Thank you to everyone who is participating in this experiment. While those of you who are not registered for the class are welcome to check this out, this is a thread for the students with questions after Session 2 and so just know that context may be missing. Recordings of the classes are available for a limited time if the conversation gets you interested—contact Kate Mabus at the Shipman Agency if you’d like to attend that way: kate@theshipmanagency.com.
Something I meant to say specifically about Luster and X is that both seem to my mind to be about gender, sex, relationships, work and belonging in very different ways but ways that are generative. To the extent that I want to respond to a novel with a novel, for example, in the way Elif Batuman has spoken of, those are two novels I feel myself responding to in my next works.
And if you’d like to prepare for the historical fiction letter next week, do check out my essay on historical fiction, “Children of the Century.”
I look forward to your questions and conversation,
My story is conceived in relationship to a decision to tell the story, and so the distance described. Here is always the distance between the conclusion of the events in the story, and then the time it takes, for the narrator to absorb the events such that they can tell a story about them. So a question Josh, herself is how much time has transpired since the end of the events described in the story, and then how much time has passed such that the story becomes a story in the mind of the narrator. We aren’t immediately able to tell a story, necessarily after the events conclude. In fact, we may not even know there’s a story there until some piece of information illuminates what happened to us across the grade distance, and then we see the story that was always there. So I suppose you could say there’s two different distances, One between the conclusion of the event, and the telling, and one between the conclusion of the event, in the illumination of the event that inspires the telling. I’m so glad the course was interesting for you!
Hi Robin, thanks for joining the class. Happy to answer this. I'm running a little behind because I got caught in the travel chaos with the snows this last week.
The distance is between the person speaking to the reader and the person the speaker was. In many ways it is the distance set by choosing the point of telling: where is the speaker speaking from later in their lives? How do they decide to narrate the story as a result and also why do they decide to do it--what motive do they have in the telling?
This has been such a fun series. I love thinking about the present tense as more than a trick of immediacy, but as way of giving the reader a guided tour of the experience. I look forward to reading more of these novels and writing more memories. I honestly thought that since Bildungsromans and Kunstlerromans were narratives of youth, those forms had to be put away when writing about older people. There must be a whole undiscovered country there.
Hi Alex, thank you so much for this rich and spiraling course. (It reminded me of circular storytelling like in Vedantic classes I've had with Indian teachers--where all the parts speak to the whole through a wandering and dense path.) I'm glad I was able to join partway through and have just caught up on the second session. I was hoping you could illuminate a little more how you were speaking about the "distance between the narrator and narratee inside the first person." I'm thinking about this particularly with memoir, this idea of the narrator who (of course) eventually becomes the writer, who has lived through it and knows a lot more than the narrator on the page in any one place in the book. I've been working with this tension (which I feel more as emotion that hasn't yet found its place rather than tension per se) and I'm very invested in keeping the adult me out of the storytelling in the obvious ways so that time, place, and understanding are more closely linked to the age of the narrator. And yet, and yet...there are subtle ways to "construct those surprises" as you said, and filter in some of the adult perspective in a way that the narrator and narratee conspire to create a more fully emotional arc. (Not to mention the blurring lines between narrator/naratee when it comes to the slipperiness of those 80-plus memories.) Can you speak more to this and how you feel it works on the page? I've looked for this in other memoirs and often find that either the memoir is an adult speaking about an adult experience, or an adult speaking about a younger experience into which they sometimes insert themselves with grown-up reflection that always feels jarring to me. (I am a fiction writer at heart, and want my book to feel absorbing and seamless.) And an aside, I grew up in southern Maine and had forgotten about the Hu Ke Lau until you just mentioned it!
Again, thank you for this course and for any more insight you might be able to share.
Thank you for this class. Your generosity throughout, especially with the depth of content in the first letter, has changed how I aspire to interact within a community of writers. Again, thank you.
Hi Alex, First off, thank you for a great series. I appreciate how much you delve into the literature in such detail to illustrate points about form. So often these conversations become very disconnected from close consideration of the literature, instead being more utilitarian and instructional. I wanted to ask about the exercise you suggested at the end of this last lesson, deconstructing Go Tell it on the Mountain and using it as a structural model. It seems to me you discuss something similar in your essay (chapter?) The Autobiography of My Novel, around utilizing mythology and The Bride of Lamermoor (also a fav of mine). I said they were similar sorts of exercises, but actually they seems almost opposite in important ways, which is what I want to ask about. Go Tell it on the Mountain is structurally quite complex, it's a structural complexity (stereoscopic- moving between perspective, time, place) that allows it's present to live in such a limited moment (that super limited timeframe, using one event as a sort of portal, is something I'm obsessed with...). But mythology, broad tragic narratives, are both huge, epic, universal, archetypal, often quite simple structurally (or maybe it just seems that way because they are so ingrained that they meet our expectations for structural organization more immediately? but often sastisfyingly so?). A writing teacher of mine once said to me, in the way instructors say things that they have said a million times before, literary fiction writes away from archetype, while genre fiction writes towards it (or something along those lines). How can you successfully utilize myth, mythic structures and archetypes without falling into the traps of cliche or predictablility?
I’m glad you feel that way, thank you. I highly recommend The King and the Corpse by Heinrich Zimmer and The Sadeian Woman by Angela Carter to anyone who wants to use myth in their work. It’s important to realize that when you write about myth or when you use it, what you’re doing is addressing the unwritten rules of the culture hidden inside of the myth. At the very least you’re reproducing them whether you know it or not, and so I think there’s much to be gained from that knowing.
Dear Alex, Thank you for two great sessions. You planted so many questions in my mind, so many ideas to chase down and follow. I appreciated what you said at the end, when responding to a question about which pitfalls to avoid: Stay in touch with your curiosity. No, it was stronger than that, more adamant. Keep your curiosity close. There may be no better piece of writing advice right now, when the possibilities are endless but pitfalls seem so, too. Thank you!!!
I really believe that in the writing of something that your own excitement about the idea can protect you from the pitfalls. One of the pitfalls is hesitating so much from fear that you don’t write. And so yes keep curiousity close but excitement too.
Sorry for the delay replying. I don’t know if I know how to answer this. I read, and what feels like the same way. I’ve always read, and it is hard to describe because it is so intimate to me. My reading was changed forever by a speed reading class Where we read sentences that were projected onto the wall at high rates of speed. And so there’s always a sense of acceleration. Maybe you could make your question more specific? Are you talking about what I read for when I read, when I choose a book ?
Thanks for you time and your answer. Truly, much appreciated!
Let me try again:
When I read, I underline a lot. I mark the quotes that I find fascinating or beautiful. I mark the descriptions that I find are incredibly clever. In other words, I leave little comments to myself while I'm reading.
Do you anything similar? Are there specific things, attributes, forms, that you pay attention to or that you are drawn to while you are reading?
And maybe a good question to consider that is also a prompt: what novels or books have you felt yourself drawn to respond to with a book of your own?
My story is conceived in relationship to a decision to tell the story, and so the distance described. Here is always the distance between the conclusion of the events in the story, and then the time it takes, for the narrator to absorb the events such that they can tell a story about them. So a question Josh, herself is how much time has transpired since the end of the events described in the story, and then how much time has passed such that the story becomes a story in the mind of the narrator. We aren’t immediately able to tell a story, necessarily after the events conclude. In fact, we may not even know there’s a story there until some piece of information illuminates what happened to us across the grade distance, and then we see the story that was always there. So I suppose you could say there’s two different distances, One between the conclusion of the event, and the telling, and one between the conclusion of the event, in the illumination of the event that inspires the telling. I’m so glad the course was interesting for you!
Thank you, yes! And as the distance changes, the story can continue to change as well. Nothing is fixed in that way. The relativity of storytelling...
Hi Robin, thanks for joining the class. Happy to answer this. I'm running a little behind because I got caught in the travel chaos with the snows this last week.
The distance is between the person speaking to the reader and the person the speaker was. In many ways it is the distance set by choosing the point of telling: where is the speaker speaking from later in their lives? How do they decide to narrate the story as a result and also why do they decide to do it--what motive do they have in the telling?
Thank you so much, Alex. Definitely something to sit with re: motive.
Hi Alex,
This has been such a fun series. I love thinking about the present tense as more than a trick of immediacy, but as way of giving the reader a guided tour of the experience. I look forward to reading more of these novels and writing more memories. I honestly thought that since Bildungsromans and Kunstlerromans were narratives of youth, those forms had to be put away when writing about older people. There must be a whole undiscovered country there.
Hi Alex, thank you so much for this rich and spiraling course. (It reminded me of circular storytelling like in Vedantic classes I've had with Indian teachers--where all the parts speak to the whole through a wandering and dense path.) I'm glad I was able to join partway through and have just caught up on the second session. I was hoping you could illuminate a little more how you were speaking about the "distance between the narrator and narratee inside the first person." I'm thinking about this particularly with memoir, this idea of the narrator who (of course) eventually becomes the writer, who has lived through it and knows a lot more than the narrator on the page in any one place in the book. I've been working with this tension (which I feel more as emotion that hasn't yet found its place rather than tension per se) and I'm very invested in keeping the adult me out of the storytelling in the obvious ways so that time, place, and understanding are more closely linked to the age of the narrator. And yet, and yet...there are subtle ways to "construct those surprises" as you said, and filter in some of the adult perspective in a way that the narrator and narratee conspire to create a more fully emotional arc. (Not to mention the blurring lines between narrator/naratee when it comes to the slipperiness of those 80-plus memories.) Can you speak more to this and how you feel it works on the page? I've looked for this in other memoirs and often find that either the memoir is an adult speaking about an adult experience, or an adult speaking about a younger experience into which they sometimes insert themselves with grown-up reflection that always feels jarring to me. (I am a fiction writer at heart, and want my book to feel absorbing and seamless.) And an aside, I grew up in southern Maine and had forgotten about the Hu Ke Lau until you just mentioned it!
Again, thank you for this course and for any more insight you might be able to share.
Thank you for this class. Your generosity throughout, especially with the depth of content in the first letter, has changed how I aspire to interact within a community of writers. Again, thank you.
Hi Alex, First off, thank you for a great series. I appreciate how much you delve into the literature in such detail to illustrate points about form. So often these conversations become very disconnected from close consideration of the literature, instead being more utilitarian and instructional. I wanted to ask about the exercise you suggested at the end of this last lesson, deconstructing Go Tell it on the Mountain and using it as a structural model. It seems to me you discuss something similar in your essay (chapter?) The Autobiography of My Novel, around utilizing mythology and The Bride of Lamermoor (also a fav of mine). I said they were similar sorts of exercises, but actually they seems almost opposite in important ways, which is what I want to ask about. Go Tell it on the Mountain is structurally quite complex, it's a structural complexity (stereoscopic- moving between perspective, time, place) that allows it's present to live in such a limited moment (that super limited timeframe, using one event as a sort of portal, is something I'm obsessed with...). But mythology, broad tragic narratives, are both huge, epic, universal, archetypal, often quite simple structurally (or maybe it just seems that way because they are so ingrained that they meet our expectations for structural organization more immediately? but often sastisfyingly so?). A writing teacher of mine once said to me, in the way instructors say things that they have said a million times before, literary fiction writes away from archetype, while genre fiction writes towards it (or something along those lines). How can you successfully utilize myth, mythic structures and archetypes without falling into the traps of cliche or predictablility?
I’m glad you feel that way, thank you. I highly recommend The King and the Corpse by Heinrich Zimmer and The Sadeian Woman by Angela Carter to anyone who wants to use myth in their work. It’s important to realize that when you write about myth or when you use it, what you’re doing is addressing the unwritten rules of the culture hidden inside of the myth. At the very least you’re reproducing them whether you know it or not, and so I think there’s much to be gained from that knowing.
Dear Alex, Thank you for two great sessions. You planted so many questions in my mind, so many ideas to chase down and follow. I appreciated what you said at the end, when responding to a question about which pitfalls to avoid: Stay in touch with your curiosity. No, it was stronger than that, more adamant. Keep your curiosity close. There may be no better piece of writing advice right now, when the possibilities are endless but pitfalls seem so, too. Thank you!!!
I really believe that in the writing of something that your own excitement about the idea can protect you from the pitfalls. One of the pitfalls is hesitating so much from fear that you don’t write. And so yes keep curiousity close but excitement too.
Excitement, yes! Sorry, if I misremembered your original point.
Thank you for attending! One last letter from me on Monday for you all.
Hi Alexander,
I'd love to know more about *how* you read.
Besides enjoying and absorbing the narrative, what else are you thinking about?
Also... I loved being a part of this. Thank you for sharing your wisdom.
If you have time, I'd be interested in this :)
Sorry for the delay replying. I don’t know if I know how to answer this. I read, and what feels like the same way. I’ve always read, and it is hard to describe because it is so intimate to me. My reading was changed forever by a speed reading class Where we read sentences that were projected onto the wall at high rates of speed. And so there’s always a sense of acceleration. Maybe you could make your question more specific? Are you talking about what I read for when I read, when I choose a book ?
Sorry for the typos, I dictated this and autocorrect also has its way with it.
Thanks for you time and your answer. Truly, much appreciated!
Let me try again:
When I read, I underline a lot. I mark the quotes that I find fascinating or beautiful. I mark the descriptions that I find are incredibly clever. In other words, I leave little comments to myself while I'm reading.
Do you anything similar? Are there specific things, attributes, forms, that you pay attention to or that you are drawn to while you are reading?
Thank you, Alex.