Notes from AWP 2009

Feb 17th, 2009 by admin in Hope, Teaching, Writing

these are my notes from the writing conference…

 

“A word is an elegy for what it signifies.”

 

“To overdescribe is a kind of death sentence for the experience.”

 

“Writing is our responsibility as human beings to answer for and to our lives.”

 

“The personal essay is, for me, a way to think out loud about life’s imponderables.” –Steven Harvey

 

 

Bausch Weir Panel on Fictional Gesture

 

Story is a fabrication arriving at a truth; it is simple the same way virtue is simple.

 

Go home and write. Be naked. Recover the innocence of a child. Be literal. Don’t think about the party. Don’t think at all. Not about any of this. Be true to the moment. It’s not a thinking thing. Just do the work. Say you are going to work tomorrow and if you do your subconscious will work for you all night long. If you do not write the next day, your subconscious will f++k with you all day. I’m sorry. Excuse me. Excuse my language. I did not mean to say the word work.

 

You must have raw interest in the other person revealed.

 

A good gesture: “she cut a large slice of watermelon and ate it slowly.” He took his fingers and ran them through each change return at each telephone.

 

“Misplaced concreteness” (example of woman eating bagel at computer); problems of a close third so close you can’t see anything. You can’t have the description be predictable. It’s the opposite of hemingway’s iceberg: the plain stage directions are all the mundane details—7/8 of the iceberg is showing, it’s all above water.  “She chewed. She swallowed. Then, she took another bite.”

 

What she KNOWS makes the reader turn the page, not what she doesn’t know.

 

Think in terms of trouble and context, not describing. Keep yourself in the deep heart of the person in the room who is the most pain. Every object in the room is metonymical. The hospital room with the happy new mother; the hospital room with the dying old man. Same room. Grass/bed/walls/art will all look so different.

 

Look closely at the ordinary in order to discover again and again the extraordinary moments are in every single moment.

 

Dream it up.  “I just dream it up!” Read it whole. Look it over cold. Read it again in order get smarter about what it is you have got. That’s the only way.

 

Novels that are good novels make terrible movies; novels that aren’t good make good movies because of the fictional gesture thing.dscn0523

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1 Comment

  • Also from Bausch/Weir/Zeidner panel on the fictional gesture, some fantastic examples of gestures that WORK:

    Nabokov, from Lolita: the paragraph when Humbert meets Mrs. Hayes;
    Hemingways’ Hills Like White Elephants, the whole story;
    Last paragraph of O’Connors A Good Man is Hard to Find;

    And whatever piece of his own Richard Bausch was reading from: I had a nightmare about it, so it clearly worked for me.

    ed