the joke about how to get a philosophy major off of your doorstep? Tip him. However, my experiences in class allowed me to see that there were other people my age struggling with waking up in the morning, and having the urge to write, only to be discouraged at every turn. Minot writes:

 Our first loyalty and primary obligation is to the artistic object we are creating. If we use characters, places, and episodes from real life, they are simply raw material to be artfully recycled.  . . . We select what we need and invent the rest. Our sole commitment as fiction writers is to the creation of an artistic work, whether a story or a novel. (145)

The fiction pieces I read in class illustrated the delicate nature of fiction. It was often easy to tell that a story had drawn off of the author’s real life, but to point to specific instances in a story and know without a doubt that one thing is the truth, and another is pure fiction is a mark of a skilled author. One piece that comes to mind is Jeff’s story. I knew he was a waiter going into the story, only because he offered the class a hookup (for charity) at The Melting Pot, where he waited. There were times in the story where I could picture the exchanges happening as if they were Jeff’s own memories. The writing was good, but some of those same scenes that jumped out at me during the reading came up in discussion as, perhaps, overly realistic. During all of the readings, though, it was enlightening to see that everyone had spent time and effort to produce a work of art to share with the class, and had dealt with turning life into fiction.

                Hearing their fiction filters at work conveys so much information about that person. Minot says that “sophisticated works ‘do’ more in the sense that they suggest more, imply a greater range of possibilities, and develop more subtle shade of meaning than simple works do” (147). Everyone in the class displayed sophistication in their writing to various degrees. For instance, perhaps the most absurd story read this semester—Paul’s story about homicidal DVD players—seemed to display thematic concerns about the dangers we face as a society when we give inanimate objects too much power. It was apparent that everyone in class had thought deeply, and it showed in their writing.

                In my own writing, I struggled to turn my own deep thoughts into something entertaining, and passable as fiction. If three men are running for hours and hours, speaking only in subtle hand gestures, how do you turn that into an entertaining, and well-written story? I thought long and hard about what other people did with their stories in class, and what Minot recommended for good fiction. Once the first draft was done, I had to read the work, and decide where changes needed to be included; fiction is delicate, this was important work, and can never really be finished. I had to go back through and work on things like passive voice, dry narration, run-on sentences, and punctuation errors. The comma discussion that Dr. White prompted in class pops into my head every time I write an “and” in anything now, and that is not so much a bad thing. How to do dialogue tags properly was something else that became more solid in my head through their discussion in class. Learning that every writer of fiction at some point must struggle with shared concerns has been an important lesson. Whether seeing the evidence of my classmates’ labors, and discussing delicate points that pop up in discussion, and the readings, or struggling to put all of the valuable information absorbed in class and through the readings into my own fiction, it all works together to improve my knowledge of, and skills at writing fiction—that is the goal of the fiction workshop. What sticks is what sticks; it won’t go anywhere, and l will always be a better fiction writer than I was before the class.

[5:11pm—6:22pm, December 10, 2009]