Weddings and Stories

Okay, this might be a little English-major-y, but let me give you some background on the "workshop."

If you attend a graduate writing program (whether it be MA, MFA, whatever) you will inevitably come across a class called the "Workshop." What that means is, each of the 12 or so students will write stories, swap copies (so everyone reads everyone else's work), and then come to class prepared to discuss the stories. The weird part is that (in most of my workshops, anyway) the author of the piece being critiqued can't talk until the end. No questions, no explanations, no nothing. The idea is that it provides the writer the opportunity to see how the work will be received by a broad audience (even though "broad" still refers to a graduate English program, whatever), and that since you can't respond to readers' questions or commments once something is published, this process is a simulation of "what's to come."

So, anyway. That's the background. The other thing you do in graduate work that's different from undergrad is you get to ask the BIG questions. Like, "Why do we write." "Why do we read." You also get to completely disregard rules of punctuation, if you like. Which makes questions like, "What makes writing good" really fun to ask.

Occasionally, we get in these philosophical/ theoretical discussions (like, debating over happy vs. sad endings, likeable vs. unlikeable characters) and we'll go around in circles for a while, until the professor steps in. The professor I'm referring to (in this particular episode) had her work published in "The Best Short Stories of the Century," so, yeah, she knows her stuff.

Last week, we read a story written by one of the girls in the class. And there was something about it that we couldn't put our fingers on, I mean it was beautiful and the characters were there and the premise was good, but for some reason, it just BORED us ALL. We couldn't figure it out. Everything we'd been taught to pay attention to (character, plot, tension, etc) was there, but the "spark" was missing. And we had no idea why.

Finally Pam (the professor) stepped in. She said,
"Right now, the problem is that everything is too perfect. Everything fits too nicely together, too cleanly stacked in little boxes. Every other page, the image repeats, so perfectly that we're bored by it. Good stories are messy. Good stories don't fit in little rows or boxes. The best fiction comes from the inexplicable, the dirty details, because that's what makes us HUMAN. Characters are not simply nice or mean or smart or dumb. They are all those things at once, maybe some traits are more prominent than others, but they're not clean and simple. They're messy and complicated. Because that's life, and that's what we love to read about. Life."

Dun da da DUN!!

And, because this is how I think lately, I applied this little bit of wisdom to the wedding. Because, after the first typo on our "wedding website," I learned that we were NOT going to have a perfect wedding. We'll have an amazing one, but it's not going to be perfect. My manicure will chip, his bout will wilt, we might knock the cake over with some characteristically energetic dancing.

But you know what? I don't WANT a perfect wedding. I don't believe they exist, anyway. Unless, like Pam's theory, they exist, but they're boring. Who wants that?