{"id":962,"date":"2020-02-25T15:36:09","date_gmt":"2020-02-25T15:36:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/english-344-001\/?p=962"},"modified":"2020-03-30T02:34:59","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T02:34:59","slug":"catherine-lacey-emphasizes-the-beauty-of-mistakes-in-lecture-on-fiction-craft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/english-344-001\/2020\/02\/25\/catherine-lacey-emphasizes-the-beauty-of-mistakes-in-lecture-on-fiction-craft\/","title":{"rendered":"Catherine Lacey Emphasizes the Beauty of Mistakes in Lecture on Fiction Craft"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Taken from https:\/\/www.guernicamag.com\/the-messy-and-the-vulnerable-catherine-lacey\/<\/p><\/div>\n

In fiction writing, there are many ways to fail. At least that\u2019s what author Catherine Lacey knows to be true. An author of four novels and a short story collection, Lacey will admittedly tell you she\u2019s struggled with her own writing, particularly with finding a space where she can exist outside her own self and take on the mind of her characters. Despite the struggles she\u2019s faced, Lacey has made a name for herself in the world of fiction, appearing on the New Yorker\u2019s<\/em> list for best books of 2014, and has her work translated into five different languages. Lacey visited\u00a0 the University of Michigan as part of the Zell Visiting Writers Series<\/a>, a program offered through the Helen Zell Writers\u2019 Program that brings prestigious authors and poets to speak to students. Lacey read from one of her short story collection Certain American States<\/em> and lead a lecture on \u201cwhere fiction comes from and where it goes.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her lecture, Lacey emphasized the unpredictability of writing, attesting to the ways fiction authors often aim for a particular target, but their best work comes from hitting something adjacent to that. She believes creative writing comes from mistakes and that it\u2019s crucial for fiction writers to pursue \u201cimpossible projects\u201d \u2014 fiction that aims to answer questions we don\u2019t have clear answers to \u2014 so they can make mistakes that will shape their future work.<\/p>\n

Lacey also described self-delusion and its value to creative writers. According to Lacey, self-delusion is essential to fiction writers because when you break it down, writers are simply readers looking for the book they want to read and in order to create that book, they need to temporarily lose themselves in the story to make their fictional world come alive.<\/p>\n

Lacey got to showcase how she\u2019s implemented these strategies into her own work during a brief reading from her collection of short stories, Certain American States<\/em>. The collection depicts \u201cAmericans tortured by the mundanity of their lives,\u201d and Lacey shared what that looks like with her reading of the story \u201cBecause You Have To.\u201d The piece reads as a series of diary entries from a narrator who\u2019s coping with loneliness after being left by someone she loved. Lacey strings the narrator\u2019s thoughts in a sequence of drawn-out sentences with occasional brief, snappy phrases that plug in bits of humor or the narrator\u2019s sudden change of thought.<\/p>\n

In her lecture, Lacey claimed good fiction \u201cdoesn\u2019t tell you how to read it,\u201d meaning a compelling story doesn\u2019t guide its readers to conclusions but prompts them with questions that they can carry with them throughout the story. Lacey beautifully implements this technique into her own writing, asking \u201chow long does an event stay in a room?\u201d after her narrator finds out her landlord\u2019s six-year-old son was being molested by her ex-husband. \u201cBecause You Have To\u201d also showcases Lacey\u2019s attention to detail. While the narrator is reflecting on the bad behavior of her dog, she mentions the smell of mildew on the quilt she\u2019s been sleeping with outside and takes time to notice that the mice in her yard are gone. It\u2019s in these details where we can feel the tension between the monotony of the narrator\u2019s life and the void of loneliness she feels that seems larger than the life she\u2019s living.<\/p>\n

Catherine Lacey\u2019s writing style is refreshing in its honesty and fearless approach to developing voice and asking tough questions, something we don\u2019t see often fiction writing.\u00a0 Lacey has clearly grappled with the question of what makes a good story, and her emphasis on learning from mistakes and allowing writing to be messy is a message of hope to writers who struggle with achieving perfection in their work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In fiction writing, there are many ways to fail. At least that\u2019s what author Catherine Lacey knows to be true. An author of four novels and a short story collection, Lacey will admittedly tell you she\u2019s struggled with her own writing, particularly with finding a space where she can exist outside her own self and Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":167,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,2],"tags":[146,149,148,147,51,63],"class_list":["post-962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-on-campus","tag-catherine-lacey","tag-certain-american-states","tag-fiction","tag-fiction-writing","tag-umich","tag-zell-visiting-writers-program"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/english-344-001\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/english-344-001\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/english-344-001\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/english-344-001\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/english-344-001\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=962"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/english-344-001\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1040,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/english-344-001\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/962\/revisions\/1040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/english-344-001\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/english-344-001\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/english-344-001\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}