Author2Author: Sarah Willis & Maureen McHugh, pt. 3

Sarah Willis: Someone in our writer's group warned me not to use names of people I know, that it throws a reader that knows me out of the story and into reality, but so much of what I write might do that for anyone that knows me well. But the same person has given me great advice in other areas. (He's the one that never lets me get away with sappy or lazy writing, and I owe him a great deal of thanks for that.) Can you say what kinds of comments have helped you from our group, and how you deal with hearing your stories critiqued by nine other writers?

Maureen McHugh: Working with a critique group is actually good training for writing for freelance. One of the things that I have to learn and learn again from comments from the writer's group is to let go of a kind of ownership of my writing. A writing teacher once said that the first draft is for the writer, the second draft is for the reader. It's not that clean for me (for one thing, at some level, all the drafts are for me, you know?) but when our writer's group makes comments, it lets me see the ways in which readers are not me.

I don't always deal very well with having my stories critiqued. I get mad. I get hurt. Oddly enough, the better the critique, the more likely it is I'll react emotionally to it. Because of course, the better the critique, the more likely it is to really hit my soft spots, and the less defense I have against it. So then I have to go home, nurse my wounds a bit, and then really start changing the manuscript. I have a rule, when three people comment on the same piece of text, there's a problem. Sometimes even our writer's group can't actually identify the problem. In one of my books, you and a number of others in the group said that a scene which should have been really emotional--a girl watching her father killed--wasn't. All of you said that sentence by sentence the writing was good, and I remember you saying, maybe it should be longer. And people around the circle nodded. Who doesn't love being told to make something longer? I let it sit for a couple of months while I went on with the novel. Then I came back to it and really looked at it, I ended up making it shorter and used some of the techniques of poetry--more metaphorical and startling language. And it made all the difference. Everyone was right, the prose wasn't working. And maybe writing longer would have solved the problem, too. But the thing was, the group showed me where to work. The hardest thing anyone has ever said to me in critique was "Why do you write this?" That has been a painful, but oddly useful question. I can't explain why it was so useful, but it was.

What are you working on now?

Sarah Willis: I'm trying an omniscient voice, a voice I love to read but haven't written in except for very short pieces. It's hard to sustain. I tend to write very short, spare sentences in first person. I want to write longer sentences. I know that sounds like a odd way to approach a novel, and it's not the only thing I'm concentrating on, but what I want to do is find a new voice, a new way of telling a story, a slower pace in some way, and in some ways, more luxurious. I'm also inventing a town. My first two novels took place in Mayville, NY, and my second two took place mostly in Cleveland. I like to start in a place I know, and invent from there--the characters, the situation. Now I want to invent the place, and since I start with place, that's where I'm starting now, working on the town, the layout, the people in it. Those people are starting to do interesting things, and I'm watching them, seeing who speaks up. I'm finding this a slower way of writing than my other novels. I imagine it will take me a while. Meanwhile, I keep writing short pieces. I have a short-short coming out in the Tampa Review, a few poems in Whiskey Island&8212;yes, I'm following in your footsteps again; I know that you're getting poetry published, too, and I got jealous—and I have a short story just published on Amazon Shorts, called "Air Conditioners."

And I'm going to college now, for my MFA!!! So I have homework! I sat on the floor in the hallway yesterday waiting for the teacher. Very strange. I'm too old for this, my body shouts, but my mind says "More!"