Back to the Fiction!

Don’t get me wrong, I love my genre. Nonfiction moves me, thrills me, and inspires me. In short, it completes me. Okay, so maybe that was a little over the top, but you get the picture. I’m a big fan of nonfiction.

But, this quarter I’m hanging out in another fiction class and loving it. This form and theory class is looking at point of view and time. The reading list is awesome: To the Lighthouse, Cloud Atlas, A Mercy, As I Lay Dying, The Known World, Pedro Paramo, Runaway, and The Zero. Homegrown author and local hero Jess Walter will be in our last class to discuss his book. I can’t wait. (I just saw him at Auntie’s tonight, reading from his new book The Financial Lives of the Poets, which I bought but am not allowed to devour until all my course work is done.)

Meanwhile, I’m learning so much stuff. I mean, I’ve been reading fiction since I learned my letters, but this class is opening up my eyes to fiction elements I had no idea about. My fellow classmates are super smart and the discussion is enlightening, entertaining, and educational. I’m even looking forward to my struggle through Faulkner (who I’m not a big fan of) just to hear what their insight is.

This is going to be one fun, fun quarter!

Oh, and I’m also working with my thesis advisor on essay, after essay, after essay. I’m a little nervous about this, but more about that later.

-Åsa

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Critique—Helpful or Hurtful?

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with one of the fiction faculty members in my MFA program. Some of the second year nonfiction students have asked to switch advisers—something that sometimes occurs in all genres in our program. The instructor theorized that nonfiction students were more sensitive about their work because it describes actual events—reality—and is therefore more personal. This made me ponder if I react differently to critique of my fiction pieces than I do on my essays. What I found was the opposite of what the faculty member believed.

Our program requires all students to take at least two “out of genre” classes—one workshop and one form and theory. Currently, I’m in a fiction workshop where I read and critique my classmate’s short stories and two of my pieces go through the same treatment during the quarter. Our instructor is someone whose work I admire and he’s known in the program for doling out great tidbits of wisdom in his classes. So far, I’ve enjoyed just about every class.

There’s been a few of them though, where strange undercurrents between the fiction students have left me baffled. This is the third workshop these guys have together; they know each other’s writing extremely well and have studied the craft of fiction far longer than I have. Maybe they’re even a little tired of each other. Sometimes comments about a piece are delivered furiously, or another student’s question is shut down for being something the class has discussed “to death” during previous quarters. At the end of one of those discussions, I leave the classroom with a beginning headache and can’t wait to get home instead of our usual routine of a few beers at a local bar. My nonfiction workshops never seemed to have these strange twinges of anger in them.

 Maybe it’s because of the strange dynamic of my fiction workshop, or maybe it’s because I’m more comfortable with my own nonfiction peeps, but I’ve noticed that I react more emotionally to  the critique I receive of my short stories than my essays. I’ve tried to analyze why this is.

The best I can come up with is that when someone gives me feedback on my nonfiction, I don’t take it personally because I didn’t create the event I’m trying to describe. It actually did happen. If the essay isn’t working, it’s because I’ve done a bad job of focusing the lens on what I’m trying to portray. I’m grateful for any constructive feedback that will help me do a better job in the next draft.

When I write a short story though, I’ve made something new and am controlling the characters on the page much more deliberately. When someone critiques my creation, I react more emotionally because the world and people of my story is a direct extension of me—there’s a little bit of me in each one of them. If a character is said to not be boring or flat I project that to apply directly to me—my personality is also boring and flat.
 
When I talked about my first fiction piece being workshopped to a friend who’s a poetry student, she paraphrased someone whose name I don’t remember (a later internet search revealed that it might have been Tom Clancy): “the difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction has to be believable.” 
 
Maybe that’s why I react more emotionally to when my fiction is critiqued. Maybe I’m actually hearing my fellow students saying: “I don’t believe you.”

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The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

Wow, talk about a testosterone shower. This book is full go from the beginning to end. Here’s the last craft essay I’ll post from the profiles class.

Righteous Now and Then

Tom Wolfe was not present when a lot of the conversations and other events he reports on in The Right Stuff took place. He started writing about astronauts in 1972 for a series of articles for Rolling Stonesmagazine about the Apollo 17 mission and eventually began researching the whole of the space program. The only way to find out what happened during Project Mercury, which ran from 1959 through 1963, and the related events at Edwards (formerly Muroc) Air Force Base during the 40’s and the 50’s were to interview the people that had been there. (And of course to read and watch already published media.) Maybe that is why Wolfe didn’t include very many direct quotes in The Right Stuff. Direct quotes and its fiction equivalent, dialog, usually speed up a story and allow the author to place the reader right in the middle of an event; Tom Wolfe chose to use other tricks to create the same effect.

In The Right Stuff, the author switches tenses when he wants us (the readers) to pay attention to a particular scene and when he wants to speed up the narrative. An example of a “mock dialog” is on page 249, when John Glenn is asked to convince his wife, Annie, to admit Lyndon Johnson into her house. It is line spaced as and reads like dialogue, but none of the sentences are in quotation marks, so instead we get the spirit of what the conversation was like. (Contrast this with the conversation between Pete Conrad and General Schwichtenberg on page 73, which do use direct quotes.) In the Glenn scene, the tense shift from past to present happens on page 248. First we were with Annie in the house where “the curtains were pulled” and “the lawn, or what was left of it looked like Nut City” then, starting with the next paragraph, we’re with John in present tense “Meanwhile, John is on top of the rocket….” The only transition needed is that one little word, “meanwhile.”

Wolfe also often switches tenses when we are in the head of one of the characters, such as in chapter 1 when Jane Conrad reflects on all the funerals she and her husband attended. Another example is the scene where Chuck Yeager is testing the NF-104 on pg. 242. We start out in the past, “At 40,000 feet Yeager began his speed run.” but make the transition into the present by one little phrase “At precisely that moment….” The rest of the scene uses present tense and sentences chopped up by ellipses to place us not just on the page, but right in action inside Yeager’s head.

The effect of Wolfe’s cleverly placed time transitions (and all the other tools he’s using: chopped paragraphs, word choices, voice, etc.) is that it feels like we’re getting the story from the characters in the book. It’s as if we’re sitting in Pancho’s, knocking back a few beers while one of the pilots is telling us a story, or maybe we’re at an AWC tea party, chatting with one of the astronaut wives. (Next time a friend tells you a story, pay attention to how often he or she switches tenses, especially if the tale is about an action filled moment.) Wolfe strengthens this effect by the way he sometimes establishes the time line of the book. He uses direct dates, as on page 172 “On January 19, the day before Kennedy’s inauguration…,” but often he adds a little time transition, so that we feel like we’re there with the character retelling the event, as on page 182 “By now, late February of 1961…,” or as on page 223 “Last year, 1962, they created the new….” The events aren’t in chronological order, but we’re never lost in the time line.

As someone who constantly lost in the order of events and verb tenses in my own writing, I wish I could sit down with Tom Wolfe in a bar somewhere, having a drink while he teaches me how to manipulate time and tenses as effortless as he does in The Right Stuff.

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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

This may have been my favorite book of the profiles class. I have a hard time chosing between this and The Last American Man.

Anne’s Alternating Views

While writing her book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman faced the daunting task of introducing a culture that is unfamiliar to many westerners and show how the difference between that culture and the American medical community ultimately caused a young girl to become irreversibly brain damaged. To pull this off successfully, Ms. Faden had to make sure that the readers couldn’t blame one person, one group, or one thing for what happened. At the end of the book, the readers had to completely understand every party’s perspective and ultimately lay the blame on something as intangible as cross-cultural misunderstanding. To accomplish this, Anne Faden chose to alternate the focus between chapters from broad to narrow and to alternate the point of view of scenes between Hmong and American.

In the first chapter, we (the readers) meet Lia Lee and her parents. The focus of this chapter stays with the Lee family, but through describing what Lia’s birth would have looked like in Laos instead of the States, we are introduced to some very specific Hmong traditions, including the practice of burying the placenta near the family house. Knowing the significance of this tradition becomes important in later chapters so that we can understand the frustration the Hmong experience when American doctors won’t allow them to take home a baby’s placenta. The second chapter pans out its focus to be more broadly about the history of the Hmong, but the author also explains how in Hmong culture any event is so interconnected by anything that came before it and to fully understand something, you must know its history. This then, is how Faden justifies why it is that she must explain so much about the Laotian Hmong to us for us to fully understand what happened with Lia, which is the ultimate question of the book.

The book’s chapters continue to alternate between a broad focus of events related to Hmong in general, to specific incidents with the Lee family. The only exception to this is three chapters in the middle of the book (7, 8, and 9) where the focus stays with the Lee family. These chapters are shorter, the narrative speeds up and the events described are very tragic. Chapter 9 ends with a cliff hanger of Lia’s doctor Neil Ernst describing how her seizures increased in severity and how he dreaded eventually not being able to stop them. The next chapter pans out again, slowing down the narrative as we learn about the importance of the Hmong’s role in the Vietnam War. Towards the end of the book, the chapters are still alternating their focus, but are interconnecting issues, showing that what faces the Hmong as a whole is also why the Lee family experiences misunderstanding after misunderstanding with the Merced medical community.

Faden is also very good at showing us the frustrations both sides of the conflict experience by alternating points of view when describing scenes. A good example of this is chapter 4, “Do Doctors Eat Brains,” where she shows the readers scenes that would be familiar to them, from the point of view of the Hmong. Since we already know a little bit about the Hmong culture at this point, we see how intrusive something as simple as general questions during a routine visit to the doctor would be. In the beginning of chapter 7, the author shows Lia’s doctors point of view on the care she received, both how they experienced things in the midst of a crisis and how they feel while reflecting back on it at the time the book was written. When neither side of the story can deliver the impact necessary, Faden inserts herself and guides us through both points of views at the same time. On page 223, while describing an interaction between the Lees and the visiting nurse Martin Kilgore, the author’s point of view allows us to see the cross-communications taking place and the insight she gains while watching Kilgore talking to the Lees, thus giving us the same insight.

The end effect of this mastery of views and focuses is that when Faden on page 262 states that she has come to believe that Lia’s life was “…not ruined by septic shock or noncompliant parents but by cross-cultural misunderstanding.” we completely believe her and trust her authority to make that conclusion. By revealing the complexity of the issues involved in Lia’s medical case, she’s managed to make us sympathetic to the American doctors, the Lee family, and the Hmong culture as a whole–making it impossible for us to pick sides.

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The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert

Another craft essay and this one also ties in with the previous post Krakauer vs Gilbert.

Elizabeth Gilbert’s Presence in The Last American Man

The author’s presence is prominent throughout this book. Before we see her and Eustace Conway together on the page, we learn a little bit about the author’s background which includes working on a ranch in Wyoming for two years with Conway’s younger brother. “Like me, Judson was twenty-two years old and a complete and thoroughgoing faker.” (9) The purpose of including this is to show the readers that Gilbert and everyone she worked with on that ranch, pretended to be what Eustace Conway is. “We were all putting on the same show.” (9) When the readers meet Conway through Gilbert meeting him, we already know where she comes from, and seeing him through her eyes gives us a better idea of how enamored she (and everybody else that meets him) is.

Many scenes in the book are told through first person. The author is not merely present and observing Eustace Conway interacting with family members, friends, or acquaintances; she is interacting with these people too. She establishes her authority by of her subject by being on the page so much. “Like everyone else, I call Mrs. Conway “Big Mom,” and, like everyone else, I adore her.” (145) She shows that she has a right to participate in the story because she didn’t just interview people, she became friends with them while writing the book “I once asked Candice what she used for her excellent bread…” (221) Even when she doesn’t put herself on the page, it’s obvious that she’s there, asking her interviewee for their opinion. “But it wasn’t as bad as Eustace makes out, Walton says.” (37)

Gilberts choice to immerse herself as a character in the story, works because reading this book is like having a friend sit across from you and tell you about someone they know, someone that’s their friend that you haven’t yet met. Although you would think that this would put a biased slant on the interpretation of Eustace Conway, Gilbert avoids that by including other people’s idea of what happened in a scene that Conway describes. For example, when telling the story of how Eustace met and dumped his first girlfriend, Donna Henry, she includes Donna’s take on the situation, “’Now, remember,’ says Donna today, thinking back on it.” (78) She also goes back to Eustace and asks him his opinion after she’s talked to his ex.

The fact that Gilbert is writing about a friend, or someone who became a friend, and she’s still close friends with (“I get drunk with Eustace Conway sometimes. It’s one of my favorite things to do with him.” (227)) lends authority to her narrative, but is also why she can be a character on most of the pages of the book. I also don’t think that someone like Eustace Conway would have shared as much of himself as he did with Gilbert, if he didn’t consider her a friend, and she probably would not have had access to his journal. (I also don’t think he would have been as open with a male—but that’s a different story.) Also, by being friends with Eustace’s family, they too are more open with her and spill more details. This is especially true when Judson and Walton Conway talks about their brother on pages 236 and 237.

It would have been very easy for Gilbert to exploit that nearness and the people that spoke to her, but her presence on the page and her friendly and sometimes chatty tone of voice avoids that. You’re left with the feeling like she really cared and still cares about the people she wrote about—especially Eustace Conway.

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