The Writing University Podcast

For this talk, we - together, you and I, audience and speaker - will explore maximalist writing as an aesthetics of excess that, according to Will Hertel, strives to "submerge readers with informational deluges, utilizing a variety of subject material and literary techniques and genres to maintain attention." However, chief among our discussion will be the question: what if one is a writer who only wants to use this technique occasionally, and elsewhere engage in a less elaborative style? Can this be achieved by crafting excess—that is, attending deliberately to pacing, use of figurative language, and/or a robust narrative voice? I believe so. Writers of any genre and experience can benefit from our discussions, which will include examinations of prose works from Richard Wright, Gloria Naylor, Don DeLillo, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

To borrow a cliche, let's go down the rabbit hole. But on the way down, let's observe the dirt, the worms, the twists, the darkness, the sacred and the profane. For a writing project, whether a short story or a novel, trope can be an entry point. Think: a locked room mystery, dark academia, a midlife crisis. Similarly, on the sentence level, cliche can be relatable and point the writer in the direction of deeper truth. Finally, identifying generic language and abstraction can guide revision. This session will draw from popular novels and explore how literary writers use character and voice to successfully subvert trope and cliche to create meaning.

Most of us who write feel the need to remember our dead in elegies, memoir, or fiction, a task that can be more difficult than we at first expect. Often our first challenge is to speak at all, to find language adequate to our grief. Then come other questions: given the injunction not to “speak ill of the dead,” and our own love for those we’ve lost, how do we avoid unrealistically idealizing them and thus stripping them of their complex humanity? How do we convey, in the short space of a poem or an essay, how our mother or grandmother or child or spouse was different from anyone else’s? How do we make the work about the person we remember and not primarily about us and our pain—should we even be trying to do so?—etc. In this Eleventh Hour we will consider these and other questions, looking at samples of successful elegies, considering how they succeed, and doing a bit of free-writing towards work of our own. Although the samples we will consider will consist primarily of narrative poems, lessons we can take from them will apply regardless of genre.

However creative and brilliant you are, your work is evaluated (consciously or not) for its style. We write in different styles, but all writing needs correct grammar and appropriate punctuation. Good writing is characterized by the clarity and felicity of sentences. Almost everyone has "tics" that mar style, such as problems with noun/pronoun agreement, clumsy clauses, dangling participles, and unclear antecedents. Sometimes, passages sound like transcriptions of talk. What to do? Add style-review to your writing process. Know the rules, and develop self-consciousness. This session will give you models, ideas, and resources for improving your style.

As a painter, I am constantly recognizing ideas about composition in art that speak directly to what I do as a writer. One concept that is especially useful is Notan, a Japanese term that means "light-dark balance." We can also think of positive and negative space, or symmetry and asymmetry--all ideas about shapes and patterns that are the foundation of composition. Consider the ways that you, too, can utilize this ancient mindset to heighten the quality of composition in your work.

The memory curve, on a most basic level, means the reader’s attention is highest at the beginning, dips in the middle, and goes up again at the end. When putting pen to paper for the first time, most writers don’t think about a reader’s memory curve, nor should they. But when considering structure after the fact, during revision, it is of paramount importance. Structuring a story or a novel has everything to do with managing the retention dip in the middle of the curve. This requires a focus on beginnings, endings and transitions. This lecture will focus primarily on transitions, their power and how they can become intermittent beginnings and endings when used effectively.

No one wants your story, essay, or poem to read like Fast and the Furious 9. But Hollywood formulae reflect a kind of science of narrative satisfaction, which can be transformative for a piece that isn't coming together in precisely the right way. We'll apply a number of hallowed screenwriting maxims to works of nonfiction and fiction, from overall structure down to the level of the scene. This session will give you resources for revising work in any genre.

Poets and songwriters utilize aspects of language that are essential for prose writers to know. Take the slow, repeated vowels and consonants Joyce uses in “The Dead”: “…his soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe…” or the hasty sibilance alive in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Oh wicked speed, to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets!” Sound and rhythm help create sense and emotion, and by paying close and purposeful attention to the words we use—the beginnings of them, the interior sounds of them, the rhythm of them—we can evoke and ignite those senses and those emotions. In this Eleventh Hour you’ll hear (and practice) how techniques used in the sung and the spoken can help us create magic on the page.

Transforming life into writing is an individual process, as individual as the art we create. Another way to think about this is how do we understand and explain the relationship of the real or actual, what some people might call, what really happened, to the stories, poems or essays we put on the page. Much of what I have to say will be a practical guide for helping writers access stories from their own lives and the lives of people they know, with pointers on bringing that material into full blossom on the page. In addition, drawing on my experience in writing a forthcoming novel/memoir, I’ll address an issue I know many ISWF students struggle with: should this be fiction or memoir.

In creative writing, truth isn’t everything, but emotional truth almost is. Whatever the genre, however familiar or strange the situation or action, readers need to believe that the emotions in a piece of writing are true. And nothing conveys emotional truth more powerfully than mixed feelings. Combining different emotions, including conflicting emotions, can strengthen their intensity as well as deepening our sense of their authenticity. In this talk and conversation we will explore some of the ways in which mixed feelings work, looking at examples from various genres and considering occasions when mixing emotions might fail us.

Death has haunted the work of countless authors. And even if we’re not writing about death directly, it often overshadows our creations, as we deal with the loss of loved ones and the inevitability of our own mortality. These struggles can be paralyzing, or they can usher in new insights. Lori Erickson will talk about how wrestling with questions relating to loss, grieving, and mortality can provide rich inspiration for our writing.

We often think about the tool of reflection in writing as a mode of thought or tone of voice we employ when we ruminate, meditate, contemplate, or explain—in short, when we provide what Phillip Gerard calls “finished thought.” But we might also think about reflection as a turning, as a sometimes distorting, but transformational power. In this talk, we’ll look briefly at four qualities of reflection that might encourage artistic transformation in our writing and try some short exercises that will give you some practical tools to “think” about yourself differently on the page.

Writers frequently confront taboos—cultural, religious, and sexual—in their work. These taboos are also reinforced by the publishing process. When is it OK to offend? When is it gratuitous? Are you being honest, or are you being a jerk? Who decides? In this Eleventh Hour presentation, Charles Holdefer will talk of recent trends and describe some of his own experiences in regard to these thorny questions.