ENGL 237/8/9 - Writing Fiction I / II / III | Summer 2017
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ENGL 237/8/9 - Writing Fiction I / II / III | Summer 2017 INSTRUCTOR: Dan Tremaglio CLASS TIMES: M-Th 11:30-1:20 EMAIL: [email protected], but messaging me through Canvas is better OFFICE: R230 HOURS: By appointment THE LIE THAT TELLS THE TRUTH That’s what Albert Camus called fiction. Like most writers, he’s being both ironic and sincere at the same time. By lie, he means a story unconstrained by fact. By fiction, he means storytelling, the oldest and original art form, which exists at the confluence of art, history, religion, politics, myth, and science. Fiction is about what it means to be human. Fiction is about meaning itself. FIRST, SOME BACKGROUND ABOUT ME, YOUR INSTRUCTOR, BY WAY OF WESTWORLD Ever watch the HBO show Westworld? If not, think Jurassic Park (also by Michael Crichton) except instead of dinosaurs, you’ve got cowboy robots. Don’t worry, it’s much smarter than it sounds. Westworld is all about stories, layers upon layers of them. There’s the story of show called Westworld, the story of the theme park called Westworld, the stories of the robots that populate that park, the stories of the characters who build the robots, plus the stories of the park visitors who pay big money to kill and/or kiss the robots. In a very real sense, we ARE the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. This is especially true in Westworld where park designers must create the personality of each artificially intelligent robot. This is the most fascinating part of the show, how programmers give each robot a collection of memories and a narrative that weaves them all together. These robots are no more or less than the sum of their stories. To the creators of Westworld, storytelling and consciousness are one and the same. There’s a concept that comes up often on the show called the bicameral mind. According to this theory, human beings did not always have the consciousness we think we have today, which is to say a consciousness that’s conscious of its own consciousness. This final development, according to the theory, took place some 3,000 years ago. Before then, the mind was made up of two separate and distinct parts (hence “bicameral”). One part dealt with sensory and motor functions, while the other was a voice that told the first part what to do. Proponents of the bicameral mind theory argue that ancient humans believed the inner voice we think of today as consciousness was actually the voice of the gods giving them orders. So what catalyzed the shift? In short: Literature. This is the super-simplified version, but yes: with the spread of written-down stories came a new universal awareness about what happens inside all our heads, a new consciousness of consciousness. Now, the big question: do I believe this theory is scientifically true? To be totally honest, I’m leaning towards probably not, but that’s beside the point. We are inside the realm of storytelling now, inside the realm of fiction, and here, when I listen to this story about the bicameral mind and the spread of literature, I recognize a metaphor for my own adolescence writ large. Time now for a humiliating confession… When I was young, say eight or nine years old, I genuinely suspected I was the only person in the world who actually thought. Sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. It’s not that I believed I was only person with a brain or the only person with ideas, it’s just that this constant chatter we have inside our heads every hour of every day, this never ending stream of nonsense and self doubt and longing and conjecture—I truly suspected I was the only person afflicted by it. I wasn’t sure it meant there was something wrong with me, but I definitely suspected there was at least something different. In other words, I was kind of like the bicameral man. I didn’t know what to think of what I thought. Then the same thing that supposedly happened to all humans 3,000 years ago happened to me. I started reading. A lot. Especially fiction. Across the pages of novels I suddenly recognized the same made-up imaginative fancy I heard inside my head all day long. The fact that none of it really happened did not matter anymore. It was art. It was meaning making. This is the kind of stuff I talk about when I talk about fiction. It’s what I’m looking forward to talking with you about it all quarter long. WELCOME TO WORKSHOP 2 That’s how I’ll always refer to class, otherwise known as Writing Fiction 237/8/9. It’s an easy course to summarize. We’re going to sit around and talk about how to make made-up stories feel like they aren’t made up. Generally speaking, we’ll follow the traditional Iowa workshop format, which means we’ll sit in a circle and together dissect a piece of fiction that’s been written either by a member of the class or an author of renown, the idea being to make the former sound more like the latter. Now is probably as good a time as ever to tell you I don’t plan to teach you anything. Fiction is an art and art is intuitive, meaning you must teach yourself. Part of teaching yourself anything means knowing what you don’t know and seeking out someone who does. That’s why we’re here. When we sit in a circle, look around. Everyone here knows something you don’t. Everyone here is great at something you’re terrible at. This is the beauty of workshop. Everyone at the perimeter tosses what they’ve got into the middle where it becomes ripe for the taking. OFFICIAL COURSE OUTCOMES After completing this class, students should be able to: Distinguish between plot and story Show, rather than tell, by using specific details, naming nouns and strong, active verbs Develop scenes Create believable characters through description, action, scene, and dialogue Establish and sustain a point of view Create and sustain tension Control sentence structure, length and word choice to create a particular tone and mood Critique, revise, and edit works in progress MY PERSONAL COURSE OUTCOMES EMPATHY – people who read fiction have been demonstrated in controlled laboratory experiments to be more empathetic than people who do not. If one takes the time to consider what a made up character is feeling, how much easier it is to do the same for a real person. FAMILIARITY WITH THE WORKSHOP FORMAT – We’re more or less going to be applying the traditional Iowa-style workshop model here: a writer provides the class with a story, the class reads the story, then discusses it’s craft in detail for 3 somewhere between 40 minutes and an hour. This is the backbone of every creative writing program at any school in the country. It’s an art form unto itself. Those of you who are enrolled in this course as 238 or 239 have already encountered it. For the rest, I hope this course is a fit introduction. A DIMINISHED FEAR OF FAILURE – I wrote “A Fearlessness of Failure” first, but then realized how ridiculous that is, so I went for “A Diminishment” instead. Donald Barthelme put it best when he said: "Let me point out, if it has escaped your notice, that what an artist does is fail. Any reading of literature, however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, to equal, the intuition. There is always something ‘out there’ which cannot be brought ‘here.’ This is standard. I don’t mean bad artists, I mean good artists. There is no such thing as a ‘successful artist’ (except, of course, in worldly terms).” I do not expect us to get over our fear of failure in the next 7 weeks, but I do hope we begin to see it as part of the artist’s journey. ENJOYMENT – this is supposed to be fun. Fun can be interpreted broadly, of course, but the point of literature, the point of art in general, is to make life more livable, to make it more meaningful and less lonely, to bring it joy. A BROADENING OF TASTE – this might be the single biggest thing I gained from my own graduate study in fiction. I went into that program with a very specific taste about what great fiction looked liked which I had cultivated and taught myself to defend with rigorous inflexible opinions. Wrong! One of the greatest gifts of reading and writing fiction is the opportunity to step inside the shoes of someone completely different from ourselves, someone with totally different experiences, attitudes, perspectives, tastes. WHAT WE’LL DO TO HIT THESE OUTCOMES Here’s the course in a nutshell: everybody is going to write three short stories, mark the hell out of everybody else’s work, and talk a lot at least halfway civilly in workshop. THE SHORT STORIES: POST-GENRE, ANYONE? We’ll have a special focus this quarter and that special focus will be “post-genre.” Other names for this concept include genre-bending, magic realism, slipstream, speculative, and a big pile of others. 4 My personal definition: post-genre is any work of fiction that borrows tropes from genre fiction while maintaining the heart of literary fiction. Another way to say it: a post-genre story is fantastical AND literary at the same time.