How to Write Authentic Fiction: Trust Your Characters, Welcome Surprise

Let me take you inside an MFA packet exchange

Photo by Kathrine Fraser on Unsplash

The most important work you do as a writer is just sitting with your characters and scenes, gently pushing yourself out of the way, and letting the talk and colors and sounds and smells and problems and longings and dirt and light and bitchiness and horror and life and death well up from inside the story.

Dear Loreates,

One of my promises here at MFA Lore is to take readers inside the MFA process. For me and my students, the packet exchange was core to that process. Each of my students would send me about 20 pages of creative work every month. In response, I’d send a packet letter of feedback, along with their marked-up pages. By the time they graduated from our low-residency program, each student had a portfolio of about 100 pages of editorial advice from acclaimed faculty authors, all focused on the student’s own creative writing. This treasure trove could guide them for years.

What makes this process so valuable is that it becomes a documented conversation specifically targeted to your work. Packets prepare students for the editorial back-and-forth they’ll experience with agents and editors as their work transitions from revision to publication. The critical ingredient is mutual investment.

As an MFA advisor I felt I was making the same kind of personal investment in my students that an agent or editor makes in writers they represent. In all three cases, feedback serves the two-fold purpose of 1) highlighting and clarifying the wonderful and 2) identifying and addressing the problematic elements. This involves much more than the casual cheer-leading that goes on in many writers’ groups. The packet exchange is an expression of engaged partnership.

This sense of partnership is why I’m still in touch with so many of my students years— even decades— after their graduations. One of those beloved students is Kakwasi Somadhi, now a published author and a creative writing professor herself. And Kakwasi has graciously agreed to let me shared excerpted passages from her MFA thesis novel (now published as Coming Forth by Day), along with my notes, so you can see, below, how much a packet exchange offers.

I also invited Kakwasi to share her thoughts as she reviewed our very first packet exchange. She replied with this fabulous story [my favorite bit is the “drink for two people”!]:

I reread your comments in my first packet over and over. I took them to heart back in 2007, but I must say, it was refreshing and inspiring to read them now after completing and publishing the novel.

After reading the following advice back then, "The most important work you do as a writer is just sitting with your characters ...and let the characters tell you where they want to go, who they need to fight, what they want to try next," I sat down in my family room with a drink for two people, pads of paper, and several pens. There, over several weeks, I "interviewed" my major characters one by one, offered them a drink: tea, coffee, wine, asked them questions, and quietly waited for responses. When I'd feel something, I'd begin writing. It was sort of like the automatic writing done by some fortune tellers. That activity helped me get beyond my own awkward self consciousness. I repeated the activity multiple times as I wrote the book, and it was especially helpful when I'd hit a block.

The published novel is significantly different from the early drafts you critiqued. I simply couldn't continue the book with Loretha [the protagonist] already deceased, and there was a point at which she told me that. So she's alive when the novel begins and ends, although it is clear her days are numbered. You may or may not recall that you suggested I change her name from Louisa to Loretha, but other characters' names changed as well, and the title of the book changed from Daybreak to Coming Forth by Day.

The novel, published in 2014, has had modest success, but I plan to relaunch it, this time with a stronger marketing strategy in place that includes an audiobook and a consistent online presence via a website. The link below is to the African American Literature Bookclub site, where I have an author page:

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AALBC

Here is a thumbnail sketch of Kakwasi’s novel. Use this LINK to learn more.

Coming Forth by Day is a sweeping story of love, dangerous secrets, and social transformation during the sixties and seventies. When Loretha Mae Emmitt discovers she’s been subjected to lethal medical experimentation, her rage ignites courage she never knew she possessed. While she faces her mortality by becoming an outspoken advocate for health care and patients’ rights, her transformation has unexpected effects on her troubled revolutionary lover— and on the son of the physician who experimented on her as a child.

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Would you like an MFA-level response to your work?

Becoming a Premium Member of the MFA Lore community will entitle you to Aimee’s written feedback on your query and up to 5 pages (1250 words) of your creative work. Your “Take 5 Packet Letter” will highlight both the Strengths and the Opportunities in your work, helping you determine whether it’s time to “press send” to agents or to reorient your revision. Subscribe at the Premium level or upgrade today.

Inside an MFA packet exchange

My goal in this post is to take you inside the MFA student-advisor partnership. To that end, I’ve selected passages from my letter to Kakwasi that, I suspect, will resonate with you. I’ve bold-faced my advice and italicized the sections of the thesis I’m referencing.