A Brief EMail Interview with Tina Jens About Her Students
Students from Tina Jens’ writing class will be reading for us at Twilight Tales next Monday evening. We emailed her a few questions beforehand pertaining to the class and her students, and thought you’d like to read her answers:
Your Group writes fantasy fiction, tell us kinds of things we can expect to hear when your group reads.
There will be 11 students reading for up to 10 minutes that night. Their themes and voices run the gamut from horror to high fantasy with stops along the way for fairy tales, ghosts stories, and the Cthulhu Mythos. There are witches and immortals, voodoo dolls, a story about the origin of elves, and a quirky fantasy about Jesus coming back as a Vegas stage magician. Actually, several of the students will be reading stories with a religious motif; we’ve got an Old Testament avenging angel and the theory that the war in Heaven actually broke out because of an ill-fated affair between Lucifer and God.
What do you hope your students learned?
Professionalism and perseverance. All the lessons, from craft and structure to editing, critiquing, from tips on how to give a good reading to learning how to track submissions, fall in one or both those categories.
Have you encouraged your students to submit for publication yet?
One of the requirements of the course is that they submit at least one of their stories for publication. We’ve done detailed market analysis on more than 20 fantasy and horror markets. Most of the students are putting the final spit and shine on their first stories (just in time for their Twilight Tales reading). I expect we’ll have a flurry of submissions in the next two weeks.
Do you recommend to your students someone else should read their work before submitting it?
Absolutely. We do a full class critique of opening scenes before I break them into small groups for in-depth manuscript critiques. Those groups are run just like a professional writers workshop. With luck, some of them will have found friends they want to continue to critique with even after the class ends. At the very least, they’ve gotten the experience of how a workshop works, so they can join one or start their own when they graduate.
Any advice you’d like for your students or other authors to remember?
I have enough advice to fill an entire semester! But a few bullet points:
- First drafts suck. That’s their job. They’re supposed to.
- All good stories, whether you find them in song lyrics, fairytales, or even haiku, have a beginning, middle, and end. The 3-act structure. Or as we call it in class: The What if? And then? & Oh, shit! The first act is the premise. The second act begins with the inciting incident that propels the hero into the adventure, and the third act is the final conflict between hero and villain.
- When starting your second draft, automatically throw out the first 3-5 pages of your first draft. That was necessary writing for you the author to figure out what the story was about, to get to know the characters, and to figure out the voice of the piece, but it’s virtually never the right place to start the story.
- Throw out the first idea you have for the ending. The third and fourth ideas are always better.
- Submit early and often, and don’t even think about rewriting your story until it’s been rejected 3-5 times…or when an editor says “If you’ll make these revisions, I’ll buy it.”
- Learn how to analyze markets and guidelines, so you’re not only submitting often, you’re submitting smart.
What are you most looking forward about your group’s featured reading?
I’ve seen these writers develop all semester long, and I’ve seen them polish rough ideas into lovely gems. I’m most excited that other people are going to get to discover and enjoy these wonderful new voices.
Thanks for inviting me to do this interview. I hope everyone will come out and hear some of the next generation’s fantasy writers!
We couldn’t agree with Tina more! We hope you’ll join us at the Mix on Monday April 28th.
