Maybe It's Time to Try Some Nonfiction and Poetry Courses

Brigitte Whiting

WVU offers MFA Certificates in Nonfiction and Poetry in addition to several in Fiction. You've probably noticed the courses listed on the calendar. You might have even wondered whether to try one, and then you remembered writing high school essays that had to follow a strict outline form, and studying poetry that seemed to become deader the longer it was parsed, and thought, "No, don't like poetry. Don't like writing essays. No, no, no."

But maybe it's time for another look.

For starters, you could try just one class or two, and you'll still earn credits that can be used toward any of the Certificates. There are also a few Nonfiction Literature courses, L400s, that can give you a better idea of what reading Nonfiction can be like, not that any one of us hasn't read numerous nonfiction pieces, whether from the texts in the courses, blogs, magazines, newspapers, letters, how-tos, memoirs, sales emails, and the list goes on and on. All of these are essays regardless of their shapes and sizes and fall into the category of Nonfiction.

Another type of Nonfiction is Creative Nonfiction. The general categories here are memoir, biography, and personal essays, each using the crafts of fiction, such as scene-setting, dialogue, and narrative arcs to tell a true story. There's one rule that holds for all Nonfiction, whether Creative or not: it has to be factual.

To come back to WVU, we have two series of flash Nonfiction, MFA01–MFA05 and MFA050–MFA054 that fit the Foundation course category and call for writing short personal essays of your experiences in fewer than 750 words. WVU also has longer Core courses, MFA400, MFA403, and MFA404, each with an ongoing project and a workshop. These can be either Nonfiction or Creative Nonfiction. The courses can be taken in any order so you're free to jump in any time.

WVU also has a number of poetry courses (MFA300s), Core that are either 8 or 16 weeks long, and shorter Foundation ones. Again, credits for these can be applied to any of the Certificates. The goal of these is to enjoy playing with words, practicing craft, and coming up with metaphors and similes. A typical week's assignment will be to read craft and a few sample poems, and then practice the techniques in writing a poem.

How, you might ask, can taking nonfiction or poetry courses help you, a fiction writer? Let's look at what you're trying to do in writing fiction: you're using words, those units of swiggles, to create worlds filled with the weight of emotions, hoping that readers will share in those imagined experiences. Nonfiction and poetry ask you to share who you are and how you see the world, to search for what the experiences mean through the writing of them, and to use words to make them come alive on the page. Nonfiction and poetry can also add a few more crafts to your writer's toolbox that might help you in prying your characters open and expanding their views of their worlds.

So, there you have it, a few reasons for considering taking a nonfiction or poetry course. Try a short one and see where it brings you. You might even surprise yourself and find that you enjoy them enough to continue.

This issue, I thought I'd share some tips from staff photographer, Gayle Drakes. I hope you find them helpful.

Landscape Photography

The last time I did a post about the upcoming deadline for Village Square submissions, I encouraged you to try your hand at mobile phone photography, with a few tips for getting good images.

This time around, I thought it might be nice to chat a bit about landscape photography. For the purposes of this post, I am going to describe this as the sub-genre of photography that focuses on the natural world around us; it includes seascapes and coastal environments. I use the term "landscape" in a general sense to make a distinction from other areas of photography such as portraiture or food or architecture. Think brilliant sunsets, soaring mountains, flowering meadows, the cold beauty of snow-blanketed lands or the fascinating emptiness of desert terrain.

Landscape photography is my first love in photography. I get impatient trying to figure out the artificial lighting and posing required for taking good shots of people. But I will spend hours photographing a rock on the coast!

Below I will share three ideas that I have found personally helpful over the years of puttering about with my camera. Then I will suggest a little exercise that you can do to challenge yourself and perhaps get some interesting and different shots.

1. Pay Attention to the Light
Most of the time in landscape photography you are relying on the natural light that is around at the time. Sometimes you will see a photographer hanging about with their camera, seeming to do nothing but all the while looking up at the sky. Then the sun breaks through the clouds and they begin snapping away madly. They were waiting for the sun to come out. I believe that photography is ultimately about all light (but that is a discussion for another time). Light helps to give the subject definition and draws your eye around the photograph because we tend to look at the brightest parts of the photo first. If you find your shots look a bit dull, take it from a different angle that allows the available light to fall on the subject, or parts of the subject- or wait for the clouds to clear.

2. Zoom In
Close-ups aren't just for portraits. This may seem strange advice for taking pictures of big, beautiful landscapes. A wide-angle shot, i.e. zooming out, is a defining characteristic of landscape photography. It takes in as much of the scene as possible. But sometimes there are interesting shots in tucked away in the great expanse. Experiment with zooming-in a bit to select smaller parts of a scene and see what interesting shots you find there.

3. Make sure the horizon is straight!
An old photography tutor of mine had a pet peeve about slanted horizons. If your scene has the horizon in it, take a little more time to frame your shot and try to get the horizon area as straight as possible. Your camera or phone may also have an optional, overlay grid that appears on the screen as you shoot (check the settings menu). You can line up the horizon with one of the horizontal lines on the grid to help you straighten it. If you can use photo editing programs, many have a ruler feature that you can use to rotate and crop to straighten the horizon.
It can be a bit challenging to see when the horizon has uneven shapes like peaks and trees, but what you are aiming for is an even distribution of shapes and lines along the horizontal, the way your eye would see it. Sometimes photographers will experiment with tilting the horizon for a particular effect, but generally, the straight horizon will be more pleasing to the eye.

Exercise
Select a spot you think you know well, like a park. Pick a random spot, or have someone pick it for you, and mark it. This is your base. You are allowed to take shots only from there or any point within ten paces of that spot. Try to find 6 - 10 shots. The photos can be wide views of the scene or they can be close-up shots. 

I did this exercise at the beach on the east coast of my island some years ago and I have attached several of the shots I got that day. Not all were successful (“Bathsheba Evening”, for example, has technical issues) but I thought these shots showed the variety you can get with this exercise. My favorite is, of course, the rocks!
Most importantly, focus on having fun. Choose the best shot you get and submit it to The Village Square for our October issue!

 Bio: Gayle Drakes lives in her native Barbados and spends her spare time on writing, photography, and gaming. She recently joined the MFA program and is working toward the Fiction MFA. She is working on several novels in the science fiction and fantasy genres but has not yet published.

The MFA Independent Study

by Gayle Drakes

Are you in the second or third year of your MFA and looking for ways to fill out your credits? Independent Study offers a great opportunity to enhance your learning experience and progress in the MFA program.

What is Independent Study? It is coursework that you design in collaboration with your student adviser. You choose a topic of interest to you and work out a plan or proposal of reading and writing assignments that you will complete over 8 or 16 weeks.  You gain 1 credit for each week of study so an Independent Study course will give you an additional eight or sixteen credits.

The study topic is entirely your choice. Perhaps there’s an aspect of writing where you want to improve your understanding, such as tone or plot development? Or maybe you’ve always been interested in the mythology of the aboriginal cultures of Australia? Or you want to understand chess openings better. You can design a course of study for yourself on any topic and get the credits for completing it. It's flexible, fun, and a great way of focusing your mind and time on a specific subject. On completion, you will come away with a sense of accomplishment and greater knowledge of a subject you like, and if your subject suits, your course will be added to the WVU curriculum.

 You can find information about the Independent Study by contacting your student adviser.

But don't just take my word for it. Below WVU students, Shanna and GaryJ, share their experiences and how they have benefited from completing an Independent Study.

What was your study topic? Tell us about the "knowledge, perspective and goals" of your Independent Study (IS) and how you first became interested in this topic.
 

Shanna:

Drawn to creative non-fiction, yet intimidated by it at the same time, I took the WVU-MFA flash nonfiction series and the personal essay classes a while back. So, I had dipped my toes in the essay sea and splashed around in the safe zone near the shore but hadn’t tried going farther or diving much deeper. I decided to face my fears and spend two months writing two or three short personal essays a week. The weekly self-assignments were based on the texts used in the personal essay courses, which had been left unfinished because the classes didn’t get us through the entire book.

GaryJ:

I chose to analyze different styles of dialogue in fiction. My goal was to better understand the use of dialogue itself and the mechanics behind crafting dialogue that people remember later.  The truth is, and I might have guessed this, that dialogue is the icing on the carefully crafted multilayer cake of narrative, and that it, like any complex endeavor, either everything works, or nothing does.  

To move from an abstract goal of "learning how to write better dialogue" to a more concrete curriculum, I started with a few didactic books on the subject. These served as primers and under the direction of my preceptor, Karen Barr, I developed a rubric to analyze the different authors I later selected. Then after coming up with that game plan, I sat down and did some research into novels and authors that had excellent dialogue (maybe). My list was eclectic and ranged from authors like Steinbeck to Jose Saramago, who ended up being my favorite. I should add that my curriculum included work on screenplay dialogue, and I would sometimes compare screenplays to the original novels.

In terms of my goal, it was pretty ambitious. I wanted (and I still want) to write dialogue that people remember after they put my work down. I want what my characters say to stick in the reader's head, for the reader to plagiarize my characters when they want to sound cool or convincing.

So far I have not achieved this goal, but I understand why characters speak, that their speech is a kind of action, and that these actions are unique to their character, both their true character and the more inchoate idea of characterization, or how the characters view themselves.

Another powerful idea that I uncovered for my own writing was the idea that no dialogue would ever feel real if the characters said what they really meant. Now this might sound cynical, but I don't mean that no one is genuine. I mean that people speak in subtext, without even meaning to, without realizing it most of the time. And more importantly, when we read dialogue that doesn't imitate natural subtext, it rings false.

What was the most challenging aspect of working on the IS?
 

Shanna:

There were a few exercises from the book that were very difficult for me. I had no inspiration for writing a gastronomic or humorous essay or creating an essay in response to one exercise that required a weird self-reflection that I didn’t understand. But the power of deadline worked its magic, I managed to draft essays in response to each of these exercises. Not that they were necessarily good essays, but I fulfilled the goal and completed the assignment for those uninspired weeks. 

GaryJ:

The most challenging part was committing to the idea that I was going to do this project. It sounds stupid and silly but taking the step of committing and risking failure was the most challenging part. I also have a day job, so the grind of individual work over the sixteen weeks proved taxing. In a normal class, you interact with other students and feel an obligation to keep up. On your own, you still have your preceptor, but really, you're alone. You have to motivate yourself. This is it.

Another difficulty I felt was navigating the freedom of setting up my own curriculum. It's hard to decide what will be best for your own writing. Thoughts like, is this the best use of my time? And am I wasting my time? These recurred over and over. In the end, I think you just have to realize that wasting hours sometimes saves you from wasting years. You have to explore the subject and find out what you need to know to get better.

Writing is such an individualistic activity, and so broad, it's easy to feel lost, or like you don't matter, or like you'll never write anything that matters, or that anyone will want to read. But these are lies. Writing is its own reward and studying the craft of writing always improves everything you will ever write in the future. It's tremendously valuable and efficacious, even when it feels like you're just coloring some kid's menu at Denny's. No offense if you like Denny's or coloring their kid's menu, which is a huge existential waste of time and probably leads to obesity, heart attack, stroke, and tooth decays. Just kidding, I love Denny's. OK, next question.

3. How has the IS improved your writing and/or your knowledge?
 

Shanna:

I wanted to hone my craft and tone my essay writing muscles, hoping to eventually work on a couple of personal projects. I think I accomplished this goal. It gave me the confidence to write eight more essays that are related to a personal project that I’ve envisioned for a while.

GaryJ:

Like I alluded to earlier, I know why my characters are supposed to speak now. Also, I can use dialogue to do more of the hard work of exposition and character developments. That alone does wonders for your writing. How many times do we struggle to just tell the reader everything that is going on in our little narratives and this is a major tool to do that in a way that moves the story forward and feels authentic.

Also, I indulge in these little short screenplay contests, and the work I did helped a lot in that area. In a movie, visuals and dialogue are central to storytelling. We can't see into anyone's head the way we can in written narrative, so you must rely on what the characters say and the way they (you) choose to say it.

Also, I think I read a lot more into what people say in real life too. Like when someone says, I have COVID and I have a cough, I'm like, I think you mean you want to hang out. It's helping in every part of my life.

4. What has been the outcome/success of your IS?
 

Shanna:

I finished the personal essay book!  The Independent Study got me to sit down every week and do the kind of writing that I’d long wanted to do, but never did. It got me to jump into the waters of the essay sea despite all kinds of excuses about it being too cold, big waves, and potential sharks. And I sometimes got some big mouthfuls of saltwater or had to pull my feet out of a tangle of seaweed, but I did it! It exercised my essaying skills.

It also resulted in a body of first drafts that I might go back to and see about revising and publishing in some form. So, I did make it back to shore and flopped on the beach to bask in the sunshine of completion.

GaryJ:

My project has culminated in creating a WVU course on the subject. And I've learned that teaching is a great way to procrastinate writing. I mean, it's right up there with alphabetizing your spices and surfing Reddit. If I hadn't started the course I'd be forced to sit and finish all the short stories I'm pretending to write. Nobody wants that.

It's very satisfying to learn something you think is the cat's pajamas and then teach that to someone who is equally blown away by its simplicity and power. Now, it's not always like that, and sometimes, online, it's hard to convey a complicated subject, then follow up and teach what the students are missing. That's tough.

In my day job, I'm an ER doc and I teach medical students (Please never ever get sick). When they don't get something important, I have to stop and slow down and really get them through it. At WVU, I feel like my students are even more upset and frustrated when they don't get a concept the first time. I want to just comfort them and tell them it's not life and death and they will still write great stories even if they misunderstand some esoteric point about free indirect discourse or subtext and the subconscious mind. I mean, relax, most of the wonderful things people write are to a certain extent unintentional. You put it on the page, but it has its own life so just get out of the way, right?

5. Do you have any advice or a message for other WVU members about the IS program?
 

Shanna:

Consider how to challenge yourself with measurable, realistic goals for the entire IS and each week of the IS. You want to push yourself, but not set goals that aren’t doable. Also, avoid creating weekly assignments that are too nebulous to help you work your way through your IS. Having clear weekly assignments makes it easy to keep it going on your own. Also, set a weekly deadline and promise yourself that you will meet it no matter what. It’s a contract with yourself and you’ll owe yourself the effort to make it happen each week.

GaryJ:

Hey, look at me, yes you. Someone once said that the difference between writers and regular people is that writers are regular people, but their fingers itch. Do your fingers itch? Yeah, they're pretty red, looks itchy, maybe a little cortisone. Anyway, listen, as I said earlier, if you allow yourself to waste a few hours, you could save yourself from wasting years.

So, pick a topic, pick a preceptor, and do the work of learning something new and interesting. can't promise it will make your readers imitate your characters or that you'll be a famous author who got their start in internet writing classes, but I will promise this, and you can take this to the bank: you will experience joy. You will discover something about the subject you love that surprises you, that delights you, and then, you can share it with someone else.

A Crash Course in Punctuation  

It was John's first day on the job, to place road signs. That should be easy enough. Look at the map, find its position, and set it in.

The first surprise was that his supervisor, Paul, would accompany him. So much for thinking he could take his time.

Both of them crawled into the utility-truck cab, his supervisor driving.

"You follow the map and tell me where to stop."

"Okay," John said.

The map was a maze of dots, some red, some yellow, some white, others green. Still, he'd seen road signs for as long as he could remember, not that he always paid attention to them, but that was another story.

The first one was a stop-sign for the corner of Elm and Birch. John opened the door and walked around to the truck bed. The red octagonal signs were stacked nearest to the back end and he pulled one out.

"Wait a minute," he hollered. "This one has a dot in the middle of it. All of them do. What's going on?"

"They're periods, for the ends of blocks, sentences, complete thoughts, stanzas. Guideposts for the readers to know it's a complete thought."

John finished installing the sign, crawled back in, and Paul drove onward.

"What's next?" Paul asked.

"A speed limit sign."

They stopped midway down a block, and John stepped out to find the sign. This time, he wouldn't be surprised by what he found. The stack of familiar white signs lay along the left side of the truck bed.

"A comma," John said. "But why here?"

"Why do you think?"

"To slow down? There's a period coming up?"

"Close. How about to guide the driver to slow down enough to understand the words, enough of a pause to separate lists of items, thoughts, phrases?"

"Got it," he said. He completed the sign and returned to the cab to pick up the map. This would be a grammar lesson. Okay, whatever.

Paul continued driving toward downtown, and John studied the map.

"Oh," he said, "Yield sign coming up at the intersection."

Paul pulled over and turned the emergency stop lights on, and John stepped out again. This was going to be a long day. He opened up the back door to look for the yellow sign. This pile was smaller than the others, and he pulled one out, a single dash-sign. Underneath it was one with an ellipsis.

"Boss, this makes no sense at all," he said.

"How many yield signs did we bring?"

"A couple. Not many."

"Why do you think that?"

"They're to slow readers down, but not completely. To have them pause to pay attention."

"Right. The dash-sign indicates a separate but important idea. And the ellipses. Well, those have two meanings: to indicate part of a quotation isn't quoted, and to show that a character has lost his train of thought or paused in midstream."

"My kids text them all the time. So, what do those mean?"

"Nothing," Paul said. "If you don't know what they mean, how can they possibly mean anything?"

John installed the dash-sign, and they were on their way, Paul barreling along at 35 mph, and then he screeched to a stop at the stop sign.

John glanced at the map. He'd been sightseeing, reading along and enjoying all the metaphors in the descriptions, forgetting what he was doing. Again. "Sorry," he said. "We need two signs back a ways on this block." The one, the comma, would be easy to find, but the other one was a question mark. He set the speed limit sign in the ground, and then walked back to the truck for a brown recreation sign.

"I give up," he exclaimed. "So, I use a question mark?"  

"What is it pointing out?"

"A hiking trail up ahead."

"And?"

"Got it. The reader will ponder whether or not to follow it. So, when do we use the exclamation point?"

"Rarely. I've heard some people say one or two for a novel, which works out to about one every twenty miles. That's about right," Paul said.

"But what if the characters are particularly excitable?"

"That's telling, don't you think?"

John set the last sign. It had taken all day, but it had been a successful day all in all, even though he'd messed up a few times.

This doesn't cover everything to know about punctuation, but perhaps it'll provide a few guiding posts for driving the writing roads.