All right. We've just got finished doing some close

reading of several texts, including the beautiful

novel Lord of Misrule, by Jaimy Gordon, my good friend,

who's the winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Fiction for that novel.

Jamie's visiting Wesleyan University this afternoon for a reading and

we snagged her for a moment to talk in this segment.

Jamie, this module of the course is about writing with nouns and verbs.

That's an insistence from Strunk and White from the Elements from Style.

And it can be a hard rule to stick to when you're writing from real feeling,

when you really when you really feel as though you've got something to say, and

that thing is an abstraction.

All of us, of course,

have had the experience of reading the creative work of people who are full of

intense emotion, and yet there wasn't anything happening as a story.

On the page.

So what would you say to someone who said, well I want to write fiction,

but it's mostly about how I feel.

>> I think that if you understand, if you think a lot about point of view

when you're writing, if you let yourself be kind of saturated by the point of view,

even if the point of view is actually about.

A character who is awfully close to you in some way.

But it's different to think about yourself as a character than to think about

yourself as the writer.

>> Mm-hm.

>> Then choice of words becomes somewhat

more forcefully offered to you.

I've never barred adjectives or adverbs from my writing.

But I must say that having been pressured at times to

shorten things I once had a book accepted by an editor and

was told get this down from 500 pages to 400 pages and

I said what should I, what do you want me to cut?

And the editor who was Shannon Ravenel of Algonquin Press said

I don't know that's up to you.

You figure it out.

I think it should be a 400 page book and not a 500 page book.

And it was a fantastically good exercise because it required me to trim,

from every page, what seemed less interesting to me then something else.

I was so young that most of my writing seemed more interesting to me,

than it would now.

But then I learned that there's always something less interesting

than the heart, the essence of the thing that you're working on.

And being forced to trim, being forced to cut away often makes you attack every

weak adjective and adverb in the piece.

It also causes you to look for a noun or a verb that

is more fully suggestive of what you're trying to describe one way or another.

So you keep trying to compress, and by God you

discover hidden energies in the piece that you didn't really know were there.

>> You said to me or you wrote to me in an email the other day when we were talking

about this conversation, this is what you said.

With beginning writers, one begs for more vivid detail and

concreteness at whatever price, and

I think that you hear that advice about concreteness all the time, and

sometimes it seems that people don't really know exactly what that word means.

And why it's so, in a sense, why it's so expensive for

a writer to write with concrete things when you might have a lot

of associative thought that you are wanting to get onto the page, but

actually talking about pumpkins and the kid who threw the pumpkin out the window.

That is like the kind of thing that you would just

say in a story that you were getting across to somebody in ten or 15 seconds.

Boy, it can be really hard to get all of that stuff on the page.

Why do you think concreteness is so important?

And why is it so hard to get to it?

>> I have two answers to that question.

One of them is, once a younger writer or any writer for that matter,

starts telling me a good story I'm hooked, in a way, I want to know more.

I'm the annoyance of everybody in my family,

because as soon as they start telling me a good story, I interrupt.

Well what was he wearing?

>> [LAUGH] >> What did he actually?

Don't tell me what it was, don't tell me that he fired you,

tell me the exact words I want to hear the whole conversation in every single detail.

And that just maddens them, and it's not because I'm not interested,

because I am interested.

>> I'm always telling them, begin in the beginning and move step-wise to the end.

We want absolutely every step.

>> I forced my older sister, as my birthday present,

to tell me a story about an ugly horse.

I just got so fascinated with the idea of an ugly horse that I didn't want one

shut up and let me just get to my point.

No I want to hear it all.

So that's one part of it.

Them actually interested.

And therefore I want to know.

The other part is the actual concrete detail is drawing the story with it.

Like bait on a hook.

And in order for this story to really acquire the particularity

that will make it memorable in any sense, you have to start looking for the flesh.

Stories are, in that sense, like evidence in a trial.

>> Broken down West Virginia race track in the early 1970's with a cast of

characters that is just so full of life.

They're so motley, they're so many young people and old people and black people and

poor people and rich people.

People who know all about horses and people who don't know,

you know they don't know a horse from their elbow.

And you've got all this experience living among those people in your

years after college.

You hung out with these gangsters and so on.

What would you say to a student?

Beginning writer he said well yeah, if I had a really rich experience of

interesting people and places and things, I might have something to write about.

But Ian said all I have is my relatively timid experience.

So I don't really want to write about specific stuff.

The important interesting things about my life are not grounded in the literal or

material stuff what would you say to that writer?

>> There's a reason that writers I don't know whether they still do this but

in the 70's and 80's, you could hardly turn over a book

to see the writer's biography without coming across a list.

So and so has been a lumberman and a short order cook,

and he's cleaned out wells and toilets and so forth and so on.

I mean, it was kind of the bragging rights of a writer.

That he or she had done all these horrible jobs for a month each, maybe.

That's all a writer probably would need if anyone of them were a real writer.

Well first of all I really do recommend that and

I often tell students instead of looking horrified when they

tell me they want to take a few months away from school, I say great, very good.

Just make sure you get some horrible job so that you can be writing about it.

On the other hand, do you have to, I mean does everyone have to do that?

Why did I love the race track?

It wasn't really carrying 60 pound buckets that

I loved or, I mean, I do love to be around animals and

to study animals one way or another wherever I am.

But it was the language.

It was the jargon of the racetrack that got me hooked.

For the first week that I was on the racetrack,

I didn't understand a thing that I was hearing around me.

It was like being in a foreign country, but it was so pungent, It was

such a spicy and rich slang that I really wanted to penetrate it.

>> That's great advice, maybe we can leave the students with that.

To write about the places and things.

The language of which is exciting to you,

the places that you like to talk to about, that you like the words of.

It could be the language of mercantile exchanges or farming or

baseball or door to door sales of cosmetics, whatever it is.

You don't actually have to have had some crazy adventurous experience

that we will be able to write about it in a way that's compelling to people.

I have never really been ever, I don't think I've ever set foot on a horse track.

Maybe one time in my life and I've read Lord of Misrule twice with complete

total just an avid, avid hunger for more the whole time.

So thank you Jamie for joining us.

We'll see you again in the capstone Segment of the class.

A Conversation with Jaimy Gordon, Author of "Lord of Misrule"

Creative Writing: The Craft of Style

Meet the Instructors