on the wrong side of sunrise

Tag: ball state university

On Character Building

I’m working on creating a character. This is something I’ve done before. That’s not to say I’m an expert at it—just that I’ve done it. Only this time it’s different, because I’m creating a character for myself.

No, I’m not writing a memoir, or a story with a protagonist who’s a thinly-veiled version of myself (at least, not intentionally). I’m also not getting into LARPing.

Fall semester is approaching fast, and six days from now, I’ll be standing in front of a class of twenty-five comp students, most of whom are in their first semester. And I’ll be trying to present a deliberately-crafted version of myself.

I tried that last semester, in a way. My students found me, for the most part, either strict and intimidating … or timid and insecure. Three guesses which of those was a more accurate reading—and there are only two options, so with three guesses, you have no excuse to not get it right eventually.

A professor of mine compared teaching to performing, and I think it’s an interesting analogy. I put on my teacher costume—a blazer, a plain top, nice pants, simple shoes—and get on my teacher stage and use my teacher voice (but sometimes slip and use my normal voice and have students come up to me after class to ask me what I said because it was impossible to hear from the back of the room). But I haven’t really created my teacher character. What does she want?

Some answers that are unacceptable:

  • avenge parents’ murder (doesn’t work when your parents are alive and well)
  • achieve fame (if you can’t handle a twenty-five person audience, the spotlight is not where you want to be)
  • win the big competition (a university teaching award doesn’t count as big)
  • slay the dragon (killing your students, even the mean ones, is frowned upon)
  • get the guy/girl (ditto sleeping with them)

So what does my teacher character want? I don’t have a good answer yet, but I have at least a nugget of what she doesn’t: She doesn’t want to seem intimidating. Avoiding timid would be pretty great, too.

Pulpy Marshmallows (or, how I became an embittered novelist)

I’ve said it before; I’ll say it again. Cathy Day is the reason I applied to the graduate program I started today, and although she isn’t the sole reason I picked it over the others that accepted me, she is a big one. This semester, I’m taking a fiction workshop with her, and in preparation, I read this.

I was going to quote some passages, but then I realized I wanted to quote the whole thing, so instead, just go read it. Seriously. I’ll wait.

Back? Okay. Still here, because you didn’t actually go read it? I’m not kidding. GO.

Now that you’ve read it, let’s talk. My writer friends will back me up on this: I hate short stories with a passion that borders on pathological. (Okay, they might not say borders.) If pushed, I will grudgingly admit that now and then, I do come across a short story I enjoy, and I have written a few that I found tolerable, but those are the exceptions. I hate short stories.

So when Day writes, as you recall, “I know without a doubt that when I was growing up, I absolutely loved to read novels and rarely read short stories unless they were assigned in a class,” I’m with her. It’s #9, though, Writing Right-handed vs. Left-handed, that really got me.

Sometimes a left-handed novelist is wise or stubborn enough to realize that he is not a right-handed story writer with horrible penmanship, but more accurately a beautiful left-handed novelist with perfectly fine penmanship. When he is alone, away from school, he brandishes the pencil in his left hand and sighs. Ahhhhhh. Then in college, he takes a workshop, which is full of nothing but right-handed desks. He puts the pencil in his right hand. Out of necessity, he’s become ambidextrous. And so, he goes through the motions of writing right-handed short stories for class. Assignments that must be completed. Hoops to jump through so that he can be in this class, read books for credit, and get a degree in the writing of fiction. At night, he goes home and puts the pencil in his left hand and works some more on his novel, the pages of which he never submits to his teacher, whose syllabus clearly states that they are to submit short stories that are 8-15 pages long.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve called short stories a hoop to jump through, I could buy so many more cereal marshmallows than one person needs. And then I could eat homemade Lucky Charms, gnashing my teeth and enjoying the bitter fantasy that the marshmallows were made of the pulped pages of short stories (which, let’s be honest, is plausible).

That’s the key: bitter fantasies.

When I was eleven, I wrote my first novel-of-sorts. It was a hundred-something pages, and I entered it in our local 4-H fair. The rule book didn’t have a page limit for creative writing submissions. I checked.

Come show day, I plopped my binder on the table in front of the judge. She looked the size of it, read the first paragraph, and gave me an honors ribbon that I knew had nothing to do with the quality of my work.

The next year, the rule book specified a ten-page limit. I brought in the first chapter of my new novel-in-progress. Suffice it to say that the year after that, they also instituted formatting requirements.

It’s always been that way. When I want to have the work I care about read, the Powers That Be won’t read it, so instead I put forth work that, to be honest, I don’t really care about. I get grades (which are what count) and feedback (which I file away, in case at some point I need, say, application material) and go back to what I do care about.

There are things fiction writers can learn from poetry. It’s the same line I hear when I say I want to be a novelist, and it’s true—there are things a novelist can learn from short stories. Still, my poetry-focused undergraduate program left me feeling adrift, alone, and embittered, and my short-story-focused education has left me the same way.

I’ve been lucky to have friends and family who have been supportive and interested in my real work. But am I really just spending thousands of dollars and years of my life in the hopes of jumping through enough hoops that one day I can get a couple letters after my name to identify me as a Real Writer, then go be a novelist in peace?

I think not. I hope not. My graduate program is not well-suited to novel writing, and I knew it wouldn’t be, just as I know my professors don’t have the resources to work with me on a novel. Wednesday, though, I start that fiction workshop. We’re focusing on linked stories. It’s not novels, no, but you read the article—I don’t have to tell you that it’s a sign that somewhere out there, there exists something bigger than the standalone 8–15 pages.

The Future

So. Let’s do it. Let’s talk about …

Two days ago, with the help of my family, I loaded my old apartment’s contents into a truck and then drove three and a half hours to Muncie, IN. I signed a lease for my new apartment and, with further help, unloaded everything again. Since then, I’ve been unpacking, arranging and rearranging, and making repeated trips to Meijer to buy a new shower curtain (free of claw marks), floor lamp (that doesn’t wobble back and forth), a silverware drawer divider (because my drawers are now wide enough to fit one). That, and frequenting The Cup, because I don’t have internet at home yet.

But there are more important things a few months off.

I’ll be starting in Ball State University’s two-year graduate program in creative writing. Although I was accepted to a couple other programs as well, I picked Ball State for a few reasons:

  • Cathy Day. Last year, I saw her on an AWP panel about midwest gothic as a genre, where she also read a story from The Circus in Winter. Both the story and her thoughts on midwest gothic captured my interest, and my discovery that she was on Ball State’s faculty was the primary reason I applied there in the first place.
  • Funding. Unlike the other programs, Ball State offered me a funding package that gives me the ability to pay for all my expenses without having to take up an outside job. My tuition is covered, and I have a stipend that will give me enough to live on comfortably.
  • Teaching. I earn my funding with a graduate assistantship. My first semester, I’ll be working in the university’s writing center, as well as taking a course designed to help prepare students to teach freshman composition. The next three semesters (and over the summer, if I want) I’ll teach two comp classes of roughly twenty-five students. As much as this intimidates me (given my something-short-of-outgoing nature) I do want to try teaching. It’s one of the obvious day jobs for someone with a creative writing degree, but I figure I should probably find out if I like it before I stake my future livelihood on it. That, and it will give me an appropriate place to correct people’s grammar.
  • The Mascot. While I can’t claim the cardinal is much more innovative than the eagle of my undergraduate institution, I can say this: Charlie Cardinal’s eyes have that special manic look that makes a seed-eating bird as intimidating as it can hope to be.

University events begin August twelfth, so I have some time to get acclimated, get oriented, and, if I’m lucky, even get the gas for my stove turned on. That box mac and cheese isn’t going to boil itself.

[insert card pun here]

After doing months of research, using up all my print credit and then some, submitting thirteen applications, and wishing I at least had some pins and needles to wait on so as to be a little more comfortable, my graduate school plans are taking shape. This fall, I’m going to begin working on a master’s degree in creative writing at Ball State University, home of the cardinals (a.k.a., the cards).

This plan, of course, is predicated upon me completing my undergraduate degree, and that is why this post is so brief. Once I’ve finished my end-of-term work, I’ll go into more detail about where I’m headed with all of this.

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