Staff writer Sofia Montagna attended an event from the Creative Writing Lecture Series in which renowned author Joshua Cohen offered students his advice on creative writing.

On Wednesday night, Professor Joshua Cohen—author of several successful novels, including The Netanyahus, Moving Kings, and Book of Numbers, previously dubbed “a major American Writer” by the New York Times, named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and awarded Israel’s Matanel Prize—gave a “craft talk” in Dodge Hall. This talk, one of several in the Creative Writing Lecture Series, drew widespread interest from students.

Cohen dubbed the talk “things I wish they’d told me.” He focused on important questions to consider before writing a story, the impacts and implications of a narrator’s point of view, and the relationship between time and chronology of events in a work of creative writing.

At the beginning of the talk, Cohen told students to consider three questions before writing—“What am I trying to say?” “How am I trying to say it?” and “Who is doing the telling?—as these questions will ultimately decide the story’s structure. According to Cohen, these questions also factor into the narrator’s point of view. He cautioned students that third-person narration is tricky because it collapses these three questions and attempts to be God for the story. However, Cohen told students that the form of first-person narration is equivalent to the form of the human mind because the events don’t follow the chronology of time. Instead, much like the human mind, the chronology of events in a story with first-person narration is circular; the narrator constantly revisits memories, reframing them and re-evaluating their impact on the present.

Later on in the talk, Cohen outlined his “5 Commandments” for first-person novels. These include, but are not limited to: “There’s always a time that you’re telling and a time that’s being told about, if you want that other field of time at your disposal”; “What links chronology and memory together characterizes the narrator for readers”; and “It’s not a book, it’s a mind.”

The next craft talk in this lecture series will be held on February 16 in 413 Dodge Hall with Angie Cruz, author of How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water, Dominica, and Soledad.

Writing via Bwarchives