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The Battle of Speed v. Authority: an Interview with Kyle Minor
by Writing Workshops Staff
6 months ago
Whether you’re penning a novel, crafting an essay, or composing a memoir, Kyle Minor's new class, Don't Bore Your Reader: a Zoom Seminar on the Battle of Speed v. Authority (for Writers of Stories, Essays, Memoirs, and Novels), promises to transform your writing.
By mastering the techniques to balance speed and authority, you’ll create stories that are impossible to put down, ensuring your work stands out in the crowded literary marketplace. With no required reading and a wealth of insights drawn from Minor’s extensive experience, this is a rare chance to learn from one of the best in the field.
Kyle Minor is an award-winning author whose work has been published by Esquire, The Atlantic, and the New York Times Book Review, three volumes of the Best American series, and whose accolades include the prestigious Story Prize Spotlight Award.
Join us for an enlightening and transformative journey with Kyle Minor, and discover how to make your prose not just readable, but utterly unforgettable.
Writing Workshops: Your seminar focuses on the balance between speed and authority in writing. Can you explain why this balance is crucial for engaging readers and how it influences the overall narrative?
Kyle Minor: If the pages aren't turning with some speed, readers will often give up on a book or a piece of writing. But if the reader doesn't know what's going on, or doesn't believe in the speaker, or feels jerked around by the narrator's unkindness or refusal of clarity, then there is no speed that can save you. So the question, for the writer, becomes: How do I keep the pages turning, while at the same time helping the reader to feel as though he or she is in good hands?
WW: One of the key takeaways from your seminar is mastering narrative pace. Can you give us a sneak peek into some practical strategies you teach for maintaining a brisk narrative pace without sacrificing depth and clarity?
KM: I can tell you a few of the tricks, all of which are oriented around questions like these: What does scene do well? What does summary do well? What does reflection do well? What are the ways to use exposition without slowing everything down? What roles do the verbs play? How do you get at the abstract while using the concrete? How do you manage interiority within a scene? How much of the room do you describe using the sensory, and why? When do you do what, and why?
WW: You mention the importance of achieving what John Gardner called "the vivid and continuous dream" for readers. How do you guide writers in your seminar to create this immersive reading experience?
KM: It's all the stuff we've already been talking about, and all of that boils down to six types of sentences: Dialogue directly quoted, Narration, Indirect dialogue, Interior monologue, exposition, and description. All of these have different relationships to speed, which is largely correlated to the degree to which sentences are abstracted from time, and all of them do some things better than other things. The whole dream rises largely from what those sentence types can and can't do well.
WW: In your course, you discuss the strengths and weaknesses of exposition and the best ways to use it. Can you share an example of when exposition can enhance a story and when it might hinder the narrative?
KM: Exposition is good for establishing things at story's beginning, doing transitions, essaying at the end, doing informational or rhetorical set pieces, and managing information in brushstrokes within a story. Exposition loves a retrospective narrator. Scene is only good at one thing, which is putting us inside time and staying there, without knowledge of what happens next. In many narratives, scene is what you mostly need, most of the time, but it can't do everything. If the moment is a moment, it demands scene, so if you give it exposition, it ceases being a moment, and instead it becomes something more remote from the immediacy of the events you meant to dramatize.
WW: Language, particularly the use of verbs, plays a significant role in your seminar. Can you elaborate on how powerful verb choices can impact the reader’s experience and the narrative's pace?
KM: Here's one: Narration, or sentences that move us forward through time, almost always demand an active, transitive verb (and we'll talk about what that means.) But sometimes exposition can get a little more speedy the same way, using the same kind of verb construction, and that can cover a whole lot of information dumping, by using the verbs to put the summary in time, or at least to create the illusion that you are.
WW: For writers looking to stand out in the competitive literary landscape, what are some of the most transformative tools and techniques they will learn in your seminar that can make their work impossible to put down?
KM: Scene, intelligent use of exposition, the six sentence types, the right verb for the right job, the specific instead of the general, the concrete to inform the abstract.
WW: Your upcoming collection of essays, How to Disappear and Why, is being published soon. How does the content of your new book relate to the themes and lessons you'll be teaching in this seminar?
KM: For the first time, I wrote a book that requires many pages that are not scene. So I've been asking the same question we'll be asking in this course: How do I keep the pages turning anyway?
WW: Can you share a memorable moment or success story from one of your past seminars where a participant's writing was significantly transformed by applying the principles you teach?
KM: I know a woman who took six single-spaced pages of exposition, turned it all into scene, and, voila!, that was her first book, two hundred pages or so. That was pretty good outcome, I thought!
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Avoid the waitlist and sign up for Kyle Minor's upcoming class: Don't Bore Your Reader: a Zoom Seminar on the Battle of Speed v. Authority (for Writers of Stories, Essays, Memoirs, and Novels).
Instructor Kyle Minor is the author of Praying Drunk, winner of the Story Prize Spotlight Award. His work appears online and in print in Esquire, The Atlantic, Iowa Review, Story, the New York Times Book Review, and three volumes of the Best American series. Sarabande Books will publish a new collection of essays, How to Disappear and Why, in August 2024.
