Part of the experience of being at the Juniper Writers Conference was meeting with one of the teachers for a manuscript conference. I had to pay an extra couple hundred dollars for it, but it seemed worth it. I sent the first thirty pages of my short prose collection ahead of my arrival; they assigned it to a random faculty member, presumably one who doesn’t mind the painful act of reading work from people like me; and upon my arrival, I find out the identity of the teacher and we decide on a common time to meet. The Conference assigned me Chris Bachelder, a genius professor at UMASS. I didn’t like the overall experience at the Conference, but this guy was a highlight for sure.
As the manuscript consultation approached, I felt more and more like I was about to meet a prostitute, not that I know what that feels like, but I was developing a dirty feeling about this process. I told him this when I met him. You know, like an icebreaker.
I’ve been hearing the same comments from editors for the last year now, but somehow they started making sense when Bachelder shared them with me. My work is driven by voice, he said, and at times too much so. My problem (one of my problems) is that the voice is overwhelming. I remember an editor sent an email to my agent saying that once — that the narrative voice is relentless. Big shocker. I don’t think you have to be an editor to know that my voice, narrative or other, is absolutely relentless.
Anyway, I have this story that uses voice almost exclusively. It was published in Another Chicago Magazine, Issue 42. In the story, the narrator, father of a toddler, is watching two teenagers out his office window push a giant boulder off of his property. The story is about the father’s fears of bringing his son into a dangerous world, and these two teenagers represent this fear for some reason. Bachelder’s question to me was Why didn’t the narrator ever go outside to confront the teenagers? His point was that I had the makings of a conflict and I failed to confront it as a writer. It says a lot about me personally, but I never realized my misstep by not addressing the simple issue of conflict in a short story. My narrative voice expressed a conflict with the outside world but my narrative action did not physically confront the outside world. I thought this was fascinating. He told me to go beyond the unpleasantness of every day life to confront a conflict produced naturally by the circumstances of the story.
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Douglas Glover—who, as you know, emphasizes the importance of conflict as a structural element in fiction—told me that the avoidance of conflict is common among writers. He has had the problem himself, and at one point he tacked a sign up over his desk, NAME THE ENEMY, to remind him that he had to force himself to confront the issue in his own work.
Frank–this hit the nail on my own head, being voice-y, myself. (I remember one advisor calling one of “voice” pieces suffocating, and an older gentleman in workshop said it left him exhausted. SORRY BOYS!) Anyway, am going to readdress one of my older pieces that has a passive but yappy protagonist and see if I can apply the Bachelder/Tempone theory.
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