Robert Eversz | Guest Writer for MFA Program

Ross Macdonald said that writing detective fiction is like interposing a welder’s mask between the reader and red-hot materials, so my intention in writing the Nina Zero series was to use the detective form as a way to take a different look at Southern California than had been looked at by your traditional, classic detective stories. My novels are less about building clockwork plots and more about using the detective form to cast a jaundiced eye onto the life of Southern California, its mores and its people. The basic idea of that series is less to create a standard detective thriller than it is to deconstruct the detective story and use it to look at society. And let’s face it—those books are fun to read.

I got my MFA in film from UCLA Film School, where I was mentored and befriended by Delia Salvi, professor of directing and acting performance, and she was big into the Stanislavsky method and performance theory—how an actor creates a role. I did a lot of improv, and I found that if you gave actors conflicting objectives and a scene idea, things just started to happen. If you combine in the same character a conscious objective and a subconscious objective that conflicts with their conscious objective, you get what’s called interior conflict, and this is what drives characters, scenes and stories. This led me to develop the idea that character is structure, that the whole idea that there are plot-driven novels versus character-driven novels is essentially false, because all stories are created by the choices characters make in pursuing their conscious and subconscious objectives. You can see how stories develop out of character, so this was the approach that I brought to fiction and teaching specifically.

When I work with writers, I work with the idea of getting them in contact with their characters, so they can see what the true character choices are—choices that come from inside out as opposed to from the outside and then interposed and imposed upon the character by the writer. It’s all about creating authentic characters. Coming from film, I also have a sense of the visual and how important it is to create a visual environment that the reader can relate to, that pulls the reader into the scene, so they can see it, feel it, smell it, touch it, and that’s called writing from the senses.

I was writing a screenplay that had been picked up, and I had written a sequence that took place in Paris. The producer said, “Can you rewrite this so that it takes place in Barcelona?” And I said, “I've never been to Barcelona. I can’t really write about it if I haven’t been there.” They said, “We’ll send you!” So they sent me to Barcelona, and this was right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, so I just jumped on a train and went to Prague, and I fell in love. It was a society in transition. They’d been living under 40 years of fascist, followed by communist rule. The people were like butterflies bursting out of cocoons, and they had a huge respect for American literature.

When I went there, my reception was so warm that I didn’t want to leave, and I got an idea for a novel that I wanted to write from the perspective of an expat. I told myself the same thing I told the producers of the screenplay, “How can I write about it if I haven’t lived there?” I decided I would live there for six months and write a novel, and I just never left. I met with a young man from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and we started together with Richard Katrovas, who is at the University of Western Michigan writing program, and we had a Czech partner as well. We thought, “Why not start a writers’ workshop here?” and it grew very quickly from 14 writers to more than 100 every year. It has continued in various incarnations ever since.

So why come to Prague? It’s just incredibly fruitful and important for a writer to leave their culture and see how other people live, how other people perceive the world and to embed yourself in what is essentially a deeply literary culture as opposed to a deeply commercial culture. If you walk through the streets, you don’t see statues of generals or politicians. You see academics. You see poets. You see fiction writers. These are the people who have been the heroes of the Czech nation since the 19th century, and Czech identity was formed around the idea of literature as opposed to money. It’s also just a fun city, one of the most beautiful cities you’ll ever see. It’s a great city for walking, and walking is always very productive to writing. It’s maybe the most ideal place to hold a writers’ workshop that’s not in the United States.

I have worked with a lot of writers, and the one skill that I hold most dear is my ability to work with the writer to figure out what they want to say and to help them say it. I am not someone who imposes a strict protocol that everybody needs to write this way, or everybody needs to read this. I have a wide repository of knowledge, so I try to use that knowledge to work with the writer in a custom way so that I see what they need, then I try to help them achieve their vision based on my knowledge of craft. All of my work with the writers will be a one-to-one experience, where I try to figure out what they want to do as creative artists and then help them get there, help them create their own vision.

A lot of writers who I work with already have a career doing something else. They are writing for many diverse reasons, and one of the most important reasons is that writing fills the soul. Writing gives people a sense of direction and purpose and solidity in the world, because you’re writing your stories, and we’re all living our stories, and stories are the fundamental element of all human life. My first approach as a teacher is, “What's your story and how are you going to tell your story?” Once you acquire the skills of telling your story, you can apply those lessons to almost any field that you’re in. You know how to organize material. You know how to revise. You know how to be articulate.

One of the great things that I found in workshop is that people in the beginning are not always articulate in speaking about story, but the more they talk about it, the better they become. A good workshop will feed your creative side, but it also teaches you all these wonderfully strong analytical skills, because we’re able to read the work of other writers and speak about them articulately, so that you can identify what’s working and what’s not working. The approach to problem solving that you learn in workshop is applicable to almost any career—except maybe dentistry.

Learn more about the low-residency MFA in creative writing at Hood College.