by Writing Workshops Staff
56 minutes ago
In The Power of Point of View, a five-week, multi-genre Zoom workshop at WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature, Kate teaches POV as a diagnostic tool for fiction writers, memoirists, and hybrid writers who want practical command of unreliable and withholding narrators.
Kate is the author of the novel Kept Animals (Scribner), longlisted for the 2020 First Novel Prize, and the Iowa Award-winning story collection If I'd Known You Were Coming. Below, she talks about the sentence she keeps rereading, the worst advice that sounds smart, and why she will insist you give George Saunders another fifty pages.
Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Kate:
Writing Workshops: Hi, Kate. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Kate Milliken: Hi! I'm Kate Milliken. I'm an author, but I also run an editorial and coaching company called, Story Therapy. I grew up in Chicago and LA, with my formative years spent backstage during theatre productions and then on Hollywood sets. I've written for television and TV commercials and basically spent my whole life thinking about the way stories influence and define us. In the future, I'm a narrative therapist and still writing novels. Currently, when not editing or writing, I lead the parent's association at my kids high school and teach writing workshops, like the POWER of POV, whenever I'm able.
Writing Workshops: What's the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?
Kate Milliken: I wish someone had told me early on that that crisis of confidence--that “I’m a fraud” voice—that everyone one of us feels at some point, isn’t about a lack of talent or inspiration, but rather stems from feeling overwhelmed by the number of choices writing requires us to make. The number of responsibilities we have to the reader, who is also imaginary to us, can make you feel incapable. But the way I find around this feeling for myself and for the writers I work with is to help them identify their underlying intentions they have with their work. What affect do you want to have on your imagined reader? How do you want them to feel when they turn the final page? Identifying your intentions in this way can be a really helpful shortcut to identify many, if not all, of the choices you need to make on the page. In my class, The Power of Point of View, we’re going to look at every lens the writer can choose. This is a choice is often one made unconsciously, yet the voice of a story or poem or an essay, is the very first door the reader walks through and it defines the rest of the journey, where they go and what they consider along the way. My intention is for writers to leave our time together feeling more confident, excited, and inspired by the ways that different points of view can help you achieve your creative intentions.
Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn't have before, what is it?
Kate Milliken: The course name is doing some of the work for me here! Obviously, I want students to know the impact their choice in point of view can have on their readers and their interpretation of their work. But I also want them to have a new perspective (see what I did there?) on their own work. I want them considering why they write what they write from a new angle!
"The voice of a story or poem or an essay, is the very first door the reader walks through and it defines the rest of the journey, where they go and what they consider along the way."
Writing Workshops: What's the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.
Kate Milliken: “Willoughbeasts, gerbil balls, screaming eunuchs.”
Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop, one you were teaching or one you took as a student, where something clicked for someone. What happened?
Kate Milliken: I was talking to an author about the balance between the environment of their story, the literal space the world building took up on the page, versus how much the character was coming alive on the page and how I felt the place around me but not necessarily the way she, the character, perceived it. Almost off handedly I said I didn’t think this was related to the writing so much as the character being unsure of what she believes on account of her older sister, who struck me as pretty domineering in the short scene we’d had with the two of them. Well, the author clapped her hand to her face and gasped. I momentarily worried I’d offended her but quickly reviewed in my head what I’d just said—nothing overtly critical—and asked what she’d realized. “It’s my family, what you just described. That’s what this is about.” Now, of course, not every story is unconsciously about our family’s, but it is always so amazing to be able to read an author closely enough to see for them what they’ve done before they do. That one aside ended up cracking the story open for her and, speaking of perspective, let her revise the narrator with more introspection, more reflection, from a point farther in the future. Is that always the goal? As a writer, reader or teacher? To discover a door, a portal, a mindset that we hadn’t known was there moments before?
Sometimes one small shift in vantage point cracks a whole story open. Spend five weeks with Kate finding the door your draft has been hiding.
Enroll in The Power of POV →Writing Workshops: What's a craft move you're slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept: a small, specific technique.
Kate Milliken: I’m currently revising a novel, so I’m in the weeds, obsessing over sentence length and cadences. Playing with how variations in sentence length can create different music for each scene. It’s sort of the way we get to score the movie that we hope we’ve inspired in the reader’s imagination.
Writing Workshops: What's a book you press into people's hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?
Kate Milliken: Honestly, I get stupid excited when people tell me they couldn’t get past page 50 of Lincoln in the Bardo. I insist that they do! Because if you get beyond the early discomfort of so many oddities and so many voices, then you are IN. Totally swept up in what Saunders achieved with that book. I think it’s a masterpiece, my favorite of all his writing. I love insisting to people who put it down too early to return to it and try again.
"Variations in sentence length can create different music for each scene. It’s sort of the way we get to score the movie that we hope we’ve inspired in the reader’s imagination."
Writing Workshops: What's the worst writing advice that sounds smart?
Kate Milliken: This doesn’t actually sound that smart, but I strongly dislike the advice, “butt in the seat, every day.” Or chair or at the desk or however they say it. This advice makes writing feel onerous. Be uncomfortable and just do it! If I just sat in a chair every day and tried to write – no way. At least, it wouldn’t be anything of substance. Just stale. It’s more important that you stay open, all the time. Maybe you love people watching on the bus or in a park. Jot down notes there! Or a voice app while driving? If ideas strike in the shower, keep a pad of paper in the bathroom. Writers need to take the world in, find beauty, you know? Personally, my desk is where stacks of paper go to gather dust. So, I like to take a journal outside for fresh pages and when I edit, I need the white noise of the crowded coffee shop. I can also get in the flow while my kids are watching TV, stretching out with them and my laptop. Yes, sure, at some point the job is just about sitting down and rereading and revising, but even that can happen in different ways. I’ve just found that butt-in-seat advice discouraging because it doesn’t connect to the actual need for creative energy to get the work done. You have to have a full tank of inspiration before you can butt-in-seat. The better advice, I think is figure out how and where you get inspired, when in your day you feel the most creative, and then set about making writing around those events the habit.
Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: "Most writing classes won't tell you this, but..."
Kate Milliken: Eventually, success in publishing means you have to get out in front of your work and talk about it. That’s why it’s important to understand the choices you make on the page. At some point, if you’re fortunate, someone is going to ask you to explain them—whether that’s an agent, an editor, or an interviewer. So, reflecting on your craft early helps you to make informed and intentional choices and be more articulate about them down the line.
Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?
Kate Milliken: Lorrie Moore. I was a freshman in college when I read Who Will Run the Frog Hospital and Self Help. I couldn’t put them down, reading while I was walked between classes. I knew I wanted to write fiction then. To tell stories but also be a poet on the line level and a comedian between the lines!? I was smitten with her work. Still am.
Writing Workshops: What's your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?
Kate Milliken: Come for the craft, stay for the community!
Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?
Kate Milliken: Well, since I’m only visible in a that tiny zoom box, they’d be surprised to know I’m six feet tall.
Kate may squeeze all six feet into a small Zoom window, but the perspective she brings to it is expansive. Her conviction is simple: point of view is the first door a reader walks through, and every writer can learn to choose that door on purpose. Over five Monday evenings, you will test your default lens, rework one scene until it reveals what your story is about, and leave with a method you can carry into every future draft. Join Kate for The Power of Point of View this fall, and see your work from an angle you haven't tried.
Five Mondays, one scene, every lens. Class begins Monday, October 26, on Zoom, with written feedback from Kate on up to 1,500 words.
Save Your Seat in The Power of POV →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
