Days 4 & 5: Welcome to the Blur

December 11, 2011 By Lise Quintana in grad school, personal, practical advice Tags: critiquing, engagement, genre writing, grad school, lectures Leave a comment

Saturday was the first day of nothing but lectures. The first lecture was given by one of the graduating cohort. Giving a lecture is a requirement for those in their last residency period, as are submission of a final manuscript, submission of an annotated bibliography of all books read during your grad school process and giving a reading of your work. The grad student was sufficiently nervous and unprepared, as though in her entire undergrad life she had never had to stand up in front of people and give a lecture. Maybe she hadn’t. But the subject was engaging, and what I liked was how much she encouraged the discussion of those of us in the room. The second lecture, on minimalism (which lasted for two hours), was similarly engaging. The faculty member giving that lecture was soliciting answers from the class and was the sort of person who, when a comment was made that wasn’t perhaps what he was looking for or that seemed to contradict what was being said, had the generosity of intellect to take a second and actually think about what was being said to him and either say “Yes, I can see how that can be true,” or “I see what you’re saying, but I’ll tell you why I think differently.” It was the best discussion I’ve heard yet.

I contrast it with the last class I took, another two-hour lecture. This faculty member asked us to save our questions and comments for the end when she would have a question period, but by the end of her lecture, nobody had anything to say. I could see several people during the course of the lecture talking to the people around them; clearly they felt engaged with the material and had things to contribute to the discussion, but there was no discussion. It meant that this two hour lecture felt like just that. A Two. Hour. Lecture.

So, day 4’s tip: engage your listeners! Make your audience part of the conversation! Encourage them to think and participate!

Today, we chose our mentors. All the faculty who will be mentoring in fiction this semester sat in a “Dating Game”-style lineup and told us a little bit about their style, and then we got to ask questions of them. What surprised me was how many of them (7 out of 9) said “I don’t do genre writing.” Frankly, I find that hard to believe. My personal feeling is that if you have a well-written story with engaging characters, a good plot, etc., does it matter whether the setting is Middle Earth, or whether the characters are werewolves? I wasn’t the only person to be offended by the seeming blanket condemnation of genre writing as being somehow unworthy of graduate-level students.

We also had our first actual critique session with our writing groups. Because I am the newest to our group, I was worried that maybe I hadn’t “done it right,” but I was grateful for the experiences I’ve had with my other writing groups. It gave me solid grounding on what helpful critique looks like, and the whole process was wonderful. As with nearly any group who shares an intimate experience (and critiquing someone’s writing is very, very intimate), we are already inviting each other over to our houses and wanting to hang out.

I have to turn in my four top choices for mentors, and it turned out to be harder than I thought to pick just one. Do I go with the guy who’s really supportive and likes to talk on the phone? Do I go with the woman who really values experimental fiction, even though I don’t like the way she writes? Do I go with the guy who gave the absorbing and challenging minimalism lecture, despite the fact that he intimidates the hell out of me? We’ll see how it goes. We submit our choices tomorrow morning and we find out our assignments tomorrow afternoon.

Day 2: Orientation

December 8, 2011 By Lise Quintana in grad school, personal, practical advice Tags: grad school, kumbaya, malnutrition, orientation, Steve Heller 1 Comment

We were greeted at the orientation by representative members of the three writing concentrations offered: fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry. The fiction guy was Steve Heller, chair of the department, so he went around and greeted everyone and shook hands and was genial and sort of majestic in that authority-figure sort of way.

He gave a speech whereby he promised us that participation in the program would change our lives. Those are the words he used. “Change your life.” I have to admit, I’m always skeptical when presented with claims of that magnitude. I can think of some ways in which I would like my life to change, and even more in which I don’t want it to change at all, but I also know that I’m terrible at predicting exactly what I’m going to take away from any given experience. I have a terrible habit of thinking negative, cynical things when presented with a situation (like, say, every single workplace “bonding” event to which I’ve ever been forced to go), spending my entire time at the event faking happy while secretly hating everyone around me for being so cheerful and gung-ho and myself for being such a miserable cuss, and then reflecting back on the experience later and admitting that I did get some value out of it. So…while I doubt I’m going to lose 20 pounds, become an extreme extrovert or suddenly become famous and sought-after, I’m sure that there will be a lot to take away.

Steve Heller left after his little speech, and was replaced by the heads of the poetry group and the creative nonfiction group. Ms. Creative Nonfiction got up and gave us a very helpful presentation about how our time will be spent over the next two years: ten days of orientations, lectures and writer meetings, followed by five months of working one-on-one with our mentors, doing a bunch of assigned readings and online book discussions with our groups, and completing papers. The the floor was turned over to Ms. Poetry, who talked for a long time about the “average” number of lectures people attend (we’re required to take 7, but most people take between 17 and 20 – I’m signed up for 22) and how it’s important to listen to your body and eat your normal foods like yogurt and fruit, get enough sleep because this whole process is so magical and that everything we’re doing here is going to change us as people and I thought she was going to break into Kumbaya.

I was happy to discover that I was not the oldest person in the group, nor the fattest, nor the most-tattooed or pierced, although I was the most-married. I was not the only harp player, not the only chicken fancier, not the only coffee hater…in short, I was in no way the odd one out, which is just where I wanted to be.

Lectures start tomorrow, bright and early at 9am. I’ll be interested to see how it goes.

Drinking Like a Real Writer

November 6, 2011 By Lise Quintana in personal, practical advice Tags: alcohol, drinking, drugs, Nanowrimo, pretension, vomit, writing Leave a comment

In the 1940 classic “The Philadelphia Story,” C.K. Dexter Haven tells Macaulay Connor “I thought all writers drank to excess and beat their wives. You know, at one time I secretly wanted to be a writer.” He tells Macaulay that Tracy Lord never understood his “deep and gorgeous thirst.” I’ve always thought that writing and substance abuse go together. Hunter S. Thompson, Raymond Chandler, John Cheever, O. Henry, Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway – all famous literary alcoholics. Baudeliare smoked hash, Stephen King did coke, Aldous Huxley did mushrooms – the list goes on and on. I think it might be more difficult to find a successful writer who hadn’t at some time abused something. Sadly, I’m not a drug addict. I don’t have the personality for it. I can’t stand the thought of regularly using something so expensive. I’m just too cheap. On the other hand…there’s always liquor.

I was at dinner with a couple of friends last week, and the drinks menu featured a couple of cocktails whose names I hadn’t heard except in novels in years and years. Singapore Sling, Manhattan, Harvey Wallbanger, Old Fashioned, Cuba Libre…I started feeling like I should be wearing a satin gown and maribou-feather slippers, making sure that I didn’t smudge my lipstick or muss my marcelled hair.

I had a couple of Singapore Slings and suddenly, I was Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard and Bette Davis all rolled up in one (seriously – they were tiny women and have you seen me?). If I had been at a typewriter (or, more correctly, if I had been a typewriter sitting at my machine), I would have been churning out the kind of prose that made people laugh on the bus, cry in restaurants and call up their friends just to read extensive passages. I’ll tell you a secret, though.

When I was 18 or 19, before they raised the drinking age in Arizona to 21, my boyfriend and I would walk to this Italian restaurant a mile or so from my house and split a plate of pasta and a bottle of bad chianti. I didn’t know it was bad chianti at the time, but I was young and stupid then. We would get drunk and, in that pretentious way that only 18 or 19 year olds can pull off, talked about deep, philosophical truths. We talked about world politics and art and the nature of reality. We talked about popular culture, the human condition and how we were going to change the world with art. These discussions were monumental. They were profound. They were so important, I felt, that I persuaded my boyfriend to bring his new mini tape recorder to dinner one evening so that we could actually remember one of these conversations the next morning.

That night, we drank two bottles of bad chianti and ate spaghetti with butter and mizithra cheese. We probed the very depths of the deepest questions mankind has asked himself since the invention of language. We revealed ourselves as the gods of our own private universe, a place much more orderly, beautiful and just than the one that everyone else seemed to inhabit. We weren’t golden children, we were beings of diamond.

The next morning, after throwing up, we listened to the tape. It was hard because the night before, we had apparently had some difficulty working the tape player. You know, pushing both the “play” and the “record” button at the same time. There was a great deal of giggling, some of that “I love you, no I love you” crap that couples at a certain stage of their relationship think is terribly charming, and a whole lot of incomprehensible mumbling punctuated with belches. When we did speak, we seemed only to be able to complete one sentence in four, and that one generally ended with a loud “HA!” The two of us looked at each other, mortified, and vowed never to do that again.

My loving husband is mixing me a cocktail even as we speak, but I’ll likely sip it slowly and perhaps not finish it, for I’m in the midst of Nanowrimo, and I’d like the words I put together to mean something.

Making a List. Checking It Twice.

October 27, 2011 By Lise Quintana in practical advice Tags: Atul Gawande, lists, November, organization 1 Comment

It’s the 27th. In four days, I start my next novel. I posted earlier about how I am planning for my story this year, but I didn’t post about all the other stuff that needs to happen this year. I’ve been asked in previous years about how one holds down a job, keeps ones’ household running and writes a novel without resorting to incredibly hard drugs or armies of servants, and I answer that it takes one simple thing. It takes a list.

Atul Gawande is a surgeon practicing in Boston, as well as the author of dozens of scholarly papers and general-interest articles about medicine and, more recently, organization. His recent articles have been about how we, as fallible human beings, continue to improve our performance professionally and personally throughout our lives. His book, The Checklist Manifesto, outlines how to continue to perform well in the face of increased complexity.

I’ve always been a fan of lists, and I’ll need them more than ever, considering that in November I will write a novel, help plan a new website for the volunteer group I work with, read and critique the writing of the rest of my cohort in grad school, look for a new house and host company from the 8th through Thanksgiving.

If you’re thinking of starting listing, here are some things you might want to consider to make your lists really work for you:

Make sure your list items are tasks, not projects. A project is a collection of tasks, so if you have “clean out the garage” on your list, you might want to break it up into things like “take old bicycles to the dump,” “put old work bench on Craigslist,” etc.
Review your list at least weekly. I put the date in the margin every Monday, and continue the same list. Then, I use a new color of hilighter to mark off the things I finish. This method means that I can instantly see what I got done this week, and tell how when I put it on the list. Things that sit on your list for 3-4 weeks should be re-evaluated – they might need to be broken into smaller chunks, or postponed.
Take your list with you everywhere. Mine is just a spiral-bound notebook that lives with all my other stuff. When my husband wants to talk about what we’re doing this week, or when I go to a volunteer meeting, I bring it with me so that I can capture any new tasks and so that I have a reminder not to over-commit myself.

Fear of the unknown is a well-known phenomenon (a Google search on that phrase yielded 40.6 million results). People with complex lives are afraid that they may miss something – that they won’t know that they should be doing X when they’re busy doing Y. Making a list is a great way to take that fear of the unknown, that fear of losing control over the complexity of your life, and make it manageable.