Click on the title to go to part 1 if it’s on YouTube, but most are streaming on Netflix as well.

The Forsyte Saga. When you get to the end of series 1, you’ll need to watch series 2. Trust me. A highly charged miniseries that follows the intrigues and scandals of a landed middle class London family, and the one woman who will turn their world upside-down.  Adapted from the novel by John Galsworthy.

North and South. Who knew the Industrial Revolution could provide so much opportunity for intrigue and romance? Basically, this is Pride & Prejudice, but it’s also about LABOR UNIONS. There’s an Elizabeth Bennett named Margaret Hale, and a Mr. Darcy, here called Mr. Thornton, played by Richard Armitrage, and he’s every bit as smoldering, growling, and mesmerizing as Colin Firth.  Adapted from the novel by Ellen Gaskell.

South Riding. A fiery young headmistress Sarah Burton brings her modern ideas to the conservative girls’ school in depression-era Yorkshire, sparking conflict — and attraction — with Robert Carne, a stubborn, brooding landowner mired in a troubled past.  Based on the novel by Winifred Holtby. Like North & South, a fascinating example of how a good love story can make a politically-minded novel sing.

Yes. Cillian Murphy

The Way We Live Now. This adaptation of the Trollope novel is a satire of the financial scandals of the 1870′s, but it speaks perfectly to our 99% times, too. Again: Romance + Social Commentary = Love Stories that “Matter”

Wives and Daughters.  Adaptation of another Gaskell novel. Note: Gaskell died just before completing the book. She was obviously aiming at a happy ending, and the writer has supplied the lost denouement with surprise and style. 

Bleak House  Gillian Anderson leads this ensemble cast. Charles Dickens’ complex tale of young love, murder, and the quest for a mystery-man’s identity unfolds in this adaptation by screenwriter Andrew Davies. Bleak House features some of the most famous plot twists in literary history, including a case of spontaneous human combustion and an inheritance dispute tied up for generations in the dysfunctional English courts.

Is it bad to admit that at a certain point, I was watching so many of these things that I could recognize recycled dresses and country estates?

Sense and Sensibility 2008  This one’s not on YouTube. You’ve probably seen the 1995 version directed by Ang Lee. But this one’s wonderful, too, esp. because Dan Stevens (Matthew Crawley) is Edward Ferrars.

What all these have in common is that they’re adaptations, and this, gentle reader, is why Downton Abbey succeeds so well. It is not an adaptation. Downton Abbey is Dallas with corsets and British accents. On the spectrum between “soap opera” and “serious drama,” it falls toward the latter only by virtue of its aristocratic setting.

Most of the series I’ve listed above are based on books of serious literature, which contain romantic subplots along with social commentary, as does Downton Abbey. But Downton, on the other hand, need not have any fidelity to a source text written long ago when narrative was simply a whole lot pokier. Downton Abbey may look like a Merchant Ivory film, but it “reads” as fast as Hunger Games.

That’s why we love it. 

Let's put our heads together.

“Of all the ambient commonplaces about MFA programs, perhaps the only accurate one is that the programs are organized around the story form.” Chad Harbach said this in his n+1/Slate essay, “MFA or NYC?” Do you think he’s right? I want to know. I’ve created two Survey Monkey surveys, one for faculty, one for students (past and present).

Survey for Graduate Faculty

Survey for MFA Students (Past and Present)

Remember: this is about graduate creative writing programs, not undergraduate.

Because your response will be anonymous, I hope you will provide honest answers. 

Survey Sample 

• True or False: It is unreasonable to expect an MFA student to complete a publishable novel during an MFA program.
• True or False: The best way to learn how to write fiction is develop some level of mastery over the short story before moving on to novels.
• True or False: It is the responsibility of MFA programs to “professionalize” students about the business of fiction writing.
• True or False: Mentoring a novelist takes more of a faculty’s limited time than mentoring students in other genres and forms.

Each survey asks 10 questions requiring a simple True or False answer. Each survey asks the same questions. And I’ll be honest here: one of the things I’m curious about is whether there’s a disconnect between what MFA faculty believe they are doing and what students perceive.  

Should take just a minute or two. Please consider the questions carefully, answer, and then (this is important) please share this post widely via social media so that I can gather a range of responses.

I’m doing this in preparation for my AWP panel, “A Novel Problem: Moving from “Story” to “Book” in the MFA Program,” which is scheduled for Thursday, March 1 from 12:00-1:15 PM in the Lake Michigan Room at the Hilton Chicago. I’m moderating, and the panelists are, David Haynes, Patricia Henley, Sheila O’Connor, and Elizabeth Stuckey-French. I will share the results of the survey at the panel in Chicago.

So: help me out here. Take the survey. Share it with your friends and colleagues. And let the discussion begin.

Description of the Panel

Short stories are often our main pedagogical tools, but the book is the primary unit of literary production. When are apprentice writers “ready” to write novels, and how do we review them in a workshop setting? How can we create courses that encourage students to move toward and complete book projects? This panel will explore the challenges of accommodating the novel or the novel-in-stories within the structure of an MFA program and in the classroom.

Statement of Merit

A recent essay on this topic by the panel’s organizer prompted a good deal of response. Some claim that MFA programs are subtly (or deliberately) “anti-novel.” That theory is disproved by the faculty panelists, who have experience mentoring in MFA program settings. They will share their best practices with the audience. 

Resources

Here’s a brief list of other articles that have come out in the last year or so related to the topic of our panel: 

Brian Joseph Davis,  “Why MFA Programs Matter.” Huffington Post.

Anelise Chen. “On Blowing My Load: Thoughts from Inside the MFA Ponzi Scheme.” The Rumpus.

John Stazinski, “A Novel Approach: Learning to Write More than Stories.” Poets & Writers, the January/February 2012 issue, print only. 

I require my novel-writing students to turn in 2,250 words a week for 12 weeks. If they turn in the words, they get 25 points. If they don’t turn in the words (or turn in less than 2,250), they don’t get 25 points. Simple as that.  

Why 2,250 words?

Because 3 x 750 = 2,250. Which means that students can meet their Weekly Words quota by sitting down and using 750words.com just three times a week. If I’m on a roll and I just write without censoring myself, I can write 750 words in about 30 minutes. Which means that all it takes to stay on schedule is about 1.5 to 2 hours of writing per week. And if they can’t manage that, well…  

What kind of words do they turn in?

Their Weekly Words run the gamut from “sketching” to “polished.” They run the gamut from actual scenes to paragraphs more akin to journal entries. And it all counts. Students aren’t graded on quality, just the quantity. To reassure them that I mean this, I show them some of my own Weekly Words. Some weeks I list plot points, or maybe thumbnail sketch some chapters. Some weeks I produce something readable. The writer Barbara Kingsolver says that when she starts a novel, she imagines that she’s starting on page -50. Basically, I let my students “count” those negative pages.

By the way, I’m teaching two sections of the class this semester, 15 in one class, 13 in the other, so I have 28 students. If you’re interested, here’s my course policy. Here’s my schedule. 

Do you read their Weekly Words?

Sort of. I don’t read them so much as I read “at” them. I look to make sure they have given me words toward their novels, not the rough draft of their paper for American Literature, not cut and pasted Wikipedia text. I read a scene or two, try to track what they were up to that week. 

Do they turn them in hardcopy or digitally?

They send me their Weekly Words via email on Friday by 5 PM. I spend an hour or two opening up the 28 emails, dipping my toe into the waters of their novels in progress, and then I move on. It’s a very disconcerting experience, a bit like trying to read 28 books at the same time. Some students leave me a bookmark, pick up where they left off the week before. Some write scenes at random, as they come. Both ways are fine.

So how do you keep them all straight?

Well, for the first few weeks, I really couldn’t keep their plots in my brain.

So this week, I told them that they needed to give me three things in their Weekly Words:

1.) A one or two sentence signature, a description of the project that they will keep using every week. Such as: “[Title], my novel about [character/s] who [describe situation of the book].” Thanks to this signature line, now I can remember that Student A is the one who’s writing the novel set on Mars, and Student B is writing the novel about the two elderly sisters who are dying, and Student C is writing the novel about the boy whose father abuses him, and Student D is writing the novel about Woodstock, etc. 

2. A one-to-two sentence prefatory statement, such as “This is where I left off last week,” or “These are random scenes,” or “I put my characters in a car and sent them on a road trip.”

3. This week only, because we talked about plot and structure a lot, I asked them to plot out 25-30 “plot points,” a series of chronological events. I cut and pasted their name, their signature, and their plot points into a document, shrunk the font until it all fit on a single page, and printed them out—for easy reference.

This is what I don’t understand: What is your role as instructor if not to read and comment on all those Weekly Words?

Why should any writing teacher be expected to read and respond to every unvarnished thought that emerges from a young novelist’s head? I force them to write every week, to establish a writing regimen which I hope they will continue. I’m like the coach who holds them accountable for running so many miles per week. By eliminating all-group workshop, I free up time to let them do guided writing in class (like a studio art course), to discuss a lot of published novels. Because they aren’t reading everyone else’s novels, they spend more time on their own writing. All of this is supposed to turn “writing a novel” from some semi-mystical process into a tangible series of digestible, step-by-step lessons. 

Okay, so the Weekly Words reinforces a writing regimen. They aren’t being graded on what they write, only that they write. So when do you read their novels, if not each week?

At the end of the semester, they revise and polish a 40-50 page chunk, “the partial,” the opening of their novel.

And you workshop all those novels?

Sort of. There’s no all-group workshop in my class. Half-way through the semester, I put them in small groups based on the kind of book they are writing—say, the dystopian/sci-fi novel group, the coming-of-age novel group, etc. They read a 50+ page semi-polished chunk by each person in their small group. I set aside two weeks for their small groups to talk–more like a writing group than a workshop–and for me to meet with every student individually. I read everyone’s first chunk.

That could be as many as 750 pages in a short period of time. How can you possibly critique that many pages?

I don’t type up a critique nor do I write much on the manuscripts themselves. I’m not grading. I’m not editing. It’s taken me a very long time to grasp this: I don’t have to “mark up” and comment all over a manuscript in order to call myself a writing teacher. I certainly do close reading of manuscripts in other classes and as a thesis director, but not in my undergraduate novel-writing class.   

Here’s the way I see it:

If as an instructor you spend 5-10 hours a week preparing for the typical short-story centered, all-group workshop—which includes reading and commenting on the manuscripts, typing up your critique, reading the students’ critiques of each other’s work, etc.—then that’s how much time you should spend preparing for a novel-centered class, too. If it takes me 6 hours to read through eight novel manuscripts and another 4 hours to meet with each student, then I have done my job that week—even though I may not have lifted a pen.

If you disagree with me on this point, that’s fine.

If I was fortunate enough to teach a year-long novel writing workshop with six students, I would do things differently. If I was getting paid to teach novel writing outside academia, such as at Grub Street’s Novel Incubator program, I would do things differently.

We must acknowledge that reading a novel (published or in-progress) takes many hours, if not days.

We must allow that most creative writing classes aren’t generative spaces—they are critical ones. And what I’m describing here is a class about generating, about process, not critiquing the product.

One last question. Do your students want feedback on their Weekly Words?

I get the sense that they like the opportunity to “just write” for a few weeks. They love that they can write without worrying about the grade for awhile. But yes, I had one student who kept insisting she wanted to know what I thought of her Weekly Words each week. I told her to make an appointment and we’d talk. She never showed up. She just kept on writing. 

First, novel into stories. 

This is what you're looking for.

1.) Find a copy of The Paris Review 10, Fall 1955. On page 53, you’ll find a short story by Evan S. Connell called “The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge.” No, the story’s not online. No, the issue’s no longer available from The Paris Review. Yes, you’ll have to actually go to the library, and you might even have to use one of those microfilm machines. That’s what I did. Kind library personnel helped me load the reel and scan the document as a pdf. It took 45 minutes.

2.) Take a good look at this short story. If you’ve read the book, then you know that Mrs. Bridge the novel is comprised of 117 titled vignettes. But “Mrs Bridge” the short story pre-dates the novel. The short story contains 12 of the eventual novel’s vignettes (in this order: 61, 39, 37, 60, 91, 99, 84, 86, 18, 102, 41, plus one titled “Equality” not found in the novel).

3.) Pretend for a moment that you are Evan S. Connell. You wrote the short story “Beau Monde” because you wanted to satirize the small-minded racial and class politics of your hometown. And you did that. Quite successfully. It’s just out in this new magazine called The Paris Review. But now what? Maybe you’re not quite done with this Mrs. Bridge. What about her husband? How did they meet? What would happen if this very American couple went on a European tour? What of her children? How will she respond when they grow up and challenge her worldview? And what about her best friend, Grace Barron? You open up the pleats. You write more vignettes. Most fit on a single piece of typing paper. They’re more than scenes, but less than chapters. They’re what Mark Oppenheimer in The Believer calls “chapterlets.” In fifty years or so, people might call them “flash fictions.” Each vignette is a building block, a movable unit, a piece of paper. You lay them out on the floor, tape them to the walls, trying to figure out how they go together.

This is exactly what I wanted to do when I finished the book: tear out the pages and lay them on the floor, tape them to the walls. I wanted them to be tangible, detachable things. So, I used post-it notes to create a thumbnail sketch of each vignette. This really didn’t take that long because I’d just read the book. A few hours.  

Vignettes 9, 10, and 11 of Mrs. Bridge

4.) Now you do it. Using index cards or post its, summarize each vignette. Use different colors to trace different “through lines” and subplots.

You  can do it by character:

• Ruth in red. 
• Douglas in green. 
• Carolyn in yellow. 
• Mr. Bridge in blue. 
• Grace Barron in white.
• etc.

Or do it by subject matter:

• Self-improvement. 
• Americans in Paris. 
• The Car. 
• The Help
• When the Children Start Dating

5.) Move the cards around. That’s the point. Lay out a line of red cards, followed by a line of yellow cards, followed by a line of blue, etc. See how the book would read less like a novel and more like linked stories if you followed one character, one plot layer, one color at a time.

When I did this activity, I realized that the way I had written fiction for many years was to take it color by color, one plot layer or subplot at a time.

Or to use another analogy: If you handed me the 117 vignettes of Mrs. Bridge out of order, I would have made piles—one for each character, then maybe smaller piles within the large ones. And that would have been my book manuscript. Hey, that’s almost exactly what my first book WAS.

I thought: Maybe a novel could be fashioned from stories by breaking up the piles and laying them out chronologically?

I considered re-typing Mrs. Bridge word for word, or xeroxing the entire book, just to test my theory, to see if these extracted stories would actually read like stories.

Confession: I have done this before with two short stories: “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, which I xeroxed, cut up and reassembled into “The Jimmy Cross Parts” and the “Alpha Company Parts,” and with Ethan Canin’s “The Year of Getting to Know Us,” which I reassembled into chronological order.

Then I realized that I didn’t have to retype or xerox Mrs. Bridge. The full text of Mrs. Bridge is available online. You don’t want to know how excited I was about this. 

6.) Now, extract some short stories from the novel. Go back to your groupings of colored post-its, find the corresponding text online, then cut and paste it into a Word document.

For example: I extracted one short story from the novel called “Etiquette Lessons.” It’s the story of Carolyn’s friendship with Alice Jones, alternated with vignettes of Mrs. Bridge “teaching” her children about manners and “teaching” her children about race and class. The climax of the story is a scene late in the novel when Mrs. Bridge wonders why her daughter uses a racial epithet and mentions her childhood friend Alice Jones who “looks very black” these days.

7.) If you can reverse engineer Mrs. Bridge, envision this novel as stories which were pulled apart, rearranged, and turned into a novel, then maybe it’s possible to forward engineer your own novel narrative from all those short stories sitting on your hard drive.

Next, stories into novel.

Backstory: When I was finishing The Circus in Winter, a few agents read the manuscript. One said, “I will take you on if you let me help you turn these linked stories into a novel.” I said I’d think about it. A few days later, another agent got back to me and said, “I think you should write the book you want to write.” That’s the agent I chose, and I’m glad I did, but if I’m being totally honest here, and I am, I was also relieved that I wouldn’t have to figure out how to turn my stories into a novel. I didn’t think it was possible.

Backstory: Flashforward ten years. A group of college students adapts my book into a musical—and they find a linear storyline in my book. They broke up my piles of stories, laid them out chronologically, and focused on the events of the first five stories. They gave the narrative its “clock,” its basetime (a few months), decided that the flood would be the climax, followed by the denouement. Beginning, middle, end. Badda bing. Badda boom.

If they can do it, so can you.

Consider some linked stories, such as the last three stories in Patricia Henley’s Other Heartbreaks (“Skylark,” “Emma Compartmentalizes in Ireland,” and “Ephemera”). List all the events (25-30) that transpire in chronological order. Imagine cutting the stories up, moving the pieces around into a more linear or chronological narrative, like Mrs. Bridge. Consider a flashforward prologue to begin the novel. Describe the structure of this pretend novel–where it starts, where it ends. It might help to decide first what the climax will be–and work backwards and forwards from there. You might be interested in reading this interview with Henley, in which she confirms that “Other Heartbreaks” WAS a novel that she broke apart and turned into linked stories.

Henley is visiting Ball State on February 15, and my students are eager to hear her talk about writing novels, writing stories, and writing novels that turn into stories.

Or try this with The Things They Carried. Or with Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Please understand: I’m not saying those books should be anything other than their own wonderful selves. 

Please understand: Malcolm Cowley did exactly what I’m suggesting when he cut up, chronologically assembled, and edited The Portable Faulkner. And thank God he did. In his now-famous introduction, Cowley writes: “All the cycles or sagas are closely interconnected. It is as if each new book or story was a chord or segment of a total situation always existing in the author’s mind.”

My novel-writing students did these activities. When I asked them, “What did you learn this week,” one woman said, “I have to figure out a way to SEE my novel, to visualize it.” Another said, “It really matters what you decide to put first,  but you probably won’t write the book in the order that it will eventually be read in. I have to stop worrying about my first chapter.”

Exactly.

A year ago, I tuned into Downton Abbey out of idle curiosity. By the last episode of series one, I was in such a dither that when THAT MUSIC came on, I squealed like a groupie.

And then it was over. FOR A YEAR.

I tried watching similar period dramas (I’ll post on that later), but none of them affected me like Downton. Why is that?

The New Yorker had it right this week:

Hugh Bonneville, who plays the Earl of Grantham, said, “What is an additional attraction for this show is that it is not an adaptation. I use the analogy of how Dickens serialized his stories, and people were standing outside the bookstore every week wanting the next edition. It isn’t like watching the ending scene of “Pride and Prejudice,” and thinking, How are they going to do it this time? It’s the unexpected.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2012/01/16/120116ta_talk_mead#ixzz1jaUbPzjw

While the set and costumes of Downton Abbey are early 20^th century, the plot is thoroughly 21^st century: fast and full of tension.  People call it “addictive.” Gawker even says “It’s like crack.” What makes a narrative “addictive,” and what can we learn from it as novel writers?

Here’s a close reading of the first 15 minutes of Downtown Abbey, series 1, episode 1. Available on PBS.com and streaming on Netflix.

Look at how this series of scenes works…

• to introduce major dramatic questions—these questions keep us watching/reading because we want to know the answer.
• to ensure that every single scene has some conflict, some crackling energy, some kind of voltage spike. Janet Burroway says, “Only trouble is interesting,” and Downton understands this.
• to teach us how to read the series, whom to follow, what to care about.

Key

MDQ=Major Dramatic Question:

Spike= the voltage meter of the scene spikes

WTW=Why this way and not another way? A kind of reverse engineering where you remove or rewrite an element of the story, make something “bad” or less effective in order to understand what makes it good.

Let’s begin.

Be sure you watch the first 15 minutes or so first. It will make more sense that way.

Montage. A close up of telegraph operator. Dot dot. Dash. Dot. Shots of telegraph wires carrying this message. More urgent dots and dashes. Spike.

Train whistle! A man’s head in profile riding a train.

MDQ: Who is this man? (Yes, I know it’s Bates, but I’m going to write this as a naíve reader would experience Downton upon first viewing.)

Telegraph operator reads message, looks worried. “Oh my God! That’s impossible.”

MDQ: What’s in the telegram? What’s the bad news?

Exterior. We get our first look at Downton Abbey. Wowza. Spike.

Interior. Time stamp: April 1912. The first face we see is Daisy’s. She’s going around waking up the staff. Which is how we’re introduced …

Room Interior. Anna and Gwen rising. Even in this simple scene, there’s trouble when Anna says, “Just once I’d like to sleep until I woke up natural.” Spike.

Kitchen. Mrs. Patmore thundering around the kitchen with Daisy, ordering her around. It’s a routine morning, no doubt, but still, there’s voltage to this scene, a conflict. We also learn a little about the house via Mrs. Patmore’s orders.

We follow Daisy up the stairs, and thus begins the amazing tracking shot as she enters the beautiful rooms. She is our eyes, and (like her) cannot resist a quick look around. It’s that little peek she sneaks that gives the scene of a routine morning its little jolt.

The tracking shot shifts the POV to a footman gathering glasses. He asks if there’s any sign of William, and when they meet in the dining room, there’s a small kerfluffle. “You’re late when I say you’re late,” the dark-haired footman says. Spike.

Daisy is building a fire in the dark drawing room. Gwen and Anna enter to fluff couch. They ask why she didn’t turn on the lights to work, and she confesses she’s scared of electricity. Spike. A historical marker is introduced organically into the story—through dialogue, “in scene,” not through exposition. 

Ominous shot of woman holding keys walking down a hallway. They look like dungeon keys. Spike. 

Two men in livery, old guy and William, young footman. Old guy asks, “Where are the papers?” Tells young man to “get the board out.” Board?

Back to drawing room. Woman with keys enters room with maids, drills Daisy the scullery maid. Ticking clock introduced. She must get back downstairs before the house awakes. She’s not dressed in uniform like the rest, because she mostly resides downstairs, out of the eye of the house. She must finish her task before she’s seen by the family upstairs, who we haven’t even seen yet.

Bike messenger approaching castle. MDQ: Does he have the newspapers the old guy is clamoring for? And is he carrying the message the lady at the telegraph office was upset about?

WTW: If we hadn’t had the earlier scene at the telegraph office, his approach would seem routine, ordinary. But now it’s full of energy, because we’re anxiously waiting to find out what’s in the telegram.

Interior bedroom. Woman in diaphanous nightgown rises and sees the messenger boy. She looks incredibly bored. (If only she knew what he was carrying!) She’s the first member of the family whose face we see, and so, we become “attached” to her as a character first. Not much energy in this scene (well, except for being able to see through her nightgown.) All that really happens in this scene is that she uses pulls on some sort of cord (a bell pull) and…

Boom, in the servants’ kitchen, a bell rings on a large board full of bells—which is how we learn (organically, in scene) about the house’s communication system. The old man says, “And they’re off.” Anna asks woman to help her take Lady Mary her tray. Woman balks. Electricity spikes. Back door bell rings. Old man says, “The papers. At last.” 

William at back door. “You’re late!” he says to the messenger, who tries to defend himself, but then he says, “You’ll see.” 

MDQ: WHAT WILL HE SEE?

WTW: Writer Julian Fellowes is stretching the tension to the breaking point. The messenger could have told William, “Hey, the Titanic sank!” but he doesn’t. He just hints that something’s not right, and we’re dying to know. We have to keep watching the show to find out. 

William irons. Why, we wonder. Carson orders William to iron the London Times, for his lordship, and the Daily Sketch, for her ladyship. (Later, we will be rewarded for paying attention to this line when we see the Earl reading the Times and Cora reading the Sketch.) William finally sees the paper. Close shot of his face. Concerned.

MDQ: What’s in the paper?

In the kitchen, Daisy asks the question the audience can’t ask: Why iron the papers? Snippy Lady answers (because it dries the ink) but her response isnt just an answer. Its also a put down. “We wouldn’t want the lordship’s hands to be as black as yours.” Daisy, who seems new to Downton and to service, has been the character we’ve been “with” the most thus far, our main POV character. We’re as full of wonder and questions as she is.

WTW: If Daisy wasn’t there, or if this world was “old hat” to her, we’d be more confused. It’s no mistake that hers is the first face we see in this show.

William shows Old Man the papers.

Interior of kitchen. Everyone’s asking, “Is it true? Nothing in life is sure.” Now THEY know, but we still do not. Also the family upstairs does not. The tension continues to stretch.

Lord Grantham makes his entrance down the staircase.

MDQ: When will HE learn the contents of the papers?

WTW: The servants in the kitchen could have said, “I can’t believe the Titanic sank,” and boom, we’d know, but the story waits as long as possible.

Interior, dining room. “Morning, Carson,” the Earl says. “Is it true what they’re saying?” Now, everyone in the story knows and we do not! There’s some talk of the ladies being taken off, and interestingly, it’s Lord Grantham who says, “The ladies in first class? God help the poor devils below decks. What a tragedy.” He opens the paper, and ta-da! We see the word, “Titanic.” Question answered.

However: there’s a good, old-fashioned reversal in the works here. Remember the telegram?

Girls come into the room, including Mary, the one we met this morning in her nightgown. The footman gives a third girl a telegram and she gives it to Earl. He’s spouting platitudes about unsinkable ships and un-climbable mountains when she hands it to him. He opens it distractedly. Music swells. He runs out of the room.

Enters his wife’s bedroom. She’s reading the Sketch in bed. “It’s too awful for words.” He stares out window. “Did JJ Astor get off?” she asks, and we know that he did not, because we saw Titanic by James Cameron.

MDQ: what was in the telegram? What has he rushed upstairs to say?

“I’ve had a telegram. James and Patrick were on board.”

MDQ: Who are James and Patrick?

O’Brien enters with the breakfast tray. The wife says, “Surely they were picked up?” We see O’Brien register this question, and we see the Earl seeing her recognize this, and he stops talking.

WTW: I’m not the first person to say this, but in so many period dramas, the servants are invisible, like the red-shirted men on Star Trek, expendable and forgettable drones whose job it is to push buttons and take phaser fire. When you watch a lot of period dramas, you become accustomed to their presence in rooms where Big Things are discussed, and you never think, “So what are the consequences of these other human beings knowing these things?” There’s an added level of tension to the scene in Downton BECAUSE the servant is there, whereas in so many other dramas, this scene would be between Earl and his wife. Period. Here, it’s a triangle: between the Earl and his wife and also O’Brien. Her being present matters.

Wife Cora says, “You must tell Mary. She can’t hear it from anyone else.”

MDQ: Why does he need to tell her? Does she mean she doesn’t want her to hear it in the papers, or because father and daughter are close? Why can’t they both tell her?

The promise of the show’s opening scene has now been fulfilled. Our first question has been answered: What was in the telegram? But the question now is: Who are James and Patrick. And why is their death a big deal? We must keep watching in order to know the answer to that question.

Cut to: man’s feet with cane walking down a dark corridor. Ominous.

MDQ: who is this guy?

O’Brien in a bedroom talking to the two servant girls we met before. “Neither of them were picked up. That’s what he said.” Spike. O’Brien’s presence in the earlier scene has this consequence: she’s got news, and news is currency. All three women talk about the terrible shame. They all know these two guys, but we don’t. O’Brien says, “It’s a complication.” SPIKE.

MDQ: Why is it a complication?

Scene going down the stairs: O’Brien explains the line of succession, girls can’t inherit, James and Patrick were going to inherit the title, etc.

So: the MDQ is partly answered. What we want to know now is: Why does this matter to Mary?

O’Brien and maids come upon a man. He’s the face on the train we saw in the credits, whose feet we saw coming down the hall. They are surprised to see him standing there. O’Brien accuses him of “pushing in.” Tension. Spike. Not: “Hello, how are you?” but “What the hell are you doing here?”

WTW: This is why O’Brien has to be in this scene. If it was Anna it would be, “Hello, how are you? Nice to meet you.” 

He introduces himself as John Bates, the new valet. O’Brien looks down at his leg, his cane, and seems doubtful. Spike. Trouble. Anna tries to make nice.

MDQ: Why is his cane a big deal?

Interior Kitchen: Mrs. Hughes asks Bates, “How can you manage?” If you are wondering why his cane is a big deal, the story answers that question with the line, “Because we’ve all got our own work to do.” Aha. Carson greets and welcomes him.

WTW: This is why it’s important that Mr. Bates is not already AT downton when the story begins: because his introduction to the staff and their rank is OUR introduction. Mrs. Patmore: what about all them stairs? He says, I can manage. More tension. He exits room. “Well, I can’t see that lasting long,” O’Brien says.

Shot of staircase. Bates looking up.

At the top, servants’ rooms. Bates is breathing hard, sweating. Spike. We feel for him. Bates sees his room. Camera stops to pan around. Compared to the luxurious rooms we’ve seen, it’s nothing. But the music is light and hopeful and Bates coos, “Oh yes.” He’s smiling. A throw-away moment has been made to matter. Later, we’ll learn why it matters—he desperately needs this job.

Interior, library: Mary asks, “Does this mean I’ll have to go into full mourning?” We’ve returned to the MDQ of why those deaths matter to Mary, why she needs to be told. In response to her question, her father is grim and reproachful. “My first cousin and his son are almost certainly dead.” She’s momentarily chagrined. There’s a spike. “We’ll all be in mourning,” he says. “No I mean with the other thing.” WHAT OTHER THING? Then we learn: Patrick, her cousin, was her unofficial fiancé? No one knew about the engagement outside the family, and her father says that mourning him openly is up to her. She says, “Well that’s a relief,” and at that moment we see Lady Mary as her father does, as an honest but cold person, someone who is relieved that she won’t have to pretend to mourn a fiancé she didn’t love. There’s a look of recognition that passes between them.

And thus: Lady Mary’s character arc is established. She begins as someone we don’t like much, a cold person who gradually thaws over the course of the show. This scene is why many audience members don’t like her—because we were introduced to her at her worst, so to speak, character flaw and all. But it’s what makes her interesting, this coldness. And because she was the very first Upstairs character we saw, we know that SHE is who we’re going to be with for the long haul.

We are 13:46 into the show.

One thing I’ve learned by watching (and re-watching) Downton is that my internal EEG voltage meter spikes in every single scene.

Novels must produce a similar kind of energy.

(To prove I’m not jumping on any bandwagons, here’s my post from last year about the show.)

Give it a listen and a download. I’m still so proud and amazed.

It’s that time of year when our students turn in their portfolios–along with the “reflective essay” in which they articulate what they learned this semester. I love reading them. This term, I asked my students to turn those essays into blog posts. NOT something written to me, but to you.

As you know by now, my goal for the last year or so has been to help my students move from “story” to “book” by tweaking how I approach my courses. specifically, how I run (or don’t run) the workshop. I taught three classes this term, two of which had a public course blog attached to them. One was an undergraduate advanced fiction writing class on “novels” and a graduate course on “linked stories.” But really, they were BOTH classes on novel writing–one explicitly (the undergrad) and one implicitly (the grad).

Each class has a blog, which you can peruse.

• The Undergrad/Novel/Explicit Approach class blog is #amnoveling.
• The Graduate/Linked Stories/Implicit Approach class blog is #amlinking.

Here are some highlights from #amnoveling:

Researching and writing a historical novel.

Beating writer’s block by “writing without thinking” so you can surprise yourself.

Writing not just a novel, but a series of novels.

The benefits of planning vs. the benefits of not planning.

Writing a “novel that’s true,” and how you try and try to “get it right.“

Honestly, all their posts are really great–about artistic influences, adapting screenplays into novels, talking themselves into attempting a novel in the first place, and writing a queer novel because you just really, really need this book to exist and it doesn’t yet.

Here are some highlights from #amlinking:

How writing in In Design–not MS Word–is helping one student create “haiku fiction.”

The pedagogical advantages of a “linked stories” workshop vs. a de facto “story” workshop.

Stories as legos–a great analogy. 

How “storyboarding” helps you move from “story” to “book.” (Here’s my post on “reverse storyboarding,” which is how we started the semester.)

A few posts (here, here, and here) on how I “tricked” them into embarking on novels by telling them they were writing linked stories.

I know it’s a busy time of year, but these blogs aren’t going anywhere. Come back to them and read what my students have to say. If you’re considering making some changes to your own creative writing teaching pedagogy, I hope you’ll start a course blog, too, so that we can all figure this out together.

Happy grading, everyone.

Come see our Benefit Performance on January 2nd in University Theatre! If you missed it this fall, here is your chance to see it now! It’s amazing.

The Circus in Winter

By the students of the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry
Inspired by the novel by Cathy Day
Directed by Beth Turcotte
Musical Direction by Ben Clark and Alex Kocoshis
Choreography by Erin Spahr

University Theatre

January 2 at 7:00pm

Tickets: $10-all proceeds will go toward the students traveling to the American College Theatre Festival

Based on the novel by Cathy Day and adapted for the stage by Beth Turcotte and students from the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry, The Circus in Winter is the story of the passion beneath the big top. Join Wallace Porter, a stable owner from Indiana, as he falls in love and searches for his life’s work, a journey that culminates in the purchase of his own circus. Filled with fantastic characters, heart-rending moments of love an loss, and extraordinary new music, The Circus in Winter is a feast for the eyes, ears, and heart.

For more information, please contact the University Theatre Box Office at 765-285-8749 or boxoffice@bsu.edu.

Tickets will go on sale on December 12th! Box Office Hours are as follows: December 12-16 from 1-5pm, December 19-22 from 1pm-5pm, December 23 from 9am-Noon, December 28-29 from 1-5pm, December 30 from 9am-Noon and January 2 from 5-7pm.

Here’s all the backstory!

Directions, etc.

Please come to Muncie and see this amazing production. You won’t be sorry. I guarantee.

Outline people (aka “Plotters”)

No Outline People (aka “Pantsers,” because they write by the seat of their pants).

I am an Outline Person. I was born that way.

On Saturday, December 10 from 1-4 PM, I’ll be teaching a class called “Storyboard Your Novel” for the Writers’ Center of Indiana.

Here’s the description:

Aspiring and working novelists can get a jump-start on their New Year’s resolution to “write that novel.” Author Cathy Day will offer practical advice on how to create a blueprint or “storyboard” for the book you want to write or are in the process of writing. Participants are encouraged to bring a package or two of index cards and/or lots of paper, Post-it notes, markers, etc.

I also suggest bringing a laptop if that’s how you work best. The class will take place at Marian University, Clare Hall/#128. Here’s a campus map. Here’s the cost and how to sign up.

A few months ago, I taught a similar class at the Midwest Writers’ Workshop and the attendees were incredibly motivated about mapping out their novels.

My storyboarding intensive at the Midwest Writers Workshop, July 2011

Really, storyboarding is a pre-writing stage that many of us skip because it doesn’t feel like “real writing.” But it is. Some novelists storyboard from the beginning. Some wait until they have a first draft. But almost all novelists do it.

If you’re signed up for the class at WCI and you’re reading this (or even if you’re not), consider this doing this activity before Dec. 10: reverse storyboard a book you want to learn from. 

How to Reverse Storyboard

1. Is there a book that’s similar to the book you want to write? Meaning: it takes place over the same amount of time, uses a single first person narrator (Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower), uses multiple first person narrators (Tom Perotta’s Election), uses multiple 3^rd person narrators (Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs), switches back and forth between two different plot lines (Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain), uses an inner and outer frame (A.S. Byatt’s Possession), uses multiple 3^rd person narrators in non-chronological order (Dan Chaon’s You Remind Me of Me), etc. Choose a book that does the one thing you’re most nervous about, the thing you feel the least sure of in your own writing.
2. Don’t pick a book because just because it’s got a similar setting or the character is the same age as your main character. This is about understanding structure.
3. Read the book once for pleasure.
4. Read the book again using index cards or post-its (real ones or virtual ones) in order to thumbnail each scene in the book. Take note of WHO (pov character and who s/he is interacting with), WHAT (1-2 sentence scene summary), WHERE (setting), WHY & HOW (purpose the scene fulfills in the overall narrative). Make sure you number the cards in the corner, in case they get out of order.
5. If using different colored cards/post-it’s helps you further visualize, great.
6. Determine what the major plot points are in the book. Narrow it down to 3-6 “big moments” in the book. Mark them.
7. Lay out the cards. Move them around. If there are 30 chapters in the book, lay out the cards in 30 descending stacks.
8. Now, what’s Act 1, Act II, Act III? 
9. Try rearranging the book in some other order—Dan Chaon’s You Remind Me of Me arranged chronologically, or Silence of the Lambs with a prologue.
10. What can this book teach you about how to begin your novel, how to keep your reader interested in the middle, and how to work toward a satisfying end?

Storyboarding Really Works

In a recent interview, writer Rebecca Skloot says she knew “very early on that I wanted [The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks] to be a disjointed structure that told multiple stories at once and jumped around in time between different characters.” 

As soon as I realized I had to structure the book in a disjointed way, I went to a local bookseller, explained the story to her and said, Find me any novel you can find that takes place in multiple time periods, with multiple characters and voices, and jumps around a lot. So she did. Some of the most helpful books early on for me were Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg; Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich; As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner; Home at the End of the World and The Hours, by Michael Cunningham. I read a long list of similarly structured novels that all proved helpful in some way or another: The Grass Dancer, by Susan Power; How to Make an American Quilt, by Whitney Otto; Oral History, by Lee Smith. 

Skloot knew the book was going to be a braid of three narratives (the story of Skloot and Deborah; the story of Henrietta and the cells; and the story of Henrietta’s family), and so she “mapped it all out with index cards.”

There it is. A bestseller. Three timelines. Three colors.

For the last year, my students have been completing reverse storyboards of published novels and novels in stories. I have found that it works like nothing else to help them move from “just reading” books passively—in order to be entertained or to interpret meaning—to reading books actively—in order to figure out how they work, how they will read, how to set up the effect they want the book to have. By breaking a novel down into its component parts, you contrive a way “to see” the narrative in one fell swoop. It’s like taking an engine apart and putting it back together again.

Here are some other blog posts on this topic:

My grad students reverse storyboarding.

My undergrad students doing it.

I’m looking forward to a large class on December 10. Please come and learn how to write your big thing.

I’ve decided that my initial post was accurate, but vague, so I’m going to say some specific and potentially provocative things about that interesting little document called a Statement of Purpose. If you agree or disagree with me, great! Put it in the comments. I’d love to get some more do’s and don’ts archived here. 

Don’t talk about how, as a child, you loved to read and write. Everyone says that. For perhaps the first time in your life, you’ll be with your kind of people! I know that it’s important to YOU that your journey started when you were a kid, but it is not as important to me as what happened to you from that point on.

Do talk about who you read now, who influenced you. Everyone’s journey starts in a very similar way (at the library, at a desk making up weird stories, etc.), but then those journeys take lots of interesting forks. Don’t focus on how your story started, on your Act I. Focus on Act II. Because what you’re trying for is an Act III.

Don’t say that your goal is to teach creative writing, eventually becoming a professor. I know that I might be the only writer you have ever known personally, but that doesn’t mean that “being a writer” means “being a college professor.” You don’t aspire to it in the same way that say, you aspire to become a high school teacher. Your first priority is to self-identify as a writer. Aspiring to become a professor of creative writing is not a reasonable goal right now, the academic job market being what it is, and every time I read it in an SOP, I cringe inwardly and think that the applicant must be either naive or ill-informed. An MFA (even a PhD in Creative Writing) guarantees nothing in terms of employment, and you should understand that from the outset. It’s not a pre-professional degree (like law school or med school) so disabuse yourself of this notion. 

Do say that you want to be a writer, that you intend to pursue a literary life, and that the MFA is a step in that direction. If you become a writer, meaningful work of some kind will follow. An academic career is predicated on you becoming an expert in your field. Focus on that. 

Don’t try to talk abstractly about what creative writing is, what it’s for, what it all means. You’re not ready for that yet, and you’re avoiding the topic of this essay, which is to state YOUR purpose, not the purpose of the discipline or the activity of writing.

Do talk about yourself. We want to know you, and you have to tell us concretely and specifically who you are. Where you worked. Where you went to school, who you studied with. What you read. What you’ve been doing since. How you have been making a literary life for yourself.

Don’t talk about how much your writing life has sucked since you got out of college and how swell grad school will be. Grad school is not utopia. If you weren’t writing outside the structure of “class,” if you need to be “in school” in order to write, then I think that means you are not in the place you need to be in your adult life in order to make the most use of a graduate education. And especially do not say that everything about whether or not you become a writer is riding on my decision to admit you. That’s emotional manipulation–and it’s not true anyway.

Do say that that writing outside the MFA program hasn’t been easy. Say that having spent some time “writing in the cold” (as my teacher Ted Solotaroff called it), you have learned to appreciate the opportunity, the time, the community, the mentoring, the rigorous training that graduate school will afford you.

Don’t say that you are going to graduate school with either a.) a very very specific plan, or b.) no plan at all. I often tell my students that graduate school is the place where you go to polish a manuscript, not to generate one. But if your statement of purpose gives the impression that you will single-mindedly focus on your work-in-progress, then the question arises: why attend an MFA program and take a bunch of classes taught by veteran writer/teachers who might have something different to teach you? On the other hand, if your statement of purpose gives the impression that you have no work-in-progress at all, no sense of your subject matter or aesthetic, then the question arises: are you only pursuing a degree so someone will make you write? My preference when reading SOPs and Writing Samples is for students who DO have a sense of what kind of book they are coming to grad school to write, but I know that other faculty don’t like this at all, wishing instead for a “blank slate” upon which they might inscribe themselves.

Do strike a balance between being dedicated to a project and being open to the possibilities. And know that there’s absolutely no way to know how a given admissions committee will react to your particular plan. You can’t know. Just like with the submission and editorial process, you put your work into the world and see where and with whom it sticks. If you’re going to grad school to polish a novel and start another one, and the faculty aren’t “simpatico“ with that plan, then that’s not the right place for you anyway.

Don’t write a boilerplate statement of purpose and send to each school.

Do address what each particular school has to offer you. Mention the name of the literary magazine or a particular course you’re interested in taking. Mention the name of a faculty member you’re interested in studying with–while bearing in mind that s/he might not be the one reading applications that year, but rather another writer in that genre who wonders, “Hey, what am I? Chopped liver?” If the city or region has a particular attraction for you, mention that. 

Don’t go on and on, not about anything, but especially about the writing sample. Trust me, we’re reading the writing sample. You shouldn’t explain it much. We’re reading so much, so many pages, actually, that if I look down and see that your statement of purpose has some glorious white space on the page, I will be inclined to fall in love with you a little. 

Despite my previous advice–to imagine the SOP as you talking to me–don’t forget that what you’re really doing here is talking to strangers. Maybe you have a great anecdote about what a strange child you were, and this relates to how and why you became a writer. Dan Chaon talks about being a strange kid in an interview that appears in The Fitting Ends, how moments such as these were part of his journey in becoming a writer. But when Dan tells this story, he’s doing so in an entirely different context than that of your Statement of Purpose. He’s telling these stories as an adult, as a respected and well-published writer, as a college professor. If you told the same story in your SOP–about purposely getting lost in a department store and refusing to appear even when your mother called hysterically for you–I might be inclined to wonder about your mental stability. 

Yes, writers are strange creatures, but try not to come off as crazy. Stay classy. Do remember that the people reading this SOP don’t know you, and they especially don’t want to invite unnecessary drama into their lives. 

Do try to keep it under a page. Do make it easy on the eyes.

Don’t write any sentences like this: “I am applying to your program in order to avail myself of the variety of opportunities you will provide in terms of my achieving my ultimate goal of being a published writer in the 21st century, whatever that means now or will mean in the probable future.”

I’m not going to rewrite that sentence for you. I think you can figure it out for yourself. And if you can’t–well then, young grasshopper, God help you.

[Here is an earlier post on requesting Letters of Recommendation.]