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--was fun. A good job was done on programming; the guests were all great; Mark Finn had a fab Tiki party; Bill Spencer showed a really swell short film, "A Child's Christmas in Texas," made of one of his short stories. 

I ended up getting to go to Emma Bull's reading after all, because the moderator of the Learning to Write - Recommended Books and Classes panel scrambled us to go to the reading when she saw there were only two people in it (I believe some folks stayed and had the panel anyway). Was very glad to get to hear her read, and read from CLAIM, the sequel to TERRITORY.

The one person in the original panel audience who had wanted to ask about grad programs in writing, which is one thing I can talk about, spoke with me after the reading, so that worked out.

The rest of my thoughts on that subject are these: Clarion West (or the other Clarion) is a damn good thing to do, classes-wise. Sixteen years later, I still remember and implement things the instructors said. For instance, Michael Swanwick said, "We want to write pulp-paced art, not art-paced pulp."

A grad school program is good mostly to giving you time to write, and, if there's a fellowship, money--but check on the faculty and what they're into, because a good number of grad school programs are not very friendly to spec fic, and that gets tiresome.

Best of the books, if you like writing books, are Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, Jon Gardner's The Art of Fiction, and, specific to spec fic, essays by Ursula Le Guin, which you can find as blog entries via her website, and her Steering the Craft; essays by C.J. Cherryh like “Writerisms and Other Sins: A Writer’s Shortcut to Stronger Writing” and others available through her website; these are the essays and writers I sought out—back when you had to find them in libraries—by writers I loved. You would seek out such work by writers you love.

However and otherwise, I am personally kind of leery of writing advice books and columns and the echo chamber of it on the internets—your writing has to come from in you; if you don’t have a voice that needs to be expressed in words and story, demands to be, and has and develops its own dictates, strictures, habits, and rhythms, then do something else with your energies. Seriously. No one, ultimately, can tell you how to write, some advice will resonate for you, but much won’t—and you can’t write out of advice and how tos; the best books and classes are to read fiction, read fiction, and read more fiction, and write it, over and over, dive down deep into your own fictions and find the wonder and quirk and sense of them. Living is also a pretty good class.

 

Finally, I was going to do a visual on the whiteboard, picked up from writer Rick Bass while I was in grad school. Here's a scribbled approximation:

 

 


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