Catching a Story by the Tale: Tips on Getting Started for Beginning Fiction Writers and New Teachers of Creative Writing

By Tom Gatten

The Kojo Hand A NOVEL BY TOM GATTEN

Im very impressed with the vivid characterization here. From the self-conscious, guarded, headstrong Deanie, the hilariously crass but needy Barett, to the big-hearted Zerk, tortured by his past, and the quietly noble Kojo, each character is unique, consistent, and nicely layered. Deanies struggle to discover and stand by beliefs in an adult world that is constantly asking her to compromise is especially engaging. I also admire the moral force underlying the narrative: The Kojo Hand makes it clear that longingwhether for recognition, sex, fame, a sense of belongingcan lead to destruction and isolation when people let their desires blindly motivate them. The Kojo Hand is a giving and humane novel, exploring interesting and important human problems with a gentle hand.
Writers Digest

Mapper of Mists POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS

I think Tom Gattens Mapper of Mists is a remarkable book of poems. For years Ive been familiar with Gattens work and here we have it together with a great deal of grace, intensity and energy.
Jim Harrison
Author of Letters to Yesenin, Legends of the Fall, Dalva, The Woman Lit by Fireflies, Returning to Earth, The River Swimmer

The Bamboushay Steel Band RECORDING

Tom Gatten played with The Bamboushay Steel Band for two years. Based in East Lansing, the band played in places ranging from the original Hamtramck High School to the famous Gate of Horn club in Chicago. In 1962, National Educational Television produced, broadcast, and rebroadcast a half-hour show by the band. The bands Folkways Records LP Album #FS3835 was reissued on Compact Disc by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in 2001 and is also available on iTunes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491806777

Tom Gatten

Tom Gatten’s fiction has appeared in such publications as Art and Literature (Lausanne), The Quest (New York), and Tales, formerly Fiction Midwest (St. Louis). His poems have appeared in numerous publications and have been anthologized in The Sumac Reader (The Michigan State University Press, East Lansing), and Earth, Air, Fire & Water (Coward, McCann & Geohegan, New York, and Longmans Canada Limited, Toronto). His book of poems and translations, Mapper of Mists, includes the Spanish of Rafael Alberti. His novel The Kojo Hand was published in 2001. Tom Gatten was born in north central Nebraska and grew up in southwestern Michigan. While a grad student in Comparative Literature at Michigan State University, he played for two years with the Bamboushay Steel Band. In 1962 National Educational Television produced and broadcast a half-hour show by the band. The band’s Folkways Records LP Album #FS3835 was reissued on Compact Disc by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in 2001 and is also available on iTunes. After Michigan State, Gatten went to the University of Iowa, where he earned an M.F.A. His college teaching credits include Stony Brook University, Lincoln Land Community College, The University of Hartford, and Penn State. For thirteen years he headed the Division of Management Information Services at the State of Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities and later became lead analyst for the Connecticut Department of Transportation Division of Graphic Systems, a position he held for five years. He lives in North Carolina with his wife.

Book preview

© 2013 by Tom Gatten. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 08/22/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-0676-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-0677-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013914405

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. Starting with Fragments

2. Finding Threads and Making Connections

3. Being Able to Discuss Your Work as a Story

4. Using the Framework Technique

5. Another View of Fragments

6. If We Could Use Pens Like Saxophones

7. Examples of Working with Fragments

8. A Get-Acquainted View

9. Give it a Try and See How it Goes

10. Talking to Your Characters

11. Dancing in the Lab

12. Thinking about Speech

13. A Really BIG Framework

14. More on Riffing

15. Close-Up Views and Range Finding

16. Descriptive Devices

17. Motivation and Patterns of Experience

18. Inventing Motives, Developing Plot, and Mapping Areas

19. Dialogue Tip

Works Cited

About the Author

Preface

The purpose of this book is to provide some road-tested suggestions and tips to help beginning fiction writers get started and to help new writing teachers keep the wheels on the wagon. In the long run the aim is to offer simple approaches that can lead to thoughtful navigation through the complexities of writing and to the ability to communicate clearly about the trip.

This work is not about how to write a story; it is about shaping materials and putting together the rudiments of a story. My intention is to show how various prewriting fragments, old or new, can be used in a tall tale format to develop character and setting, giving the beginning writer something to work with in her or his further efforts with a short story. In a variety of ways the suggestions and tips here have proved their value over the years for beginning writers in my college classes. As to developing skills on the road ahead, the beginning writer would do well to look into the craft of writing as considered by such well-known writers as John Gardner and Charles Johnson.

Most people interested in fiction writing that has an academic connection are familiar with the theory and practice of the widely used writer’s workshop. There are, however, limitations to the workshop approach. One is that many beginning fiction writers may not have adequate first fiction to consider in the workshop; they more often than not need to develop something on paper that could be talked about and rewritten, something that from their point of view at least looks enough like a first-draft story that it could be discussed in the workshop. Joseph M. Moxley has considered the need for pre-workshop fiction in Creative Writing and Composition: Bridging the Gap, an article in the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Writers’ Chronicle. Moxley’s findings, from the book he edited, Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy (1989), assert that by focusing primarily on revising and editing, the workshop fails to address prewriting strategies and that the implied assumption… is that students already know how to gather, shape, and revise material (n. pag.). Moxley goes on to report that in workshops most teachers direct the group’s attention by asking, ‘Does the text work?’ (n. pag.). He adds, This method presumes that students already know how to write and that all they need to master the craft is a little practice before a critical peer-audience (n. pag.).

The suggestions and tips that follow aim to help the beginning writer overcome the kinds of limitations described above and to help new teachers of creative writing answer the needs for adequate pre-workshop fiction. Those who are not connected with a workshop or an academic environment still, as the saying goes, have to start someplace, and I believe that the materials in what follows will help such writers as well with their first fiction. The suggestions and tips deal with organizing, shaping, and revising one’s own materials and seeing how certain writers used certain techniques to solve certain problems, both large and small.

Seeing how authors solved problems, examining the artistic choices they made, makes it much easier to develop characters and start putting together a story that includes recently written notes as well as items that may have been saved up for a long time waiting for a format that would handle them.

I said putting together above, rather than writing, because at this point putting together does not let us forget that looking at things, listening to things, and touching things literally and imaginatively to make them fit in some order or form are essential aspects of learning that may not always be included in a discussion of writing.

The discussion of writing in this little volume is not intended in any way to be prescriptive. Forms of imitation have always been extremely important in studying artistic choice, and such forms will be considered in various ways here. This book is about giving materials a form that can be used up to a certain point, and then, when the growing story takes on a life of its own and begins talking back to the writer, the form can change with the story into something totally new. There is a huge difference between imitation to discover methods and imitation to avoid thinking. The poet W. D. Snodgrass in Finding a Poem, an essay following his poems in Heart’s Needle, provides an excellent way for beginning poets and fiction writers to look at the journey ahead:

Our only hope as artists is to continually ask ourselves, "Am I writing what I really think? Not what is acceptable; not what my favorite intellectual would think in this situation; not what I wish I felt. Only what I cannot help thinking" (75).

Introduction

I think it’s safe to say that most readers of this book have either said or heard the phrase I know what I want to say, but I don’t know how to say it. I believe that in reading through the nineteen sections that lie ahead, you will have the opportunity to become familiar with some strategies and attitudes that have in fact helped others in their efforts to collect their thoughts, written or unwritten, and get started writing short fiction.

My discussions on getting started