Hi, Frederick, Lots of questions, but I enjoy promoting FIU
every chance I have. When I was there, from 88 to 92, Hall
only had two books out, and Standiford hadn't yet gone into
crime. I wouldn't say there was a push of any kind, and my
mentor was Lynne Barrett, who won an Edgar Award for a short
story, but is mainly a literary writer. She, however, is a
Cain lover and introduced me to his works. She edited a book
called the James M. Cain Cookbook, that I don't think you can
get. Then John Dufresne came in, who is also a literary
writer, Lousiana Power and Light and my favorite Love Warps
the Mind a Little. However, the encouragement to write
whatever you want, but do it in a literary manner is what
helped me. I had been trying to write for years and not
getting anywhere because I knew nothing about plot and
technique. FIU gives a really solid, nuts and bolts approach
with the use of Janet Burroway's and John Gardner's books on
writing, but they don't look down on genre. Jim Hall was
actively teaching at the time, but now he does mainly theses
and lives part time in N.C. Les Standiford still teaches, but
again, probably only two or three classes per year. I don't
really know anything about other programs to compare, but I
have heard about a snobbish attitude and even the prohibition
of genre writing in some programs. I was on a panel at the
Assoc. Writers Program last weekend in Vancouver with Neil
Smith, editor of the former plotswithguns.com and Victor
Gischler, author of Gun Monkeys, Pistol Poets, and Suicide
Squeeze-- excellent, funny--who had experienced prejudice in
that area. Our topic was
"Riding the Fence Between Genre and Literary" to enlighten
the literary writers to the fact that "genre" doesn't mean
formula or bad writing. Obviously, the college where you've
enrolled for the class doesn't have any genre prejudice
because they've already assigned me and Cain, so that sounds
like a good place to start. I'm sure the instructor must have
known about the connection between the three books. I hope
you stick up for me, as I'm bound to come out on the short
side of the stick being closely compared to Cain and Camus!
Denis Lehane was in classes with me at FIU, and he was kind
of the ring leader in arguments with Jim Hall, in a class on
bestsellers, when we all argued against the sloppy writing
and cheaply portrayed emotions in the 12 books that we read
and discussed that semester. The idea was to analyze
bestsellers to see how they were done, and we couldn't really
conclude much besides that they all had factual information
on a subject and much detail about food. Dennis, of course,
went on to bestseller fame, so he must have absorbed a lot,
despite his disdain! I have to say, however, that Dennis
isn't a hypocrite--he sticks to literary principles and
portrays true emotion, nothing like what we were picking at.
We were all snobs in that class and had a great time. I don't
think Jim has offered it again, however. I should clear up
once more, that I was never assigned to write a sex inversion
of Postman. In that class of Jim's we could pick any novel to
use as a quantitative model. The plot was not supposed to be
the same, and you can see that it's not in MP. The triangle
is there, number of pages, chapters, locations, quantity of
scene as opposed to summary, the way things are repeated in
two's, but that's about as far as I meant it to go. Perhaps
there are other similarities that followed naturally, but I
wasn't conscious of them. Jim Hall was my thesis advisor, but
he didn't have much criticism, although he did go through the
manuscript and make small comments. He mostly told me
to
"tinker" with this or that. The scene where Sherri and Payne
are in the Key West hotel room was one case where he said
nothing was happening. That's when I added the part where
Sherri burned Payne with the iron. Good luck on your writing
career. I don't know how I could live without mine and all
the friends and good times that come with it, as well as the
constant challenge, whether money is coming in or not.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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