Sorry about the silence last week, but I was at Goddard, starting the penultimate semester of my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. It’s crazy to think that at this time next year, if everything goes right, I’ll have a Master’s degree. I mean: I was the kid in high school who said, “I’m not going to college.” And now I’m halfway to a terminal degree.

Suck on that, bitches.

And by “bitches,” I mean “me in my youth.”

Most of you probably remember the short pieces that I posted during my last two residencies, and being the huge fans that you are, you spent the last week wondering where the short pieces from this residency were.

The answer is that there weren’t any short pieces from this residency. Because of Goddard’s rule that you can only have the same advisor for two semesters in a row, I began working with a new advisor this week, and she doesn’t give the same kind of writing assignments as my previous one. My new advisor’s name is Rebecca Brown.

Check out all of Rebecca’s books on Amazon.com

Instead of giving her advising group relatively arbitrary (but incredibly useful) writing assignments as my previous advisor had done, Rebecca gave assignments that pertained to our existing theses (for me, a novel; for others, a poetry collection, play, or memoir). For the first assignment, she gave us certain categories and asked us to write a list of items relating to that category. She took the categories from an ancient text, The Pillow Book, by Sei Shonagon, “a court gentlewoman who [lived] among the nobility at the height of the Heian period…in classical Japan.” The Pillow Book is like an ancient blog. It’s a collection of Miss Shonagon’s thoughts. Sometimes, she writes about the court and its ways, sometimes she writes about the qualities she desires in a good lover, and sometimes she writes simple lists: names given to mountains and rivers; what is good about the first month of the year; and things that “though it’s the same it sounds different.” Anyway, Rebecca gave us some of Shonagon’s lists, and asked us to use the same topic to write a list from one of our characters’ perspectives. Since you all haven’t read my creative thesis and don’t know any of my characters, the lists wouldn’t have made much sense to you.

In another assignment, she asked us to cut a third of the words from an existing piece. I chose the opening of Chapter Two. It was just under 3000 words, so I had to cut a lot of friggin’ words.

First, I went through and removed anything extraneous. Then I went back through and rewrote sentences to make them shorter. Because I had already cut the extraneous words, this actually meant revising sentences entirely. Example:

And she figures that by leaving an opening at the apex of the dome, the architect ensured that the Taverners who sought refuge in the [redacted] would stay in constant contact with the weather of the territory; they’d have a constant reminder of who they were and what they stood for; rebellion in the roof of a dome.

[The redaction is to prevent a spoiler from getting out.]

Compare that sentence to the revision:

The apex of the dome? An architect’s choice. Those who seek refuge shall feel the weather on the surface of their skin. It will be a constant reminder of who they are and what they stand for; rebellion in the roof of a dome.

The word count is 58 words for the original and 44 for the revision. But it’s not just about the word count. The edited version recasts the information into the form of a question and answer. The effect this has on the narrative tone is drastic, and I think, much more dramatic. In turn, the choice to turn it into a question and answer meant I had to revise almost from scratch. To make the choice work–to prevent it from being arbitrary–much had to be done.

Once I went through and did as much of that as possible, I was still 400 words short of my goal. It was time to be brutal.

Here is the original opening paragraph to Chapter Two (remember: this is from the first draft, so don’t judge too harshly):

An eight-year-old girl named Eliza Best stands halfway up a mountain, in the middle of a frozen river. She spies, behind a barricade of snow-covered fir trees, a marble dome peaking above the pine trees. The dome is forty yards from her, with no path between the river and the dome that she can see, and no footprints in the snow. She begins punching through the dense, snow-covered underbrush, and each step she takes allows tiny particles of snow to somehow find their way through the warm, protective fur lining her moccasin boots. The cold particles irritate her young skin, and a chilled “oo” escapes her lips on every step. Her rawhide pants, too wide by far, slap against each other like the hands of two children playing patty-cake palms during Afternoon Release, and the slaps provide a steady marching beat below the high-mountain wind that blows melodiously through the tips of the trees. Low-lying branches rake across the natural fur of the girl’s overcoat and clingle the bells hanging from the wrists of her mittens, adding to the orchestral performance of her movement. In the monotonous silence of the mountain, the movement of Eliza Best through the trees has become a musical interlude for a snow-drawn afternoon.

And this is after being brutal (remember: second draft is not final draft):

An eight-year-old girl crunches through the frozen underbrush of an unnamed mountain; a marble dome peeks above a distant barricade of snow-covered fir trees; a light wind blows melodies through the birch and pine; low-lying branches rake the girl’s overcoat, clingling the bells on her mittens; a snow-drawn afternoon.

Obviously, the first contains not just a lot more words, but a lot more detail, detail that increases the quality of its atmosphere. But here’s the thing: Because I lose the atmosphere in the revision, I had to find a way to bring it forward somewhere else, which in its turn, changes the section yet again.

This exercise was fantastic. It not only changed the narrative tone–not only the way I tell the story–but it changed the story itself. The changes ripple across the entire novel, and in the process, improves the fuck out of it.

But again, the assignment wasn’t something I could post to FI, hence: last week’s silence.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to do too much work on the thesis this semester, because I need to get some of the other graduating requirements out of the way, including my teaching practicum. I’m sure I’ll write more about this later, but I’ll be teaching a class in short-story writing and revision this semester. I’ve got about five students signed up at Green Mountain College. Each of them are going to work on one story for the entire semester. I think the syllabus I designed calls for seven drafts of the story over the course of 15 weeks. The practicum is more than just teaching though. It also calls for a very long essay reflecting on the process. I’m excited, but at the same time, it’s going to be a lot of work, and it’s going to take time away from the novel.

I also have to complete the 20-page critical paper that I neglected to write last semester, plus ten more annotations.

Regardless of all that, I absolutely have to finish the first draft of the novel before the end of May. That’s it. Plain and simple. There’s no other way if I want to graduate by this time next year.

Do me a favor. Extend your sympathies to Dawn, because I suspect that I’ll be damn difficult to live with this year.

That’s it. Thanks for listening.

Fluid Imagination will now return to its regularly scheduled broadcasting.