(sounds like a Dr. Seuss book)

Last spring, I took Cathy Day’s fiction workshop.  Have we talked about how much I love Cathy Day?  (And that she’s totally a two-name person at all times?)  I had taken a short forms fiction readings class with her the semester before and sweet talked her into being my thesis chair.

To which she asked, “Are you writing a thesis or a book?”

Oh.

Well.

I don’t know.  By program design, we’re all supposed to be writing books.  Especially in nonfiction where people were encouraged to write narrative nonfiction with the fringes opting for memoir and some (this girl) writing essays in order to meet the two-hundred-page manuscript requirement.  People walk around the fifth floor of the Cathedral talking about my book. (More on this later.)

But are we writing something that meets the thesis requirements and will most likely be forever condemned to the box marked What $60,000 in debt buys you?  Or are we using our time and our efforts toward the hazy horizon of the publishing industry?

So I said, “Thesis? Question mark?” because I really wasn’t sure what to say.

Fast forward to January.  Workshop time.  Time, we are told, to work on our Big Thing.

First, thank goodness for the Big Thing.  Because manuscript sounds weird, thesis sounds like not enough for how much we’re expected to write (though I still continue to use it), and my book sounds presumptuous in ways that rarely please the fates.  The deal – as Cathy writes about in this incredible essay – is basically that we weren’t in there to write short stories (unless, you know, you actually wanted to).  Snippets of Big Thing, chapters or large portions of Big Thing.  You could have two little workshops or one big workshop to meet your fifty-page requirement for the semester.

A glimpse of what actually winds up happening in nonfiction workshops where we all workshop our manuscripts (ha, there’s another one of those words! Also, it’s my understanding that fiction students frequently workshop short stories for journal publication while working on their novels on their own time): confusion.  Nonfiction workshop is so often confusion.  The same semester as Cathy’s class, I also took nonfiction workshop, and I watched my friend try again to make something happen with her memoir only to be told to do the things she had been told not to do the previous year.  She, to say the least, was not thrilled.  And, really, twenty pages out of context isn’t enough to get the feedback you really need.

And then Cathy’s class.  We kept a class blog where each of us posted our project proposal and charted our progress and our process.  This alone was great.  And then I got to see how it went over to get fifty pages of a classmate’s work in a classroom setting.

You may or may not know that I’m president of the Julie Draper Fan Club.  This happened as a direct result of Cathy’s workshop.  Because we got fifty pages of Julie’s sweeping Southern novel, and I was In Love.  We’re talking a level of investment in a classmate’s work that usually takes semesters to acquire.  There’s such a huge difference in what you can feel as a reader in twenty workshop pages and fifty workshop pages.  And, sure, there are still problems with workshop regardless of number of pages, but that’s another discussion entirely.

And then there was the Big Thing about the Big Thing.  As with most workshops I’ve taken, there was reading to be done.  But because we were focused on the Big Thing, instead of the Little Thing, we were each asked to read a book and then take it apart.  You know, like you’ve done eight million times for short stories and other Little Things.  The book was our choosing – something that would help us figure out our own Big Thing.

What happened: Julie Draper finally explained Absalom, Absalom! so that I finally understood what the hell was happening.

Good for you, Julie.

The rest of us were not so ambitious.  (Short of something by Joyce, I’m not really sure what could be more ambitious than Faulkner.)

Because I’m working on a collection of essays and because I have a creepy obsession with Sarah Vowell, I took apart The Partly Cloudy Patriot.  Maybe you’ve seen me color essays/chapters of books/etc.  (It’s fun to be in class with me.)  I did, in fact, consider coloring the entirety of the book, but I don’t have that kind of time on my hands (though it would be a worthwhile future exercise).  Instead, I cut out sections of colored scrapbook paper to represent what I might color on the page.  Themes, tone, etc.  I cut them according to approximate proportion in each essay, and each essay in proportion to the book.  It was intense.

And the little creaky gears in the back of my head went click.

Oh.  The difference between a thesis and a book.

I had plans for ten twenty-page essays.  Workshop length essays.  Because that’s what you write, right?  But a book!  You guys, do you know what happens in a book of essays?  Ten-page essays.  Thirty-page essays.  A three-page essay containing nothing but quirky tidbits about the Pittsburgh airport and The Great Gatsby.  Little essays that reflect on bigger essays.  Funny essays, sad essays.

There are so many things I want to write about that I really don’t want to write about/don’t really have enough to say for twenty pages.  Lifetime movies. Series finales.  Sex and the City.

Boom.  Restructure.  Anchor essays.  Essays that move themes along.  Big Center Essays.  Lists both annotated and standalone.  Energy! Enthusiasm! Creation of the Cathy Day Fan Club, Pittsburgh chapter.

The semester ended.  I turned in a complete draft of my Big Thing.

A few weeks later, I got the two hundred pages back from Cathy.  Scribbled near the front: “I think you’re writing a book.”