Steven Wingate
fiction & more
Readings/Workshops
Whatever people may say about the Internet, there is still no substitute for standing (or even sitting) in front of an audience and reading your work. No amount of bits and bytes can match the power of visual and vocal contact, and I cannot imagine any better way to encounter my audience than in person. To facilitate this, I plan to travel as far and wide with Wifeshopping as my schedule will allow, visiting bookstores and reading groups throughout the country. (That schedule, as it develops, will be posted on the News & Events page.) Previous reading venues have included the Denver's Tattered Cover Bookstore, the Boulder Bookstore, the Boulder Public Library, the University of Colorado, LA's sadly defunct Big & Tall Books, and the countless coffeehouses in both Colorado and LA where I cut my teeth as a reader. After a decade of teaching university-level writing workshops, I am also eager to take Wifeshopping on the road and share what I have learned about the craft of fiction with students at all levels. In addition to traditional fiction workshops and one-on-one meetings with student writers, my repertoire includes presentations and projects on the writing process, self-editing, character development, and navigating the publishing world. Please Contact me if you are interested in a visit; I promise an engaging and fruitful time for your school, group, or conference.
TEACHING Q & A (special thanks to PEH)
Q: What do you feel is the single most important thing that new writers need to learn?
A: Patience. Writing fiction is a long-term process, a life-long process, and you need to be open to developing incrementally. Too many young writers are focused on success and style that they end up ignoring the fundamentals: being faithful to the inner life of their characters and creating strong, emotionally true sentences. As a result their characters become hollow stereotypes; their sentences become all surface and don’t offer a real human connection to the reader. So the beginning of the writer’s path is crucial, and you have to know what you’re in for. Very rarely does that involve instant success. As jazz trumpeter Miles Davis once said, “It takes a long time to play like yourself.” The best thing new writers can do is plan on taking a long time to develop their craft.
Q: But some of your teaching focuses on the “industry” aspect of the literary world. How to you reconcile this with what you just said about learning the craft?
A: Knowing about the publishing industry—in all of its manifestations—is important for two reasons. Number one, new writers have to know how it works so that they don’t make poor creative decisions based on unrealistic expectations. If you know how the system works, your expectations will be more realistic. Number two, the shrinking readership for literary fiction, poetry, etc. means that an increasing percentage of readers are also writers. In a sense we are the industry, so we need to know understand and influence the means of production to keep our voices. Creating literary magazines, chapbooks, and even small or micro-presses is becoming an increasingly important part of writers’ lives, and getting to know that aspect from an early point in one’s development can only be helpful.
Q: What do you see as the most common difficulty with work from new writers?
A: It’s the confusion between the “narrative I” and the “autobiographical I,” which prevents writers from really working with their imaginations. They think “This interesting thing happened to me when I was six years old, so I’ll write a story about it.” But that’s really the realm of nonfiction, which I encourage fiction writers to try. Fiction comes from a different place, what my former teacher Robert Olen Butler, citing Graham Greene, called “the compost heap of the imagination.” That compost heap contains memory—much of which is vague, subjective, improperly remembered anyway—as well as things you saw or thought you may have seen. It sits around in your imagination and bubbles up onto the page. It’s crucial for new writers to find ways to let that bubbling happen, and very often getting the “autobiographical I” out of the picture helps to remove the block.
Q: Can you describe your workshopping philosophy?
A: The first thing I try to do is democratize the room and try to “defuse” the tools of literary criticism, which don’t really help with early drafts. Literary criticism is a great entryway into Ulysses, but few works by new writers are going to stand up to that kind of scrutiny. All that workshop participants can genuinely be “experts” on are their own aesthetic reactions to the work in question, and that’s where I try to focus conversations. Author and audience are engaged in a dance, and in a workshop we essentially talk about how that dance went in a particular piece of fiction. Where was it strongest? Where was it confusing? The worst workshops are about “fixing” a piece, and these are the ones that end up strangling creativity. What we really ought to do is tell the writer how it felt to read the work, try to understand what the writer wanted to do, and offer suggestions on how to make the piece be more of what it is. That’s how you create workshop environments that produce highly individuated works, rather than work that all sounds the same—the much-lamented curse of the fiction workshop.
Q: What do you look for when you read a workshop manuscript?
A: When working with early draft manuscripts, I look—both in my private readings and in workshop discussions—for images, moments of emotional or linguistic energy, or even unconscious contradictions that give a piece life. Even in the midst of a work that struggles to find its footing, such elements lurk beneath the surface and will yield great results if a writer is willing to sink deeper into them. Often these are moments of intense dramatic potential over which a writer has “skated” quickly. These often lead to great energy in a given piece when they are teased apart and brought out into the open. So I look for the chaos and uncertainty in a piece and try to lead the author deeper into it, because that’s how the essence of the story will unfold in revision.
Q: I imagine that you don’t view this kind of revision as an “instant gratification” process.
A: No. It takes many drafts to figure out what a piece is about, largely because the best narratives are about something other—or more—than they appear to be on the surface. It can take awhile even for the author to discover this. Several of the stories in Wifeshopping were first drafted fifteen years before I signed the book contract, so I can personally vouch for this. The best thing I can do for new writers is to teach them how to dig through their own work with patience and allow each piece to unfold over time, just as they have to be patient with themselves overall as writers. If a story or a character comes genuinely from your own imagination, you owe it the respect and space to develop freely on the page. What looks brilliant today might seem to need work in six months; in two years, you might look back at it and think that you’ve just scratched the surface of the characters’ lives. I also suggest a cyclical approach to ones’ writing work, in which you have many pieces in various stages of completion, because the best discoveries you make as a writer happen in revision. I couldn’t imagine living life without having something to revise.
Q: Is revision as you see it a matter of wordsmithing or of wholesale changes to character and narrative structure?
A: Both, but I think that sentences lead the way. When you carefully re-read your work—ideally aloud, though this might not happen in the first few rounds of a particular revision—you develop a sense of what’s a clunky, emotionally untrue, or lazy sentence. It doesn’t ring true to the ear or to the mouth, so you change the sentence, and in doing so you often change the narrative structure or the nature of the characters. Structure and character, we have to remember, do not exist as separate entities from the words on the page; we only encounter and understand them through the sentences a writer gives us. Therefore thematic revisions are irrevocably embedded in linguistic ones. Storytellers who come from a strong oral tradition know this, but sometimes I think our contemporary culture has forgotten it and abandoned the connection between writing and and the human voice. But that’s a dangerous thing to forget, since our modes of written narrative are direct descendants of our spoken ones. The closer writers can get to the voice, the better chance they have of creating emotionally true characters that will unfold for their readers on the page.