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Novel Writing
the kislist volume 46
By Kiini Ibura Salaam
As unbelievable as it may seem, I am STILL in
the race with this novel. It has been quite a long time. I have
written three full drafts while in five different countries.
I've been angry, optimistic, threatened, confronted, and
exhausted by the process. I've had three agents and two editors
read it and give me feedback. And I am still in the race!
[Applause]
Thank you. I feel proud from that simple achievement alone.
My mentor for this upcoming semester--or project period, as
Antioch calls it--is Frank Gaspar. Frank is a novelist and poet.
He is a warm individual who has a laid back demeanor and a deep
knowledge of and love for literature. He said in his many
decades of teaching creative writing there are three things that
he's seen create failure for writers. Unfortunately, I only
remember two of them.
1. Writers don't finish their novels.
They quit after the first draft. They quit after the third
draft. They don't commit themselves to staying until it's
complete.
2. Writers don't use critique to
improve their writing. They emerge from a workshop or from an
MFA program writing in exactly the same way they did when they
went in.
Last semester the critique from my writing group
("huh?" "we don't get it" "does
speculative fiction mean we have to speculate as to what's
happening in the story?") and the feedback from my mentor,
helped me realize I did not have a character narrating my novel,
I had a voice.
The voice of the narrator spoke, but she was
never embodied as a person. Not even in my head did she have a
complete identity. Aha! I thought. Because structure and a
throughline is my big problem, I thought this was an important
step forward. You can't have a throughline without a character.
So I saved two characters from a neglected short story and used
them to animate the story. So far it has been working pretty
well.
During this residency period--two weeks in December--I worked
with Nancy Zafris as my workshop leader. Nancy looks at a story
like a fish.
The top arc of the fish's body is the plot,
the bottom arc of the fish's body is the theme.
Ideally, the plot drives the story, but recedes at the end when
the theme (and the resonance of the story) rises up to meet the
plot.
Looking at the story like a fish helps to
pinpoint where a story might be weak or lacking.
Commercial fiction--Nancy
says--tends to be all plot. Imaginative stories which move
characters from plot point to plot point without much resonance
or reflection.
Literary fiction tends to be
all theme and little or no plot. Nancy's goal as a workshop
leader is to have our stories have both, and use each to maximum
effect.
It was a great exercise to take everyone's story apart and try
to figure out the working parts. In my case, I was intentionally
trying to get from my characters to a certain place so after the
first half of my chapter all the resonance/theme dropped out and
I had only plot.
Nancy went on to draw the characters in
relationship to each other. Nancy likes to identify character
triangles. Triads hold a special tension that two characters or
one character alone doesn't. So Nancy identified the triangle in
my story and then demonstrated how the fourth character created
a second triangle and intensified the theme. Then she
demonstrated how a fifth character totally took the story and
ran off the edge of the page with it--with no resonance and no
relationship to the theme.
Literary writers like passive characters, Nancy asserts. She
believes literary writers are mostly observers, so we write
observers. We like to have our characters reflecting and
thinking and dwelling in deep thoughts, but nothing
happens.
She classified all the characters in the
workshop. Out of 8 stories, 6 featured passive main characters,
1 featured a partially passive main character and the last
featured an active main character. My main character goes into a
coma . . . how passive can you get? I don't think there's
inherently anything wrong with passive characters, but if all
you write is passive characters, then you don't have much choice
in your expressions or much control over your craft.
Frank furthered this conversation by talking about throughline
as the engine that drives the character forward. Throughlines,
he says, need to be simple. A man wants to catch a whale.
In Moby Dick, this simple throughline is the
engine for pages and pages of ruminations on whales and the
meaning of the universe, and more. The engine is what pulls the
reader through the story and anchors the writer. He gave an
example, a family searching for redemption is not a throughline
. . . it's a theme. But a family fighting to regain their
farm, is a throughline. It is still redemption they want, but
it's in the form of something tangible.
I can hear a million dissenting writers saying, no you don't
have to write a novel like that. There's lot of great literature
that doesn't fit into that category. And I am certain that is
true. But it just so happens that I've been writing in circles,
slowly and slowly coming to some form of forward motion and I'm
seeking structure for this novel. It just so happens that these
ideas and suggestions address the aspect of my novel that isn't
working and gives me tools for fiddling around and finding my
way. Later having found my way, I'll be able to do what I want,
but I would be ecstatic to simply create a novel that works. A
book-length piece that zings and sings.
So I'm in L.A., meditating on throughlines and preparing to
return to NYC. I've decided to take the upcoming semester off
from my 9-5 so that I can focus on my novel. While it is humanly
possible for me to do this degree while working, it is not
possible for me to apply myself to my work while doing the 9-5.
My writing has suffered, and I'm taking a break to invest in my
novel. Best wishes for the new year to all of you.
Be well. Be love(d).
posted kwanzaa 2004 kiiniiburasalaam@hotmail.com
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher
By
Leonard Harris
and Charles Molesworth
Alain
L. Locke (1886-1954), in his famous 1925 anthology
The New Negro, declared that “the pulse of the
Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem.” Often called
the father of the Harlem Renaissance, Locke had his
finger directly on that pulse, promoting, influencing,
and sparring with such figures as
Langston Hughes,
Zora Neale Hurston,
Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé, William Grant Still,
Booker T.
Washington,
W. E. B. Du
Bois, Ralph Bunche, and John Dewey. The long-awaited
first biography of this extraordinarily gifted
philosopher and writer, Alain L. Locke narrates the
untold story of his profound impact on twentieth-century
America’s cultural and intellectual life.
Leonard Harris
and Charles Molesworth trace this story through Locke’s
Philadelphia upbringing, his undergraduate years at
Harvard—where William James helped spark his influential
engagement with pragmatism—and his tenure as the first
African American Rhodes Scholar. The heart of their
narrative illuminates Locke’s heady years in 1920s New
York City and his forty-year career at Howard
University, where he helped spearhead the adult
education movement of the 1930s and wrote on topics
ranging from the philosophy of value to the theory of
democracy. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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