“No story is beyond hope.” —Chaitali Sen
On Wednesday, March 4, Chaitali Sen will teach “The Art of Pacing: Macro and Micro Methods to Keep Your Story Moving.” In this class, students will learn what affects the speed of a story and practice ways to modulate pacing so readers are compellingly pulled along from beginning to end. Whether you’re writing a short story or a novel, stalled in the middle of your work or bored of your project, join us in learning how to achieve the right pacing for your story!
Chaitali Sen is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky and the short story collection A New Race of Men from Heaven, winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her stories and essays have been published by Catapult, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, LitHub, New England Review, Texas Observer, and other print and online journals. She is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston and a recipient of the Inprint J. A. and Isabel M. Elkins Foundation Fellowship.
Here’s what Chaitali had to share with us:
Who are your earliest influences? What people and books made you a writer?
My sister was probably my biggest inspiration for becoming a reader and writer. She always had a book in her hands, and I wanted to be just like her. At some point, I fell in love with the art of storytelling. I have a memory of copying down whole stories by hand just to see how it was done, whether they were folk or fairy tales or short stories I found in the library. Eventually I started reading a lot of novels and learning what I liked about them, which made me want to try writing my own stories. I think reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was a turning point for me.
What writing challenges have you faced? What have these challenges taught you about your process?
In the past few years, sustaining the quality of focus and attention needed to complete projects has been a challenge. There are a lot of demands on me from different directions, and I have had to really dig deep to reconnect with the part of me that is driven to do the hard work of building up stories sentence by sentence, page by page. I had to experiment with different practices, even taking a few nights to stay up way past my bedtime to write when I knew I wouldn’t be getting any phone calls. But I’m happy to say that I found myself back in a flow state recently, and I learned that it is possible to come back from periods when I’m not writing as much.
From your perspective, what’s the most rewarding part about being a writer?
It’s knowing that I created something that didn’t exist before except in my mind and being able to share that with others. It’s also knowing that a story can get better. No story is beyond hope. My interest in the story might fade, but if I care about the story enough, I can get it to a point where at least I’m happy with it.
Who do you write for?
It sounds like a cliché but I write for myself. I have tried writing for “the market,” but it doesn’t work. If I am not passionate about the project and see it as a labor of love that might never get beyond my own eyes, I lose interest. That’s not to say that I don’t get to a point of caring about an answer or wanting to know how a reader responds to my work. I just can’t start there, and it’s really only in very late drafts that I start thinking about an audience.
What do you hope writers will learn from your course?
Pacing is not mainly a matter of action. I hope students will come away with a better understanding of what pacing is and how it contributes to good storytelling.
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Thanks, Chaitali!
Click here to learn more about Chaitali’s upcoming class.
