Margaret Lazarus Dean / photo credit Joe Vaughn

When I was asked whether I’d be interested in taking part in a panel on turning the MFA thesis into a first book, I said yes right away, but I wasn’t sure what I could contribute. In fact, I felt like a bit of a fraud because my journey from the thesis to the published book was so long and roundabout. But I’ve convinced myself that this is part of what makes my story worth telling here, because long and roundabout might be just as common as quick and straightforward, and my particular kind of roundabout experience makes me feel emboldened to give certain bits of advice.

I started the MFA program at Michigan writing short stories, as just about everyone does, but I always had trouble with the form. The first story I workshopped upon starting the program was about a little girl in Florida who sees the space shuttle Challenger explode in the sky over her school. It had some passages in it that I was proud of, but as a story it was an unwieldy, wandering thing with no real development and no plot to speak of. I was so clueless I didn’t even realize that these were serious deficiencies, and when one of my classmates told me that I was a good writer “at the sentence level,” I was naïve enough to think he was complimenting me. My Challenger story grew to 30 pages, then 50, then 80, until I finally realized that I was not writing the world’s longest short story, but had in fact embarked on a novel.

Challenger Explosion January 28, 1986

This is always a scary thing to admit to oneself, especially in the middle of an MFA program, many of which (including Michigan, at least at the time) can seem very story-centric. I met with two of my professors to ask long series of confusing craft questions, but in reality what I was asking them was whether it was okay that I was writing a novel, whether I would sound like an idiot if I said in public that I was. My professors were generous enough to encourage me to work on the novel, and pointed out to me that novels are easier to sell than short story collections, a fact that had not previously been brought to my attention.

In my last semester in the program, our class took part in a thesis workshop with Charles Baxter, in which each of our thesis projects was to be examined as a whole. At that point I had been working seriously on the novel for a year, and would like to be able to tell you that I was getting my feet under me, but I distinctly remember Charles Baxter explaining to me in one of our meetings in his office that it was not a good idea to spend fifty pages creating a main character and then end the second chapter with the words, “And I never saw him again.” A short story writer’s mistake, obviously—I had to learn that in the novel you don’t have to pack up all your toys and put them away at the end of each chapter.

I submitted as my MFA thesis the first 150 pages of a novel about a little girl who watches the space shuttle Challenger explosion, knowing that her father’s job at NASA and her own hopes of becoming an astronaut may have been lost along with the spacecraft and its crew. It felt like a bit of a cheat, to be honest— my classmates who submitted collections of stories, like Valerie Laken, had to actually finish each of those stories in every sense—even if there weren’t yet enough stories to make up a published collection, the writer at least had to demonstrate her ability to write complete stories, beginning middle and end. Submitting the first half of my novel (or, as it turned out, first third) felt like cheating because I not only had no idea how the book might end, I also had no idea how to structure a novel or in fact what the very next page would be. I had struggled through those 150 pages a sentence at a time, and I felt like a fraud presenting what I had come up with as “a novel,” when in fact I still felt like I had no idea how to write such a thing.

I was lucky enough to get a lectureship at Michigan after I graduated from the MFA program. In the evenings, on the weekends, and especially in the summertime, I picked up my copy of my “finished” thesis and shut myself away in my study and ordered myself to finish the book. This was time I spent largely reading over the pages I had already written and feeling alternately hopeful of the work’s potential and self-loathing at the fact that the whole thing hadn’t written itself already. I could see it so clearly when I closed my eyes: the child’s horror at the disaster standing in for an entire generation’s, the resonance when the child’s family breaks apart in slow motion just as the space shuttle breaks apart in the sky— but I kept sort of not seeing that on the pages I’d written. But then sometimes I did—sometimes the passages I’d written years before seemed great to me, or I could see glimpses of the greatness I imagined, and I spent months and years (and I am not exaggerating) rewriting the same paragraphs and pages over and over again when really what I probably needed to be doing was forging ahead, drafting the middle and end, thinking about structure and roadmaps. As I am doing with the novel I’m working on now.

A year after I finished the program, I was still teaching and still rewriting the same pages over and over again. A few people who had graduated around the same time I did suddenly got agents, and those agents made book deals for those writers based on partial manuscripts, causing panic attacks among the rest of us. I was suddenly stricken with anxiety that this was what I was supposed to have been doing: finishing a partial manuscript that I could entice an agent to be interested in. I decided that that was what I needed to do, but before I got to work seriously on cleaning up the first hundred pages, I made plans to meet with one of my professors from the program, Eileen Pollack, and this was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done.

Eileen suggested we go for a walk rather than sitting down for coffee, and I still remember strolling through the spring buds of Burns Park while Eileen explained to me, very patiently, that I needed to write my book and not worry about what other people were doing. She told me that selling a partial manuscript was a nice option to have, that it had been the right choice for some of my classmates, but it was probably not going to be the right choice for me. Then she promised me— and this impresses me even more now than it did then— she promised me that I would find an agent and find a home for my book if I would just write it first and promise not to think about publication or money or any of the business side of it, and she was absolutely right. I did just need to write it, and to do that took another four years after that conversation.

Then, and only then, I sent the manuscript to six agents, three of whom offered to work with me. I signed with the amazing and beautiful Julie Barer in 2005, and, after we went through a round of edits together, she sold The Time It Takes to Fall to Simon and Schuster, who brought it out in February 2007, then in paperback in 2008.

I’m making all of that sound really quick and easy, and while I don’t want to mislead you, it really was quick and easy compared to the long hard slog of actually writing the book. But when it was done to my satisfaction I wasn’t afraid anymore of what the agents and editors of the world might say or not say, because I had finished my book and I was proud of it. This is a feeling that I highly recommend, as it also guards against fear of reviews and disappointing sales. It’s not that those things can’t hurt my career—they can—and it doesn’t put me above worrying what others think of my work, which I do, obsessively. But ultimately I can always sleep at night no matter what happens because what I wanted all along was to be a writer when I grew up, and I know I’ve become a writer because I wrote exactly the book I wanted to write.

Now I’m working on my second novel, and because I have a much clearer understanding of structure and how the moving parts of a book fit together, it’s going much more smoothly than my first novel did. Sometimes I wish I could e-mail notes to myself in 2002, telling myself how to take the long view of the narrative, how to roadmap the long arc of the story without getting bogged down in paragraphs and sentences. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t do that even if I could: As much as I make fun of my poky process over the years I wrote my first novel, I find that the process I used is inextricable from the finished book itself. When I flip through my book now looking for a passage to read at a book event, I remember how each scene, each paragraph came out. The things I’m most proud of in the book are the things that took the longest to bake, and so I can’t truthfully say I wish I’d written it more efficiently. If I’d written it efficiently, it wouldn’t be this book.

My students at the University of Tennessee sometimes ask how long it took me to write my book, and I see their faces sink a little when I tell them the truth. It’s important to me to be honest about how long it can really take, and I’m also honest about the fact that it was hard, that there were several points when I felt very strongly that I’d written myself into a corner that I wouldn’t be able to get out of, when I was convinced that I would have to quit and start over. I tell them something I heard Charles Baxter say once in a lecture, that “literature is not a sack race.” I say this to students probably once a week. My husband and I say it to each other around the house. When we write, what we are aiming for is not just to be done, and not just to be published, but to be read and remembered long after we are dead. It takes courage and perseverance to write, and it takes even more courage and perseverance not to be in a rush.

And—I give exactly the same advice to my present graduate students that Eileen gave to me. Write your book, make sure it’s the book you wanted to write when you first said, “I think I want to be a writer when I grow up,” and then—and only then—go out into the world with it.

Extras

- Margaret Dean adapted this essay from her talk for the 2010 AWP panel From MFA Thesis to First Novel—Five Writers Share Their Stories. (Sheila O’Connor, Geoff Herbach, Nami Mun, Valerie Laken, Patti Frazee, Margaret Lazarus Dean)

Is the MFA thesis an end or a beginning? How do we know if our thesis project is a viable book or an early draft that still requires radical revision? For books that need revision, how do writers practice the necessary discipline novels require over the long haul? How do emerging writers secure agents and publishers for that first book? Focusing on the challenges and triumphs of seeing theses projects into print, five first- time novelists will share their diverse writing and publishing experiences. – Description from the AWP Program

- Read an interview with Margaret Lazarus Dean here on Fiction Writers Review, and follow her on The Time It Takes to Blog.

- Read reviews of The Time It Takes to Fall, via the author’s website. Click here to buy the paperback from Powell’s.

- Five British writers talk to the Observer’s Kate Kellaway about writing their first novels–and getting them published.

- Listen to Grammar Girl’s podcast about Scott Sigler’s “surprisingly simple and slightly disturbing” advice for writing a first novel: in addition to writing every day, he advises penning a “bad book” first, as a way to learn what not to do. And read Robert Twiggler’s “Nine Mistakes to Avoid When Writing Your First Novel” on The First Post.

I loved this morning ritual, which is why I never complained about getting up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday to trudge to work. I liked it for many reasons, not just the pastries. For one, New York publishing was closed, which meant I didn’t having anyone from accounts payable telling me that I owed them tens of thousands of dollars and that a collection agency—always, always from Texas—would soon be contacting our business. So that was good. But more importantly (and more seriously) I loved the interaction with our regular customers.

Jeremiah and Dean, 1998: photo credit James Wilson

Paul, who read the Financial Times and who was originally from London, would typically be the first to arrive, often before I had even unlocked the door. He urged me to read Penelope Fitzgerald, and eventually gave me a copy of The Bookshop to be sure I did. Then came the psychology professor and his wife, both of whom loved to hit the Saturday Farmer’s Market early so they’d have their pick of produce. He raved about Oliver Sacks, she about Rohinton Mistry. One by one, the familiar faces came through the door. I don’t remember everyone’s name, but to this day I can still tell you what they read.

Now, before I paint too bucolic a picture of bookselling, let me say that managing an independent bookstore was one of the hardest jobs of my life. In addition to the aforementioned accounting departments of publishers, and the constant threat of going out of business, there was an endless amount of work trying to bring in books that readers would love, finding ways to connect those books with the right audience, arranging author visits, haggling with advertisers, sitting on downtown development committees, and then the general headaches of staffing a store with human beings—some of whom were not inclined to work, others who were inclined to sleep in, and the occasional few who were inclined toward theft.

photo credit: Julio Garciah

But much of the time—particularly those Saturday mornings with their dependable rituals—I was able to talk with fellow readers who were enthusiastic about books. How we read them, why we read them, where we read them—you name it. And whether mysteries or metaphysics, non-fiction or nature writing, Chaucer or children’s literature, there was a world of writing to discuss, much of which I had never heard of. I loved nothing more than learning and contributing to that community.

It is this same sense of community that we try to foster at Fiction Writers Review. One that is made up of tastes and interests as divergent and varied as our contributors. But if there’s one unifying element, I have to say it’s that very same enthusiasm for books. An unabashed, unapologetic, earnest love of “shop talk.”

Talking shop is how I think of everything that we do at our site. For example, we aren’t interested in reviews that are purely evaluative. The “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” assessment of a book doesn’t interest me, or our fellow editors. Nor do we find much use for plot summary. After all, we’re not trying to help you figure out whether you want to read something based on its worth or subject matter. Instead, we push our writers to think of everything in terms of craft. Not “did I like it,” but what was the author doing stylistically that’s interesting to think about?

original illustration from

A good review should leave a reader with a new way of seeing the craft of writing, regardless of whether he or she ever picks up the book in question. Similarly, we publish in-depth interviews, most of which run 4,000-6,000 words. This allows enough time for a genuine dialogue to develop between interviewer and author, for the conversation to move beyond talking points. Most importantly, it becomes an actual exchange between two individuals who share a love of a thing. Likewise, our essays are guided by the interests and point of view of our contributors. We’ve published essays ranging from a re-reading of Chekhov’s famous “Lady with the Pet Dog” to a memoir of recovering from total hip replacement surgery while reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, to an exploration about why the next Great American Novel might just be a video game.

At the same time, however, Fiction Writers Review isn’t a wiki. This isn’t a posting board. While democratic in terms of content and contributors, there is rigorous editorial oversight, both in terms of what gets published (we often receive several submissions a day) and the multiple rounds of editing that occur with every piece, some of which have taken more than seventeen drafts over the course of five months to reach successful completion.

Now, none of this is unique to an online literary journal. The best print journals have rigorous acceptance and editing standards, they publish a range of essay topics, they feature sustained interviews, and they focus their reviews on thoughtful analysis. But what we also have is what the bookstore provided me: sustained, regular interaction. Almost every day we post new content on our blog—whether industry news, calls for submissions, news items, or general whimsy—and every three to five days we publish a new feature. So each day a reader visits the site, it feels as if there’s an ongoing conversation taking place. This is further underscored by the fact that readers can leave comments and questions and links to related material in response to the work itself. And if a particular author’s work interests them, at the end of each feature we also have a wealth of other resources they can explore—video clips of readings, podcasts, links to further interviews, reviews, and original work by the subject, as well as suggestions for other writers undertaking similar projects.

It is this ongoing dialogue that lends this particular venture its deeper sense of community, for me. Though I subscribe to Zoetrope and Tin House and the New Yorker and Poets & Writers, and an embarrassing number of magazines with glossy covers whose names I won’t speak here, to say nothing of quarterlies ranging from AQR to MQR to VQR—all of which I read and love—I don’t converse with them daily. Fiction Writers Review, on the other hand, is my water cooler. And there is something about the immediacy and closeness that is valuable.

The clearest example I have of this is when Barry Hannah passed away in early March. The news of his death was leaked via Twitter, and was quickly picked up by online journals like HTML Giant, The Rumpus, and The Millions. Long before the New York Times or any other periodical was running the story, a real-time outpouring of sympathy, as well as a wealth of tributes to his work and teaching, was unfolding from his friends, former students, and admirers. I was one of those individuals. Barry was my teacher at the Sewanee Writers Conference several years ago, and I spent the day after his death re-reading his work, meditating how it had shaped me, and writing a short essay about his influence. Because we are an online journal, we were able to publish it on our blog that very day, and within hours it was picked up and re-published (or linked to) in dozens of places across the country. [Here's the essay in its later, expanded form.] This is another unique aspect of online literary journals and they way they foster community: the work is shareable. Immediately. So there is not just a community of readers of our journal, but also a community that exists among online journals.

But perhaps most importantly, I believe that online journals like Fiction Writers Review provide a unique place for emerging writers to join the conversation. After all, few print journals accept book reviews from individuals who haven’t yet published a book themselves. And even if they do, they rarely take unsolicited work. So how does an emerging writer enter this critical dialogue? Here they can. Likewise, the interview is a form that doesn’t have a prominent place in most journals. The average quarterly only publishes one an issue, meaning four a year. Here, we often have more than one a week. And while most publications seek creative nonfiction that is predominately literary journalism or personal narrative, here we are looking for meditations on craft and the writing life.

Again, all of this is “shop talk.” All of this is about bringing together people who believe that talking about writing matters. This is what I found so enriching and gratifying about my bookstore experience all those years ago—what I looked forward to every Saturday even more than those marzipan croissants. Because the best conversations are not only ones that include us, but also ones that are ongoing and endlessly evolving.

Editor’s Note

FWR at AWP: Dean, Mike, Valerie, Jeremiah, Anne, Zachary, Margaret, and Natalie

This essay was originally delivered as a talk at this year’s AWP Writers’ Conference (in Denver) as part of the panel Evolution of the New Media: Online Literary Journals in 2010. Joining our Associate Editor, Jeremiah Chamberlin, were Dan Albergotti (Waccamaw), Dan Wickett (The Emerging Writers Network and The Collagist), and Terry Kennedy (storySouth). The panelists’ presentations ranged from the evolving aesthetics of online journal design to the ways in which lit sites and blogs foster an extended literary community for writers. More than 100 participants attended the panel, which sparked a lively debate (one that continued afterward) on such issues as the sustainability and funding of online projects, the commitment to editorial excellence in a digital landscape, and the future of publishing in this medium. FWR was honored to share this event with such respected journals/editors, and also to have so many readers and contributors in attendance. But for those who weren’t able to make it this year, we wanted to share Jeremiah’s talk with the rest of you at the literary “water cooler.” – Anne Stameshkin

Extras

- Visit and read our fellow panelists’ lit sites and journals: The Emerging Writers Network, The Collagist, storySouth, and Waccamaw.

- The following video, an introduction to each of the online lit journals and communities featured at The Evolution of the New Media session, was designed for and screened at the panel:

Thursday, April 8
10:30 – 11:45 a.m.
Rooms 102, 104
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

R124. Bollywood, Bullets, and Beyond: The Poetry of South Asian America. (Featuring: Summi Kaipa, Pireeni Sundaralingam, Ravi Shankar, Bhanu Kapil, Subhashini Kaligotla and Monica Ferrell) What do a sestina, 9/11, and Amitabh Bachchan have in common? Popular, political, and poetic themes all appear in Indivisible (University of Arkansas Press, 2010), the first anthology of contemporary South Asian American poetry. The collection features emerging and established poets who can trace their ethnic heritages to Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Six extraordinary writers from this collection read from their work.

Thursday, April 8
12:00 – 1:15
Granite Room
Hyatt Regency Denver, 3rd Floor

R168. The Soul and The Machine: Teaching Creative Writing through Technology. (Laura Valeri, David Rothman, Kathryn Winograd, Steven Wingate) This panel explores the complexities of teaching prose and poetry with online technologies and social media. New medias offer us practical advantages, but also present technical and pedagogical challenges involving privacy, censorship, copyright, and other issues we are only beginning to understand. Creative writing professors share their lessons adapting Podcasts, Wikis, Videos, Facebook, online course platforms, and other sundry tools to graduate and undergraduate creative writing classes.

Margaret Lazarus Dean: photo credit Joe Vaughn

Friday, April 9
9:00 – 10:15
Rooms 401, 402
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

F119. The Place of Place: Crafting Place as Character in Fiction. (Sejal Shah, Margaret Lazarus Dean, Geeta Kothari, Michael Byers, Jesmyn Ward) It’s a commonplace notion that setting can be so central to fiction that the landscape can become a character—even a central character. But how, in craft terms, does it come to pass that place can inhabit fiction as much as fiction inhabits place? Five fiction writers will discuss their approaches to writing place—both urban and rural—in their works, drawing on settings as diverse as Bombay, the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Upstate New York, Cape Canaveral, Washington State, and the American Midwest.

Friday, April 8
9:00 – 10:15
Room 111
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

F108. To West or Not to West. (Jenny Shank, Marilyn Krysl, Steven Wingate, Laura Pritchett, Robert Garner McBrearty, Janis Hallowell) Fiction writers in the West inevitably find themselves face to face with two forces: the region’s role in America’s cultural mythos and the shadow of “the Western” as a genre in fiction and film. Many authors with roots in the West do not write “western” fiction, yet they feel their aesthetics and subject matter being influenced by the life of the region. This panel will explore the variety of ways Colorado fiction writers respond to the West at a time when the region’s identity is shifting.

Margaret Lazarus Dean: photo credit Joe Vaughn

Friday, April 9
3-4:15pm
Room 108
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

F196. From MFA Thesis to First Novel—Five Writers Share Their Stories. (Sheila O’Connor, Geoff Herbach, Nami Mun, Valerie Laken, Patti Frazee, Margaret Lazarus Dean) Is the MFA thesis an end or a beginning? How do we know if our thesis project is a viable book or an early draft that still requires radical revision? For books that need revision, how do writers practice the necessary discipline novels require over the long haul? How do emerging writers secure agents and publishers for that first book? Focusing on the challenges and triumphs of seeing theses projects into print, five first- time novelists will share their diverse writing and publishing experiences.

Saturday, April 10
10:30 – 11:45 a.m.
Room 201
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

S132. Re-writing America: Complicating the Poetics of Identity. (Featuring Hayan Charara, Samantha Thornhill, Ching-In Chen, Tim Hernandez, Summi Kaipa. Moderated by Neelanjana Banerjee.) Even as the minority surges towards the majority in making up the New America, poets seek out the nurturing spaces of ethno-literary organizations like Kundiman and Cave Canem. Popular ethnic-specific anthologies are being published each year. Yet the work coming out of these cultural boundaries is incredibly diverse in style and influence. This panel examines the ways in which hyphenated American poets are rethinking the concept of identity and, in turn, shaping the national zeitgeist.

FWR at AWP 2009 (holding my photo. I had pneumonia!)

AWP 2010 in Denver is just days away, and Fiction Writers Review will be there. Stop by our table at the bookfair, sign up for our mailing list, win loot from the FWR store, and check out our panel with the editors of Waccamaw, The Emerging Writers Network/Dzanc, and storySouth on Saturday from noon to 1:15 (Granite Room: Hyatt Regency, 3rd Floor):

S163. Evolution of the New Media: Online Literary Journals and Websites in 2010. (Dan Albergotti, Dan Wickett, Jeremiah Chamberlin, Terry Kennedy) This panel examines the evolution of online publishing and literary promotion via digital media in the 21st century. Dan Wickett and Jeremiah Chamberlin will discuss ways their sites have developed an extended literary community for emerging writers, while Dan Albergotti and Terry Kennedy will address how aesthetics of online journal design and presentation have evolved in recent years.

Denver-based writers: even if you’re not registered, the bookfair is FREE and open to the public on the last day of the conference (Saturday, April 10).

We hope to see many of you soon!