PHILOSOPHY

My official RU faculty photo.

ALEX DAWSON: I remember sitting on our back porch listening to my stepfather and his friends, men with names like Bud and Bubba and Bo, tell stories. How they passed that boxy bottle of Beam. I remember the wipe and sip. How they used their sleeves. If a story was good, it would get quiet quick, and you could hear the clink of their buttons on the bottle mouth. The tick of the moth on the bare, porch bulb. Story after story. How an alligator ate a hunting dog. How the kudzu swallowed a pickup truck. A buck with thirty points. A piebald doe. A fifty pound buffalo fish caught in the tailwaters of Wilson Dam. Bud saw a cigar shaped formation of lights over his lake. Bo heard an infant wail in the tall haunted grass of Cry Baby Hollow. Southern men can talk, and I remember the language. The lingo. The verbal music. No one said "hot" or "cold" or "clear as day." They said "devil's armpit" and "tin toilet seat" and "clear as balls on a tall dog." I remember how the stories moved. Full tilt. If a story didn’t move, grab you up front, the other men would just start talking over it. The words of literary fiction hold up signs that say “Look at me, I’m beautiful.” The words of commercial fiction hold up signs that say, “Don’t look at me, look ahead.” I want words that hold up both signs. I want student work that is both lyrical and active, like the stories of Bubba and Bud and Bo, I want work that is propulsive AND finely written.

I like werewolves and mermaids and talking dragons.

I sometimes hear fellow instructors complaining about a particular kind of student story. The zombie apocalypse. The alien invasion. The unethical science experiment gone wrong. They erect bans. No zombies, they say. Send them my way, I say.

I’m a coach not a judge. I believe in the student’s dominion over their own work. Writers first, students second. My job, as I see it, is not to change (or, indeed, appraise) the way they write, but to understand, through close review of submitted material (and conference discussion), what they’re trying to achieve, to identify what’s in their way, and to help them remove it. My objective is not to “fix” any one story, but rather to enhance a student’s overall writing (and clarify their creative intentions).

I believe the way to wonder (and beauty and terror) is through novelty. You can't inspire awe or fear unless the thing is new. I prefer immersion to translation. I like writing that is horizontal and vertical, forward moving and downward reaching. I want scenes that are bumpy and noisy. I want stories that stink. I believe in getting down the crazy crap that’s in your head. But I believe, too, that writing is an act of invention, not transcription, a journey of discovery and surprise. The story becomes what it is, tells you want it wants to be, through the act of writing. The path is made by walking.

I encourage students to take chances. To delineate between caution and care. Write with diligence, certainly, examine every word, but be bold. Be brave and tricky. Take risks. Write want you want to write, but write, too, what you NEED to write, what you’re AFRAID to write. I believe in dangerous writing. In truth and broken hearts. In prospecting your personal battles, the things that won’t leave you alone.

I believe in writing what you know, what you’re obsessed with and curious about, what preoccupies you. But I believe, too, in “radical empathy.” Creating characters that are nothing like you. Exploring and rendering lives entirely different from your own. I believe in knowing what your characters know.

I don’t believe in the puritanical grind. That good is achieved only through difficult, exhausting labor. I believe in joyful effort, in helping a student create a project that captivates them. I grew up on a ranch in Alabama. I had a black pacer named Midnight. Midnight was my horse, and I remember long days in the paddock teaching it to lead. I knew they were long, not because I was watching any kind of clock, but because when I was done, it was dark. I remember how my friend and I would lose days to rebuilding motorcycles. His dad had a bike shop. There was a poster next to the scissor lift: “Work Willingly and Build Cool Stuff.” My mission is to get a student invested enough in their own project -- enthralled, even -- to continue working on it over winter and summer break.

I believe in vocal publishing and sonic thinking. The profound difference between how a sentence sounds and its mute presence on the page. I want words that clamp down and stick like Bubba’s story about Cry Baby Hollow.

I believe in the practical product of craft i.e. the story, the poem, the book. I believe in putting your work where at least one stranger can encounter it. I believe a writer must have at least one reader (or, indeed, a listener) like a magician must have one person watching. The reader fills the story with wonder just as the spectator turns the trick into magic. I believe in tools not rules. And if there are rules, I believe they can be followed poorly and broken beautifully. I believe in creating a writing regiment and keeping to it. Whether it be fifteen minutes every morning or five hours Sunday night. I believe in fires, not buckets. I believe in manic first drafts. In writing fast, writing like you stole it, and daring the keys, the little licks of light, to keep up. I believe in outrunning the bastards. I believe in drive. 

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Dave locks eyes with a Xenomorph.

DAVE RUDDEN: Writing philosophies are weird. They’re at once deeply personal and meant for sharing, hard-won and designed to be thrown away – stepping stones on the way to somewhere else.

My first stepping stone was the worlds of others. I got my start in the fanfiction mines, and that taught me that all fiction is fanfiction – a living, evolving conversation between you and the stories you love. I believe in both owning your influences and interrogating them – not all conversations have to be pleasant after all. There are no sacred texts, and if the canon doesn’t leave space for the story you want to tell, I’ll hand you the pickaxe to carve it out.

I spent my twenties in smoky Irish pubs yelling poetry at pint-demented crowds, and they taught me that you get a heartbeat to win an audience, and that heartbeat buys you another, and another, and another. Seven minutes can be as long or as short of a time as you make it, but if you do it right, you’ll never want those seven minutes to end.

My twenties also infected me with a terminal case of freelancer brain poisoning. My first novel came out in 2016, and I probably did 300 events that year. School events, library events, pumpkin festivals, literary death matches – I would have gone to the opening of an envelope, and I am not the better for it.
Now, I am obsessed with preparing aspiring authors for the practicalities of writer life – the bread and butter and lack thereof. I believe in full-time writing but not in writing full-time – that sitting at a desk all day is not as fulfilling as people think it is, and even if you think you hate events, there is a way to design your writing life that protects you and inspires you and promotes you and gets you paid.

As for the writing itself, I’m here to learn as much as you. Every student is a new genre, a new puzzle, and while I have some (strong) opinions on what makes sharp and sparkling prose, there is nothing I love more than the collaborative process of aiding a student in applying that intentionality to their own work. It is easy not to mean everything you put on a page – to include the thought that led you to the right line as well as the right line itself – and I’m here to learn exactly what you meant, and help you mean it.

My editing process can best be described as ‘cockroaches don’t roll.’ In an early draft of my first novel, I included the line ‘the word rolled from his tongue like a cockroach.’ Great, gross, delighted. However, the first edit I got from a very talented friend was ‘great line, but cockroaches don’t roll.’ He was correct. I hated him for it, but he was. The final line ended up being ‘the word skittered from his tongue like a cockroach’ which annoyingly is a lot better.

I believe talent is nothing but ore – pretty but unrefined, and no good to anybody without the work to make it real. And that’s where I believe the joy is – tuning each sentence like a guitar string, looking for any opportunity to make your writing more intentional, more elegant, more you.

That’s my philosophy. I’m excited to help you find yours.