Transcript: Creative WritingBlending The Creative with The Practical

HadleyCreative WritingBlending The Creative with The PracticalPresented by Michael RydelDate January 31st, 2017

Larry MuffettWell come to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I am a member of Hadley Seminars Team. I also work in Curricular Affairs. Today’s seminar topic is Creative Writing: Blending The Creative with The Practical. Your presenter is Hadley’s Dean of Curricular Affairs, and my boss, Michael Rydel. Mike teaches the “How to Make Money as a Writer” course for the FCE program and, also, teaches Writing and Literature at Loyola University, Chicago. He has published poetry in a variety of small magazines and journals. Today, Mike will discuss both the creative and the practical sides of

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the creative writing field. At this time, I am going to welcome Mike and turn the microphone over to him and we will get underway. Welcome, Mike.

Michael RydelThank you, Larry. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Creative Writing class, another of our Seminars@Hadley. I am going to present in two different sections. First, the creative side of creative writing. Then, the practical side of creative writing. A few objectives that we have for this seminar is that by the end of this hour, you should be able to recognize the basics of short stories and poems, describe the best practices of getting published, describe the value of contests, agents, writing organizations and networking, and then, we are going to wrap up the hour with identifying a variety of writing processes. Basically, the first objective is the first part. Then, the other three are the second half of the seminar.

Part one here is going to be an overview of fiction and poetry. Most people get published writing fiction and poetry. I will talk a little bit about non-fiction, as well. In general, I am going to talk about

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the basics of short stories and the fundamentals of poetry. If this sounds like an English class, that is exactly what this is. This is a lecture from the Literature classes that I teach at Loyola and I thought I would share it with you not so much in terms of interpreting literature, but to come to the thoughts of a writer, “What are publishers and editors looking for?”

Let’s start with short stories. I am going to talk about length and then, plot, setting, character, diction, theme, and point of view. If that doesn’t sound like English class, nothing else does, does it? Length. There are general guidelines for each literary category. Short stories, in general, run from about fifteen hundred words to about seventy-five hundred words or eight to twenty-five pages is your normal length for a short story. However, some people pick the short out of stories and write anywhere up to a hundred to a hundred and twenty page short stories. But, most publishers for magazines are looking for that eight to twenty page range.

If you have what is called a novella, that is thirty to fifty thousand words or about a hundred and

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twenty to two hundred words. Novels range from a minimum of fifty-five thousand words to a maximum of approximately three hundred thousand words. If you are thinking page for a novel, you pretty much have to have two hundred and twenty-five pages for a publisher to consider a novel. You can get up to a thousand or twelve hundred and fifty pages, but I wouldn’t recommend that. I wouldn’t recommend aiming for the high end, as books the length of “War and Peace” are not that easy to get published and sell.

What are editors looking for? Basically, number one, they are looking for a great plot. They are looking for a story. They are looking for something that will keep the readers interest for eight to twenty-five pages. The basics of plot in Western literature and very classical literature is exposition, complication, resolution, climax, and something called denouement. In general, most short stories begin with an exposition in that the author describes the setting, describes the characters, sets everything up. Then, right after that, there is a complication. Something has got to happen. Some event occurs that causes the story to move forward.

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For me, for instance, I drive to work every day. Some people take the train every day. To start an exposition of just my normal day driving to work, if I want to tell a story, something has got to happen. There has got to be an accident or there has got to be an incident or something has got to happen that moves that story along because basically the rest of the story is going to resolve that action. That is called resolution. Basically, what happens is that resolution ends up into a climax. Then, they denouement is essentially the wrapping up or the very conclusion, the very end of the story.

This format fits into what we call genres. This could fit into a romance story or a spy story, detective or science fiction. As a writer, you should know the basic plots of your genre. If you are a literary writer, that is that you are trying to write literature, you have a lot more leeway. But, if you are writing a romance or a spy novel or a detective story, there are conventions that have to be followed so that the editor knows exactly what is going on.

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Early in that story, you should describe the setting. These are descriptive passages that put the reader in the location. In general, that is sight and sound and scent and taste and feel. Very definitely describe sensually. In terms of characters, generally, you are going to have a hero and a villain, which is known as a protagonist and an antagonist. In modern literature, what you normally find in short stories is what I call the “60/40 Rule.” That is, the hero is usually about 60% good and 40% evil and the villain is 60% evil and 40% good. There is a little ambiguity and if gives interest in that story. If your hero is 100% good and your villain is 100% evil, the reader can kind of predict what is going to happen.

In general, for most novels or in this case most movies, generally speaking, there are seven main characters. If you think about it, at a movie, at the end of a movie, there are credits and usually there are about seven famous actors and actresses in those first seven spots. Then, after that, you have your unknowns. This is because most authors manipulate about seven characters. If you think of science fiction, for instance, and think of Star Wars, you have Luke and Laia. You have Obi Wan Kenobi,

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Han Solo, Chewie, Darth Vader, and the droids. There are actually two droids, but I am just making them one droid for the purposes of seven characters.

This is usually the number of major characters that a story can handle. For those of you who prefer Star Trek, for instance, you have got Captain Kirk and Spock and Bones, Agura, Sulu, Chekov, and Scottie. Then, the eighth character is usually the one to get shot by the fazer. All of these characters are described by the author in terms of traits and behaviors. In general, what that author is doing is describing the character and giving that character some traits and allowing the character to behave in the story and use dialogue so that you characterize that character.

In terms of diction and theme, in terms of diction, you have to have narrator. It could be you, but a lot of authors also pick a third party as a narrator. In either event, the word choice and the subtle symbolism used by that voice, that voice that tells the story, that is the narrator. Theme, the only thing that I will say is that a story has to be about something, but to get it published you generally

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don’t want to be preachy. It has to be subtle. Most stories have what we call default themes. So, order versus disorder or fate versus free will or illusion versus reality. For order and disorder, some of the characters will want to put things in order and other characters want to create more chaos.

Fate and free will, the major characters usually have a bunch of choices that they are going to make. In terms of illusion and reality, in that particular case, very often, some of the characters delude themselves or lie to themselves and create an illusion. This is all controlled by the point of view. So, that narrator lets you get in and out of the characters as they go in and out of the settings as the plot progresses. Sometimes, some authors let you inside the mind of the characters. Those characters will think things and the read can actually hear them think.

Everything that I said here, by the way, if you are interested in more information about short stories, is in Purdue Owl under “Creative Writing.” They have dozens and dozens of pages describing short stories. I spent so much time on short stories, I have to rush through poetry here, which is my

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genre. What I am going to talk about in terms of poetry is what is being published now. In general, again, the length of poetry, most of your journals, most of your little magazines have a limit of about thirty to thirty-six lines of poetry. Others are limitless, but most of them want shorter poetry. What you have to do with these poetry journals and the short story journals for that matter is make sure that you read the submission criteria so that you know. You would hate to send in a forty line poem or a twenty-six page story and just get rejected because it is too long.

What makes poetry poetry? Poetry, in general, has been described as chaos under control. Chaos being the expressive language that you use and the control being the sense and the sound, the rhyme and the meter that you put it in. Most people write free verse, but others will write sonnets and villanelles and odes and elegies. The real creativity is not so much your self-expression, it is your self-expression within the form that you choose. All of these poems have metaphors and similes, apostrophes, hyperbole, synechtody, metonymy: all of what we call literary devices. Purdue Owl explains those, as well, but then there

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is also a website called www.LiteraryDevices.com that will give you examples of each of these techniques in poetry.

For poetry, what are popular themes? There are thousands of themes of poetry, but the stuff that is getting published nowadays, outside of your political poetry, and there are a lot of journals that look for politics, but most of them don’t. They are looking for personal experience. Things like adversity or change, divinity, the power of forgiveness are all very popular themes right now with these magazines.

To wrap up poetry, I do want to say this, poems are meant to be read out loud. They are not drama, but they are a spoken art form. Most of us write poetry on the page, and then, read it to other people to make sure that it sounds right. Poems are meant to be read out loud. Mainly, poems tend to live on their own. A lot of poets put it on that page because they want to seek some sort of immortality for that poem. The way to think about it is that poems really exist as poems and if you were to publish it anonymously, it would still stand on its own. In fact, one of the greatest poems ever

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written, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” was published anonymously and was only revealed who wrote it after his death.

What is really popular nowadays is what we call performance poetry or spoken word poems. These are poems that are meant to be read out loud. It is kind of a monologue that many of the poets who go to open mics tend to recite. A lot of them actually memorize it and then get up there on the stage in front of people and read their poems aloud. What you have to do is find a nice place that won’t boo you off the stage and will have at least some sort of applause to give you the encouragement that you tried.

Which brings me to the last topic, which is called Poetry Slams. Poetry slams are a competition invented here in Chicago my Mark Smith at the Green Mill. They are poetry competitions in which the poet gets three minutes to read that poem and then the audience votes for the best poems. Then, that winner gets a prize. You really have to be confident in that poem to go to a poetry slam. But, what is nice about poetry slams is that very often before the competition starts, there is a friendly

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open mic for more amateur poets because most of these poetry slams are really more actors who are really used to the stage and who get up there and it is more of a monologue than it is a poem.

That is the basics of short stories and poems. I would like to open up for some questions and see if…

Larry MuffettWe have a question and answer period here. Those of you who would like, in a moment I am going to release the microphone so you can queue up and ask some questions. If you do not have a microphone, you go ahead and type your questions in the text box and press F8, type in your questions and press “Enter” and I will relay those on the mic. I am going to release the microphone here. Start queuing up for questions.

UnknownIn literature and fiction, what do the words protagonist and antagonist mean?

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Michael RydelProtagonist is the hero. Antagonist is the villain. It is the star of the movie and the evil villain in that story. That is protagonist and antagonist.

Larry MuffettOther questions? Anybody else want to jump in here?

UnknownYour vision that hero has 60% of good and 40% of evil and on the contrary, villain has 60% of evil and 40% is good is very interesting. I would like to congratulate you for your vision of this kind of literature.

Michael RydelThank you. Yes, a lot of modern literature has ambiguity. You look at these characters… You think of somebody who is completely evil in a movie like Hannibal Lecter in “Silence of the Lambs.” He is totally evil, but they give him some sophistication. They give him a little bit of intellectual promise and give him a little bit of sympathy for other

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characters that he lets go. Hannibal is probably more 80/20 than he is 60/40, but even in those terrible villains there has got to be a shred of decency to make the audience feel sad that this person has chosen evil. If your hero is 100% good, for a lot of people, that is not believable. If you do a little bit of that evil or a little bit of that questioning that that person has, it makes that person seem a lot more real to the reader.

Larry MuffettSpeaking of ambiguity, Marcia asks, can you have more than one narrator or point of view in a story?

Michael RydelGenerally not, unless you are in experimental writing. William Faulkner wrote a novel called “As I Lay Dying” in which he wrote… In ten chapters, he wrote the same scene from ten different characters perspectives. That is one example of it, but that is really hard to do in a short story of eight to twenty five pages. Generally, you are going in the mind of usually one character or all the characters… That will be the difference between what is called a limited narration or omniscient.

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Larry MuffettWe have got time for one more question. If anybody wants to jump in here, I am going to release the microphone one more time. Hearing none, we will turn the mic back over to Mike.

Michael RydelOkay. Now, for the secrets. How to get published? I will tell you, I am sixty-plus years old, I have been writing for about forty years and in forty years I have gotten thirteen poems published. You say, “What qualifies you to teach this class?” It is that hard. In those years, for those thirteen publications, I have probably gotten two to three hundred rejections. That is just the way it goes. What I am going to go through right now is: Where do I submit the work and how do I get published? Probably, the best source of magazines is Poets and Writers Magazine. Poets and Writers Magazine will give you a list of all the small presses that are accepting stories and poems. The editor from that magazine is nice. They will put the selection criteria in there and the dates.

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A lot of times magazines will accept poems or stories just for a three month period of time or a six month period of time. Then, basically, publish twice a year. They will have a deadline, let’s say December 31st, to let you know the rejection slip or acceptance within a couple of months and then publish them in June. What is happening nowadays is that almost all of these magazines are going online as opposed to in paper. Some of them go online and then have a PDF version that you can download and print yourself.

Writer’s Guide is another one that gives you a nice list of reputable magazines. In general, what you want to do is get your list of magazines, especially if they are online, and then go read and see what they have published already. In general, those editors will tend to publish the type of stories and poems that they have already published. You can match up and see if your style matches that magazine.

There is also something now that is very popular called flash fiction. Flash fiction is very, very short stories of a thousand words or less. That is three to five pages. If you Google “flash fiction” one of the

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magazines is called Brevity Magazine. If you write very, very short stories, you can read these ahead of time and then see what they like. But, the answer to the question, “How do I get published?” it really comes down to the same thing that if this were a seminar in “How do I get a job?” you have to cultivate relationships with people who will publish you. You have to find agents, editors, other writers in creative writing classes at conferences, book signing events. You have to get a group of people who are other writers who will know other people who publish.

Once you get a network, there are some do’s and don’ts. I hate to say this first one, but it is true. You have to write correctly. You have to make sure that you have no grammar mistakes, no spelling mistakes, no punctuation mistakes. It is worth finding someone to read your stories and poems ahead of time to double check and make sure there are no typos. You say, “What is the big deal?” If I am and editor and I get a thousand poems or a hundred and fifty short stories, I am not going to pick the ones that have mistakes in them. I am going to eliminate off the top the ones that it is going to take me hours and hours to fix.

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The other thing is the submissions guidelines. They are going to tell you how many words, what they topics are that they are looking for. They even get as picky as where to put your name, where to put the page numbers. They will definitely eliminate stories and poems that just don’t follow the rules. Should you wrote a cover letter? In general, yes. There should be a cover letter, but it has got to be short. It should, basically, describe your story or your book or your poem very briefly and tell just a little something about yourself, a little biography, but for a cover letter for magazines, generally a page or even a paragraph if you can get it down to a paragraph. What is happening now is that because these journals are going online, it is all done online. You just type it right into an entry screen and cut and paste your story or poem right into the submission software that they are using.

I will say this, don’t take rejection personally. Like I say, I have thirteen wins and three hundred losses. Even the Cubs are doing better than me nowadays. It just takes persistence and you have to find the editors who like your stuff. When it comes to books, it really comes down to what they are

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looking for. If you are writing non-fiction, this is my little foray into non-fiction here. You want to send to the publisher an outline of your book, a short biography, the market research that the book is based on, and the first thirty page of the book. This would be more like journalism.

If it is fiction and you are trying to get a novel published, you have got to send the whole novel in. That is the whole two hundred and twenty-five pages. I would highly advise that before you do it, you sign up for a creative writing class, get it workshopped, get other people to read it first, get some opinions from other writers, make sure that it is edited. It might be worth it to hire an editor and to make sure that all the commas are in the right spots. Then, know where you are going to send it. Is this literature or is this commercial? When it comes to poetry, go to these open mics, read your poems. Other poets will hear them and give you encouragement and maybe tell you about their publishers, journals, contests, and what is called chap books or small books of poems.

Let me move on to another topic here: Do I need to get an agent? In general, if you have a book that

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you are trying to sell, you are better off finding an agent, but you have got to network to get these agents. You have to go to writer’s conferences and find places or book signings and find places where these agents are hanging out. Agents are looking for clients, but they are not literature people necessarily, they are business people. What they are really looking for is a book to sell. You have to pitch your book to them. You have to be ready to fast describe the book the agent, but not just the plot, the audience and why this agent should take the time to try to sell this book for you to a publisher because these agents tend to be what we call gatekeepers for the publishers.

Most fiction publishers are going to work with a dozen or so agents. They trust the agent has screened out the more amateur books. Piece of advice, do not pay these agents up front. The standard contract is that they will take your book and then they will take 15% of what they sell it to the publishers for. I would highly advice you not to pay people upfront to be your agent. What are they looking for? Plain and simple, they are looking for a good book. Be open to change that book if they have suggestions. If they are willing to try to sell it,

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they are going to make some suggestions. Be open-minded because they know what is going to sell and what is not going to sell.

Another approach are called writing organizations. In a lot of towns there are writers groups and writer’s conferences and writing associations. It is a community of people. It is where you find workshops and critique groups. It allows you to network, to approach people who run the events. If there are writing events in your area, I would volunteer, attend readings, attend book signings, have a personal profile, and always be ready to have a sales pitch that you have got this book and you are just looking for the right publisher.

Another question that is often asked is, “Should I publish for free?” So, not to get paid to publish. That is a personal choice. You have to assess your goals. Do you just want to get published or are you trying to make money off of writing. If you are just trying to get published, it might not be a bad idea to go into journals that don’t pay, because it gives you a publication to put on your resume. It gets you exposure and it gets you a following. In journalism, however, and non-fiction, you generally

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want to get paid. I hate to tell you what the going rates are for beginners, a story, you will probably get about a hundred bucks or a hundred and fifty dollars for about five hundred words.

Which leads me to the next topic which is writing contests. I am a big, big fan of writing contests because it gives you a chance…who knows…to win and get published. Poets and Writers Magazine advertises a lot of these. The Writer’s Guide advertises a lot of these. They cost money. They will range from five dollars to fifty dollars for an entrance fee. In general, the winners get published by the publishing company that is running the contest. But, a lot of them do have honorable mentions. Again, if you get an honorable mention at a poetry contest or a short story contest, that is something to put in your cover letter when you are trying to find and agent or a publisher.

There are some free contests, but generally the free contest just announces the winners and don’t publish the winners. What happens with these entry fees, the entry fees are given to the judges in general to cover the overhead for the contest. In fact, there are three types of contests. In general,

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the winner gets published in the general. The second type is a book length manuscript that gets published. The third type is a republishing. It is a previously published book that gets republished by a bigger publishing house.

What happens to your poems or story when you send it to a contest? There is a screening process. There are volunteers who take a look at all of the submissions. I have done this in the past. Basically, you are checking to see if the person followed the rules of the contest, the title page is in the right spot, it is post-marked on time, and the check is attached. Then, of course, the check has got to clear. That is another part of this, as well. As volunteers, we usually end up picking the best fifty stories or best fifty poems and then the celebrity judge reads those fifty and picks the top five or ten. Will that celebrity judge read that entire submission? Oftentimes, no. They will read it until they know that it is not a winner. Then, you say, “Well, what am I paying for?” You are paying to be judged. You are not paying to be read. My advice then, is to make sure that the best writing you have is in the early part of that story or if there are

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a number of poems that you are submitting to a contest, put your best ones first.

How do I win? You write the best story. Send your best writing, find your niche, find the right contest, and then, of course, again, I will repeat: Make sure that it is a clean copy and that there are not grammar or punctuation mistakes.

A couple of final things here. Networking with other writers. When you meet other writers, what type of conversation starters really help especially if it is a published writer? How do you just walk up to a stranger and start a conversation? Here are a couple of tips. “What are you working on now?” you ask. Everybody loves to talk about their own writing. “What current trends are you seeing?” “What authors do you read?” “Are you in a workshop group? Is it a good one? Are there openings?” “How are you marketing your writing?” “Do you find reading your work at open mics and these venues valuable? Has it paid off for you?” “What type of writing conferences do you go to? Are you going to any?”

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Nice ice breakers. The more writers you get to meet the larger your network is and the more likely it is that they will become friends and if they are published, what you really want is to get an introduction so that that other published writer sends your book to their publisher. That is a nice way to avoid the hassle of submission and rejection. If you want to get an agent and you haven’t necessarily met that person, you need to send a query letter to see what they are looking for. A sample query letter would have some sort of hook, “I met you at a conference. We have a mutual friend. You are the agent of my favorite author.”

Very often, in novels, the agent will be acknowledged at the beginning or end of a book with a “Thank you to my agent.” Make it personal. You don’t just send it to an agency. You have to find out the name of the agent and make sure that you get the agent’s name right. When you do your autobiography, it has got to be short. It has got to be a short paragraph. Twenty-five, no more than fifty words. Basically, describe your background. Your project or your book should also be described

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very briefly. They get hundreds of these letters. You want to get write to the point.

Remember, if you are looking for an agent, they are trying to sell your book. So, this is not a plot summary that you are giving them, but you are giving them an elevator speech on how they can sell this book. So, what is the audience? Why is this book going to be popular? You really answer the question, “Why you can sell this book?”

Let me finish with the writing process and a couple of suggestions that I have for people who write. There are a couple of ways of doing it. One of them, for this type of writer, is to make sure that you promise yourself that you are going to write at least one page a day. If you are writing a story, make sure that you spend time at least to write a page a day. A lot of people say that when you finishes that page, a lot of people like to finish in the middle of a sentence so that when you come back tomorrow you can pick up exactly where you left off.

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Once you have written that page, try to find a book and read some other author. If you are a poet, you should be reading other poet’s poems every day. If you are a short story writer, you should always be reading other writers to give you that encouragement. A lot of people keep a journal. Some people are more… Well, they will write more. They will write up to five hundred words per day. Keep it in a notebook. A lot of people start with a title and write from the title. Others write the story and then come up with the title. It just depends what is more inspiring. Above and beyond, don’t feel guilty. If you miss a day that you are not writing, so what? Sometimes a story or a poem has got to incubate. It has got to be inside your subconscious for a day or two. Then, when you sit down, you will write the whole thing maybe in one sitting.

If you are writing non-fiction, make sure you conduct your research, write sections at a time, let it sit, go back later, and don’t forget to revise. First drafts never get published. In fact, War and Peace which is a thousand page book, is the eighth draft of that book and the only reason that there wasn’t a ninth draft is that Tolstoy the author died. I will

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leave you with a phrase, “Great books are never finished, they are just abandoned.” That is creative writing in fifty minutes. Too bad you can’t get college credit for this.

Larry MuffettI think we answered Lydia’s question. She had a question about having to pay a fee to enter a poem or story in a contest. Justin has a question, is it common for a person to write about their life?

Michael RydelYes, however, with stories, a lot of people will write about other people in their lives. So, as opposed to writing about yourself, I would try to write a story about an aunt or an uncle. I have an uncle, for instance, who went through all of World War II carrying a radio on his back. It is much more interesting for me to write a story about how my uncle survived the war than my reaction to how he survived the war. A lot of times the confusion is, write about personal experience… It could be personal experience, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be about you.

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Larry MuffettThis is my own personal question: Tips or things about writer’s block? I think even people that have to write term papers for school occasionally just get into the thing like, “I have got nothing today.” How do you handle that?

Michael RydelWriter’s block is tough. The one thing that hurts a lot of people is that they try to write from the beginning to the middle to the end. Sometimes the best way to break writer’s block is just to write a paragraph in the middle of your story or just start writing about something that is not necessarily your story, but in the middle of that paragraph, you will be amazed how you get the idea and it goes back to your story again.

Larry MuffettI am going to release the microphone here. Go ahead and queue up if you have got some questions for Mike. You have got a real resource here to take advantage of. Hopefully, we will get a lot of good questions. Any questions for Mike? Hearing none, I want to let everyone know that this

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seminar, like all of our seminars, will be archived on our website and available for your use anytime around the clock. Also, each Hadley seminar is now made available as a podcast which you can download on your computer or mobile device. If today’s seminar has you interested in this or related vocational topics, please check out he seminar archives and, of course, Hadley and The Forsyth Center’s course lists. Mike and I both thank you for your participation. Your questions were, as always, outstanding and added to the value of the seminar.

Hadley values your feedback. Please let us know what you thought about today’s seminar and please give us suggestions for future topics. One way you can do that is by dropping us an email to feedback@hadley.edu. I am going to turn the microphone back over to Mike for a second and ask if he wants to make any closing comments.

Michael RydelYes, I would like to thank you for your attention and encourage you, if you are a writer, we do have a number of courses here at Hadley, English

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courses and Literature courses that might be interesting to you. Then, of course, the course that I teach which is called “How to Make Money as a Writer” which is a very practical approach on how to become a freelance writer. That is it for me.

Larry MuffettI personally also want to thank everyone for taking time out of their busy days to me a part of this. Your input added a lot of value. Mike, do you want to give out any contact information? We had somebody here that said they would like to contact you afterwards.

Michael RydelYes, my email address is rydel@hadley.edu. Feel free to drop me a note. Based on that email, we could schedule a phone call, maybe.

Larry MuffettThanks, Mike. I want to thank everyone again for being a part of this. I want to thank Mike for taking the time to present this information today, and I

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look forward to being with you all very soon, again. Thank you.

For more from the iFocus Series, including many other topics of interest to individuals with vision loss, visit the Videos@Hadley page on the Hadley Institute website at www.hadley.edu.

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