ENG 421 The Preface
The preface is a 3-5 page self-evaluation exploring the techniques used and influences in the revised story, as well as an exploration of your development as a writer over the semester. So, in the course of your preface, you should speak to how the story changed from your initial conception of it to the draft you're turning in with your portfolio. Since plot and characterization have been major craft themes of the course, I encourage you to speak to how the story evolved in these ways. At the same time, I want you to also speak to your growth as a writer as well, and the following quotes should be taken as suggestions, not prescriptions. (Do not feel that you need to respond to each one. )
Tobias Wolff "A creative writing workshop doesn’t communicate information so much as it attempts to communicate a set of values."
What values now guide you in your story writing? How have these values changed through reading and discussing stories and writing exercises and numerous drafts?
What short story (or stories) that we read this semester do you want to emulate most? Why? Is it for craft (dialogue, diction, structure, characterization, etc) or is it for something more mysterious? Or for some large question the story leaves you to ponder?
What questions do you want your reader to ponder after they finish your story?
What short story did you dislike (intensely?) on a first read, but like or, at least, admire now? Why?
Jane Smiley: “The first idea you need to give up when you begin to revise a story is that you know what this story is about.”
How have your thoughts about revision changed over the course of the semester? What certain ideas did you give up about your story in revision and how did this change the story?
George Saunders: "Overfullness is the most satisfying part of writing a story — that space where you honestly don’t know what the heck you’re doing, the story is sort of getting away from you, but it feels honest and urgent. To me, the process of writing is just reading what I’ve written and, like running your hand over one of those mod glass stovetops to find where the heat is, looking for where the energy is in the prose, then going in the direction of that heat. In this way, for me, the process of writing becomes an exercise in being open to whatever is there, to what you’ve done, truly open without attachment to yesterday’s vision of what was there, and then trying to respond to it in that full-bodied, visceral way…"
Regardless of how you feel about your portfolio as it exists in this draft, when, in the writing did it feel most alive to you? Most urgent? When did you feel that Saunders heat? That overfullness? Why do you think you felt this way? How did you go in the direction of that heat?
What the hell does the above quote possible mean? How does it relate to any of the stories we’ve read? How does it relate to the stories you’re trying to write?
Charles Baxter: "Sometimes we have to try and persuade our characters to do what they’ve only imagined doing. We have to nudge but not force them toward situations where they will get into interesting trouble, where they will make interesting mistakes that they may (or may not) take responsibility for.”
In your drafting and revising, were your characters flaws and mistakes clear to you?
Was it hard letting your characters make mistakes? Why?
How did the characters’ mistakes and flaws (once you understood them) alter the course of the story?"
Tim O’Brien “About real people we sometimes say, “Well, she’s a mystery to me,” or “I wonder what makes him tick.”
In what way do you want your main character(s) to be a mystery to the reader.
In what way, are they still a mystery to you?”
Richard Ford: “Stories…are makeshift things. They originate in strong disorderly impulses…proceed in their creation by mischance…distorted understanding, weariness, luck…with the result often being a straining barely containable object held in fierce and sometimes insufficient control. A formal template for studying narrative can guide us… permit a desired intimacy…aid our confidence, encourage our thinking, lead us to other parts of the story… But an organizing or explaining system which doesn’t illuminate the haphazard in any story’s existence can’t be a real comprehension.”
What “disorderly” or random impulse did your story originate in?
How did the story move away from this impulse in the drafting and revising?
How did you get lucky?
How were you orderly in your revising?
How were you haphazard?
Other Questions:
What story analysis and exercise helped the most and why?
What craft problem did you struggle most with throughout the semester? (Plot.. Time Management. Formidable obstacles. Problem rooted in character. A story as a record of choices. A story as a record of change. The Interesting Mistake. Turning point. etc.)
What do you think is most ambitious about your portfolio? Where do you feel yourself taking risks?
In what craft areas does the story still need revision?