[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: When you read your students stories, can you tell when a writer is avoiding their truth?
Author/Instructor Jonathan Blum: The arrogant answer to that is yes because it means that I know their truth in some way that they don’t. I try not to take the arrogant approach. I try to take the approach of I don’t really know what this person’s truth is but they don’t quite seem to be hitting all the notes.
One thing I sometimes tell my students is to Use the whole instrument which is a musical reference. Essentially don’t keep playing the same few notes over and over and over like to use different parts of the instrument, try to create different sounds, try to do different things and you’ll arrive at these complex truths some of which you may be avoiding. If you do that, I’m very reluctant to ever think I know what’s best for a student’s story. That’s another thing that’s not permitted in my classes and nobody in my class will say nobody including me will say like What you should do writer is X. Those kinds of sentences don’t come out in my classes. What I say is…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BUY THE BOOK – LAST WORD
BUY THE BOOK – THE USUAL UNCERTAINTIES: STORIES
About:
Jonathan Blum grew up in Miami and graduated from UCLA and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of two books of fiction: The Usual Uncertainties (Rescue Press, 2019), a story collection, and Last Word (Rescue Press, 2013), a novella. Both were named one of the best books of the year by Iowa Public Radio, and The Usual Uncertainties was named one of the 15 Best Short Story Collections of 2019 by Electric Literature. Blum has twice appeared on KCRW’s Bookworm. His short stories have been published in Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Northwest Review, Playboy, and Shanxi Literature, among others. His short story, “The White Spot,” which was published in Electric Literature with an introduction by Deborah Eisenberg, appears in the award-winning anthology The Best Peace Fiction (University of New Mexico Press, 2021). He has taught fiction writing at The University of Iowa, Drew University, and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and is the recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship in Scotland, and a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. He has also been a guest writer at the Tianjin Binhai New Area International Writing Program in China. He lives in Los Angeles.
WRITING CLASSES WITH JONATHAN BLUM
Jonathanblumwriter.com/classes
CONNECT WITH JONATHAN BLUM
Advertisement – contains affiliate links
(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases)
More affiliates:
Check out Film Courage on Patreon!
Camera we use for interviews – https://buff.ly/3rWqrra
Sound we use for interviews – https://amzn.to/2tbFlM9
Other books on Amazon that Film Courage recommends – https://buff.ly/3o0oE5o
