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Life is so simple here in Iowa City. I write, go to class, hang out with my friends, workout, read comic books, critique other people’s work. It’s awesome. No stress. No complications. No responsibilities. No logistics. No money issues (rent is $500/mo here). Seriously, my most common concern for the day is whether it’ll rain or not. I love it.
My backwards story was a difficult process. Although I like the story that come out of it, I plan to try the experiment again. I had tried to come up with an ending first, then the story. That was really hard in that I kept thinking, that's a great beginning! Adrian Khactu, my highly entertaining and brilliant classmate here in Iowa, was the one who told me about this particular backwards exercise. He says that he first freewrites enough to get an idea of the story, THEN envisions an ending. Oh. No wonder it was hard. That makes a lot more sense.
My next experiment will be to incorporate a particular city into a story, where the city matters. Adrian and I are both doing this not because we think it'll improve our writing, necessarily, but because we're cheap whores who want to be accepted into a particular anthology. Submission to the anthology is by invitation only and we managed to crassly invite ourselves. So our stories had better be dazzling. And that's the plan. :-)
Susan Ee
The 4 emotional stages of the Iowa Writers Workshop, summer session:
EXCITEMENT - there's always so much excitement to joining a new group, especially when I go to an exotic place like Iowa City!
HAPPINESS - downtown Iowa City is awesome. Lots of restaurants, lots of cafes, several gyms, a few grocery stores, a great library with comfy chairs and all of it within walking distance of both the campus and my place. And because Iowa City really is a writers mecca, there's this sense of being in a very special place. I love that they have quotes of authors imprinted on the sidewalks and more bookstores than I can count. Here, if you meet someone, there's a very good chance s/he is a serious writer and you can talk about the art and craft of writing to your heart's content.
DISAPPOINTMENT - our instructor is highly respected, absolutely adorable and lovable, kind, generous, funny and brilliant... but he doesn't say much in class. There are no lectures, very few pearls of wisdom that get passed on to us, no real craft discussions. He's an artist. His discussions are esoteric and enigmatic and its up to you to fill in the gaps on what should be done to improve your work.
The students are the best group of writers I've worked with -- they're all talented and skillful with interesting voices. But it's not the best group of critiquers I've seen. I'm not necessarily talking about each individual critique, I'm talking about clarity and the need to get some consensus on the feedback so the writer can put weight on a particular issue. With our group, it often feels that everyone has a different opinion on what should be done to take the story to the next level. At the end of the critique sessions, I feel that the writers often walk away with a muddied picture of what to do next.
My last disappointment was that we only get two story submissions per student for the quarter. I'm used to a much more intense workshop format. At Clarion West, we wrote a story a week for 6 weeks and critiqued everyone's submissions every weekday. It was intense and transformative. I was hoping for something just as intense and just as transformative.
CONTENTMENT - I've now reached a good balance in how I feel about my time here.
Although our prof doesn't say much, when my story came up, he caught me in the hallway before my critique and told me that it was "really amazing." He also talked about my story for 30 minutes in our private conference and lent me 3 books on heroes, myths and feminist writing. I still don't know how to improve my story exactly, but the fog is slowly clearing as I learn to interpret his enigmatic suggestions and allusions. This is his style. I've realized it's my job to fill in the blanks because it's my story. And how I interpret his comments will be strongly colored by how I see my story. I'm cool with that.
Re our critiques -- at first, I thought it was just luck of the draw that our group had so little agreement in our constructive feedback. But now, I'm thinking that this may be normal at this level of writing. It's easy to agree on what needs to be done when there are basic problems in a story. But it's much harder to agree on what needs to be done to improve that last 10% - 20% -- questions of how you modulate the voice of your narrator, get your story to breathe, add more emotional weight to your ending and questions of whether this story needs any of these things in the first place. These are very difficult questions and we're no longer talking craft, we're talking art. And because we're talking about art, which comes from the heart and not from the head, people can get quite passionate about their opinions. I've decided to stop focusing on how the overall picture is muddied and start focusing on how each person approaches a story. They're good writers -- their instincts work for them and I can learn something by opening my ears.
Re the number of stories -- by great luck, it turns out that someone else in my class is also a Clarion West Alum. Yay! I was really surprised because Iowa is not exactly known for their speculative fiction, despite the fact that they had Kurt Vonnegut on their faculty. Anyway, we've agreed to write a story a week and give each other feedback. I'm also recruiting others to give me feedback as well, although I'll only ask them to read one or two. I'm experimenting with each story. The one I turned into class was my most experimental piece ever. Wild and wacky and a blast to write. The next one was a story that mixed a literary character within a genre story. I was trying for emotional weight in a Twilight Zone-ish plot. The one I just finished is my first hard science fiction piece wrapped in a light-hearted story. My next one is going to be written backwards -- by envisioning the ending, then writing the rest of the story to get there. Each has its own challenges and pleasures. Each has its own volume of lessons for me.
ACK! This entry is way longer than I expected. I have a backwards story to write. Happy 4th!
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com/
The Writers Guild Foundation is having their annual Screenwriting Craft Seminar in LA. I went to one a couple of years ago and it was pretty good as far as panels go since they were crammed full of working and accomplished screenwriters. It's not nearly as advertised nor attended as those "commercial" seminars and there are way more panelists from recognizable movies/shows. It's pretty easy to talk one-on-one with the screenwriters, especially since about half of the attendees were also WGA members, meaning they've done at least some pro work. It's $150 for the general public. If you're itching to hear directly from people in-the-know, it's probably worth checking out:
Saturday, July 19. Tickets & Info: www.wgfoundation.org
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com/
Iowa is flooded. The airlines are still sending people there but I found out that once you get there, you're stuck at the airport indefinitely. I was supposed to fly out there tomorrow to start my summer writing program but no such luck. University of Iowa is closed and all classes have been cancelled for next week. I was so ready to go out there and steep myself in writing but that'll have to wait another week. I'm now flying out next Friday.
Looks like there are 13 people in the summer program. So far, I know that 2 are from SF, one is from NY, one from Vermont. Don't know about the rest yet. The instructor is James McPherson, a Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction, a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the MacArthur Fellowship. He went to both Harvard and Yale Law Schools and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He's now a regular faculty member of the Workshop. One of his stories was selected to be in John Updike's Best American Short Stories of the Century. I'm looking forward to meeting him as well as my classmates... wonder if they like monster movies?
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com/
Went to the DMV yesterday. The line was out the door and zigzagged 4 times in the building. Time to whip out the Kindle. I now have the NY Times, LA Times "The Biz" section, BBC, WSJ and The SJ Mercury bookmarked so I can read the news anywhere I can get cell reception. I also have several manuscripts of my various works-in-progress in my Kindle so I can review and comment. Some people wonder why I would bother to do these things on a Kindle as opposed to a mini-computer. It's the screen. To me, it's the difference between reading on a computer and reading on paper. The Kindle is not quite good as paper but it's pretty close. I use it as a portable "printout." Also, once you buy the Kindle, there are no mobile connection fees. So for people who don't have mobile Internet access, it's really great to get news on the fly. Besides, I wouldn't expect the DMV to have wi-fi but I would expect it to have cell reception.
Unfortunately, the commenting process in the Kindle is awkward, putting into question whether it's worth editing on it in the same way you would mark up a printout of a manuscript. I'm not one of those thumb-entry people who can type a text message in no time flat. But I'm getting more comfortable with it. The trick with the Kindle for me is that if I see something I want to edit, I thumb-type a note and I also highlight the section. That way, I get all my notes and highlighted text on one screen so that when it's time to do the actual edit on a computer, I can refer to that page the same way I would refer to a printout of a summary of comments. On my computer, I can do a word search on the text to get me to where I need to be and then make my edits.
My process doesn't make much sense if you have no issues reading on a computer screen. But if you use the Kindle as a virtual printout, it's awesome. Still haven't read an ebook on it yet but I plan to. :-)
Here are some unofficial shortcuts that can be found on Reversing Everything:
Alt-1 show current location in Google maps
Alt-2 find gas station nearby
Alt-3 find restaurants nearby
Alt-4
Alt-5 find custom keyword nearby
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com/
I bought an Amazon Kindle a couple of days ago for my trip. OMG, that's the greatest thing ever! I bought it for ebooks but books are the least of the cool features. I have my entire novel manuscript on it. I converted my Word doc to .txt using "save as" then saved it to the Kindle via USB. Oh, it's so amazing to be able to read a "print out" without lugging around 500 pages. The text is really comfortable to read, unlike a computer screen. I'm supposed to be able to make notes on the text and highlight it but that's awkward, although I'll try it out for awhile. I may end up using the Kindle for reading my work and taking editing notes on a piece of paper or something. Every writer and editor ought to have one. It's not as good for screenplays because converting to .txt will kill the formatting but if you're just reading for content, it should be okay. The other super cool thing is that it gets Internet access, although it's slow and limited. I can get Google, Wikipedia, Maps, news and such while I'm on the move without an additional fee for the mobile connectivity. Love it love it love it.
Oh, and there are the books, magazines and newspapers but I haven't tried those yet. :-)
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com/
Due to a move and being on the move, I've been in a virtual brownout lately. I got back from Wiscon last week. It's a feminist fantasy convention that people LOVE. The description and program sounded totally whacked out to me but enough people told me they loved it for me to try it out this year. I thought it might be all women but actually, it felt about 50-50.
I also made a new friend, Sharyn November, who was my roommate at the con, thanks to Ellen. It was really fun to get to know her as we chatted in the dark, both too exhausted to have our shields up. Then I saw her on a couple of panels and realized she's a total powerhouse. The woman has serious presence. Very cool. She's a senior editor for Viking Children's Books as well as the editorial director of Firebird.
Overall, I had a good time. Okay, it wasn't as wild and crazy as Robert's experience at Cannes but what is?
Cheers,
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.vox.com/
I won't make the 50,000 mark, but I'm still happy to have a decent word count for an unfinished novel that will need a lot of editing even though I thoroughly had fun writing it. It was a great outlet for what I've been going through this year.
But I'm calling it a day for this year's NaNoWriMo, will put my unfinished work aside and enjoy the holiday season, and pick it up again in January.
And as in NaNoWriMos past I got sick, made trips to my doctors, was bedridden and am recovering slowly. NaNoWriMo and Thanksgiving Day were poignant without my Tom.
Word count:
(74.2%)
You're a Duck!
Incredibly versatile and capable of carrying yourself over almost
any surface of the Earth, you are a born traveler. As you journey far and wide,
you tend to try to follow the climate to keep things mild and temperate. While
you were always told you were ugly at a young age, you've since managed to grow
out of it. You now find orange to be a very favorable color for shoes. Lately
you've come to be caught up in the petty peddling of unnecessary
insurance.
Take the Animal Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
You're The Hobbit!
by J.R.R. Tolkien
All you wanted was a nice cup of tea when some haggard crazy old man
came into your life and told you it was time to do something with yourself. Now you're
all conflicted about whether to stick with your stay-at-home lifestyle or follow this
crazy person into the wild. While you're very short and a little furry, you seem to be
surrounded by an even greater quantity of short folks lately. Try not to lose your ring,
but keep its value in perspective!
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
