things i like this week that have nothing to do with writing

• giving my dog a bath so he doesn't smell like a port-o-potty anymore. and then he gives me this face. I HAVE THE CUTEST DOG IN THE WORLD.
• that's pretty much it.

two of my favorite things right now

because my writing has never won anything before* and this is better than nothing! also, i dream about nutella.

 

*yep, my last literary award includes being a finalist for the (hampton roads) peninsula spelling bee in 1994. yep.

and one day, life will be as badass as ever...if i keep my motivation.

usually after a busy weekend, i want to do anything but sit down and work at writing. strangely, i'm feeling ready to get down to business. i'm thinking about my query letter to agents for my book. i'm thinking about the revisions to my book, which i'll be working on during the next workshop starting next week.

i'm even thinking about the next reading which isn't even happening until january. after talking about it with my boyfriend, i'm going to take a shot at reading my australia stories. i've balked from doing this solely because there's a lot of dialogue in those stories. dialogue with aussies. which means i'd have to read with an accent.  ugh. i'm no actress, but i can pull off the accent. the problem is performing in front of people. it terrifies me. but john made a good point. if i'm trying to sell this book, it's likely that i'm going to have to read it in front of people. i should try to make it entertaining.  i think i can do that. if i still feel this way come january...well, we shall see.

another point of motivation is my honorable mention win for best nonfiction writing in the conference. i didn't feel it was my best work because the submission was restricted to 2000 words, and the story i submitted was originally 3000+ words. editing was a pain in the arse. but i'm glad somebody still liked it enough. no monetary award but i get in next year's conference for free. and who knows, maybe by then i will have a book deal, be in a great writing program, and life will be as badass as ever. POSITIVE POSITIVE POSITIVE THINKING.

writing conference, day 1

highlights 

• kinda decent swag bag, including the new P&Ws/the writer magazine issues, cookies, free jodi's popcorn, and 2 tickets to the norfolk botanical garden and the chrysler museum of art.
• meeting a fan from my reading last night
• getting a tasty veggie wrap
• meeting jill mccorkle *
• meeting katherine sands**
• catching up with former barnes and nobles employees

not-so-highlights

• false fire alarms that made judi mccoy pretty angry
• pitch session not quite going as i planned***

*jill mccorkle is one of those people you just want to hang around with on a front porch swing on a summer day sipping ice tea and bourbon. calm, graceful, modest. it was a pleasure stalking her down and making her sign my book. i told her that i really loved her new book (okay i just read halfway through at that point but it's really amazing) and that i've also been reading her colleague john kessel's short stories "the baum plan for independence." i was looking forward to applying to ncstate for fall 2011, where they are both faculty. yes of course it's brown nosing and i look like a fan girl. but she looked at my name tag and said she'd keep a look out for my name. yessssssssss.

**katherine sands is one of these people who know their shit and got it straight. she seems to be one of those relentlessly accountable people with confidence and swagger and is just generally cool as hell.  because i just saw this movie, i'll compare her to the character of chris chambers from the movie "stand by me": 

what's your pitch, sucka?

her pitch session was well-informed and entertaining. she was direct and honest and was committed to giving each member the information he or she needed to make a successful book pitch. i respect that. 

*** now, sadly,  i  don't feel like this was my shining moment. this is not katherine's fault in any way, but i definitely felt like i missed the pitch. i know my idea has all of the components she talked about in her panel, but being in front if her and explaining it all...well, it just didn't gel. she did invite me to send her my query, so i plan doing that as i feel comfortable with it. which will be veeeeeerrrry soon. 

fiction readings for amateur writers...

can be a terrifying experience. depending on size of the crowd, the location/environment, and the piece that the writer has to read, this can be brilliant success or utter failure.

last night, i read a short story that i recently wrote that has been swirling around in my head for some time. before this, knowing I had a 7-minute reading to perform, I scourged all my writing samples to find a piece worthy of reading in front of my teachers, fellow writers, loved ones and varying strangers. I found nothing that i was comfortable reading for 7 minutes in front of anybody, not even my dog:

tough crowd

and so the unworkshopped, unreviewed short story made it to the stage. i ran it by a couple of my most trusted beta readers and ran a spell check. that was about it. 

i have to say it was more well-received that i would have thought. my current instructor seemed nervous because i was reading a piece that had not been worked in her class. afterwards, she gave me her usual, "it's brilliant!" face. which makes me happy. i talked with a former instructor, who told me good things. i even met a woman today at the hampton roads writers conference who recognized me from the reading and told me she really enjoyed my story. overall, that's a score. lauren: level up!

the submissions mission

here's a quote from a publication's "what we look for in submissions" page: 

Stories that begin with descriptions are the worst offenders. I receive dozens of these. Descriptions of pastoral scenes or bustling streets in exotic foreign lands or the weather, or even a description of Joe waking up in the morning, don’t tell me who’s involved and what’s at stake (unless Joe is on fire). They don’t tell me why I should care about whatever this eventually turns out to be about.

I am also squeamish about stories that begin with a piece of dialog (I don’t know who’s talking, or why), and stories that begin with background information. A teacher of mine called this type of opening “throat-clearing”. Skip the intro. Just get on with it! 

A few of my prejudices - I don’t want to see any more stories where the P-O-V character has Alzheimer’s. I don’t want to see stories that depend on dreams; I don’t trust dreams in fiction. I cringe when I begin reading another story about “mama”. I have a bias against stories in which the main characters are children or animals. I am bored by stories in which the characters suffer from some indefinable, generalized angst or ennui. I have a bias against stories which are mostly internal monologue or exposition; I want to see the characters “in scene”.

I must also admit a prejudice against experimental fiction, or meta-fiction. My experience has been that most writers who claim to be writing such fiction are doing so because they cannot write a traditional story. But I try to keep an open mind.

reading this information completely turned me off to submitting a story to them. not only because of the restrictions/biases/pet peeves/seemingly minor annoyances that this editor felt necessary to communicate to writers, but also because it reminded me how jaded editors can be. 

i realize that the amount of terrible writing these people receive has made them intolerant to reading anything less than what they consider "good" writing. well, too bad. maybe they shouldn't be literary magazine editors. 

more importantly, reading this has discouraged me. maybe it's because it is sunday and i'm a little mopey i have to go into work early tomorrow, but this was a major bummer for me to read. previous to reading this, i submitted a story i recently revised to a number of publications. now i am feeling doubtful about my work. as if writers need another line item on their list of anxieties. now i should be wary of editors with a prejudice against experimental fiction. fantastic!

what is it about the submissions process that upends my confidence and turns my usual proud self esteem into a pile of jelly? i know that successful writers need nerves of steel to make it in the business, but what is it about some (certainly not all) editors and publishers that make it a point to test those nerves? if an editor doesn't like a story, simply send out the rejection form and move on. i feel that the only restrictions a publication should list as an official guideline is the preferred manuscript/submission format and the theme/genre of the publication. everything else is purely preferential. it's one thing to state a manifesto, it's another thing to ridicule style. 

i once had a teacher who taught writing through a list of rules. no dreams, no memories, no telephone conversations, no misplaced modifiers, no talking animals, no first person POV, and so on. here's my thing: short stories have a very basic set of rules to adhere to. everything else is fair game. if it works, it works. if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. making lists of specific things to avoid in a short story is pointless and self-gratifying BS. 

and so, one rant spawned another. i promise it will be the last. although, i do feel better now.

currently reading...

amy hempel's "reasons to live"

it didn't take me long to finish the author's first collection of short stories. most of the stories are only a few pages long--one in this collection is a mere page and a half. hempel is known for her lightning-quick prose and sentences so fecund with wit and raw emotion that an entire paragraph is a story in itself.

that said, i'm not sure i liked it. in fact, the first story i read kind of annoyed me. i wanted to read "in the cemetary where al jolson is buried" first because of its legendary status as the story that made her gordon lish's darling when she was a student at columbia. it's also the first fiction story she ever wrote (maybe that's why it annoys me, hah).

of course, the beginning is amazing:

"'tell me things i won't mind forgetting,' she said. 'make it useless stuff or skip it.' 

I began. I told her insects fly through the rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like a banana-- you see it looking full, you're seeing it end-on." 

it's clear that hempel is an extremely effective writer in that she knows exactly what she wants to communicate and she knows exactly how to communicate it. everything else is unnecessary bullshit. all this time i thought raymond carver was bare bones. i believe it was truman capote who said he believes in the scissors more than the pencil. perhaps that is hempel's credo. it's clear that she wants to push the boundaries of what a short story is and what the form is capable of, which i can appreciate.  hempel creates compelling characters in stories such as "nashville gone to ashes" and "tonight is a favor to holly" but the stories end before i can establish a connection to them. i found it a bit anticlimactic.

that said, i believe she's an amazing writer. you'd find more talent in her index finger than ten fiction bookshelves in barnes and noble. it's obvious that the publishing world loves lady hempel, that her vision of the short story is nothing short of literary genius. a quick google search and you'll find nothing but laudatory articles and interviews celebrating her. not to mention at nearly 60 years old, she's a babe. if the interviewer is male, you can almost see the blush rising in his cheeks as he conducts the interview. more power to her.

but the fact that her very first attempt at fiction was so groundbreaking and well-received makes me think that her technique comes out so perfectly organic in her writing. she can pop out a couple pages and it's all the rage in the next harper's. it kind of usurps this indelible image in my head of writers toiling away in dark rooms, writing and tossing out material, then revising and writing some more. she says in her interview with powell's after a question about what kind of writing she would consider a weakness:
"I don't know that I'm not good at as much as I'm not interested in the big picture in any given story. I like the moment the thing changes. I like the aftermath of the big event more than I like to portray the event itself."
i don't really understand that logic, but her choice in not writing longer fiction is interesting. not that i think short fiction is easy in the least, but i get the sense that short fiction comes rather naturally to her. this talent has afforded her a career as a professional writer and educator at some of the best writing programs in the country. but i wonder what would happen if she took a stab at writing something longer than a novella. something out of her comfort zone. it seems like she has carved out this niche in short fiction and is one of the most successful modern writers because of it. she knows what she is good at. she has her formula and doesn't monkey with it. is that any different from the mass market romance and mystery authors who find their formula and write the same story over and over again? aren't writers of literary fiction supposed to challenge themselves as artists?

clearly, this is a tangent and i come off naive. that's fair. what do i know? with my drawerful of unpublished short stories and a book that needs serious editing, i really shouldn't be talking. most of what draws people to a certain author or type of fiction is so nebulous, it's not even worth going into. all i'm saying is that this reader would love to read an amy hempel novel someday. this reader thinks she should take a crack at it.