Writers Who Read
LIVE! #9
LIVE! #9
3 April 2019
There There
by Tommy Orange
by Tommy Orange
Agenda
- Why We're Here / Roundtable Rules
- Introduction to Literary Forensics
- Group Discussion
- Further Study
Why We're Here
We writers want to improve our craft
by reading like a writer
We learn from each other
using Literary Forensics
Roundtable Rules
Always refer back to the book
Practice active listening & serendipity
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but not every conclusion
Always refer back to the book
Reading Teaches Writing
Today's author: Tommy Orange
- Raised near Oakland, registered member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes
- Teaches creative writing at IAIA (Institute of American Indian Arts) Santa Fe
- “There’s no there there.” - from Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) by Gertrude Stein
- Upon seeing that her childhood house demolished and the land paved over
- 2011: Novel's genesis. Target audience was ‘urban natives’
Wanted a cathartic event with fatalities; created Thomas Frank so he could die first - 2012: Son born. He started writing.
- 2012-2016: Workshopped hundreds of characters, threw most of them away
- 2016 November: Three days after the election – got an agent
- 2016-2017: Edited final 15 characters down to 12
- - Orange writes lying down. (Memory of he and his father watching TV lying on the floor)
- - Has an app to read him his text in a robot voice as he does the dishes, runs...
What do you feel?
What in the book elicited that feeling?
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but every conclusion should be questioned
We practice serendipity
- nothing is too crazy
Always refer back to the book
What do you notice?
Throne of the Third Heaven - James Hampton
There There - Stats
Marketing: Native American, Political
Genre: Realistic, Present-Day, Arch-Plot Long-Form
Word count: 82,473; Print Pages: 278
Person: 1st, 2nd, 3rd; Tense: Past, Present, Future
POV: 14 different POVs
Publish date: June 5, 2018
Publisher: Knopf; Sold By: Random House LLC
Awards: Center for Fiction's 2018 First Novel Prize,
2018 National Book Critics Circle Award's John Leonard Prize,
2019 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award,
(shortlisted) 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction,
New York Times 10 Best Books of 2018
Person / Tense
Contour Map (14 POVs)
Word Cloud
