Writers Who Read
LIVE! #9
LIVE! #9
3 April 2019
There There
by Tommy Orange
by Tommy Orange
Agenda
- Why We're Here
- Literary Forensics
- - What do I bring?
- - What do I feel?
- - What do I notice?
- - What do I study?
- Next Month's Reading & Study
Why We're Here
We Writers want to improve our craft
by Reading like a Writer
through Literary Forensics training
we learn from each other
Roundtable Rules
Always refer back to the book
We practice active listening & serendipity
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but not every conclusion
Always refer back to the book
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 I 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 I notice?
- • Language and Grammar
- • Context
- • Point of view
- • Character & character development
- • Pacing
- • Horizontal structure
- • Layering of themes
- • Overall effect
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
Writers Who Read: Next Up
May 1: The Witch Elm - Tana French (USA, 2018)