I remember reading this before and it’s still so true. Here’s what literary agent Noah Lukeman says about an MFA program in creative writing. “Take the $35-50K you’re going to spend ont he degree, buy yourself a good laptop and printer and a bundle of paper, and go off to a cabin and write. At the end of the two years, the worst that can happen is you have nothing. Less than nothing is what you’ll almost certainly have at the ended of your MFA program, because, besides nothing, you’ll also have a mountain of debt.”

“When you hear a teacher say that writing can’t be taught, run to a nother workshop.” I agree with TIm Tomlinson on this. It certainly can. I just had to teach myself. I ran into some of these “moses complex” types of teachers and others just taught in broad generalities and templates – not without their value, of course, but not useful to actually grow creatively.

“Bias toward the pantheon and prejudice against the marginal” – I like that heading. Tomlinson’s advice, the classics are great BUT “…in a writing class, you want to read writers who stimulate your desire to write, not writers whose diction and content and worldview are so removed from your personal experience that they read like the literary equivalent of museum pieces.” Which is why I struggle with classics myself.

And this: “When the virtuoso voice or the quirky vision (both by definition rare) are elevated so above the well-told story, you wind up with perfectly made nothings.” And I feel like my own tendency toward lyrical voice has left me with a lot of hollow drafts of my own…

What is a prolegomenon? “A critical or discursive introduction to a book” and discursive meaning “digressing from subject to subject” (I do this already by nature) or “relating to the discourse of modes of discourse”.

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Digging into chapter 1 of the Portable MFA with Tim Tomlinson on Fiction, I decided to write down his list of “life-changers”

• On the Road, Jack Kerouac (need to reread)
• Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
• A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley
• Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
• Remembrance of Things Past / In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust (I only ever read a small chunk of it, and really need to come back to it)
• The Flowers of Evil (poems), Charles Baudelaire
• Light Years, James Salter
• Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone
• The Beautiful Room is Empty, Edmund White
• Liars in Love, Richard  Yates
• John Cheever and Raymond Carver short stories

“If it’s true, as Saul Bellow said, that writers are readers moved to emulation, then it might also be true that we write fiction we hope will change our lives or the lives of others. That’s a noble and lofty ambition.”

Great point, and why I’ve often considered focusing on short stories rather than novels since my teen years: “A good short story is better than a bad novel. A good short story will make the reader crave more short stories, more fiction, whereas a bad novel will make the reader reach, once again, for the TV remote.” Or more likely now their phone…

Interesting exercise: “Make a list of five turning points in your own life and note the years in which those turning points occurred. Now make a list of historical connections to those years. What happened in the news, in sports, in politics, in entertainment? Think about how (if at all) your life was influence or impacted by those apparently surface events. You may discover that moments in your life that felt divorced from the march of history were actually quite connected with the larger picture on some level.”

These are interesting starting points for potential stories. Maybe I can explore so many of those what-if scenarios I’m constantly cooking up in my subconscious… What if I’d decided to start my card business way back out of high school? The world was VERY different back then. What if I’d taken entirely different paths coming out of the “college experience” or starting my life over during the pandemic? What if one supernaturally unlikely thing happened and how would it have upended everything I understand about the universe? 

I’ve always tinkered with the idea of writing speculative fiction where the world is basically exactly the same but there’s one incredible difference that changes absolutely everything. And I’ve never properly explored any of them (besides everyone being humanoid cats, I suppose, and that’s interesting, and again, not fully and properly explored.)

“Autobiography and its connection to history can lead to resonant fiction.” This is an important thought I need to circle back to soon.

I’ve never been much into retelling. But it’s another interesting route to go. But it can be a useful exercise.

“You can’t make discoveries about character types, humor, personal themes, the nature of your imagination, and a whole lot of other things critical to the development of a writer if you don’t get the material on the page. And you can’t get the material on the page if you’re hung up about rules.”

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In the Portable MFA, Tomlinson suggests that plot is as easy as introducing routine then disrupting it… routine-disruption is my entire life! The three big examples he gives are the chance encounter, the mysterious stranger, and the shattering statement. I think the 3rd may be the best of the three, the other two feel too tropey, even if those situations do happen (they have to me!)

Another plot device is expectation vs actuality, kind of like the popular tiktok memes we see today. There’s also the road story, which has been done to death… which is why I try to avoid that trope.

Truthfully you don’t NEED plot to succeed; it just means your characters and ideas have to be so much stronger. 

Henry James says in “The Art of Fiction:”

“What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”

It’s possible to have voice-driven works do well, but having a plot still is what invests many readers. Personally, I tend towards focusing on ideas and deeper themes, although I DO want to like the protagonist.

This is a great bit on moving into the second act: “In discussing plot, John Barth borrows language from physics an calls this middle section the section of increased perturbations.” I suppose writing fiction is also a physics problem, just like everything else!

Funny enough, sometimes the best way to write the middle is after the beginning and end. Especially in short stories, the end is extremely important. Novels don’t necessarily need as strong of an ending.

About events in stories, ask yourself: “Do they raise questions ? Are they representative of more than just the literal action?” I think those are amazing questions.

I was also thinking about the maxim “write what you know” which of course Tomlinson himself throws out, although there is some wisdom in starting with what you know in fiction. There is a couple sections about nonfiction in this book, actually, but I was thinking… writing about what you DON’T KNOW and the process in discovering that, personally, seems very intriguing. Which is why I’ve considered docufiction at length. I love documentaries where the host is learning alongside the viewer (or at least it appears that way in many cases.)

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Where I’m at in the MFA: how time is used in stories, like flash forward and flashbacks. I agree that flashback can be used effectively, but it’s often grossly overused and used as a sort of backstory exposition, which is a no-no.

Characterization through action and detail – this is something I need to work on myself! More great advice: study characters the way that actors do. Really immerse yourself in the sort of person the character you’re writing and how they live and what their world is like.

I love how men in order to write women characters well, they’re best off starting with a male character then just change the name and switch all the pronouns. Kinda shows you how much of gender is performative, doesn’t it?

“If you have a villain, make sure the villain has some positive quality.” Mine always do. Even the most cartoonishly evil ones in my stories have redeeming qualities.

Protagonists should have flaws. Oh, believe me, even the ones who are super powerful have some major character failing. But perhaps, I don’t show their failings enough – that whole characterization through action and detail…

“Virgian Woolf said that a writer can’t write about the flaws of others until she is ready to acknowledge the worst things about herself.” Yeah, um, I have a lot of flaws. If I wrote those into my protagonist, everyone would hate her… maybe I shouldn’t care about that and do it anyway. 

You need to dig into what Robert Olen Butler calls “the white hot center of the unconscious.” I really want to steal that, but I’m far too intellectually honest.

I like the exercise of the interview. I intended to do these as I was developing Tunes and Tails. Those could be very revealing. Perfect for docufiction, too!

I really like this line of questioning. The basic questions like ‘Where do you see yourself in five years’ are just a warm up. I appreciate where Tomlinson is going with these: “For you, what defines love? Is there anything your creator doesn’t know about you? Is there a secret you’re keeping from him? Is he preventing you from revealing that secret in the story? Is he being fair to you? If you could tell the story, what would be different?”

Funny enough, part of the magic of Tunes and Tails was the five different perspectives I was looking to include. And honestly, their voices don’t come through nearly as well as they should in Volume One. That book was a rush job. This is why I always liked the setup of Trudy as a podcaster (I’ve even bandied about the podcast being CALLED Tunes and Tails, which would make so much sense since it features musicians and authors!) We’d really get to know the characters and the world they live in. And those questions are incredibly good. My favorite though, and he doesn’t mention this one: What excites you most in life? You learn a lot from that one.

And sometimes the interview becomes part of the book. It may even become THE book.

Oh, dialogue, my worst enemy. Again, this is why I should write long interviews before I write anything. I just fear that the interviews will be better than any story I write, and perhaps that fear is well-founded and is EXACTLY what I should do.

Apparently one great way to practice writing dialogue is to have a 10-minute argument between two characters, like that monty python sketch with the pay a pound for a five minute argument. Just have two characters refuse to agree with each other. Sounds like Congress… but they use a lot of boring monologing…

This is a great rule of thumb for scenes: “get in late and leave early.” I should do that more often.

I got a good amount of info out of that section.

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Reading about subtext and creating tension with off-screen events. I like this sentence about setting: “In order to create the fictional dream, the writer needs to render place effectively enough for it to convince the reader.” 

It’s also important to consider your characters’ relationship to space and Tomlinson suggests not only introducing the setting before the characters, but using the details to reveal point of view, how the character sees them and also the world. Placing your characters in an already existing space can be helpful, although in some stories the character is most important, but more generally I think this is good advice.

The next bit is about primary vs secondary information. Primary “advances the narrative,” secondary “provides context, metaphor, idea, etc.” I don’t think it’s completely fair to call a James Bond story “one-dimensional” even if it’s formulaic. There are definitely ideas in Bond films, although that may come out of the filmmaking not the story itself.

Great bit: “So much of the writer’s job involves getting out of the head – getting out of thoughts, words, abstractions, figured-out solutions – and going into the senses.” This is something I’ve struggled with, even though it’s very much in mind with my fiction. I should integrate sensory details into all phases of my writing. I think it’s that I don’t want to imagine anyone in my place due to my own physical, mental, and neurological maladies, as if I’m saving the reader from great inconvenience by imagining these things. But for better or worse, they are a part of my truth and make my creative efforts far more difficult than they should be. My hand already needs a break, for example.

“Gustav Flaubert said that in order for an image to work it needs to appeal to three senses.” While Tomlinson agrees that’s good advice, he suggests that modern readers don’t have time for that, and for prose fiction, just “try to include at least one sense per paragraph. And don’t rely on sight always or primarily.” I think splitting the difference might work for me, trying to integrate two (if not three) a paragraph.

For example, the taste of my coconut water fruit punch is just sweet enough to power through this early morning deep reading session and I feel my writing hand cramping up just enough to make me want to stop and finally feel the hot water (from the shower) rush over my neurologically damaged body. See, that wasn’t so hard. I’m gutting through this section, though.

“The point to remember is that description reinforces the fictional dream. If the fiction strays from the real world too far or for too long – that is, if the writer is stuck on providing information or explaining an idea or running a riff with language – the reader’s immersion in the dream is imperiled.” I most certainly go on too long in fiction sometimes, but more often, it’s more like “and then this happened” and you don’t want that either. I’ve considered moving unnecessary exposition to footnotes for those who want it, in fact what remains of 80 percent of my current fiction drafts may soon be reduced to “worldbuilding” footnotes.

“What’s the right amount for description?… That answer changes for every stroy… In your own work, the idea is to determine what’s ended and then to provide no less, and no more.” Seeking a balance in the farce…

“Remember the old Hemingway dictum: You can leave out what you know; you can’t leave out what you don’t know. Put in as much detail as you can imagine or remember and then take away as much as you can.” 

This could be a fantastic writing/editing strategy; I mean, obviously, it worked for Hemingway. Tomlinson often says himself, “On every page of your story, your character is somewhere. Where? And how are the details of that place participating in telling the story?”

He also says: “I tell my students in session one that in session two I’ll contradict some if not all of what I said in the first session. That’s the nature of writing. While there are general guidelines for writing fiction, there are no hard and fast rules other than to make the reader want to turn pages. But beginning writers do themselves a disservice by worrying about readers turning pages. Beginning writers need to keep their focus on writing pages, and worrying about anything that sounds like a rule is self-defeating.” As far as I’ve come, why do I still feel like a beginner so often?

“Think about the element of description, and how much attention it requires, once you have a stack of pages. Then think about the needs of your readers.”

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Today I’m reading about POV. 

Some strong philosophical stuff when it comes to third-person narrators: “A narrator’s subjectivity often reflects the writer’s subjectivity. A writer whose subjectivity remains unexamined may create narrators who share his limitations.

“Great talent and great vision may, to some extent, transcend those conditions, but even great talent and vision are constructed in a particular context, a context whose ‘truths’ may differ from the ‘truths’ of another context. So a writer’s stance toward her material is also, consciously or not, an ontological stance.”

I have flipped between third and first person narration over the years. I’ve considered dabbling in second-person, but then I feel like I’m just writing a choose your own adventure script. I actually prefer first-person in some ways as in third-person I tend to ramble way too much. (Tunes and Tails is first-person, for example, and even written in the present tense to show the Felona worldview; although interestingly enough, Stillwater’s Daughter is not. It was intended to be, I think.)

A great use of the second-person narrator is in the “how-to” genre. And by that I don’t mean how-to manuals, but stories that follow a very particular premise that feels a bit like a walkthrough for a particular way of life: “How to Become a Writer” by Lorrie Moore, for example. It is best used for short stories as it’s a gimmick that doesn’t hold for a whole novel typically. And some readers never get the hang of it.

Whatever you end up being most comfortable with, and whatever POV best serves the material, Tomlinson suggests playing around with it. He writes: “The rule of thumb used to be that the aspiring author had to write a million words before arriving at her authentic voice. You can do a lot of experimentation with a million words, and the practice of writing virtually demands it. Experiment on, and bring your monsters and angels to life.”

I’m sure I’ve written a million words by now, although not entirely fiction. And I have become most comfortable, it seems, with first-person. But I’m getting very curious about second-person, putting the reader in the protagonist’s shoes. That might be a fun new direction to go.

…

I love how Tomlinson opens the section on Revision, “With apologies to Jack Kerouac (a man and spirit I adore), good writing involves hard revision.” (The truth is, actually, it took six years for On the Road to be revised before it was published. Yes it was all written as one big “scroll” originally, but yes, he did actually edit his work quite a bit. So Tomlinson leans into the myth of On the Road being written in a single shot a bit too much here.)

As a revision fiend myself, it’s comforting to know that Raymond Carver never stopped revising his own stories, even AFTER they were published! He later published alternate versions of many of his stories. Denis Johnson’s stories began as poems that he revised so much that they turned into stories! Funny enough, I tried doing that. A couple became essays, most went in the bin, and the rest are in my collection that some day I’ll recompile into something I’m actually happy with.

Up to this point, the types of revisions he’s discussed in the book have to do with major structural changes, as he calls then, “revisions that restructure the entire piece and create a brand new topography, not to mention a brand new (hopefully less volcanic) middle earth.” And he doesn’t mean the place the hobbits live.

But when it comes to smaller revisions, they can also be essential. “These types of revisions can (and often do) open up elements in the psychology of the story of which you were hitherto unaware.”

These are my favorite kinds of edits, the little tweaks you make that turn a fairly pedestrian paragraph into something that gets quoted for the rest of time…

These types of revisions include motivation, significant details, repetition of detail, and recounting of story events.

…

…

The next section gets into the novel, as opposed to the short story, which is typically the focus of MFA creative writing programs. There are programs that do have candidates submit novels (although Tomlinson considers the one he submitted back then “a detestable impertinence.”) and while there are several workshops that focus on the novel, many don’t, and Tomlinson says that the MFA focus on the short story can lead to problems when then going to write a novel.

The primary issue is that you can get away with a lot more in short stories than you can in a novel, because sustaining a vision and various gimmicks is a lot harder past 30 to 50 pages. He cites when novelist and short story writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni was asked to read the novels nominated for the National Book Award. There ere like sixty of them. And funny enough, Divakaruni later described in an article that all of the novels started out brilliantly. Tomlinson’s words: “Their language was exquisite, their characters compelling, and their initial mechanics dynamic. Then, after somewhere between thirty and fifty pages they all fell apart.” This leads me to believe NONE of them were actually good past the typical online book preview on Amazon, etc. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, but there is an underlying problem that MFA programs seem to perpetuate, which is “their stress on the perfect surface and their tendency to homogenize prose.”

Tomlinson continues, “The flaws in a writer’s vision, the limitations of a writer’s skills, might not be so readily apparent in a short story. The novel, however, will turn the klieg lights onto flaws and limitations.” This is why so many short story writers are praised while their novels languish in obscurity. “A writer with razzle-dazzle language, a writer with a couple of interesting experiences and the acquaintance of one or two interesting characters, the writer with a quirky way of thinking, of living, might be able to get those strengths onto the page and hold the reader’s attention for the length of a short story… A story story… is short, compared to a novel; it represents  a small investment on the part of the reader, so its flaws won’t be as crippling, its disappointments as profound.”

I feel like at least as a fiction writer, that is my issue. I start out with some strong stuff, and that’s probably why Stillwater’s Daughter sustained as well as it did; Tunes and Tails is three novellas mashed together and the third act is honestly pretty rushed. My thinking is that I should just stick to short stories from now on. It means much less investment for ME, too…

(I still need to get back to editing acts two and three…)

Now, yes, Tomlinson brings up the end-around solution of making a series of short stories following the same characters or situations over a period of time, and turn that into a novel. This can work, yes, but it’s not as satisfying because it’s still, essentially, just episodic short stories. What’s funny is that a lot of short stories are parts of novels that just never came together, but were good enough on their own to just be several standalone short stories that share POV characters.

One advantage of the novel is it can afford some digressions. “What a novelist knows, what he’s studied, what he’s passionate about, might find its way into a novel without killing the novel’s ultimate impact. So the novelist can get away with a little instruction, a little rumination, a little denunciation, and the overall story might not suffer too terribly, if at all.”

Novels, though, even bad ones, take a long time, typically six months to a year to write. “Short stories might not challenge the writer on levels as deep as the novel does.” Oh, believe me I know. I realized today that I have the makings of more novels than I’d first thought in my archives…

The way my brain works, I can’t hold my attention onto a single idea more than six months at a time. No wonder I abandon stories so quickly. I usually lose interest after a couple weeks, even something that was as solid and coherent as Stillwater’s Daughter got buried after a couple weeks and didn’t get picked back up for about a year! It’s not perfect, but it’s a complete story. A lot of these novels have been sitting for multiple years in various states of disarray so brutal that they need to be stripped for parts and completely reworked into something passable just so I can move on from them… a big reason I’m reading this book is to come up with strategies just to revive them as short stories and move on to bigger and better things. It’s why I love nonfiction so much; it’s over and done within an hour many times, and at most, a couple days between writing, editing, rewriting, and abandoning to my website for it to sit there.

This is rough but honest: “A failed short story is a few weeks of fruitless work; a failed novel is a dead child.” Ouch.

I need to keep this in mind: “A well-paced novel is constructed on chapters that each raise a question, just like a short story, and then delay answering that question for as long as possible. But each chapter’s answer hooks into the next chapter instead of ending the story. So, in novels, answers create questions – those questions are the inner dynamic of the novel, and they suspend the answer to the Major Dramatic Question, which was presented in the novel’s opening.”

This is really important, and is a problem unique to writing. “The amateur’s crisis of confidence as she begins her first short story is the writer’s crisis of confidence at the outset of every new project. This is unique to writing. Once an architect knows how to design buildings, she designs buildings. On her next assignment,she doesn’t wonder, How do I design buildings? Maybe I’m not really an architect… Once an orchestra conductor knows how to conduct orchestras, she conducts… But the writer faces that first vast empty page (or screen) of the new project and thinks… [all sorts of silly distracting things]… Who cares what I write? Why should they? Maybe I’m not really a novelist. Maybe I’m not really a writer. (Maybe I should have tried something easier, like designing buildings, or conducting symphonies…

“That’s the good news and the bad news. The bad news, because it means that comforting terror and humiliation is part of the job description. Good news, because it happens to everybody, it comes with the turf, and each time out will be like the first time. First love only happens once, but first-fiction terror and euphoria can happen again and again.

So haul out your Moleskine or boot up the iBook [yes before macbooks], and go scare the hell out of yourself. Then fall in love. Repeat when necessary.”

I copy all of that conclusion to remind myself that even the greats run into this same problem. And you wonder why there are all these templates and people leaning on LLMs now… just reverse engineer what’s already worked and try jamming your own ideas into them. (I’m not advocating for this, but it is what commonly happens now.) But that only works for so long… and honestly, it’s probably STILL better than what came out of MFA programs in the ‘90s ‘00s and perhaps ever…

There’s some recommended reading I should come back to on page 75, and I’m just too lazy to type it up right now…

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More to come.