“A good story resists paraphrase,” Flannery O’Connor once said. It’s the message Aimee Bender sought to deliver at her talk last Thursday, as part of the last installment of The Provost’s Writers Series for this year. Bender, who is known for the unpredictable, fantastic turns that her stories take, teaches creative writing in the graduate program here at USC. She has written several novels, including acclaimed works like "The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake" and "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt". 

The night began with an excerpt from her short story “Bad Return”, part of her new collection "The Color Master". The story follows two college girls, with very different tastes in men—one likes athletic guys, the other brooding types. Bender read the first half, which featured arguments over compost, a thieving environmental protestor, and a heated conversation with an angry army wife. You know, college stuff. “It takes a very strange turn in part 2,” Aimee assured the audience, hinting that it involved the flare of magic that makes her writing so much fun to read. 

After the reading, she discussed her creative process.

Surprise. Aimee Bender prescribed it to every writer in the audience. Not the contrived kind you come into a story knowing about, but the fresh kind, that surprises yourself. The kind of surprise where you start a sentence, not knowing where you’re going, until, suddenly, there it goes in another direction, carrying a what-if scenario to some strange, spontaneous conclusion you never expected. Surprising yourself, “that’s the lure that keeps bringing me back to writing,” Bender said. 

To explain exactly what she was getting at, Bender shared some of the writing exercises she uses to get her students to embrace the possibilities of surprise. One involved students picking out the first red book they see on a shelf, turning to pg.36, and then reading the 7th line. “There, that’s your first line.” 

Bender also discussed some of her personal writing practices, like forcing herself to sit down and write for two hours every morning. “I don’t know that I believe in inspiration,” she said. “I believe in boredom.” When you force yourself to write, your writing becomes a way to entertain yourself. That’s when you start to take risks and play around. 

Bender ended her talk with cheerful optimism, arguing that, if you learn how to surprise yourself, you can come up with something totally new. “The world of books is roomy,” she said. There are still plenty of ways to resist paraphrase.