19.25: From the Classroom to the Page
Learning is great, but how do you translate it into doing without getting overwhelmed? What is the difference between learning in the classroom and executing when you’re on your own?
Marshall, our incredible recording engineer, just finished an MFA program. Congrats, Marshall!! On today’s episode, we gril Marshall in order to understand his takeaways from the program. Specifically, we are interested in how he takes everything he learned in the classroom and turns it into actionable things he’s doing on the page. We talk community, motivation, and how to consistently make time for your writing.
Thing of the Week: The Fall of the House of Usher, TV show created by Mike Flanagan
Homework: Take a turn being the teacher– how would you teach a group of people about a concept you’re struggling with in your own work, and what homework would you give them to better understand it?
Close Reading Series: Texts & Timeline
Next up is Character! Starting July 7, we’ll be diving into three short stories by C.L. Clark. These are all available for free through Uncanny Magazine.
Character: “You Perfect, Broken Thing,” “The Cook,” and “Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an Account of Several Misadventures and How I Found My Way Home” by CL Clark (starting July 7)
And a sneak peak on the rest of the year…
Tension: Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark (starting September 1)
Structure: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (starting October 13)
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
Key Points: How do you take what you learned in the classroom and use it when you’re writing? Take time to internalize it. Be aware that motivation shifts! External or internal, how do you keep it going? What works well for you? Build the craft through intentional practice. Make notes! Reflection soon after. Look at the aggregate, the common or repeated comments. Take a chance, try it! Audition techniques.
[Season 19, Episode 25]
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Season 19, Episode 25]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses. From the Classroom to the Page.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Marshall] I’m Marshall.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I wanted us to have this wildcard so that we could grill Marshall a little bit, who’s finished an MFA program recently…
[Marshall] I did.
[Erin] About all the things that you learned. Please repeat them to us. No. Like, actually, how do you take all the things you learned in the classroom, for people who are listening on this podcast, and actually, like, turn it into something you’re doing when you’re writing?
[Marshall] I think it depends on what you… For me, it depends on how I started… Why I started the program in the first place. I started the program to make myself make the time to write. Because I really wanted to do… Get as much as I could out of it. I was paying the money. I had some amazing instructors, and my goal was to figure out how to make writing a bigger part of my life amidst all of the chaos already, that’s teaching full time, parenting, and all that. I’ll be honest, I graduated in August of 2023, and I took a break. From writing. For a little bit. A lot of what I’m doing… What I was doing was soaking in some of that stuff that I learned and trying to figure out how to go back to a schedule and remember that I can do this, and the big part is keeping that connection with my community as well. Keeping that motivation going. Now, specifics? Also, I think, depends on the type of classroom you’re taking. In the beginning, we were taking a lot of classes around different genres. So, I personally, now… This is one example… Am trying to incorporate some of the studying of mystery and romance and those components and those beats and stuff like that into my science-fiction and my fantasies that I’m writing. Because I love those genres, so much, but I may or may not be working on a mystery/sci-fi novel right now. So it’s fun to kind of think about. I learned all these specific things, studied all this work, but I really want to figure out how to make it my own.
[Mary Robinette] I like something that you said, which is, I think, a piece that a lot of people miss. Which is that after you learn something, that it takes a while to internalize it. I see a lot of people who will take a workshop, and afterwards, they stop writing. But they never start again. It’s not an intentional break. Some of that is that, I think, that they aren’t… They aren’t thinking about the action of internalizing, that that takes time and it takes energy.
[Marshall] Yeah. Part of the clarity… To clarify kind of what I was saying, why I’m taking a break to is when… At the end of the program, I ended up with a pretty decent draft of a novel. So, at this point, I am… What I’m trying to make another pass at it, and I need to… I want to start querying agents, because I really want to try to get something out there. I’ve been working on this for years and years and years. I finally went back to school. I’m teaching creative writing to high schoolers. I’m trying to get a job teaching at the college level. I also want to publish. So it’s going to be that editing work and that revision work and putting myself out there. That’s terrifying.
[Mary Robinette] So… Yeah. Yes. It does not stop being terrifying, honestly.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But I think, like, one of the things that I find is that the motivation shifts. That when you’re in class… I see this also, a lot, where I will have a student and they come and they talk about how they had written all of this while they were in their MFA, and they can’t find the motivation to write afterwards. I find this, for myself, that I go to a writing workshop and after the writing workshop, it’s hard to find that motivation, because it’s like, well, there was a deadline, there was body modeling, there was a teacher that I didn’t want to let down. So I had all of this external motivation. Then, when you’re cut loose from that, you suddenly have to find an internal motivation. Which is a whole different racket.
[Erin] Or just different forms of external motivation.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Like one of the things…
[Mary Robinette] Money.
[Erin] That…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Money is a big one. But also, like, I’ve created… I’ve been in groups of people. That’s why people have critique groups, sometimes, is that you want to continue to have people you can disappoint.
[Laughter]
[Erin] It’s like the disappointment of others… Such a driver in my life. Maybe just my life. But that way there’s something else, there’s another deadline, there’s another way to make yourself do things. I think that’s one good thing that you can actually take from the classroom. That’s not a direct lesson that your taught. So it’s not something that your teacher tells you. It’s more how you learn well. What are the kinds of things that work well for you? Are there exercises you did in class when you were like, “Doing six short flash pieces really got my engine going,” or “Oh, I was much better when I was able to do a back and forth on email with my professor about this particular part of my novel.” Then you can say, “How can I create those same structures in my life now?” Like, what can I… Where are the people that I can reach out to who can fill that role in my life?
[Marshall] Yeah. We’re all at different stages. I talked to my cohort, we’re all really close. We get on zoom here and there and kind of try and bring each other out. A lot of us are all in different places in that journey. It’s like are you writing? Are you working on this? Are you working on a new project? But something you said earlier, a very specific lesson. It wasn’t necessarily a specific lesson for me, but it was the way they structured the thesis project that worked really well for me. I really liked just sitting down and writing. But I’d noticed that when I outline, I more productive. In the thesis process, there was multiple outline stages. It wasn’t like, okay, throw this outline together, and then just start writing. I changed stuff as I went, and we had amazing advisors that supported us, but that kind of living outline and keeping up with that, and tracking my character wants and needs and arcs and relationships and that kind of thing as I wrote really changed how I plan on approaching novel writing going forward. I think without that, I’d probably get stuck pretty quickly. Because now I know I can lean back on that structural part of it that wasn’t in my toolbox before.
[Mary Robinette] I find that… So when I started writing… I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, that I would write a story that had a really good beginning, a really good middle, and a really good end, to three completely different stories that happen to have the same cast of characters.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Oh those [garbled] totally [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] No, they’re just not… They’re just like…
[Erin] [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] It’s not… No, the story ends and you’re like, “That was the ending?” They just kind of stop. So, for me, the thing that I had to learn, like, the practice that I had to learn was how to… Was structure. So I had to spend a lot of time doing very intentional practice on learning structure. So I would do the thumbnail sketches, or I would just write beginning, middle, and end for things that would fit on three by five cards. Just to get the sense of, okay, making sure that all of those things were actually connected. That craft, having that craft to lean on, is very helpful to me now at a point where I have internalized structure and I just write and trust that I’m going to have that beginning, middle, and end. But when I’m having a bad brain day, having the tool, having the craft to reach for and being able to articulate what that craft is, has been incredibly useful. Did you find, when you were doing your sessions, that there was any way that… Like, are there things that you found that made it easier for you to start internalizing things or for you to identify the things that you needed to internalize?
[Marshall] What do you mean? Sorry?
[Mary Robinette] So, like…
[Marshall] Like, after the program, you mean?
[Mary Robinette] After the program or even during the program. It’s like, oh, this is a really good tool that I’m having to use consciously right now, but at some point it won’t be… I won’t have to think about it.
[Marshall] Yeah. I mean, like, I say, I was really lucky to have some awesome instructors. So one of the classes, we actually took, was short forms. We were all… The number of short stories I have now I’m really thankful for. But short stories are really difficult to do well. So internalizing some of the feedback from my workshops and my instructors was kind of the… Not the challenge, but just making sure that as the workshop was over, I made some notes. I looked back at my work relatively soon after, just so I could, “Okay. When I go back to revise, this character was flat because of this reason.” Or “The feedback on the ending was it was too abrupt and I didn’t… I didn’t… The promises weren’t kept at the end.” Things like that.
[Erin] One of the things that I really enjoyed doing what I did work shopping in my MFA program was to actually take all… So people would write things on the paper, like [garbled] your story, they’d right marks all over it, and then they give it back to you. I would put all of, like, the page ones together, all the page twos together, all the page threes together, and then actually just kind of, like, flip through them and look for where everyone… Like, if everyone highlighted the sentence, it was like, “Amazing,” I was like, “That was a good sentence.” If everyone wrote question marks on the same corner of a page, I was like, “Maybe that is confusing.” It was a way to actually make… Because a workshop can be hard for people because sometimes it can feel like people are coming for you. I generally enjoy it, because I’m like, “I just forced like X number of people to read my work and talk about it.”
[Laughter]
[Erin] So I’m like, “Ha ha…”
[Marshall] I wish I could think about it that way.
[Erin] “Fooled you.” But even so, like, when you take it and look at it in aggregate, it’s a lot easier to look at the patterns and not get stuck in one particular person’s feedback, but look at, like, where those systems happen. It made it a lot easier for me to figure out when… What were the kinds of things that I was doing that I kept getting flagged for, what were the things that maybe I should internalize. Looking at my own work in aggregate, and what were the things that kept coming up over and over again.
[Mary Robinette] I love that technique. I also look for patterns and, as you were talking, I’m like, “Oh, because I use Google docs, and everyone will comment…” Like, you can easily see that everybody is commenting in the same spot. I have to go through and clear them so that people aren’t commenting because other people have commented. But that’s a whole [garbled other] So…
[Marshall] Well, something Erin said, to. Work shopping was always really terrifying for me, and it still is. But, throughout the course of the program, I figured out, kind of like you were saying, I would get all this feedback and depending on the story and depending on… How well I knew these people, some of the feedback, it was… To be able to take the feedback that mattered the most. Not that some people’s feedback didn’t matter, but it was just like, okay, this person is confused because they really aren’t… They don’t really like fantasy. They told me that. I get it, they don’t understand this element. But everybody else really liked this element. So I put this person’s feedback aside and focus on the clusters of stuff. So being able to take that and having the confidence to eventually get the writing group together and willingly go forward and workshop things together. That’s what I want to… That’s what I’m moving up to.
[Mary Robinette] Something that you said earlier, but I just want to circle back to that I really liked was that you would make notes about what you had learned. I find that that’s one of the best ways for me to solidify things is to write them down, because I have to articulate them. One of the reasons that I love teaching and doing the podcast is because when I have to explain it to someone else, that’s one of the best ways for me to start internalizing it myself, because now I’m taking words that someone else has said and I’m internalizing them. I have to, in order to be able to express it in my own language. That, for me, is one of the ways that I will try to put into practice things that I’m learning after taking a class. Speaking of after, we’re going to pause here. Then, when we come back, we’re going to talk about some other ways that you can go from the page… From the classroom to the page.
[Howard] The Fall of the House of Usher, created by Mike Flanagan from various stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe, is some of the best storytelling I’ve ever seen on TV. It’s horror, full of jump scares, dread, and… Well, horrific things. But it opens in media res to defuse the tension. Or at least to get you to let down your guard. In the first 10 minutes, we learn that all of CEO Robert Usher’s children have died. So, hey, that’s cool. We know who will live and who will die, so we can relax and enjoy the ride, right? That was my thinking, and, right or wrong, I’m happy to let you think that too. Yes, there are some surprises, but relax. What really carries this series is the outstanding performances upon the brilliant script. The words, they are delicious. Like lemons. So very lemon. The show carries a TV MA rating due to language, sex, smoking, substance, suicide, and violence. That rating, unfortunately, omits the fact that there’s also some violence to animals. Especially in episodes three and four. The Internet has spoilers and explainers if you’re concerned. I watched the entire eight episode run four times in an eight week period. Once for fun, once for more fun, and twice more so I could learn things while watching other people see it for the first time. So, I guess, all four times were for fun.
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the other techniques that I am a big fan of is taking a chance. The… I don’t know about you all, but I’ve been in classes where the teacher is talking and I’m like, “Well, this is some bull shit.”
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] This is…
[Marshall] As a teacher, I know for a fact that a lot of students think that about me a lot of the time.
[Mary Robinette] Yep. It’s the same. Absolutely.
[Marshall] I know it’s because they don’t want to be there. But continue.
[Mary Robinette] What I’ve learned is that if I go in and think that, that I’m going to get nothing out of the class. But if I think, “Okay. Let me just try this thing that they’re talking about.” Even if I think it is completely absurd and not going to be useful, I will get something out of that even when it’s not the thing that they intend for me to get out of it. So I think of it as auditioning a change, or auditioning a technique.
[Erin] Yeah. Also, I… One of the things I’m now remembering that they had us do in my program was to write these annotations, where we would try to, like, analyze a story for what it’s doing while doing a close readings of our own. One thing they suggested was to do a few close readings of things you hate. Books and stories that you’re like, “This story, I would burn it.” But you don’t burn books, don’t do that. But…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Figure out why. I think the same is true for techniques. Like, occasionally somebody tells you to do something or asked you to do an exercise and you’re just like… Who knows, maybe one of our homeworks, you’re like, “Nah. Nah. Not doing it, dog.” But it’s nice to kind of try it and see what is it about it that you’re reacting to so strongly.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Is it because, like, it goes counter to the way that you think about storytelling? Is it just because you’re in a bad mood that day? What is it that’s going on? If you can identify that anything you feel that strongly about, there’s probably something there that you can use for yourself.
[Marshall] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The… I’m just going to use a concrete example of this kind of thing. I was… I took a workshop and the instructor said to put all five senses on every page. We were doing standard manuscript format, so this is 250 words and all five senses on every page. I’m like, “Well, that’s… I mean, I agree that you should use all five senses, but that’s extreme, and I don’t think that…” So I did it. Then, when they started critiquing, the instructor said, “I just… You know, I started reading your story and I just fell asleep.”
[Marshall] Wow.
[Mary Robinette] First of all, you should never say that to a student.
[Marshall] No, that’s horrible.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But, second, they were right, it was really boring and it was hard to tell what was going on. I knew as I was writing that it was a problem. But I was like they told me to do this. What I realized was that by writing all five senses on the page, I was making everything in their of equal value, and that I could use the senses to anchor things that were important. That when I put in a sense, that it was going to ground the reader and that if I reserved those for the important things, that it was significantly more powerful. So I would not have come to that understanding if I hadn’t tried this technique that I hated. That is, I think, why it’s worthwhile to audition… So I love this idea of doing a close read of things you hate.
[Erin] I hear, see, and smell you.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Just do not taste me, please.
[Marshall] So, one of the things they… When I heard this talk a few minutes ago, I thought about was… At the end, the tail end of the program, my program, was the thesis project. Right? They paired us up with a thesis advisor. I got really lucky to work with an awesome writer, his name is Isaiah Jonah Everett, and he rocks. But I… His style of suggesting things to me was kind of what Mary Robinette was saying, I feel like. Like, he’s like, “Hey, have you thought about this thing? Have you thought about maybe this character’s think… Responds this way instead?” The way he suggested things wasn’t like, “you need to change X, Y, and Z because I hate this character.” It was like, “Well, this character… Really interesting.” Then he made suggestions about a character who doesn’t have a POV in the book, but he does at the very end. He goes, “What if this is this character’s story?” I said, “Okay. That’s not really daunting. It really is his story. Not his story yet. It’s not his POV now.” That really helped me power to the end of it. Because I knew what I was leading up to. I knew that that character, at the end, was going to step into his own and then it was going to be about him. More about him.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Marshall] All about him.
[Erin] Another thing that you… Like, there are two things that you said, maybe more than that, where your… It feels like you’re keeping a really open mind. Like, there you sort of were like, “No, because…” Not just like not doing that. But, like, let me consider it, and let me figure out why it is and isn’t working. Way at the beginning, you were talking about using other genres…
[Marshall] Yeah.
[Erin] I think sometimes people… You get really comfortable in the genre that you know, and school is a time when often you will have to read or work with or try out genres and formats that just may not work for you. Like, some people don’t like writing short fiction and may never.
[Marshall] Right.
[Erin] But the exercise of trying it, maybe you take a little bit out of that in terms of the way that you write a sentence to try to get so much you can in and make it dense, and you can use that, in a part, in your novel in which things are really emotional and heavy. So, I think that it’s great that you did that as opposed to being like, “Mystery? Whatever.”
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Instead, you brought it into what you were doing.
[Marshall] The result, actually, by the time I got to that thesis project was I knew I wanted to write a black space opera. Then, I’m like, “But the alienness of…” I wanted horror elements. I knew… I know it’s not all the way working yet. But when I go back again, I really want to make that… I want to make it terrifying at certain parts. It’s not a horror novel. But the enemy is horrifying. So I want to make sure that I want the reader to feel… Feel a certain way with the characters that we are supposed to love. I hope they do, encounter those things.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I love… I actually really hate and love at the same time that moment when you can feel that something is not right, because at that point, it has shifted from being… Into being a known unknown.
[Marshall] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] It’s like you know that there’s a problem there. You don’t know exactly what the problem is. Which is so much better than I don’t know if this is any good. That’s like, yeah, this is good. There is an opportunity here. Just interrogate it and try to figure out where… What that opportunity is and how you can get into it. Sometimes I will do… I have this intentional practice that I do where… It’s like reverse engineering an outline, but I will… It is… I will also say, it is a thing that I discovered as a teaching technique, and then realized that it was actually incredibly useful, which is I go through and I highlight the things in the story that are, like, loadbearing and important in a scene. Then I kind of categorize them based on MICE quotient’s, which, for people who are listening to this in isolation, is an organization structure, milieu, inquiry, character, and event. So I do that, and then I see, “Oh, like, actually, the bulk of this scene is this event shift, this status quo shift. But when I come into the scene, I’m not signal… I’m not doing anything about that, and there’s a whole bunch of me figuring out what I’m writing.” I knew it was flabby, but I couldn’t figure out why it was flabby. I love… This is one… Again, one of the reasons that I love teaching is because it gives you these tools that you can use and then do some intentional practice on your own work.
[Marshall] That was one of the shifts… I feel like, as a cohort, we got to. Really, in a heightened way. Like, our instructors at some point, I feel like, were kind of sitting back and letting us discuss each other’s work in such a way… We would come out it, like I said, being like him, “Well, I know something’s not working.” But we would tag a couple questions to a short story. I mean, like, I feel like this character’s this. Or I don’t feel like this part of it is working. When we come back to discuss and workshop it, the language we used, the feedback we were able to give each other, was in valuable. I mean, at that point, because we had all leveled up in such a way, we were able to look at each other’s work and know each other’s work well enough to be like, “Okay. I hear what you’re saying, but I actually think it works. But I think what you really are missing is this.” Those conversations are something I’ll never forget about being in this program. Of course, we made plenty of excuses to get together before residency and stuff like that. So we got more of those conversations. But, again, that’s part of that community thing.
[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of community, I think it is time for us to give you some homework.
[Erin] Yes. I have the homework. Which is for you to become the teacher. So what I want you to do is find something that maybe you’re struggling with in your work, something that you’re not completely sure about. Maybe it’s POV. Who knows? Maybe it’s voice. Maybe it’s one of these things. Think, how would you try to teach this concept to someone else? What homework would you assign them?
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.