An Unlikely Mentor

by Angela Fountas

One of the challenges I set for myself in graduate school was to write longer, more involved stories. My stories naturally fell between four and six pages and were rarely peopled with more than two characters, who often went by "she" and "she."

This changed the semester I unwillingly took an undergraduate poetry class, a requirement of all fiction students. I didn't read much poetry, nor did I write it. In fact, I didn't have a clue where to start or what to do. Luckily, Bruce Smith, my poetry professor, doled out assignments that supplied first lines or required the writer to put a dream into verse. Assignments that I could wrap myself around and come up with something under the pressure of this-poem-is-due-in-the-morning.

It helped that Bruce Smith didn't treat me like a fiction writer trying to write poetry. He treated me like a writer trying to improve her writing, and this built trust. But the day Bruce Smith reached mentor status was when he told me that my poetry needed more "thingyness."

I'd received similar feedback in fiction workshops, questions and suggestions that pushed toward insistence: "What kind of fish is he scaling?" "What kind of tree is she sitting under?" "Be specific." My reaction: "This character wouldn't know what kind of fish (or tree) so why should the reader?"

But when Bruce Smith said "thingyness," something shifted inside of me.

thing, n. 1. Any distinct substance; a distinct object or thought. 2. pl. Personal belongings, as clothes. -ness. A suffix added to adjectives and participles to form nouns expressing quality.

The quality of distinct things was what my writing needed, substance. This made sense to me. Writing poetry became an exercise in deliberation. Is it "fish" or "brown-spotted trout"? Which choice would distinguish the "I" of the poem, the "she"? Better evoke place? Open up more possibilities for the next line? And the next?

When I brought this same practice to my fiction, my writing grew. Getting specific added depth and texture to my prose and took me further into a story. The act of revision even started to make more sense. I never expected that writing poetry under the mentorship of Bruce Smith would add more tools to my fiction-writing kit, but it did.

The happy ending: My defense of an 88-page creative thesis, one continuous story.

Credit: Definitions from The Concise "Standard" Dictionary of the English Language, copyright 1945 by Funk & Wagnalls Company.

Angela Jane Fountas reads, writes, and teaches in Seattle. Please visit Write Habit.