Welcome to MFA Lore!
This is the very first post in the MFA Core section of Aimee Liu’s newsletter, where I share my legacy as a creative writing professor. The bulk of these posts are drawn from my correspondence with MFA students and teachers over 15 years, as I realized they contain nuggets of insight that will apply to anyone writing creative nonfiction or fiction.
Each post will focus on a particular writing challenge. Today’s challenge is Story Development. The student on the receiving end of this letter was just starting her MFA journey and had submitted several fledgling stories in various stages of development. I decided that my comments on certain key aspects of the most promising piece would be most useful to you.
I would love to hear from you if you find this post helpful or if it raises questions that you’d like me to address in future posts. I’ll also keep expanding this community by interviewing some of my former students, faculty, and fellow writers, editors, and agents I’ve worked with over the years.
Here, then, is your first excerpt from The MFA Archives— sections from an actual MFA letter sent to one of my first-semester students.
Promise
We have pay dirt. The narrator is the teenage daughter of a KKK accountant. Brilliant! And her voice, her ATTITUDE are vividly clear and ring true from the first lines. Her voice alone tells us she has a stake in what happens. Bravo! And a clear unexpected and tension-packed situation: picking up trash to prove the KKK’s bona fides as a service org.
There are so many ways to go with this piece. It could be a solo story. It could be a chapter in a young adult book all told in this voice. It could represent one voice in a book told by several voices – including her father’s or uncle’s – that reaches an older audience. Depends on how deeply you understand this character and her family, what your ultimate objective is in writing her story. I’m reading The Bee Season right now – completely different world, but beautifully detailed – a family told from the POV of each eccentric individual, but via an omniscient narrator whose voice holds everyone together.
As you develop your story, control the SEQUENCE of scenes and reflections. Please don’t get ahead of the story, unless there’s a strong reason to do so. Please build your scenes carefully, from beginning to end. Don’t loop backward just to tell us what we already know. We know that Dad wants to turn the Klan into the Elks because nobody thinks of the KKK as a kindly service org. You don’t need to say essentially the same thing on p. 2 – unless you can deepen it.
Characterization
Remember that your characters need to be fully realized, with history, desires, agendas, tricks, motivations, ulterior motives, Achilles heels, pretenses, charms, and tempers. They represent the forces that are pushing our narrator in one direction. She has to have her own problems, motives, agendas that push her in another.
Our narrator here is a girl nobody respects and who would rather die than ask for anybody’s respect. Why? What makes her tick? How does her clockwork get rearranged in the course of this day? What does she learn that she never knew? What preconceptions get overturned? What price does she have to pay? How will this day change her life? You need to have all this in mind as you rewrite.
MAKE EVERY LINE MATTER. MAKE EVERY ACTION CHANGE SOMEONE. MAKE EVERY CHANGE CAUSE AN EFFECT IN SOMEONE ELSE. THINK STIMULUS, RESPONSE. AND SURPRISE.
Telling Details
When we get out on the road, please use many, many fabulous concrete details to paint the scene. Show us used condoms with lipstick smears, sunshine that drips from the cellophane candy wrappers, smells of grape soda in dad’s burp, ants carrying chunks of Kentucky Fried Chicken like soldiers in Pharaoh’s army. What the narrator notices tells us who she is as well as what her world looks, smells, feels, and tastes like. EVERY WORD NEEDS TO BE INTERESTING AND SERVE MORE THAN 1 PURPOSE.
Focusing the Protagonist Narrator
If she’s telling this story in present tense, it’s fine for her to say what she thinks early on, only to have it overturned at the end.
If she’s telling the story in past tense, make sure she doesn’t give the ending away, but also don’t let her lie outright – unless you mean for her to be a crafty unreliable narrator. Example: Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier opening with “This is the saddest story ever told,” which is pure bull.
Whatever her tense, “I don’t know” is a cop out unless there is an interesting and relevant reason WHY she doesn’t know what’s happening. She’s our narrator, so she has to know the critical details or at least show us how she tried her damnedest to find out – and in the process discovered something even more important or interesting.
At the same time, the narrator mustn’t tip off the reader by predicting exactly what’s coming. E.g., when a protagonist expresses a specific fear – the driver’s a serial killer, someone’s hurt or drowned on the lake, that better be telling the reader what’s NOT coming. Never let the story deliver exactly what’s expected. What happens has to surprise us and the characters, both.
Bottom line, our narrator needs to exert a lot more effort, exercise a lot higher emotions, trigger unexpected consequences, and come out of the story a changed person.
Your Story Plan
Sketch out a plan for your central story as soon as possible. By this I mean:
- Key characters, and what they want/what motivates them
- Where the story is set, and when
- Precipitating event (2 kids drown; Phillip is killed; Dad’s disbarred from the KKK), and what crisis it creates for the main characters (Edie’s responsible for the deaths, Lynnette has a stroke when she hears the news; Uncle decides to infiltrate the Klan and seek revenge)
- Who’s telling this story, and why
- What is the governing tone – drama, tragedy, comedy, coming of age?
- Why do you care/what about this tale has you hooked and won’t let go?
It’s worth thinking through this plan before you start writing. The answers can change as you go along, but this process should help ground you. Then push deeper, interrogate the text, allow your subconscious to surprise you, and really wrestle with those surprises.
That’s your dose of craft advice for today. Thanks for reading, and write on!
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Love this new series concept and looking forward to reading this!