Author: Torg

Writing Teacher at App State, Head Women's Basketball Coach at Watauga HS in Boone NC and podcaster at Torg Stories

Real Life in Fiction

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway.
–Stephen King, from On Writing

     In my short story “Eye Contact” a woman texts her husband a kiss “mphwaa,” (or something like that—I need Megan here to remind me of how to spell it) and then goes into a hotel and commits adultery.  This this string of letters meant to be a textual kiss is something that my real-life wife actually sends me.  This character in my story has my wife’s sister’s red hair, and probably her taste in shoes and handbags.  The character is also a pharmaceutical rep, a job that wife used to do, and a job that my buddy’s wife does now.  It’s a profession which I know just enough about that I might be able to lay down the relevant details neccessary to convince a reader to fall into what John Gardner called, “the fictional dream.” 

     My wife used to be a little obsessed—I think she’d admit—about who was who in my stories and what parts of the stories had actually happened to me.  I tried to explain this to her, but I think that it took her discovering the little details of our life in my stories for her to understand how it all worked, at least how it works for me. 

     If my stories were milkshakes, then here are some of the ingredients:  actual details of people I know and places I have been, situations I have personally experienced, heard about, or seen on the news, and everything I can dream up.  All of that gets tossed into a writing blender and eventually out comes a story, part real life, part imagination.  

     Among readers, I’m recognizing two poles: one pole is where strangers reside.  These are people who don’t know me and who have never been to Winamac, Indiana where I grew up, Bourbonnais where I went to college, or any place else I have lived.  These people read stories with no suspicions about what character might be who, as if each character has a real-life secret identity.  Somewhere between the poles are the people who know the writer just well enough to think they know who is who.  I think these people are the most dangerous when it comes to logical leaps off the wrong end of the boat dock.  They might see the coach in my novel Love on the Big Screen and think that my fictional man is the actual coach I had when I played basketball (mostly watched from the bench) at Olivet Nazarene University.  The truth is, I’ve known a lot of coaches (having been one for eight years) plus there are all those coaches I’ve watched from afar: Bob Knight, Bob Huggins, Rick Majerus, Rick Pitino, etc. and so when I write a coach, I’m thinking about what will serve the story that is unfolding before me.

     Opposite the pole where total strangers gather round, is the actual person who is rumored to be a character.  I have a friend with the last name Zaucha, a name I used in my novel for it’s capability of transforming into the nickname “Zuke.”  I wrote that friend and asked him if he was cool with me using his name.  If this friend thought the character was him, then he’d rightfully be able to say, “Bill has told a lot of lies about me.”  And if my book was nonfiction, he’d be right.  I used Zuke’s name for a reason I just shared.  The rest isn’t him and someone who says I’ve said X or Y about him would be wrong.

     What’s set me to thinking about this?  I think it’s been that I’ve got a few author’s visits planned, and some emails have come in about some of my stories. I can see that people are going to leap to conclusions about who is who in my books.  I’ve heard writers say they aren’t welcome in their hometowns anymore and maybe this is where I’m headed.  I don’t think it should be a surprise that my stories are often happening in the Midwest, that many of the details I can lay down are ones I’ve either witnessed, heard about or actually experienced—maybe for example powering that little boat I used to cruise the Tippecanoe River on—and so I’m hoping not to face too many accusations that a story like “Eye Contact” suggests that my wife is dying her hair red and sneaking into hotels.

Fear and Writing

A friend of mine wrote to me scared about an opportunity he has in that his girlfriend is going away for 21 days and he has practically the whole time to himself to write.  He’s wanted to write more but he suspects that he might instead sit around in his underwear, let the dishes pile up, and watch a lot of stupid television shows.  (if you laughed, his words)  There’s a lot in what he says that resonates a ping for me.
Let me start with fear.  I am more terrified today when I am about to write something new than I was when I got started trying to write everyday.  I think I know enough to know how badly I could screw everything up.  I’ve got Chekhov, Dubus, Ford, Boyle, and Chabon in my head and every sentence that I write is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich next to a Giada (see the Food Network) creation.   When I’m revising, no problem.  I’ve got something to work with and I can read it over and over, dink around with the sentence, chop paragraphs and put them back.  I can layer in images related to character or setting and cut what doesn’t add up to much.
As for my fear of the new sentence, I worked up a lot of what I’d call “warm ups.”  I read a poem or two from Poetry Magazine.  Since I’m not so smart there are always a few words I don’t know.   I look those up, log the definitions, and then I type in the context of the poem.  I try to look over one of those pages a day.  I don’t really learn the words as they pop up and surprise me once in awhile.  It was like that in basketball.  People who saw me play will laugh that I use this analogy.  I don’t know that I had moves in as much as I just tried to run past people and shoot.  But I think words and sentences pop out like dribbling moves on a baskteball court.  You drill and drill, you immerse yourself in the langauge, and then in the games (when you write for real) every once in awhile you surprise yourself with something new.
I’ve lost my way a bit from where I started here, but I keep telling myself that’s what I like about a blog.  I can be a little off my game, not pay total attention to my focus, but still find my way into something new to think about, find my way into 1 little bit about something I care about.  If you write, I wonder how you get going, I wonder if you’ve got half the hang ups as me that you must cling to in order to get started.

An Argument For Church From Someone Who Doesn’t Go

My father-in-law Jim recently passed away from cancer.  Several weeks before his death, my wife received a call that her dad had checked into hospice.  We began packing immediately and drove 800 miles through the night to North Carolina so that we could be sure to see him as soon as possible.  In addition to our emotional worries regarding Jim’s health, there were a lot of practical matters to consider:  Where would we stay?  I had to get back to work.  Would I rent a car or would we rent Megan one?  For how long?  At what financial cost?  Who would help Megan with our girls?

All we focused on was getting to the hospice to see Jim, and before we even had a chance to start doing the math and thinking about money, Jim’s wife called with the news that her Sunday school class had met.  Someone had an extra house outside of town that Megan and our girls could stay in indefinitely free of charge.  We arrived at the hospice, spent the day there, and then another member of this Sunday school class met us so that we could follow her out to the home we were being lent.  She did this after a full day’s work and the drive was at least thirty minutes out of her way, over an hour by the time she would get to her own house.  When we arrived at the home, the owner was already there inside cleaning it and changing the sheets.  Next, the two women took a grocery list Megan had been putting together and got ready to head to the store.  On their way out, they asked if we had any need of an extra car.  They paid for the groceries.  Everything that had just begun to hang over us had suddenly been taken care of by these  two women and the members of their Sunday school class.  My family, especially Megan, was free to concentrate on what was important, to spend time with Jim.  After I departed, this Sunday school group was in constant touch, offering to help, watching my girls, and just letting everyone know that they were around to love and help.

It’s been a long time since I’ve gone to church, and by that I don’t mean that my family doesn’t pray together, that we don’t talk about Jesus, or that I don’t read the Bible, but we haven’t been attending church as a family.  What transpired in the day or so that we all rushed off to North Carolina caused me to begin to think just how much we were up on our own up in New England.  We do have a growing group of friends, and I realize that it’s not just church folks who can rally around and help out those in need, but the kind people that were friends of Jim’s, those who came together as a part of Sunday school class, they all created for me one of the more convincing arguments I’ve experienced for church attendance.  I thank them for their example of Biblical love.   It’s an example I’ll be sure to try and put into practice myself.

What Casued You to Start Writing?

Around the year 2000, I felt like I had a crummy life.  I understand that this feeling of crumminess was very relative.  The world is full of people whose struggles were much deeper than mine.  I was divorced, an experience that caused for me to for a certain length of time to believe that God didn’t care much about what happened on the earth, or else He wasn’t about to do anything about what was right.  I didn’t believe other people’s promises and I didn’t believe my own word.  I went out to bars too much and woke up too many mornings exhausted.  I thought I was bummed out from getting divorced and because I was lonely, but upon reflection, I was too filled up with the depressant alcohol and suffering from not enough sleep.

I lived in an ugly cycle until I was sick enough of it to be moved to action.  I decided to run a marathon, move to someplace where I didn’t know anyone, and write a book.  Right, pretty random.  I thought myself a warrior of sorts.  I’d heard people talk in terms of running a marathon or writing a book as a kind of pinnacle of human achievement.  I read this book by Paulo Coelho called The Alchemist. It was a journey/adventure story and I thought I could go on one.  That was my move from Indiana to Charlotte, NC.  That I thought writing a book and running a marathon was such a unique achievement is kind of embarrassing now given the number of people I know who take on both experiences.  Go to any major city in the United States and you’ll see ten to forty thousand people run a marathon. I will say the marathon cleaned up my life.  I couldn’t keep being a person who ate bar food and drank beer 3-4 nights a week. If someone wants advice on how to deal with a divorce, I’d say to abstain from alcohol and exercise every day.

I can’t point to one event or idea that caused me to begin writing.  There were a couple impulses firing all at once.  I enrolled in the M.A. program at UNC Charlotte and got a degree in English Education.  I met a man named Dr. Sam Watson who loved to write.  I caught his fever.  He and Dr. Lil Brannon pushed me towards what is called the National Writing Project’s Summer Institute.  I didn’t want to give up two weeks of my summer, but in the end, the 6 credits persuaded me and the experience changed my life. I read Donald Murray’s Write to Learn and Stephen King’s On Writing. Both of those men made me feel as if writing a book was something I could to.  I didn’t think very hard about why I wanted to run or write.  I just thought both acts would be better than drinking and not sleeping.

During the summer institute, I found that I liked it when most of my days began with writing followed by reading with lots of conversation mixed in.  The world often annoys me with its fluffy conversations:  Nice weather we’re having? Did you see the Bears got Peppers?  I heard gas will go up to $3 this summer.  Of course I say many of those very things, but I like something more complex too.  The people at the summer institute—those I was reading and writing with—helped my mind to open up and relax.  That summer, I was slated to go back to Vance High School, where school started at 7:15 and I taught up to 180 students.  As much as I wanted to make good on my personal promise to start writing, I knew myself and knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep it if I kept my current job, and so I quit and got a job working where school started at 8:30 and where I would teach 100 students.

As fall came round, every morning I sat down and tried to write down everything I could remember about my divorce.  If I would have known more about what I was doing, I would have called my pages a memoir, but I didn’t have much understanding about that word.  That’s another embarrassing admission for an English teacher to make, but let’s be honest, I got into the profession to coach basketball.  I changed a few names and called what I wrote fiction.  I wrote a page or two a day, tried to stick somewhat to the subject of divorce, and in less than a year, I had about 300 pages.  Even I could see that what I had written was not a book.  It was mostly a long summary with very short or nonexistent scenes.  I knew I needed help, and I decided that I could get some in an MFA program for creative writing.

I want to leave you with the title of an essay I really enjoyed. I think if you have grieved deeply, or if you liked the first Rocky movie, or have run long distances, you ought to track down Jeremy Collins’s essay “Shadow Boxing.”  It originally appeared in the Georgia Review and I came across it in the 2009 Pushcart Prize Best of the Small Presses collection. Also, if you’d care to comment, I’d love you to tackle the title question of this entry:  Why do you write?  Or perhaps, why don’t you?

How Would I Improve Public Education?

How Would I Improve Public Education?

Exhausted and frustrated, five years ago I quit public education.  In the years that have followed, I’ve tried to think about ideas which might have improved the situations within which I worked.  I mean for this to be a catalyst for conversation, and I’m happy to have these ideas refuted and/or debated.  I realize I am a person offering suggestions for a field I have departed, but the students in my writing courses are often future teachers, and I am in continued professional conversation with those who work in the public schools

  1. All of the professional staff in the school should be in the classroom teaching students. It’s too bad that just about anyone who displays ambition in public education, anyone who wishes to get a substantial raise in pay, must leave the classroom.  If all administrators (from assistant principals to superintendents) were required to teach, class sizes could be reduced and those who have become administrators because of their dislike for teaching or working with students might be driven from the field.
  2. Decision making power should be given to teachers with the most experience. How should money be spent?  What meetings should be held for what purpose?  What should the curriculum be?  These are questions that teachers should be working together to answer.  When I taught in Charlotte, all of my classes had over thirty students enrolled and in one class many of the students had previously failed the course.  I had a thick grammar manual and literature anthology neither of which was a very effective tool for engaging students who were not very interested in reading and writing.  How much did those textbooks cost?  What else might I have done with the money?  Too often those who had advanced degrees in something besides English Education were driving my curriculum.
  3. Teachers should be the highest paid employees in education. In many of the places I worked, it was too easy to get the job of teacher.  Although some of the smartest and most admirable people I have ever met are teachers, I also worked with people who frequently missed school, wouldn’t bother the students if they didn’t bother them, and were in education because they couldn’t find anything better.  There were times when the school year began and the school was still looking for a warm body with a degree to fill an empty position.  Teachers are often not paid and treated with the respect accorded to other professions, and so those professions continue to draw the smartest and most dedicated people.
  4. School should be process and project oriented. Standardized tests murder students’ passion for learning.  What rewarding job is like taking a multiple choice test?  The more school requires students to sit quietly in their seats working their way through multiple choice tests, the worse off its students will be.

These are ideas I hope to develop, refine, or altogether change, and I’d appreciate your perspective.

Best,

Bill