Archive for the ‘On Writing’ Category

On “Walter” and Writing: An Interview with Ed Winkofsky

Sunday, February 24th, 2013

Ed Winkofsky

Ed Winkofsky is a writer and lawyer in Chicago. His short story “Walter” appeared in FWJ’s fall 2012 issue. He is currently writing more Walter stories. We asked him to tell us a bit more about Walter and his writing process. Here is what he says.

Why did you choose an amusement park parking lot as the setting for “Walter”?

There are really two answers to that.  First, and I think that this is always the answer, I picked a place that was interesting to me.  The parking lots at those parks can be astoundingly huge – shocking even, the way the size of a Wal-Mart use to be shocking.  There are, or seem to be, rules of procedure.  The attendees tend to fall into set classes (e.g. families with young children, tweens with chaperones, teens, etc.).  So there is a lot going on there, a lot of opportunity for exploration, and that is all I know when I get started.

Second, once I get going, I have to make sure that it is still working for the character and the story.  There is something sad about the parks themselves – everyone chasing amusement – or, if not sad, there is at least the opportunity to fail – seeking fun and not finding it.  At the same time, the parking lot is right next door to the fun.  Walter wants to genuinely be a part of that world and so he gets as close as he can.  At that point, I decided, Ok, the setting seems to be working, adding some real value to the story as a whole.

It is also a bit absurd – and I like that.  Maybe that was three answers.

Did you have a specific amusement park in mind when you were writing the story?

Growing up, we would spend occasional summer days at King’s Island near Cincinnati, Ohio, and later at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio.  Those places are both a part of it, but so is the parking lot at Six Flags Great America.  I can see it from the highway when driving up to Wisconsin.

Are there certain people in your life who provide inspiration for your characters? If so, do you piece together each character from a few people or just one?

The characters are, at a minimum, always composites of more than one person.  There is a little bit of me and a little bit of my family and friends.  For example, I knew a guy in college who drove a fabulous, gray Buick Century.  I remember the way it would rock from side to side whenever we hit a bump in the road, as if it was proving to the world just how elegant it could be.  Of course, the similarities between Walter and the kid who owned the Buick probably end with the car.  This may seem a bit ridiculous to say, but the characters are also made up.  A piece from this real person or that real person, sure, but also a piece from my concept of what “loneliness” or “middle-age” or “bearded man” means.

Loneliness is a very strong theme in “Walter.” Though brief, the personal ads give readers a quick yet deep glimpse into the lives of your characters. Do you use the personal ads device in some of your other stories? Also, how did you come up with using them to aid in character development?

I have not used the personal ad device in any of my other stories and, frankly, I have mixed feelings about [the ads].  They are gimmicky and are, I believe, a bit antiquated.  Yet, they are also so efficient and such an obvious talisman of the lonely life.  In the end, I left them in, telling myself that it is ok to do something that feels lazy and distracting if it is also working.

As to their origin, I, like everyone else, was reading David Foster Wallace, and, like everyone else, was enthralled with the footnotes.  So much information in such a small space.

As an aside, I do really enjoy loneliness as a theme and feel as if everyone completely underestimates the impact that it has on the trajectory of a life.

You mention David Foster Wallace as a source of inspiration. Which other writers have influenced your work? How so?

This one is always a tough one.  I am not messing around when I say that everything I read influences my work.  Example: Paul Luikart, a local guy and fellow [University of Chicago] Graham School alum, was just nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  Paul is a friend of mine.  He wrote me a funny Christmas card one year.  I find myself stealing from that to craft my next story.  But, I am sure that this is not what you were looking for when you asked this question.??Honestly, I really have no idea.  I am impacted by the stories that I read, certainly, but I cannot tell you who is channeled into my writing and who is not.  I read CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders just last year, and that resonated with me.  The way that he tells stories – blending real and unreal into irreverent and ridiculous truth – is the way that I would like to tell stories.  Paul Auster was big for me in some of my more formative years – college and immediately after – The New York Trilogy, The Music of Chance.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez was also a big deal – both short stories and his longer works.  I like stories that are accessible but not pandering.  I am insanely jealous of Patrick Somerville (another local), who seems to have the universe whisper the essence of dialogue into his ear while cranking out drafts of terrific novels.  All influences to be sure, but I don’t know how, exactly, or how much.?? And right now I am reading The Once and Future King and loving it.  Will T.H. White have a big influence on my work?  Who knows, but I will never look at the migration of geese in the same way and have been reminded how amazing it is to learn new things.

What is the main thing you want readers to take away from your writing as a whole?

Gosh, Annie, I don’t know.  I guess I want the same things for readers that I want for me – as reader, writer, husband, father, and person.  I want to be entertained and engaged, and to uncover unexpected and elegant but nonetheless messy truths.  I want to get done with something and say, “That was fun,” and to mean it in a simple way, but to also know that whatever it was took me someplace new and, at the very best, will come back to me to enrich a future moment or force me to reconsider the past.  Simple, right?

– Interview by Annie Bruckner, Media Assistant at Fifth Wednesday Journal.

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A Few Thoughts on the Nature of Earned Risk in Fiction

Wednesday, November 21st, 2012

Sky diving in Dakar with Captain Jeannec Raphoz, 1976 © Dr Michel Royon / Wikimedia Commons

Let’s talk about risk.  Specifically, the lack of and misuse of risk in the construction of fiction.   When an editor rejects your work and sends you a note that says something like “The story is well put together, but it feels too neat” or “There’s something missing” or “I feel like I’ve read this story before,” they’re talking about a lack of risk.  In a successful story, readers sink down into the narrative and move moment to moment with the characters.  What compels them forward is often the frisson created by the unexpected.  Understand this: when a character behaves in a natural but unexpected way, that’s risky.  When you make a narrative decision that doesn’t conform to convention, that’s risky.  When you make stylistic or structural or voice decisions that feel fresh or that use an old technique in a new context, that’s damn risky.

These risks are the life-blood of fiction.  If you risk nothing, you bore your reader.  Every time you give your reader a little goose from the unexpected, you risk their abandoning your story because it doesn’t conform to expectations.  But readers don’t want you to conform.  They want you to hint at the conformity that makes them comfortable before abandoning it in favor of innovation that invests them in the world of your story.

Unearned risk is as bad as no risk at all. A story that takes risks that aren’t mandated by the core of the story irritates the reader.  Either way, you’re leaving your reader dissatisfied.  Stylistic, structural decisions have to be in service to the content of the story.  I don’t care about the voice trick you developed unless it leads to the heart of the narrative.  Characters who behave in risky ways just to be risky are marked with the heavy hand of a writer intent on shuffling characters around a board rather than letting them live organically within the world of the story.  Going to fracture your timeline?  Great, but you better have a reason for doing it.

The best way to learn how to earn the risks you take is to read the work of writers who take chances for a reason, and emulate them.  I’m not advocating the theft of their specific risks.  This leads to a world where there are a million uninteresting clones of David Foster Wallace.  I’m advocating copying the functionality of what they do.  I’m re-reading Adam Johnson’s masterful novel The Orphan Master’s Son. Halfway through the book, he changes the voice, structure, and focus of his narrative.  In the hands of a lesser writer, that shift would be hokey and distracting.  It would feel like Johnson broke the contract established by the first half of the book.  But the author earns that risk by making the shift reflect not just the thematic work he does in the novel but also the inner lives of the characters.

Great writers are honest to who their characters are and to the world they live in, and they take huge risks so that they can remain honest to those characters and to their stories because here’s the thing: in our real lives, we risk something everyday.  We hurtle around cities in little metal boxes, we flirt with strangers, we dance even though we don’t know how, we risk death and pain and embarrassment and loss and failure every single day of our lives.  Trying to be true to that basic truth of humanity isn’t the worst idea when sitting down to write a story.

– Christopher Lowe, assistant fiction editor at Fifth Wednesday Journal

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Literary Sex

Wednesday, October 24th, 2012

Linda Downing Miller shares thoughts from her MFA program reading.

One of the benefits of an MFA program for me has been the opportunity to read recommended works with an eye toward particular aspects of craft. How does an author manage time? Establish point of view? When the syllabus arrived for my next residency at Queens University, it felt like literary karma. I’d spurned Fifty Shades of Gray while others succumbed. Now, for a seminar on the “The Joy of Writing Sex,” I was required to explore a racy reading list with literary merit. Thank goodness I’d saved myself.

At Queens, I look forward to discussing how (and why) the authors on our “Sex” list wrote their characters through passionate moments. From just one book, Mary Gordon’s Spending, I already have a few thoughts on how to write sex well. 

Combat cliché or vulgarity with humor and self-awareness. When Gordon’s main character takes to the dance floor with her future lover, she notes: “What we were doing was so much about sex, so clearly a pantomime of sex, that I couldn’t begin to pretend it was anything different.” Later, she tells him, “Most pornographers lack a sense of both humor and variety.” When she uses the expression “bring me off,” she references its strangeness.

Involve the reader’s imagination. Hints of position or the focus of a lover’s attention can be more compelling than explicit details. Metaphors can be powerful: “the violinist fretted the string” (describing background music in the midst of sex). Not every encounter needs pages or paragraphs. Sometimes a single sentence implies enough.

Make the sex relevant to the plot, and the plot more than sex. Sex in Spending often reflects the characters’ changing financial relationship and fears; the novel explores these connections along with the nature of art and the creative process. As a reader, I wanted even more from the introspection-heavy plot. Overall, though, Spending was a pleasurable learning experience.

- Linda Downing Miller, Assistant Fiction Editor at Fifth Wednesday Journal.

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Reading for FWJ: An Inside Look

Wednesday, July 25th, 2012

Gro Flatebo takes us through the submissions evaluation process at FWJ.

The room is packed beyond capacity. I’m at an Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference listening to the panel “What Editors Look For” for the fifth time. It’s hot, the room is overcapacity, and I sit 300 feet away from the presenter. (“Can you hear me in the back?”) The presenters mirror the hundreds of submission guidelines for literary journals I read each year: “It’s all about the writing. Surprise me. Make me miss my subway stop as I read your story.” After two years of reading submissions for a literary journal, I can tell you that piece of advice is true. (more…)

Posted in General Musings, Gro Flatebo, On Editing, On Writing, Our Staff | 1 Comment »

NaNoWriMo: Trend or Training?

Sunday, November 13th, 2011

Writing has never come easily to me. It’s always been a delicate dance of determination and shame, shame which has also driven me to grueling bouts of revision. A story is whittled out of me with painstaking tedium: I write, revise, write, revise, write, revise sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph. After a particularly harrowing bout of toil, I often stare at the screen in resignation, the critical voice in my head nagging, “Who will want to read your work?”

My tendency to revise as I go can also be a positive thing. For instance, I’m far from the type of writer who slams out a draft and then sits back, basking its glaring newness with a sense of finality. Indeed, none of my stories ever feel finished; even after a piece is published I read it again and wish I could have continued tweaking.

However, this tendency also leads, on occasion, to stagnation. I can make myself absolutely sick of a story, begin to resent its very existence, and tuck it away in a drawer or file folder, leaving the characters frozen and unfinished.

That is where NaNoWriMo comes in. I’ve heard some writers brush it off as a useless trend, a 50,000 word fad that “less serious” writers engage in for the prestige of “winning.” To be frank, I’d never given it a second thought, myself, until this year. Until now, I’d always have workshops to give me deadlines, and before obtaining my MFA, I was intensely productive. My graduate program afforded me the time and luxury as well as the fire under my feet to face my insecurities and write regularly.

Then came the 40 hour work week, accompanied by three freelance gigs and two volunteer opportunities, and my life became ordered by a hierarchy of survival that shuffled creative writing to the bottom. Creative writing has been allowed such little precious time that I’ve let my insecurities and incessant revisions descend over my pages like a fog in the night, obscuring the stories I need to tell.

This year, NaNoWriMo will be the blaze to dissipate my fog. No revising. No second guessing. No time for insecurity. I have one month and 50,000 words and no excuses. Will I make it to the shining, 50,000 word finish line? Likely not, given my responsibilities and needs for sleep and nourishment. But will I engage in the delicate dance of worry that so often commences in my consciousness? No time. This month, I will undergo a march of triumph. I will get as close to 50,000 words possible and I will not revise one sentence until it is over. For me, NaNoWriMo will be more than a test of endurance; it is a personal challenge I am setting for myself to break out of my rut and into the worlds of my characters.

I invite you to join me. This is a time to break free with our writing. Save the worry and the revising for later. Pure production and perpetual motion. Turn the critical voices in your head down and crank up positivity and determination. We are most purely writers only when writing, and NaNoWriMo provides us with the reminder to not let anything get in our way, not even ourselves.

By Erin Christian

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