Gotham Writers Blog

Sure, lots of places shutter the shop in August and go off for a spell of leisure. And we hope you can slow your pace a bit, perhaps relish a slice of watermelon. (And, of course, we have many readers in the Southern hemisphere who might prefer a hot cocoa on a winter’s day.)

If you wish to weave some writing into your August, Gotham is here for you. We’ve got classes starting in August, free Friday Write-Ins, our monthly edition of The Razor, and these two special things…

The Writer’s Mind

The Writer’s Mind is a fascinating new course, or rather a reinvention of a course we offered a while back.

Unlike most writing courses, it’s not about the craft of writing. It’s about something deeper and more mysterious. It’s about techniques for thinking as part of your writing process. Such as …

Letting your mind aimlessly roam, which often leads to great ideas and solutions.

Slipping back in time to engage in child’s play, where the imagination runs wild.

Accessing your dreams and semi-awake state, as a path to your subconscious.

The Writer’s Mind debuts August 6, in an asynchronous Online class. Sorry, that one is sold out, but it also be offered Online starting September 10 and October 8. And you can put it on your Gotham Wish List to be notified about future dates and formats.

I don’t know of a course like this offered anywhere else. Are you up for an odyssey of the mind?

Gotham in Bryant Park

Every summer, Gotham takes up residency in NYC’s Bryant Park for free Thursday night classes. We just did three of them in July. Now, we’ve got three of them in August:

August 1 – Fiction Writing
August 8 – TV Writing

August 15 – Memoir Writing

These outings are maybe my very favorite Gotham event. The park is a luscious green rectangle surrounded by soaring buildings and right next to the magnificent NY Library building (the one with the lions). Not only do we get great crowds at our classes, but it’s a collection of interesting folks, a real mix of what the city and its visitors can provide.

As the summer day turns to night, the magical light brings a kind of magic to the writing people do in these classes, and those who want to can share their words into a microphone.

These events are worth the trip.

Have a great rest of summer…with us.

Alex Steele,

Gotham President

Letters From Kelly

July 16, 2024July 15, 2024

Coaxing Seedlings

Recently, the author Annabelle Tometich visited my class to talk about her debut book The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony, and the conversation was, frankly, epic. She and my students talked about discerning whether most of the scenes in your first draft are really just different versions of the same scene (probably); the difference between keeping your reader in mind and pandering to them; and how to write about identity without lapsing into nationalism.

But my favorite moment came when somebody asked Annabelle why she wrote a pivotal scene in the book the way she did, ending it where she did, and Annabelle answered, “I don’t know. I honestly don’t remember.”

She said that a few times, about writerly decisions large (how did she hit on the five-part mango-tree inspired structure?) and small (why did she use second person to start Chapter 24?).

Annabelle made plenty of conscious choices when it came to writing her book, from its themes of growing up mixed-race in Florida to its title to its structure. But when it came to what some people call process, she just wasn’t aware of it.

“Every time I realized what should be next, I hurried to get it down on the page as quickly as possible,” she said. “Often I realized what should be next when I was at the grocery store or driving in my car, and I would rush to write it down when I got home.”

This thing we call process, it’s mysterious by nature. We’re not talking about the efforts you make to get the words out of your head and onto the page, nor the routine you use to make time for your creative work. We’re talking the means by which a writer realizes what a story needs next, and then creates it.

Or as novelist George Saunders described it, the writer doesn’t necessarily decide what scene to write, what point of view to use, or even choose their words.

“It might be more accurate to say that it occurred to [the artist] to do so; in a split-second, with no accompanying language, except maybe a very quiet internal ‘Yes.’ He just liked it better that way, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, and before he’d had the time or inclination to articulate them,” Saunders wrote.

And the most impactful choices are the most inchoate, and incremental. A word or a sentence, added or deleted. Saunders likened it to a cruise ship turning.

Annabelle compared it to her mother choosing mango pits. Her family would go mango-picking at an orchard every year, and her mother would inspect every mango, choosing just a few pits to try to coax into seedlings. Some sprouted; some didn’t. A few became actual trees.

Did her mother have a process for making those choices? Did Annabelle when making hers?

“As much as you can call it a process, I guess?” Annabelle said. “I don’t really know!”

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Letters From Alex

June 25, 2024September 16, 2024

Kicking Down the Door, Part 3

Hey, this is part of a series on writers who kicked down a metaphorical door with their writing. Like Marie Curie with science and Little Richard with music.

Alice Munro passed away in May at the age of 92, after a long career publishing fiction. The first unusual thing about her is that she only wrote short stories, never a novel. The even more unusual thing is what she did with her short stories.

Reading Munro takes patience. The writing style and characters aren’t flashy, most of the stories about folks living in small Canadian towns, facing the kinds of things you face in life.

The stories seldom start with a hook. For example, here’s the opening line of “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”:

Fiona lived in her parents’ house, in the town where she and Grant went to university.

Gosh, nothing terribly exciting there. Indeed, after reading the first few paragraphs of a Munro story, you might be tempted to set it aside. If you stick with it, however, you’ll soon find yourself inside a tunnel that keeps leading you deeper into something fascinating.

As in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Fiona and Grant are a married couple in their golden years. When Fiona discovers she has dementia, she consents to enter a “home” when it gets bad enough, which it does. One day Grant comes to visit and finds that Fiona has taken a beau at the home, something that happens when spouses forget that they’re married. But did Fiona really forget, or is she slyly chiding Grant for all those casual affairs he used to have? Either way, Fiona is genuinely upset when her beau’s wife removes him from the home. And then Grant begs the beau’s wife to bring her husband back, hoping to make his wife happy. And that tunnel keeps on deepening.

Did I mention that her short stories are long? A good deal longer than they’re supposed to be. When you’re inside them, though, they don’t feel long because they’re delivering the depth and complexity of a novel, leaping through time and evolutions so seamlessly you barely feel it until you’re done, dazed by what you’ve been through.

Though considered one of the best—if not the best—writer of contemporary short stories, Munro was a modest person. She led a quiet life and had no real interest in publicity or accolades (she won all the big awards). As she said, “I always got lunch for my children.”

If you forced me to pick my all-time favorite short story, I would tap Munro’s “Carried Away.” Don’t get me started on how wondrous I find it.