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Writing

Most of my web posts about writing are about writing productivity. You can find them here.

At the same time I have been going through myMFA. (for which my reading list is posted.)

How’s it comming? Well, I recently sent an email to Joel Hinman at the Writer’s Studio when he asked, prior to our beginning studies this Spring, about my background. The email still seems to cover the topic so, here’s an excerpt…

I started writing full time in September of 2007. At first I was full of misplaced self-confidence, thought I knew everything I needed to know about writing, and ran off, macbook in hand, typing wildly. Ideas were flowing and a twenty year backlog of stories came rushing out. Most of what I was doing was just keeping up with the transcription.

Then a friend, who had also gone through a mid-career switch to fiction writing pulled me aside and said the writing classes he took were very helpful. “Even thought we have been writing our whole lives, you and I, we have not been writing like this.”

Since he was successful, and published, I listened and he was so right. I followed him over to The New School and started collecting all those skills I quickly I realized I didn’t have. I’ve learned, now, that there is so much to learn about what we do; that writing fiction is a constant form of exercise, like doing Tree Pose every day, and that a surrender to external structure makes the internalization of the craft much more productive.

I’ve taken three course so far, all at The New School.

Writing For Style – Basics of the craft by Randi Ross – the foundational writing course over there on 12th Street.

Fiction Writing – Sidney Offit’s class – An amazing experience in the hands of an old NYC writing and publishing hand.

Accidental Realities – Sharon Mesmer’s experimental writing class – Also amazing to have a poet of her caliber comment on your work, sometimes not so gently. Writing in the form of Ginsberg or Burroughs was not something I would have naturally done if she had not shown the way.

And of course, Writer’s Studio Level 1 twice.

Besides that, I have a BA from St. Lawrence and an MBA from Loyola, and I’ve done a bunch of post graduate work, but that was so long ago.

I try to be very humble in describing my writing. Reading other writer’s material in workshops puts things in perspective, so much of their writing is so good. I quietly say that I have a book in progress (about 150 pages written) that came out of Mesmer’s classes, there’s a little novella of 40 pages I usually give to people to prove I’m not illiterate, and some seventy or so ’shitty first drafts’ (as Anne Lamott taught me to say) of short stories, some of which ended up folded into the book.

I also have a few dozen non-fiction essays up on dougist.com, some better than others, but they must be entertaining since visitors regularly stop by.

My favorite writers are, of the great ones, Joyce, Twain, Roth, and DeLillo; and McInerny, Dillard, and Didon of the contemporaries (not to age Don DeLillo before his time, but he seems to fit in the first category better than the second). I’ve also recently read Forster’s Aspect of the Novel, Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and Wood’s How Fiction Works. Perhaps the work that most effected my craft was Dilard’s Death of a Moth, and her follow on essay, How I Wrote the Moth Essay – and Why.

Other study notes

Linguistics under Justus Rosenberg at The New School. Here’s a great video about his war heroics. (Fall 2008)
Dr. Brooks Landon’s (University of Iowa) courses focusing on Frances Christensen’s revelry of the periodic sentence, along with other grammar and style work. (Fall 2009)