Thanks for comment. Your prompts are more exercises than gimmicks, and the value of the prompts you present at the Kenyon workshops is one of the many reasons I’ve come back to Kenyon and your teaching for so many years. My concern is that writers encouraged by gimmicky prompts often generate the search for finding their inner self and the stories that created inner selves; this is often a misdirection that doesn’t help the writing. Anything that suggests an experience that produced a feeling in the writer will be recreated and valuable to a reader when described on the page is detrimental, I believe. Prompts are useful, I think, when they identify areas to explore human motivations and desires–and the human spirit in conflict–that will contribute to a story. You taught me that.

I know you think I list toward plot, but my belief is character is everything in the great literary fictional story. Only when well developed, interesting, (a little heroic, inherently amusing, consistent in their moral applications to life, and active), can characters drive the action-dramatic plot necessary for memorable literary fiction. Is is essential, that characters, I think, need to be developed through action and conflict, in addition to descriptive narrative. All this means something needs to happen—a lot, but does not mean plot dominates. In literary fiction, I believe plot is characters forced to make decisions that cause plot changes and progress. In genre fiction, circumstances and environment drive plot, and characters are actors on a stage often preset with a plot contrivance.

I’ve always admired your top-story/bottom-story concepts, and your insistence that your class is a fiction class and not a memoir class. Thanks for all you’ve given me over the years in the understanding of what writing should be.

Best,

BILL