"If everything lives happily ever after, make it worse..."

THURSDAY July 14th...those TREES those beautiful TREES followed by Mr. Offutt discussing "first person retrospective vs. first person non-retrospective (Huck Finn)", Johnathan Lethem & "Fig Leaf Man" [lived in a nudist colony, super power: could take people's clothes off]; "engage through disengage"; "first paragraph - narrator, gender, time, tone, style, place, situation"...lunch was followed by "Performing Surgery w/out Anesthesia: Revising Fiction" with Offutt a/k/a "the great reviser". Notes: "polishing vs. revision"; #1 First Draft #2 Revision #3 Polishing #4 Editing..."cruel & ruthless objectivity" "revision: to see again"; then he drew the line on the blackboard again illustrating the "start near the end" premise "cut the beginning 1-4 pages" "cut the last page/ending" "see what the story is that developed on its own - rather than what you're forcing it into..." "make yourself vulnerable on the first page" "there is no such thing as the reader during the writing process" "FIRST DRAFT: structure, POV, plot, flashback, exposition, put in how Chris would feel NOT character - make sure everything serves the STORY not the WRITER..." 2ND LEVEL of revision: "consistency of tone, style, language...morse code - vary sentence structure..." POLISHING: "verbs, repetitive words, 2 similes MAX per short paragraph...ADVERBS - look a them carefully...switch scenes around & combine characters..." "Two's company, three's a short story..." "linear or circular - which? why? does it serve the piece?" limit exposition; "start near the end" "your first character should be your protagonist""dialogue: listen to other people - get out of the way & let them talk.." "avoid stage direction, avoid telling how the characters feel"..."DO NOT REVISE UNTIL YOU HAVE A DRAFT"...at this point, Offutt deferred to Denis Johnson (who was in the audience) who gave the somewhat contradictory advice, "start in the middle" & mentioned that he often revises a piece "300 times"..finally Offutt's quote of the day, "If everything lives happily ever after, make it worse..." 3pm Crafting Character: Who are these people Inhabiting Our Fiction?" with Dorothy Allison, Denis Johnson, and Ron Carlson notes: "the longer I listen to people, the less I know" (D.A.); "characters grow from a small piece of curiousity" (D.A.); "there's so little work in fiction, everyone's always sitting around drinking" (R.C. or D.J.?); in re: 'character sketches': "Go slowly, go in every door" (R.C.); "Write as large as you can reading through until you find what the story really is & get rid of the rest" (D.A.)...fangeek moment - handing D.J. a newly purchased copy (i think this makes about 8 or 9 times i've bought this book now) of "The Name of the World" and blathering on about how I keep buying this book and forcing it on people & asking him to sign it with a pen that was sadly, runnning out of ink...4:30 cocktail hour; 5:30 Tin House Editors reading with CJ Evans (more of that tear the heart out and stomp on it poetry) and Lee Montgomery who read from a longer piece that will likely be stuck in my brain for a very long time (this is a good thing BTW)...time for PB&J (having by now given up on the limp salad bar) & more beer...8pm Matthea Harvey read some of her wonderfully crafted poetry ('Roboboy') and Charles D'Ambrosio read from a longer piece (novel?) I took no notes (outside, dark, swatting at bugs) but it also was well crafted and managed to illicit some degree of emotional resonance despite my now near-numb brain (no...not from the beer...from all the mental exercise...)..on to student readings, another beer and "home" to my cell & another night falling asleep to dean martin, billy holliday, and gillian welch (will i EVER get sick of "I'll fly away"?)...