I forgot to mention that last week I sent a short story off to a magazine. And now this week I will send another one! This can only end well: either I will start a collection of rejection slips or I will get something published. Both would be steps forward for my career.

Anyway today I was looking at my most recent short story effort and considering what changes I’d made in it since the first draft. Is it instructive to note that it went from about 5,900 words in the first draft to 4,500 in the final one – and that 4,500 words was the exact length of the short story I finished in September? Perhaps. Then I decided to compare them more, well, visually:

Story draft 1

Story final draft

Mexican Blanket A (on the left) represents the initial draft of the story. Each colour represents a ’section’ – I was initially going to do it by paragraph but there were too many – and everytime there’s white space there’s a break in the story. On the right is the finished product, showing how bits and pieces moved around, sections were shortened or removed entirely, etc. There was only one part where I felt I needed to add a new colour to represent a previously non-existent part, though. My editing process for this piece, it turns out, was less about producing new material than about finding new ways to interpret and connect that material I’d produced.

Plus both of them really would make lovely Mexican blankets.

The final editing process for my first application suggests to me that I don’t need to watch out for the word was. I need to watch out for the semi-colon, because I really, really like it, and will use it at the slightest provocation. (Full disclosure: I wanted to use it between the first two sentences in this post.) Anyway, I changed a few of them up, and tidied up a few weedy sentences, and it’s all been sent off now. Yay! Now onwards and upwards with my regular writing work.

Then again, Drop City (TC Boyle) one of my favorite books, begins with the line “The morning was a fish in a net,” and Cloudstreet (Tim Winton) has “The sun was in the sea” on the third page, so I must remember that it is possible to use “was” well. It is simply a matter of picking the right moment, rather than letting was trample into all the moments itself, like a pig loose in the garden.

Right now I’m obsessed with the word “was.” (And all the ‘to be’ offshoots – were, am, is, and so on.) Not obsessed in a good way, as in fascinated by; obsessed in a “Oh, God, this is word is hijacking and ruining my writing,” sort of way.

I’ve always known that using too many ‘to be’ verbs weakens writing. (I almost wrote “is supposed to make writing weak” and then I realized,  hello? That made the sentence weak.) Active verbs, visual verbs, emotional verbs, imaginative verbs; they all bring the writing to life. But two sources hammered this particular lesson into me recently – one, Susan Musgrave mentioned it during our classes; we did an exercise attempting to use active verbs with random nouns in a fresh way. I came up with “The canoes wrote cursive scribbles on the lake,” among other things.

And then this essay, at The Morning News, in which Alexander Chee writes about studying under Annie Dillard (jealous – I adore Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), plays the same note again: “You want vivid writing. How do we get vivid writing? Verbs, first. Precise verbs,” Chee quotes Dillard as saying. “Gerunds are lazy, you don’t have to make a decision and soon, everything is happening at the same time, pell-mell, chaos. Don’t do that.” Oops! I do that! I throw out -ings like they’re candy on Hallowe’en.

So my editing process – of stuff for my application, of the short story I just finished – has been filled with me furiously eradicating the dreaded ‘was.’ When it pops up I shoot it, like a farmer in Saskatchewan killing gophers. Pop! Dead. No more was.

This is not a post about appetizers. I wish it was a post about appetizers, though. I really enjoy appetizers.

Yam fries, how I yearn for thee

No, this is a post about applications.

Specifically, MFA applications. Oh, you say; what’s an MFA? Happily for everyone, Writer’s Digest is here to tell you. (They also have an MFA Confidential blog now, which I’m quite enjoying.) Anyway, short story (so you can get back to your appetizers): I already have a BFA, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, and now I have decided that I want an MFA, a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Of course deciding to get something and getting into a program are another thing. As the WD article suggests, there are quite a few options for pursuing such a degree in the States. I do not want to pursue such a degree in the States; I want to pursue it in Canada, which, as far as I know, limits my options to the following: UBC (where I did my undergrad); UVic (the program just stated two years ago, and only accepts one person per genre per year); and the University of Guelph-Humber (program started in ‘06 and is located in Toronto, not Guelph).

What would one do with such a degree? Well, the Rumpus is here for you, ready to be funny about the options. (“So, to answer your question, I’ll probably just starve to death. I might blog a little,” Sheera Talpaz writes.) More seriously, one would hopefully use the degree as a springboard to writing success, as having the MFA connections can be helpful in both finding the discipline to finish a manuscript, editing it in preparation to send it in, and having the connections to get the manuscript placed with an editor. Then, if you manage to publish some novels, and have the MFA, you can teach creative writing! So that’s, like, the end goal, and stuff.

Anyway as I said in yesterday’s post the application process is one of the things that’s interrupting my novel-writing groove, if I could be said to have such a thing. (I do have a yam fry-eating groove.) The first application is due November 8; the other two aren’t due until January, but for the next two weeks I’ll be a busy appy beaver.

Over at MFA Confidential, Kate has a post that expresses, more aptly than I did in my post about the short story assignment, why I needed to drop the story I was working on and write something completely new on Thursday.

She says, “A mentor once said to me: ‘Never write a story you don’t want to be writing.’ This seems simple enough, but sometimes we think we do want to be writing a particular story.  We’re sure it’s a great idea, a great concept. And so we pursue it. But the question is: should we pursue ideas or should we let them pursue us?” Unfortunately for her, she has a particular assignment that she needs to finish for the next day, so in some senses, she does have to write something she doesn’t want to be writing.

I totally recognize what she says about having five “half-baked” stories in her files, full of so-called good ideas – I have so many of those, bits where I’ve gotten the first page or so done and then just stared at the page and thought, okay, this is where this will go … and then I get up to stretch, or have tea, and nothing ever happens again with those stories. I need to get better at recognizing when something isn’t going somewhere – and also when I, myself, am somehow keeping it from going in a direction that really might click.

And maybe better about deleting those scraps, and not continually thinking that something will come of them.

A couple of lit links that seem to also be linked to my particular project:

First, ‘Who’s Afraid of a Book a Year?‘, at The Globe and Mail; the author makes the rash decision to be a book-a-year type of author and then realizes what a goal he’s set himself. I’ve read a lot of stuff lately about how long it takes people to write novels, succesful novels (Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean, which is the most shortlisted of Canadian novels this awards season, took her eight years, for example) and beginning to sort of feel the pressure of this “One Year, One Book,” thing. Especially as other aspects of life – the need to start earning a semi-regular paycheque again, some application stuff that I’ll talk about later on the blog – begin to crowd in close again. Well, there’s still five months left; I’m still hopeful that I’ll have at very least a solid first draft done come March 15, 2010.

Second, Writer’s Digest ran an article called ‘10 Questions Writers Must Ask Before Quitting Their Day Job.’ I think I considered 1, 2, and 3, and there was some worry about #8 (“Do I have the discipline to work independently?”); #9 I felt was covered off as well as it could be; but I think 4, 7, and 10 all could have used a bit more consideration. Not that I wouldn’t have done it anyway – but they all could have used more thought. When I can say, “I’m not worried about getting H1N1 this season because I don’t see enough people to be exposed,” it might have been good to have a stronger plan for human interaction.

So last night was the last class of my continuing ed class at Camosun with Susan Musgrave, as described in this post. So now you may ask – did I, in fact, as assigned, write a short story during the 21 days that the class covered?

Well yes I did! It’s still very much in the first draft stage, but the story, currently called Migrants, is 5,000 words on paper that were not in existence before I took the class. The class took the opportunity on Monday to read a couple pages from our work and to take a few comments from the class and Susan has also graciously (considering that, officially, the class is over, and she teaches three other classes through UBC’s non-residential MFA program) agreed to read and comment on our stories if we choose to email them to her.

I have made an effort over the last little while to read more short stories, because I think one of the reasons I quail before the task of writing them is that I don’t read enough of them to sort of ‘get’ how they work. That seemed to be a trend among the other class members, as well – a lot of people who said they didn’t read many short stories, or that they didn’t like the modern form of short stories but preferred the older style, which often features more plot and more clear resolution. I think it helped, this reading effort, so I guess I should keep it up. Just because I believe that I’m not really a short story writer doesn’t mean it’s true; it just means I haven’t tried, really.

The 21 days thing is a bit of a lie, though, really – what happened was that I slogged away at one plot for the first seventeen or so days, found that I wasn’t getting anywhere at all with it, and last Thursday, decided to start again. Then I wrote the first draft of this thing entirely that day. It moved. It worked. I went from beginning to end and that was that. In class I suggested that this is just my method, that if a thing is going to work for me it’s going to work smooth and fast. Lesson learned, I suppose; thanks, class! Also the story grew out of a ‘write a first line that starts a story in the middle of things’ assignment we did in class, so I’m grateful for that, too. I may just take that up as a regular exercise.

I know, I know – I haven’t been around much. Last week I went back to my old job for four days to cover a vacation, and remembered why I never got any writing work done while I was working there full-time. And a family friend who just had a baby has been in town since Thanksgiving and just left today so that’s been busy … plus I’m still taking that class, and this week I’m shuttling back and forth to Vancouver to go to the Writer’s Festival. So far have seen Audrey Niffenegger chatting about her new book (and her old one, for that matter) and on Friday I have two more things to go to, and the logistics of the visit are not making me happy. Every time I go to Vancouver I admire its largeness, and remember liking that fact (they have Subway that’s open 24 hours!) but then I remember how I like the coziness of Victoria, too, and am happy to come home again.

Anyway, more on those events soon, and other writing things!

So I’m taking a class this month, in an attempt to get myself up and out of the house and out talking writing with other interested writer-types. It’s through the continuing ed program at the local college and it’s being taught by Susan Musgrave, and if you don’t recognize the name, click through that link to her webpage and read her biographical information, because besides being a very accomplished writer (I’d say she’s best known for poetry, but she’s also written three novels, a number of books for children, and some creative non-fiction), she’s had quite an interesting life. Amusingly, at the first class she made a number of quite deadpan jokes about said interesting life, noting that “writers need domestic calm” and that having a life like hers is sometimes not conducive to getting the writing done. She seems like exactly the type of teacher I like to have for these sorts of things: she’s confident when giving instruction, friendly, supportive, open with her own experiences as a writer, and willing to admit that what works for one writer may not be the thing for someone else.

The class is Monday and Thursday nights through October, and she’s assigned us (I mean, sort of – it’s continuing ed, so if we don’t do it, there’s no penalty; she just wants to inspire us to get something done) to write a short story during the 21 day stretch that the class encompasses. This is exactly one of the things I wanted from the class – I’ve been pushing at an idea for a little bit, but been unwilling to sit down and do anything with it, and last night after the class I sat down and wrote a couple pages.

Interesting to hear from the people in the class – there’s about 15, I think – why they’re there, what their backgrounds are, etc. Lots of diversity, from a woman who’s published a novel in the UK and is slogging away at a second one, to a man who previously found writing fiction to be the hardest section of a broader writing class and wants to challenge himself with this class. In university I found that my writing classes had the most diversity in the students, in terms of age, professional experience, and so on, and this is no exception. I’m hopeful that it will be a good outlet for sharing the writing experience, because I’m finding that writing a novel can often be an isolating process, burrowing me deeper and deeper into my own brain, with no glimpse of the light to pull me back up.