The Mark Program commences with The Defense or La Défense, as I’d been calling it. It loomed large like the Grand Arch, the monument in the Paris business neighborhood called La Défense, which was where I was when told of my acceptance into the Mark Program. I wondered why PEN called it that when clearly my manuscript was not a finished product to defend, but a draft in need of vast amounts of work. I thought a better name for it might be The First Meeting, or Getting to Know Your Project.

Though we’d been given questions to think about, it was hard to know what to expect. The questions seemed ordinary: What was the genesis of the story you’re telling? What’s your writing routine? These are questions one rehearses constantly in daydreamed interviews with the New York Times/Pulitzer Prize Committee/Charlie Rose. Or maybe that’s just me, narcissistic with delusions of grandeur. They’re questions and answers a writer is very familiar with. I for one have been writing this story for seemingly ever, certainly several years. So I know all aspects of the story intimately and can talk about it easily.

Or so I thought.

Everyone on the defense committee asked sharp, pointed questions, many I didn’t have answers for. Libby Flores asked what each of two characters wanted out of their marriage. Now, I thought I’d been clear, at least in my mind, about everything I needed to know about the characters in my novel, but I didn’t know that, and it was immediately apparent how important this knowledge was to the story.

Alan Watt asked several questions about motivations: the ones behind what I thought were the motivations. All those years, all those workshop leaders, urging us to “go deeper,” always deeper, imploring that I wasn’t digging enough: It finally dawned on me what the hell they were talking about. Years of writing workshops crystallized in a moment.

It was fifteen or twenty minutes before I realized that everyone in the room had read my manuscript, the whole thing, 429 pages. I don’t know why this surprised me, but it did. No one has read the whole thing except me. It seemed amazing, and it meant that all the manuscript’s flaws were now out in the open. They were obvious to everyone, except, perhaps, me.

Then Samantha Dunn clairvoyantly guessed what one of my favorite books was and saw the influence in my own. She pointed out exactly what drove the narrative of the one and asked where that same type of kernel of drive existed in mine.

I didn’t know. No one knew, because at this point it’s missing.

This knowledge was so humbling as to be almost bewildering.

And yet, I left, not deflated, but exhilarated. This is exactly what I need. These people have read my work. And embarrassingly, have thought about it in some ways deeper than I have, at least with more story sense, and aware of the narrative problems writers face. They gave me so much to think about.

I was leaving the Defense with a goal and plan. They’d handed me a shovel to go deeper with. I know there’s so much more to glean, so much more to come. But the Defense felt like if that’s all there was, then the whole application and interview process had been well worth it. I still hate the name. I propose that they rename La Défense to something that describes it as it is. I propose calling it: The First Gift or simply, The Gift.