Italics are mine

Year 2023 in Review

It's this time of the year... let's do a year 2023 in review. Here are some highlights:

1. I sold the novel I had been working on for the past ten years (I am so excited to have Holly Ingraham as my editor at Crooked Lane Books/Alcove Press for a publication this fall! her comments and edits have really pushed me to become a better writer and the book has benefited greatly) At some point I am going to share more details about my path to publication, but it deserves a post of its own. For now, I'll just say: what determines success in this business (as in many/most/all? creative endeavors) is not talent, although I like to think I am talented, but staying power. I decided many years ago I'd become a published novelist and I never let go of that goal. Do I wish I'd achieved that milestone sooner? Sure. Am I proud I never gave up? Of course. Do I have enough ideas now to publish a novel a year for the next decade? Absolutely. The years to come are going to be a lot of fun. Random fact: my agent (huge shoutout to the amazing Betsy Amster, who believed in me from the start!) sent my manuscript to Holly on the one-year anniversary of my mom's death. She didn't know the exact date, although she knew my mom had died the previous year, so it was a fluke that she got around to reading my last edits and sending the manuscript out on that very day (I had sent it to her for review several days earlier), but when she told me the book was out on submission, I knew my mom would watch over me to find the perfect home for my novel. My mom had always believed in my writing. 
2. I started and completed my first year in the low-residency MFA program at Bennington Writing Seminars (Bennington College) in Bennington, VT. (The picture above is of the impromptu pizza party we had with my cohort during spring residency when the fire alarm got triggered in the dining hall right before dinner.) I absolutely adore this program. Usually, I tend to think in terms of academic years because of my day job, but Bennington has both fall and spring cohorts, so I started in January. (I applied after my mother died. I wanted to do something I wouldn't have done if she hadn't died, and I've always dreamt to study writing more deeply.) By now, I've gone through two residencies, with three to go. The timeline works beautifully for my schedule because the residencies happen outside the regular semesters when I have to be in Dallas to teach. I also just find a low-residency MFA a much better fit for me than a "full-time on-campus" one. That is because, in MFA programs that are full-residency instead of low-residency, you spend a lot of time workshopping other students' material. In low-residency MFAs, you exchange packets (writing materials) with your teacher outside residencies, where you submit new writing pages and annotations on books you have read for the program, and you only workshop other students' work during residencies. I personally prefer focusing my time not spent writing on analyzing published novels for what makes them work or what doesn't resonate with me. Also, there is a much more diverse crowd in low-residency MFAs than in "full-time on-campus" ones, where most students are a few years out from college. In my program, some people are just out of college, some are retired, some never even graduated from college (it is a hallmark of Bennington that they don't require an undergrad degree for the MFA). My cohort and other Bennington cohorts have included retired lawyers, investigative reporters, university professors, rock band frontmen, HR specialists, marketing wizards, and more. It has been refreshing to be with other dedicated writers who have a day job. We understand each other in ways other people can't. 
3. I rescued a stray cat from the Dallas heat wave back in August. He'd been coming every few days for the past two years because I was leaving food outside for him but he wouldn't let me come close. Then, the heat wave happened and in two separate occasions he seemed in distress so I opened my door and aimed my cold air column at him and fed him rotisserie chicken from Whole Foods and Central Market and he decided to stick around. 
4. I went to Asheville, NC for Spring break. This had been on my bucket list for years, and I finally made it happen. (Years ago when I still lived in Pennsylvania I wanted to road trip down the Blue Ridge Mountains with a good friend of mine, but unfortunately our schedules never aligned and the trip didn't happen. I've been thinking of visiting Asheville ever since.) I struck up so many conversations with strangers during the long weekend I was there, and visited so many cool places, and ate at so many amazing restaurants. I initially had wanted to go for fall break last year but it didn't work out schedule-wise, which may have been for the best, because locals told me the prices for hotels and restaurants become prohibitive since it is peak foliage season. Instead, I got to see the "real-er" side of Asheville. It's a lot more expensive now than when I first thought about traveling there, but it's still a great travel destination.  
5. I got assigned my first CASA case with Dallas CASA. CASA stands for Court-Appointed Special Advocate. It is a nonprofit organization that trains volunteers to assist and advocate for foster kids through their journey in the foster-care system. I can't discuss details of the case, but I will say I have a phenomenal supervisor who inspires me in every interaction we have.
6. I completed the 200-hour yoga teacher training offered by Aligned Yoga (Briohny Smyth's online yoga school) and started the 300-hour follow-up training. I had already completed a 200-hour YTT with Dallas Yoga Center, which was good, but wanted something with more precise instruction for advanced yoga poses, and the training (which includes teachings on yoga philosophy, breathing techniques and so on) has done wonders for me. I may enroll in the 300-hour DYC YTT too in 2024.
7. I attended my very first writers' retreat. It was outside Los Angeles and organized by the UCLA Extension School. I learned about it last year because my friend Darren N., who I met through taking online classes at UCLAx, went last year and praised the retreat. Fun fact: I didn't know she was returning to the retreat this year, but Darren and I ended up rooming together in one of the chalets. It was a fantastic experience. 
8. I completed the Nanowrimo challenge. (If you don't know what it is: the goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month. Ideally, you start from scratch, and by the end of the month, you have the rough draft of a book.) I now have a first draft of my third novel. I had never attempted the challenge before but wanted to push myself. At the UCLAx writers' retreat, someone gave me a demo of the Scrivener software, and that was instrumental in my completing the Nanowrimo challenge because I just started a file for each day I was writing and uploaded my word count after each session. I discovered that writing 1,667 words at a time wasn't hard (I didn't say they were *good* words). There was something about the challenge that helped bypass my critical brain and so almost every day I would sit down and write the required amount of words. I stumbled around Thanksgiving but there was no way I was going to fail so close to the finish line so I forged through and I succeeded. I created a new writing habit and was thrilled to have completed a major writing project in just one month.  
9. I roadtripped to Albuquerque, NM. The last road trip I took was to Marfa, TX, two years and a half ago. That was also one month before I had a bad car accident. It took me a while to find both the time and the inclination to get on the road. Driving ten hours solo each way was a bit out of my comfort zone, but I am glad I did — first, because challenging oneself is always good, and second, because Albuquerque is such an amazing city. It has a lot of street art and has a funky vibe that Asheville, NC probably had before it became super-popular. The main reason for my trip is that I've never managed to see the musical Hadestown (I had other shows lined up when I went to New York City, I had conflicts when the national tour made stops in Texas), and I decided I really wanted to see that show, so I booked a ticket on a Thursday for a Saturday matinee, and the next day I got in my car and drove west toward New Mexico. I stayed at the Hotel Andaluz, which I highly recommend. I also had time to see the river lights, do some sightseeing around the Old Town Plaza, eat what is supposed to be the best guacamole in Albuquerque at El Pinto and drop by the museum of art, which had an exhibition about Georgia O'Keeffe and Henry Moore.  
10. I kept learning Ukrainian and I brushed up on my Spanish too on Duolingo. I'm not sure how any beginner can learn a new language on that platform, but when you already know a bit of the language like me, a couple of minutes a day on Duolingo is a fun way to feel accomplished. And I've been earning multiple monthly badges although the number of quests to complete each month keeps increasing.
11. I went to Los Angeles twice. The first time I was based in Pasadena and the other time in Los Feliz. I did a lot of sightseeing, from LACMA to the Pacific Asia Museum and the Huntington Gardens (which is where I was when I learned Holly would be making an offer on my novel. You don't forget moments like these.) I love LA and it was a great opportunity to meet up with other members of my Bennington cohort.

Just in case you think my year was all peaches and roses, there were also some major downs. I may write about those one day but not now... Over the past four years, I've definitely had more downs than I wanted, but maybe they make the ups seem much sweeter.

Happy New Year! Best wishes for a fantastic 2024. I have a lot of plans for this new year and I can't wait to share what I do on this blog!

 

• 
• 
• 
• 

 

 

 

 

 

Bennington One

So I got accepted into the Bennington's low-residency MFA program a few months ago (the best low-res MFA program in the country if you ask me, but it is said to be neck-and-neck with Warren Wilson). Bennington is of course famed for its innovative, student-centered curriculum, mostly at the undergraduate level -- besides writing, there are a couple of MFA programs in dance, music and public action at Bennington as far as I am aware -- and its role in pioneering a new era of modern dance thanks to Martha Graham, whom I adore. I applied to the program after my mother died unexpectedly, because I wanted something positive to come out of her passing -- she would have wanted that for me, and she was the only one in my family to fully support my writing. So throughout the residency I kept taking stock of how lucky I was to be sitting in this or that auditorium and meeting so many phenomenally talented writers and I kept silently saying: Thanks for making this possible for me, Mom. 

I can do a low-residency program because the residencies fall outside the academic terms at the university where I teach. I was wondering if I had made the right decision right until the moment I showed up on the Bennington campus on the shuttle from Albany Airport, and then it was so obvious I had I thanked my lucky stars and I enjoyed ten days of phenomenal master classes with top instructors and best-selling writers, great readings, and the wonderful cohort of my amazing cohort members. I have met more interesting people in ten days in Vermont (none of them living in Vermont, but still) than I have met in almost seven years in Dallas, Texas. It has been a while since I was surrounded by so many talented creative people and it has already pushed me to achieve a new level of proficiency in my writing. That residency was total bliss (ok, it helped that the weather was very mild for early January in Vermont, going barely below freezing). The 20+ first-termers all lived in the same "house" (dorm), we just had to get up in the morning and get ready and walk to the dining hall, which was about 4 minutes away and had delicious organic food sourced from local farms. The first tremors would recognize each other and we would sit together in the dining hall, in maybe two tables due to the size of the group. Then we would walk to the first class or reading of the day and would just keep going until it was lunch time, where we would repeat the same process as for breakfast. Then there was time to go back to the dorm if needed before going to the mandatory workshops (where our work would be workshopped). Then more classes and readings and then social hour (wine hour at Roz's Cafe!) and then dinner and faculty readings. It was an extraordinary experience. I can't wait for the next residency. 

Here are some pictures of residency. (The man at the podium is David Gates, author of the amazing Preston Falls, who teaches at Bennington.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes life takes you through a meandering path, and that has certainly been the case for me and the MFA program. If I had been able to, I would have done a MFA years ago, but I had no one to recommend me, a student visa and later a H1B, and even after I got my Green Card, it never occurred to me to quit my job to pursue a full-time MFA. I come from a blue-collar family, so quitting an engineering job I was good at for a MFA just didn't cross my mind. Where I come from, the priority is to make a living. But years ago (close to twenty years ago, I think), a friend of mine who lived in NYC at the time had told me about the Gotham Writers' Workshop, and I took a couple of online classes there, and I hired someone to give me feedback on a story of mine through them. That person was an adjunct at the UCLA Extension School, so about nine or ten years ago I looked into whether they offered online classes, and they sure did. That's how I got started taking online classes at UCLAx, back when I still lived in Pennsylvania, and ended up taking two master classes there and getting a Certificate in Writing (with Distinction :) from them. Through the first master class I met a woman my age who was writing a similar type of fiction, and we stayed in touch over the years. She got a NY agent but when the agent refused to send out her manuscript (perhaps the agent's assistant had been more enthusiastic about the book than the agent herself was), that friend of mine announced she had decided to pursue a MFA at a local low-residency MFA program. This is how I learned low-residency MFA programs existed. I also got my literary agent through the UCLAx program, and she has been excellent. When that friend of mine told me about her MFA program, I researched the top MFA programs in the country (hers is one of them), and applied to the top three. I was accepted into two of the three, and picked Bennington due to the name recognition, the great support for students and alumni especially regarding publications, and the better fit with me as a person (innovative curriculum... Martha Graham... student-centered... groundbreaking...)

Now that residency is over, we have to read about 20 to 25 books each term (approved by our advisor that term), and submit about 25 pages of new writing to our advisor each month. I actually have already read 11 books for the program since the beginning of January (I was having a dry spell in my writing so I decided to read a lot), and now I am working on new pages. My cohort has a Discord channel and we keep in touch through that as well as occasional group Zoom calls. It's been such a joy to meet people as dedicated to their writing as I am and as talented too. For many years I didn't have nearly enough writer friends. We give ourselves book recommendations, celebrate good news, share publication opportunities and cheer each other up as needed. 

One thing that is embedded in my mind about residency is that I liked to sit at the back of Tischman Hall for the faculty readings and the master classes, and one day I looked around and noticed how different everyone looked -- everyone with their unique style of clothing and hairstyle and shoes. This is so different from Dallas, where women in particular most often have their hair down with little curls at the bottom and wear some kind of revealing dress with stilettos or other high heels.

I went to some breathtaking graduate readings and I can't wait to see where the recent graduates end up publishing. The Commencement ceremony was also the most enjoyable Commencement ceremony I have ever attended. This is a remarkable program and I am so glad to be part of it. And if you ended up on my page because you consider applying, all I can say is that this program has been incredible for me. 

On Likable Characters

 Someone, reading the beginning of my opera novel the other day, made the familiar comment that the two main characters weren't likable enough. For those of you who haven't followed me for long, it is a novel about two French opera singers during World War II. I have written several drafts of it since I first got the idea for it in 2009 (!) reading the nonfiction book The Shameful Peace by Frederic Spotts on the bus back from New York City. In it, Spotts describes how French soprano superstar Germaine Lubin associated with the Nazis during the war. I find her fascinating, because she was already famous when the war came and could have used her renown to take a stand. Instead, perhaps because she was best known for her interpretations of Wagnerian roles like Brunnhilde and Isolde, which had made her a darling of the crowd at the Bayreuth Festival (attended by Hitler himself), she chose to have a grand time with Third Reich officers. A picture of her at the 1939 Bayreuth Festival shows her, all smiles, sitting at Hitler's feet. She is also rumored to have had an affair with a Nazi. Hence, Germaine Lubin, while fascinating in real life, makes for an underwhelming character in a novel, as she undergoes no character development whatsoever and after the war denied all responsibility in her actions, tried to return to the stage (was thwarted) and helped a sympathetic writer pen an admiring biography of her to absolve herself of any wrongdoing. So Germaine was not suitable as a novel character at all.

Instead I chose to focus on the ambition of a young woman whose career has been thwarted by the lead soprano at the Paris Opera and who finds that singing for the Nazis is her last chance at success. I hope some readers will relate to her, but I don't particularly want her to be likable. For me "likable character" is code for American consumerism, for wanting a work that, by appealing to many, never becomes memorable or thought-provoking - easy to digest fare that can't be argued with, protagonists who are good people with only minor flaws, antagonists who are two-dimensional villains, like those in blockbuster movies with a mindless plot that hits all the right notes at predictable intervals. (I also think the issue of likability is raised far more often with female characters than with male, which I take issue with, and I prefer female characters who don't care one bit about being likable.)

If my book resonates with many, of course I will be thrilled, but I care more about finding the specific audience that is the best fit for it. If you had dreamed of success since you were little, had a specific talent for which you had been abundantly praised, but now had a hard time seeing success materialize before your talent wilted in front of your eyes, to what length would you go to fulfill your potential? I want my book to reach those people who feel my main protagonist could have been themselves, people who understand thwarted ambition and the temptations it brings, people who relate to (although do not necessarily condone) the sacrifice talented folks sometimes have to make in the pursuit of their art. We'll see if I can find them.    

Against Likability

Someone told me the other day that the main character of my novel-in-progress wasn't likable enough. That my main character wasn't particularly likable didn't come as a surprise: she is a French opera singer who sings for the Nazis during World War II and has an affair with a German officer - the striving type who took her chance when she saw it. She isn't supposed to be likable. What puzzled me more was the strongly held opinion, strongly expressed by that reader and one other, that my main character should be likable. They read excerpts from the middle of the book without reading the beginning, which covers why the main character turned the way she did, and apparently her unlikability was too much, although she's not even as dark as I could have made her: she doesn't denounce anybody, she would do anything for her son (who loathes her for associating with the Nazis and joins the Resistance).

This struck me as a fundamental difference between French and American reading tastes. In France, The Kindly Ones, written in French by American-born Jonathan Littell, which focused on a (very unlikable) rising star in the SS, won the Goncourt prize and the Grand prix du roman de l'Academie Francaise, two of France's most prestigious literary awards. The English translation was panned by a number of media outlets in the U.S. French literary tastes are also less action-driven and more character-driven, a nice way to say that there can be tens of pages where nothing happens. My book is more action-driven but I have an instinctive distaste toward using likable characters with World War II as the backdrop. Then for me it'd become really trying to use a tragic history to make money by, say, having a heroine who locks her younger brother in a cupboard when the police comes to arrest them, thus causing his death by asphyxiation, or a heroine who goes blind when she was a child. All very cute. Likable protagonists sell a lot of books in the U.S., as did a likable would-be journalist writing about the situation faced by her African-American maid during the heights of segregation in the U.S. Those books have sold extremely well.

But what interests me isn't a story that a lot of people are going to find touching. Literature is a business and you don't write a touching story of epic scale unless you are hoping for the big bucks. I am writing this book because I want people to think about how collaborateurs - people who behaved disgracefully during the war - turned out the way they did, how they moved step by step toward the line that defines right from wrong, and crossed it. This for me is more interesting. I've said before and I'll say again that one of the most relevant metaphors I've encountered about life is the frog in boiling water. (And the engineers and scientists around me can't resist telling me that's not how a frog would behave in real life, to which I say: it's a metaphor, alright? let me finish my story). If a half-decent person sees something really bad all of a sudden, hopefully he would take a stand against it. But if he sees a small bad thing and doesn't let it bother him and then something just a tiny bit worse that doesn't seem so much different from the first thing, he probably won't bother speaking up, and then the third thing is only slightly worse than the second one so it doesn't seem worth speaking up about either, and in the end he witnesses terrible things and doesn't lift a finger. Now, some people did terrible things during the war and showed they were intrinsically evil. My main protagonist isn't one of those people, and I find her more interesting for that. She is an opportunist focused on her own success, that much is clear, and she will pay for her behavior at the end of the war.

I suppose what bothered some of my readers was that they weren't sure where I was going with it and didn't know if my protagonist would pay for her actions. (They're some of my newer readers. They haven't spent the last year slugging through my many rewrites.) There is only so much time one can spend watching someone do bad things - I am one of those people who enjoyed House of Cards's first season and then promptly got tired of it.

So my purpose for the book is to show readers what they don't want to become - but have them empathize enough with my protagonist that they follow her through her rise and fall and ultimate small-rebound-out-of-the-abyss-but-definitely-not-rise-again. This may be an ambitious goal for literature and I'm glad I have a day job to remove the need of writing a bestseller in order to pay the bills. In the end, I want to put the book into the hands of as many people for whom it will resonate as possible, but that's probably not going to mean everybody, although I wouldn't mind having my protagonist turn into the Scarlett O'Hara of the 21st century (people find Scarlett annoying but they always root for her, especially in the book where she is so much better than in the movie). Every time I hear about a character that should be made more likable, I worry it's the first step toward selling out. I don't want people to find my protagonist likable. I want them to recognize the risk they might turn like her under certain circumstances. What would people do to be successful today? Preventable environmental disasters, loans with soul-crushing interest rates, banks that push people toward foreclosure or bankruptcy: we have plenty of reasons to worry losing our humanity in the quest for more money. 

But then this is a long post because there is always the question of whether I'm writing in the right language - whether I was right to write in English for the past 15 years or if I should've stuck to French. Each country has the culture that fits its priorities. How many U.S. indie movies have you seen that were actually good? The U.S. has its blockbusters and its mega-stadiums and everything has to be big, cars, trucks, portion sizes at the restaurant, house sizes. There are some good U.S. novels that reach a wide audience, though. (They usually don't have any message so I can't say this bodes well of my book, but anyway I've enjoyed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, The Painter by Peter Heller and The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander. My fiction tastes are very different from my nonfiction ones, which center around theater, Eastern Europe and biographies... I actually like very few World War II novels.) Hopefully my novel can find its audience too. And if it doesn't, I can always translate it into French.

#BlogOctober Writing Productivity Tips

Today is the start of my (online) master class in Novel Writing at UCLA Extension School so I decided to write a quick post on writing productivity tips. This may sound trivial, but one thing that has helped me tremendously is to set a timer on my smartphone when I write.

First, it helps me keep track of how much time I spend writing, because I often am not sure if I am writing enough, to the point that at the end of some days I had no idea whether I should be proud (of all the time spent writing) or dejected (by the lack of time spent writing). Now I am better able to keep tabs on my time.

Second, without the timer I tend to be scattered and take too many breaks or get distracted by Internet news. (Because I often look up period details for the book when I revise, it is easy to then glance at the tab with my email open and get sidetracked.) But when I have the timer on, I keep my breaks to a minimum until the time is over. I always stop the timer when I take a break, and it makes me think more about how I want to spend my time: do I want to check the news for five minutes or do I want to progress on my own book for five minutes? The timer highlights the displacement cost when I stop and am not writing. Distractions that seemed harmless when I did not have the timer quickly become unimportant. In turn, I become more focused because I spend more time on the book in one stretch. 

The way I do it at the moment, when I am revising and adding material, is to work in three-hour blocks. On weekends, I am sometimes able to repeat a block (i.e., work six hours on my writing). On Sunday I even squeezed in one last hour and worked a record-breaking seven hours on my novel. Back when I was writing the first draft I liked to go to the library (I was at MIT on sabbatical and would go to the Haydn Humanities library with its large windows overseeing the Charles River) and aim at four hours on a chair. I find that anything below two hours does not allow me to focus enough and really get into the story, but if one hour is all the time you have for, by all means, set the timer and get to work. It is better than nothing. 

I hope this technique will allow me to complete the second draft of my novel within a few weeks. I have revised over two hundred double-spaced pages now but I am not quite at the emotional core (half point of the novel) yet. Still fifty pages to go. I am tempted to say a novel on World War II - and opera - shouldn't be on the short side to do the topic justice, but I'll probably have to cut anyway. At least the timer will get me faster to the point where I have polished everything and can then cut more confidently. We'll see!

Writing!

Someone asked me the other day why I wasn't posting updates on my writing or my novels anymore on this blog. So, if you're curious, I'm writing as much as ever - perhaps more than ever in fact - but because I write so much, when I write a blog post it is more relaxing to write about something else, so the blog has taken a performing-arts flavor over the past few months. I hope you enjoy it. Also, it makes more sense to blog about the novel once it is about to get published, so writing-related posts don't seem timely right now and probably won't for a bit more time, although I might write something about craft or inspiration once in a while. I'm re-reading my creativity go-to book, Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (I love, love, love that book) and I'll definitely write something soon on a new painting of mine that I'm particularly proud of.

A lot of good things have happened to me writing-wise this year, the most important of which being the Writers' Program at the UCLA Extension School. I took an online course there with the phenomenal Robert Eversz, co-founder of the Prague Summer Program for Writers, who has been hands-down the very best writing instructor I've ever had. My writing has improved tremendously thanks to him, and I like to think I was a good writer before. I feel so blessed to have found a writing program where the instructors hold the students to high standards and want them to be the best they can be, instead of simply pocketing tuition money and letting students get away with being "lazy" writers (if you're a writer you know what the expression means, if you're not it's not important for this post). In my line of work it is very rare that someone gives me direct, thoughtful, constructive feedback solely aimed at improving the job I'm doing and I have felt really grateful at the opportunity. I've also much enjoyed the whole class and the other students' novels-in-progress. I only wish I lived in the LA area so that I could meet more of my fellow novelists in person!

I've also been nominated for a writing award, and I'm waiting to hear whether I've been accepted to a Master Class in Novel Writing. In the meantime, I keep polishing my draft, and on occasion I slowly prep for the next book I have in mind, although slowly is the key word there, given the other commitments I have. I am ecstatic with how positive this year has been on my writing. Things started falling into place after I returned from Utah, and I hope the year will finish on an even stronger note. All this to say, I'm not writing about Writing at the moment but I'm Writing instead! And that's a very good thing.

Writing Quote by Richard Toscan

Here is a great quote about writing that I found in Playwriting Seminars 2.0 by (former Dean of the School of Theatre at USC) Richard Toscan. While he refers specifically to playwriting and screenwriting, the quote is applicable to any writing endeavor (and the book is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in playwriting).

"Playwriting and screenwriting are not what you do after the dishes, walking the dog, feeding the fish, washing the car, and vacuuming the rug. All of that comes after writing. Or it should, but the discipline to do so takes practice for most people. Writing is hard work, so avoid falling into the trap of getting all the unimportant things out of the way first so that you can concentrate on writing. By then your back will hurt or you'll feel like going out to the local coffee shop. Make writing the most important thing you do and let it come first."

Highlights from #Muse15

Last weekend (May 1-3) I attended the Muse and the Marketplace writing conference in Boston. For this post I want to focus on my favorite teacher at the conference, Lynne Barrett of Florida International University, who taught two classes, and the winner of the Grub Street National Book Prize, The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil. (Weil was on hand at the reception for a short reading and book-signing. He also taught a craft class and led a discussion on his book, which unfortunately I could not attend.)

Lynne Barrett

The classes I attended over the weekend were all very good but Lynne Barrett's were so head-and-shoulders above to the rest that the advice I got from the other presenters (quite good in its own right) seems very trite by comparison. I had taken a class with Barrett by chance at the previous M&M conference I attended - I think it was in 2009 - and when I had the opportunity to attend again this year and saw she was teaching two distinct classes this year, I jumped at the opportunity to hear her twice.

Because she might give these lectures elsewhere in the future and clearly put a lot of time and effort in preparing her talks, I don't want to post her entire content here for the world to see for free, so I'll only provide highlights. If you'd like to know more, please find a conference near you where Barrett teaches and race to secure a spot!

Lecture 1: Dramatis Personae. In this lecture, Barrett recommended making a list of the characters that appear in a story or novel, including when they appear and the role (character type) they play in the book. She also recommended making scene charts as a way to see how characters interact with each other. A scene chart captures, for each scene, the length of that scene and the characters that appear in it. (You want your characters to have effects on each other.) It also distinguishes whether the scene is in the present or a flashback. Barrett used a fictitious example of an internal process/decision to illustrate her point and then led us through a more complicated but highly insightful chart depicting character interactions in The Great Gatsby.

Quote: "Characters who enact their internal conflict with strong, contradictory actions serve the story the best."-Lynne Barrett

Lecture 2: Disentangling Time. This lecture discussed the structure of three progressive complications as an overarching frame for a story or book, with the writer's choice of point of view and story start (choosing what will be a flashback, etc) creating compelling, unique stories. Barrett used The Three Little Pigs to make her point and we had a great time crafting a story using that very same theme, turning the three little pigs into two brothers and a sister and the wolf into a loan shark looking for his money. In the second part of the lecture, we studied the structure of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier with an eye on disentangling time, especially how du Maurier accelerates or slows down the pace and skips information inessential for the reader. (For example, we are told the narrator discusses her now-defunct parents with Max for an hour but we are not told what she said, because it is not important to the story.) We analyzed some of du Maurier's techniques to increase tension. Rebecca also falls within the framework of the three complications when seen through the prism of how the narrator views Max's feelings toward Rebecca.

In addition to being an English professor at FIU, Barrett (@LynneBarrett on Twitter) is also an acclaimed short story writer, best known for The Secret Names of Women and Magpies. I hope she'll return to M&M next year!

Josh Weil

Weil read from his prize-winning novel The Great Glass Sea, set in contemporary Russia (in a slightly alternate universe), which depicts the life of two twin brothers who drift apart in adult age. It has been described as "an epic tale of brotherly love, swathed in all the magic of Russian folklore and set against the backdrop of an all-too-real alternate present." Weil, like me, studied Russian for several years in high school and what I've read of the book so far (I bought the paperback after the reading) is truly excellent, as original and compelling as it was presented to be. I can't wait to read more of the relationship between Yarik and Dima.

This was a highly successful M&M conference by all accounts, further cementing Boston's position as incubator not only of start-ups and technologies but of creative writers and artistic innovation.

Getting the Shadows Right

I struggled with the title of this post for a while. Since my last two posts were on Julie Orringer and Thomas Mallon, two writers known for their high-caliber historical fiction, I knew I wanted to discuss my own fiction writings for today's post - especially Isolde 1939, where my main protagonist is a made-up character inspired by a real-life opera singer who sang for the Nazis, and my current project, where I write fiction about well-known musicians who fled the Third Reich. I usually come up with a title for the blog post almost immediately, but this one stumped me. I had a very good idea of what I wanted to express but couldn't summarize it into a few words, until the words practically wrote themselves: getting the shadows right. 

I used the fictitious character of Yvonne Chevallier in Isolde 1939 because the opera singer her story is loosely based on - Germaine Lubin - saw her career irremdiably tainted after the war by accusations she had fraternized with the enemy during the Occupation. She lost her French citizenship, lived in Switzerland for several years. She also sang Isolde at the Bayreuth festival in 1939 - a festival that was attended every year by Hitler himself, a long-time friend of Winifried Wagner's (the composer's daughter-in-law) and had an active operatic career during the war, including in 1941 when she sang Isolde in Paris with the Berlin State Opera and Herbert von Karajan.

If you do a Google search on her name and Hitler's, you'll find a picture where she sits at his feet at the Bayreuth festival. A French biographer who wrote about her in the 1970s absolves her of any wrongdoing. Saying that the woman had a complex personality is an understatement. I chose to use a fictitious character instead of because, if you are going to give center stage to real-life controversial characters,  you absolutely have to get the shadows right - you have to see the real person and not the person you wish he or she had been just because it would make for a better story. Who am I to pretend I know for sure what Germaine Lubin did and why she did it? In this case, using a fictional character seemed an absolute necessity.

For the project I am currently working on, on the other hand, the real-life protagonists are very positive characters: multi-dimensional people without a doubt, but with high integrity, a compelling personal story, and a network of similarly famous friends. I am still debating how many names to change, but it is not as important as in Isolde 1939 - because my characters and the people who have inspired them are fundamentally good people. The book will not be on their shadow the way Yvonne Chevallier's (shadow) drives a lot of what she does during the war.

Recognizing the inherent goodness of a character is not nearly as fraught as shining a light on her dark side. It is also more difficult to portray deep flaws in biographies since it may leave the reader with the impression that the author is "finding excuses" for his subject, who may have caused tremendous hardship to living people and not be deserving of the slightest excuse whatsoever. On the other hand, writing fiction about positive people who really existed allows members of the general public to become more aware of a real-life story they may not have known, while making it come to life thanks to the liberties fiction writers can take by creating lively dialogue or tightening the story line. I'm not sure when I'll be done, but it should make for an interesting new book.

Announcing My New Blog

For those of you who share my tastes (and hopefully if you are reading this blog, you share at least some of them), I'd like to invite you to give my new blog, DCtonians, a try. There will be one new post per week, each time about someone related to the Greater DC area who inspires me. (I picked DC because I'd like to move there in the not-too-distant future.) Comments, feedback and advice all welcome. Feel free to spread the word, especially among other people who like or live in the Greater DC area. Thank you!