Creative English Theses, Part II

The Crimson published interviews last week with two students writing creative theses in the English department —a poet and a playwright. This week The Crimson talked to a novelist and an author of short stories. Made up of prose and broken into chapters, these students’ theses look more like their non-creative counterparts. But because their works will be personal creations they are more similar to poems and plays.

Both Angela M. Hur ’02 and Elizabeth A. Phang ’02 are writing theses which are ostensibly more personal than those of the authors interviewed last week. The stories are set in a suburban town; the novel’s characters are like the author or people she knows. Do these similarities represent shameless and tiresome exploitations of the author’s experience, or are they simply a means to help the author create a new world that has never been seen before?

Because creative thesis writers draw on personal experience, some may not consider what they do an academic or intellectual pursuit. Hearing about the process of writing, though, alleviates any doubts we might have. Books are not written in a vacuum—they are influenced by scholarly minds. Beyond that, in the writing and revising, the process is itself intellectual.

Angela M. Hur

The Harvard Crimson: What is your thesis about?

Angela Hur: I’m writing a novel that centers around the translation of a dead mother’s diaries (written in Korean) and the resulting love triangle that develops among the mother (in the form of her writing), the translator and the daughter (an archivist and the narrator). So basically it’s about language, obsessions with textual characters, a threesome with your mom and lots of paper. A major part of the novel is the family story, typically dysfunctional and told through the daughter’s memories triggered by the diary entries.

THC: How did you come up with the plot and characters?

AH: I happened upon the idea. It had been brewing in my head for a few weeks. Applying for a creative thesis had always been in the back of my head. I didn’t think I would get it but once I had the idea I figured ‘“why not?”

My ex-boyfriends are worried that they will be portrayed unfavorably. But my ex-boyfriends couldn’t provide enough interesting fodder for a short story, let alone a novel. Just kidding. Really, [to her ex-boyfriends] if you are reading this, I’m only kidding. In fact, many people I know have inspired characters for me, and lots of people I don’t personally know have also provided mannerisms and physical features. This is especially true of people in my sections. It’s hard for me to stay awake at times, so I just sort of jot down notes about the other students instead, the way they speak, the way they pick their noses, etc.

THC: Who influenced your writing?

AH: My influences writing this thesis have been Henry James, Aimee Bender, Haruki Murakami, Marguerite Duras, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Russian patricidal literature (my father thinks he’s going to be the “bad guy” in the story, but I don’t think there’ll be any daddy-killing in it yet).

THC: Russian patricidal literature?

AH: My older brother was very much into Dostoevsky and was always pushing him onto me when I was a kid and making parallels between the literary characters and our own family members. The problem is, as I became obsessed with these family stories like O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey into Night, for example, or Terry Zwigoff’s documentary about Robert Crumb and his family, all the characters became blurred and sometimes it’s hard to remember if Smerdyakov really is my brother or not.

When I wrote the proposal the family story wasn’t really there but I realized while writing my first draft that the family story was crucial; it was the most interesting stuff in relation to the plot and the narrator. So it’s being fleshed out and taking up more of the novel.

THC: How personal is your work?

AH: One author I like says that the emotions are autobiographical but the events are not. When my friends read my stories they always think the main character is me—they think that my self-absorption is taken to a new level and my stories are peopled by multiple versions of me talking to each other. But this is not true. Well it’s less true these days. My writing will inevitably be personal because it’s either something I experienced, or someone has related to me, or how I envision or interpret an action. Memories in their coloring will probably be very personal but the situations and characters might not.

Sometimes I’m scared of revealing something that is true, but writing it down is a way for me to make sense of things. It saddens me if people think I’m exploiting my family just to make a good story. That’s a cheap way of looking at writing about childhood and memory. I’m trying to rework the material to bring out the humor and sympathy where it might be overlooked. But yes, most of my characters are based on people I know very well and it’s made the process very intense. My meetings with my thesis advisor sometimes feel like therapy sessions. She’ll ask me, “Why does this character feel this way? It’s disturbing and I want to know what makes the character do this.” And I’ll sit there and wonder, “Oh God, why do I that? I don’t have a fucking clue. So does she think I’m weird?”

THC: Do you get writer’s block and what do you do about it?

AH: I get writer’s block not so much because of lack of inspiration or material. I have a little notebook full of ideas and sentences that I haven’t used yet. I get writer’s block more from fear, from not feeling up to the challenge of getting into my character’s heads and emotions. So instead I’ll stare into space, dye my hair, eat something fatty and spicy. I can’t find enough big chunks of time to write these days, so I’ll keep notes and write stuff on my arms and transfer them to paper later. Or I’ll underline and draw little stars in my notebook next to the scenes or dialogues that I really should write soon. Drawing little stars makes me feel like I’m getting somewhere.

THC: It’s November. How much have you finished?

AH: I have a first draft done, it’s around 200 pages. Parts will be cut and added, the plot will change, especially if I continue to move further into the relations between the family members. One major character needs a total overhaul, but I’m still casting. I’m still waiting to meet someone who I think can really give me what I need for that character.

Elizabeth A. Phang

The Harvard Crimson: What is your writing experience before your thesis?

Elizabeth Phang: I took two fiction workshops last year, and I wrote two stories for each. I’m using three of them in my thesis. I had also taken a non-fiction and a poetry workshop, but I hadn’t done any fiction after high school until last year.

THC: What is your thesis about?

EP: I am writing a series of about eight short stories. They all take place in the same relatively small suburban town, each at a different period in time within about a 50-year range. Some of the characters appear in multiple stories at different ages and life stages. The protagonist or narrator of one story sometimes appears in another story as a minor character, or as a character important to the plot but not as the central figure. There will be a story about a ghost. I wouldn’t say that the work has a theme, they are just stories about suburban life. I wanted the passage of time links between the stories to be surreal. A child in one will be an old man in another, but the stories aren’t dated. I want the connection to be subtle.

THC: Did you grow up in suburbia?

EP: Yes. The town is not unlike where I grew up in Maryland. But it has no name for now.

THC: Who are your inspirations?

EP: I was inspired by some John Updike stories. One in particular inspired me to write about older people, “Playing with Dynamite.” For the most part before that I had written about younger people. I like George Saunders a lot—how he addresses the absurdity of suburban living—but I don’t think I write like him. I’ve also been inspired by Barry Hannah, Flannery O’Connor, Bobbie Ann Mason and many others. Basically everything I read influences the way I think about writing to some extent.

THC: What are your inspirations for characters?

EP: First I think of the situation I want the story to show, then I pinpoint who the characters will be. Probably five of the stories will be in the third person, a little more than half. Generally if a main character is very distant from me and my experience, I will write him or her in the third person. I should probably deviate from this at some point.

THC: How personal are the stories?

EP: None are about one specific experience of mine, but all are informed by my experiences. None of the characters are me or people I know, but they all have parts of them.

THC: How do you come up with plot?

EP: First I think of a general idea that would be interesting for a story. A story I just wrote is about a young immature mother who is jealous of her son’s relationship with his piano teacher. Then I try to think of an arc for the story: I decide where the story should be going, where I want it to end up and I think of some scenes and details I want to include. Then the plot usually develops itself further in the process of writing. My stories are generally contained—they aren’t sweeping stories that encompass a lot of time or action, so plotting them hasn’t been that involved a process so far.

THC: How do you read and revise your own stories?

EP: I try to get a sense of what someone else would make of it, if what I want to get across is coming across. For my thesis stories, I’ve been giving my advisor drafts to read, and he gives me comments that usually make sense to me, with what I feel is accurate and useful feedback. After that I usually just do one big revision, making minor changes after that. I am thinking about getting more readers for my thesis later on in the process, but it is also good not to have a million people telling you a million different things, which sometimes happens in writing workshops and can be overwhelming.

THC: What do you do about writer’s block?

EP: When I have a deadline, it forces me to write something. I had a really hard time trying to write over the summer when there were no concrete due dates—I would write a paragraph, obsess over revising it and making it perfect, then I would go watch TV or something. When I know I need a story done in a couple days, I’ll crank it out in a few sittings and not worry so much about perfecting every sentence. If I’m feeling uninspired, reading some published stories (by other authors) usually helps. I look at what kind of voice an author is using, what kind of structure the story has, and how it begins and ends. Even if I’m writing something totally different, just reading something else can give me a fresh perspective that somehow makes it easier when I sit down to write. If it’s really not working for me I’ll just take a break and try again later.