Dream Girl

No one uses words correctly and if you call them on it, they claim that words are fungible, that it’s oppressive and prissy not to let words mean whatever the speaker wishes them to mean.

Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, Richard Russo’s Straight Man, John Irving’s The Water-Method Man. He doesn’t

Triggered. A sloppy term, to Gerry’s way of thinking. A trigger is something someone deliberately pulls and it leads to a very specific sequence of events. If one is triggered, then one is the weapon or the snare, no? The recurrence of

generation. They were the little pigs who built their houses of brick, whereas Gerry’s peers tended more to straw and wood. And, oh, how people loved to blow them down. Everybody huffs and puffs, intent on destruction. What do they call it now? Cancel culture.

Ghost Story (1981) The Getaway (1972) The Godfather (1972)

Bury Me Deep, Megan Abbott Red Baker, Robert Ward Ghost Story, Peter Straub The Getaway, Jim Thompson The Godfather, Mario Puzo Suggested Viewing Misery (1990) The King of Comedy (1982) A Place in the Sun (1951) I Want to Live! (1958) The Wire, season 2

Syllabus for Advanced Creative Writing Suggested Reading The Speed Queen, Stewart O’Nan Zuckerman Unbound, Philip Roth Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser

The wheel spins, the ball bounces, bounces, bounces. Where will it land? Will you get the girl? Will your name be read from stages, the recipient of important prizes? Will your name be remembered? How will it be remembered? Will you be remembered at all? Everything is in the before moment. That's where life is richest, in that moment of possibility and anti- say it, the audience screamed at the screen - pation.

Everyone’s unhappy if they have even a sliver of intelligence. Who can be happy in this world?

Nothing’s worse than a bad person who thinks he’s good.

I’m simply advising you to remain true to your characters. Nothing can happen now that hasn’t been prepared for. As writers, we must stay within the reality we’ve created.

Where on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs does one find storytelling? Technically, he supposes, it’s near the narrow top, a part of self-actualization. Yet it feels as if it’s the entire foundation to Gerry, as if even the basics of water, food, and shelter rely on one’s ability to make sense of the narrative of one’s life.

Yet soft, tactical lies, so-called white lies—is it okay to call them white or is that now racist?—are the social WD-40 of day-to-day life, greasing all the tiny connections, keeping things frictionless.

It’s exhausting, meaning well in a world that assumes you’re a pig because of the body you’re born into, but then—it’s so much

Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, he rolls onto his back