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Edwin Sanchez “Making Drama”

May 27, 2015 By Word Cafe

Edwin Sanchez “Making Drama”

May 21, 2015

Playwright Edwin Sanchez gave us a tantalizing and hilarious sneak peek at his forthcoming novel Diary of a Puerto Rican Demigod, along with some wonderfully down-to-earth advice about writing (“You just sit down and do it.”)

Do playwrights and fiction writers approach their work differently? Not really, says Eddie. “We all have the same box of crayons. We just use different ones for different things.” For him, the joy of writing fiction was getting to go inside a character’s head.

When he teaches playwriting, he asks his students the following questions:

— Who’s the main character?

— What does he want more than life itself?

— What’s stopping him from getting it?

Nina observed that the character’s obstacle can be internal–something he’s scared of or struggles with–an outside circumstance, or both at once. The bigger the obstacles, the better the drama.

Eddie often starts out by writing a monologue for his lead character (“A good monologue is like an aria.”) Then he starts thinking about who’s hearing this monologue and how they might respond. We talked about the elasticity of writing for theatre. It’s a collaborative form, and a script isn’t fully alive until it’s performed. Plays take place in present tense, in real time and space, and no two performances are alike. Different actors and directors may approach the same character in ways that surprise you, for better or worse. But when you write a novel, the buck stops with you. “You don’t get to say it was miscast,” Eddie said.

Diary of a Puerto Rican Demigod is distinctly not miscast.

EDDIE’S EXERCISE:

Write a character’s dream (or nightmare) as a scene, monologue, or poem.

NINA’S EXERCISE:

Write a two-character scene in which one character has something the other wants. What does the second character do or say to get it, without ever coming out and asking “Can I have that?”

As usual, the concentration was intense as a roomful of writers went to work on these prompts. As Eddie and I sat and talked quietly, one of the vintage signs on the wall caught his eye. So here is Exercise #3:

Write a short play entitled EAT CHICKEN DINNER CANDY.

Eamon Grennan “Detail”

May 17, 2015 By Word Cafe

May 14, 2015

Read Nina Shengold’s Chronogram profile
Photo credit: Jennifer May

“I’m going to read a few poems for about three hours,” declared Eamon Grennan. All of us laughed, but as soon as he started reading, we wished he actually would.

The Dublin-born poet and Vassar professor emeritus read five of his own poems: “Painter’s Diary,” “Swifts Over Dublin,” “Landscape With Teeth,” “Detail,” and “The Horse at Hand” (all but the last in his Out of Sight: New & Selected Poems), interleaving the poems with observations about their construction and our topic for the evening, Detail.

Eamon described “Painter’s Diary” as “a litany of what I could see,” likening it to collage, a medium he loves because “it forces a curious breakage–it breaks the logic, the linear.”

On “Swifts Over Dublin”: “All we’re trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.”

“Landscape Over Dublin” led to a riff on how to get out of a poem; he observed that he doesn’t know exactly what the final lines mean.

He described the prose poem “The Horse at Hand” as “another example of things piling up,” noting that it starts with a list of negatives, what the subject is not.

Of “Detail,” he said, “It’s really only about paying attention. You’re concentrating on craft, and suddenly, out of left field, the poem is telling you something else.” He used to tell his students at Vassar that poems need to have both data and rapture. “They have to be grounded and also able to levitate.”

Eamon often sets himself specific challenges: finish a poem every day for two years, then go back to see what you have and do a lot of editing, converting them all into poems of 13 lines (“disappointed sonnets”). These formal constraints, he says, give him “something to kick against.”

He also suggested reading writers’ journals and letters (Thoreau, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Keats, Wallace Stevens), looking at paintings, and going on walks. “When you don’t know what to do, you just set off,” he said. “Don’t think. Look. If you look hard enough, the thinking will come.”

THE EXERCISES:

Eamon read Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Gift,” which has, he says, “a kind of lift at the end.”

He asked us to start a poem with the line “It was that kind of day:”, write five more lines, and end with “Just ordinary light.”

Nina’s exercise: Describe an object in this room in vivid detail, without using any visual references at all. Since most of us rely on sight to describe the world, this is a way to stimulate the other senses. How does this object smell, sound, feel, taste? What does it do or suggest?

Pamela Erens “The Storyteller’s ‘I'”

May 13, 2015 By Word Cafe

May 7, 2015

Novelist Pamela Erens treated us to a reading of the opening of her brilliant novel The Virgins. Its narrator Bruce Bennett-Jones, a student at an elite 1970s prep school. Obsessed with the romance of fellow students Aviva Rossner and Seung Jung, Bruce not only describes his own encounters with these two outsiders (Jewish and Korean-American) but imagines what might have happened between them in sophisticated literary detail.

Pamela’s reading sparked a lively discussion on narrative voice, and the differences between first and third person. Nina observed that in cinematic terms, third person is a long shot or even an aerial view, where first person is a point-of-view shot, often a close-up. She also paraphrased Valerie Martin’s dictum that first person works especially well when someone is trying to justify their behavior.

The Virgins is narrated in first person by someone who uses third person to narrate scenes that he couldn’t have been privy to–Bruce is recreating the story of Seung and Aviva, for reasons that become evident as the story unfolds. This unusual narrative strategy was inspired by James Salter; Pamela named an English teacher at her fictional school after him in homage.

Her first novel, The Understory, also has a first-person male narrator, whose view of himself and the story’s events is extremely limited. She finds writing male narrators “very freeing. I felt less exposed because I knew they weren’t me.”

One of Pamela’s writing teachers assigned her to write prose in the style of various famous writers, including John Cheever and Eudora Welty. She found it a very useful way to analyze diction and prose rhythms, and took comfort in realizing that even when her classmates were imitating someone with a distinctive style, they still sounded like themselves.

There were some excellent questions from the group, including a discussion of writing first-person narration from the point of view of someone who wouldn’t have a sophisticated literary vocabulary, for instance a teenager. Pamela’s advice? “Don’t worry about it. The voice of a story is never identical to the voice of a character. It’s a translation of what that character is thinking and feeling. Prose that’s written as we really talk is not that interesting most of the time. Readers will always go with you if give more richness to the language.”

PAMELA’S EXERCISE:

1) List 4-6 basic attributes (gender, height, personality, etc) that are true of yourself.

2) Write a new list with the OPPOSITE of those attributes.

3) Choose an autobiographical event or situation you’ve wanted to write about and narrate it as this opposite persona.

NINA’S EXERCISE:

Think of a recent encounter you had with another person (buying shoes, arguing with a sibling, spotting someone on a train platform) and write it from the other person’s point of view.

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