susan woodring

With a Little Help from My Friends

2012-01-31T08:23:00.003-05:00

Back in my long-ago college days, I had a close-knit group of friends who weren’t much for partying. I mean, we weren’t much for your typical college-style partying. We rented movies on Friday nights or else played Azuma and got crazy on Zima. We concocted bizarre scavenger hunts the details of which I cannot divulge except to say they often ended badly. Once, very badly. We drove to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee to eat at a restaurant that we discovered to be out of business when we arrived. We lived in an off-campus trailer. We walked to class when it snowed. We ate frozen Patio-brand Mexican dinners that were plainly disgusting.

We loved Beastie Boys. Also Crash Test Dummies (the sideways line from the T.S. Eliot song was always so, so much more fun when we’d had a couple of those Zimas…) and The Presidents of the United States. Also, Grover’s “Wubba-wubba-woo” song from Sesame Street.

I went to college in Cullowhee, North Carolina. It was pretty remote, in the mountains, and the joke went, Cullo-where?? Sometimes, if we were really feeling crazy, we got got all gussied up—skanked up, we called it—and drove down the mountain a little ways, to the crazy discotown of Asheville, NC.

We were pretty dorky. But, oh, did we ever have fun.

It wasn’t always dancing and road-trips, though. Most of us in our little group had a major emotional breakdown at least once during our years there, on our mountain. I had one that lasted for the entirety of my junior year. It was boy trouble, mostly, but these boy troubles led to other troubles which accumulated into a huge crisis of faith, which in turn led to a crisis of identity. You could say I lost my way, and I don’t mean that my grades dropped (they didn’t) or that I adopted any truly wild behaviors. I just changed every other single thing about myself and tumbled into a depression so deep and so lightless, that the only relief I found was when I finally gave in. I simply quit trying not to hate myself.

My friends were mostly horrified by the change in me, by my new photographer/cyclist/vegan/allen-ginsberg-quoting/tin-cup-wielding/anti-establishment-ranting boyfriend. They tried talking to me. I remember my friend Becky taking me down to the river—literally—to try to talk some sense into me. They tried ignoring the crazy in me, just waiting it out. They didn’t know what to do with me. We were so young, and they were, most of them, battling their own demons. Like I said, we all had our big and large identity crises in college. I wonder, doesn't everyone?

In the end, their patience was extraordinary to me. The fact that they were still there, ready to take me back the minute I returned to my senses.

I especially remember the kindness of my friend Tanya. Tanya, the tiniest person I know, but with one of the sturdiest faiths I have ever butted up against. She loves her friends fiercely, but quietly. Steadfastly. In the middle of everything, when I was the most unreachable, she wrote me a letter. It was a bunch of God-stuff that I just couldn’t stomach at the moment, but her love for me, her belief in me, it shone right through. In turn, I saw the God she wrote of, reaching me not through her actual words, but through the heart of the letter. The faith and love for me—and for God—that had compelled her to write it.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever outright thanked her for that, or my other friends for simply being there: thank you. Thank you all—and you know who you are—so, so much.

This life, the writing-life and the non-writing life, the everyday struggles and the bigger ones, the crises of faith and the crises of no longer knowing who you are or why you are: it’s pretty awful sometimes. Damnably lonely.

I’m grateful for the people who love me, who put up with me. I’m grateful to my God, who saved me. Who keeps saving me.

Flap Copy, A Clarinet, and a Spy: Or, How My Friday Went

2012-01-21T07:55:00.007-05:00

I woke up feeling exactly how I'd felt waking up every morning this week: clogged and scratchy and swollen and grouchy. I like to say my husband's a baby when he's sick, but really, it's me. I'm the baby.

And moms don't get sick days (wah, wah). So, I lay a cold washcloth on my face--my eyes are bloodshot and swollen, as if I've been on a bender--slapped on some makeup, herded the kids into the car, and took off for Black Mountain. It's Tin Whistle and Clarinet Day.

Also, today, my editor has sent the flap copy, which neither she nor my agent is happy with, and so, after tinkering with the bio just a little, it seems the summary needs a pretty big overhaul. So, after music classes, I put the kids back in the car to drive back down the mountain, and my little boy asks me if my agent is the same thing as a spy and I say, yes! Exactly the same thing! And my daughter, who is 9 and just started clarinet in the fall, wants to jump, in two short weeks, into the big time: Concert Band! And, could I please work with her this afternoon to come up with a practice schedule? And my agent, the spy, calls twice--hates my revised flapcopy--and my little boy wants to do nothing but play Legos Star Wars on the computer all afternoon, and my eyes are still so puffy, my nose so snotty, all I want is Nyquil...

But, finally, I pay my daughter to play Go Fish with my son (it's babysitting, right??), and I close the door to my office, drink my diet pepsi and finally hammer out something my agent and my editor and my editor's assistant and my husband and I are--with a few minor adjustments--pleased with.

When Percy Harding, Goliath’s most important citizen, is discovered dead by the railroad tracks outside town one perfect autumn afternoon, no one can quite believe it’s really happened. Percy, the president of the town’s world-renowned furniture company, had seemed invincible. Only Rosamond Rogers, Percy’s secretary, may have had a glimpse of how and why this great man has fallen, and that glimpse tugs at her, urges her to find out more.

Percy isn’t the first person to leave Rosamond: everybody seems to, from her husband, Hatley, who walked out on her years ago; to her complicated daughter Agnes, whose girlhood bedroom was papered with maps of the places she wanted to escape to. The town itself is Rosamond’s anchor, but it is beginning to quiver with the possibility of change. The high school girls are writing suicide poetry. The town’s young, lumbering sidewalk preacher is courting Rosamond’s daughter. A troubled teenaged boy plans to burn Main Street to the ground. And the furniture factory itself—the very soul of Goliath—threatens to close.
In the wake of the town’s undoing, Rosamond seeks to reunite the grief-shaken community. GOLIATH, a story of loss and love, of forgiveness and letting go, is a lyrical swoon of a novel by an exceptionally talented newcomer.

And then, of course, I'm off to Food Lion. I cook dinner. Collapse.

PS. I didn't write the last part, about how great I am and how great the novel is. My editor calls me an exceptionally talented newcomer (love her!!) and I'm not sure who wrote that it's a lyrical swoon of a novel, but I'm pretty sure it was somebody who writes a lot of jacket copy...

Know Thyself: Dress Accordingly

2012-01-16T07:00:00.001-05:00

The first time I joined a somewhat formal writerly community, in January of 2002, I wore an ugly green pantsuit and smiled entirely too brightly. I was ten weeks pregnant with my first child, and I had just quit my middle school teaching job because the instructor at a community college creative writing class—the only such class I’d taken—had said I should. And, so, here I was, at the semester’s opening reception of the Queens University MFA Program, ready to begin.

And now, ten years later, all I can do is hope that I make sounder fashion choices these days. As with so many other things in life—and in writing—I knew the pant suit (with an elastic waist, no less) was all wrong when I did it, but I did it anyway.

I can say there was something I liked about that horrible suit. I think I liked the jacket—tweedy gold-threaded muted piney-mustard green (okay, so that sounds unforgivably terrible, actually). I liked that it was an ensemble—three distinct pieces of clothing that went together (I haven’t mentioned the matching scarf because I really am trying to forget it; shudder). I liked that it was dressier than anything I usually wore. That I had heels to wear with it. That the length of the pants had fit me (though the jacket pretty much swallowed me whole). I liked the idea of the suit, but not the suit itself.

Like that once-upon-a-time-on-a-shopping-trip-with-my-mother-pantsuit, so many things I’ve tried to pull off in the world of fiction-writing have been better in theory than in actual execution. Once, I tried to write a story about a woman infected with tiny, white, flesh-eating insects. She also happened to be trudging along in a bad marriage; the woman was literally bugged to death. (Get it? Get it?) I’ve written stories with too many characters, stories with too few. I’ve written failed ghost stories and over-written allegories and saccharin poems about the long-ago passing of my grandfather and an essay about a girl (myself) who turned into a stone (my not-so-funny struggle with motherhood and out-of-whack hormones and the realization that, hey, I’m not a girl anymore).

I’ve used contrivances that were hugely self-conscious and ultimately false in life, in fashion, and in writing.

It’s another way of looking at killing your darlings. Throw out the ugly green suit. Know thyself: dress accordingly. Be bold in your writing. Write the terrible story about the tiny white bugs—because you have to write such crap; you really, really do—but push through it. Come out the other side. Take a deep breath. Start again. Now, say what you really want to say.

What I'm Wishing for You in 2012

2012-01-02T06:41:00.001-05:00

I wish you time for writing.

Also, I wish you (brief) periods of time when you can't quite get to the writing. I wish you the joy of missing the writing.

I wish you the serendipity, the pleasure, and the artistic emboldening of finding just the right novel/story/memoir at just the right moment.

My friend Karen--the most well-read person I know--is genius at this sort of thing. Her shelves are like those of a pharmacy, and she dispenses books like medicine.

I wish you friends like Karen. A writing group like mine. I wish for you a collection of people, both dear ones and acquaintances, near ones and cyber-pals, who both inspire you and challenge you.

I wish you a single perfect sentence.

I wish you wisdom, boldness, and heart when it comes to revising. I wish you clearmindedness when it comes to cutting the fat, and courage when it comes to pressing the character or the language or the scene just a little bit further.

I wish you the joy of not knowing--the pleasure of writing to find out.

I wish you your dream agent. A brilliant editor. A bevy of enlightened, enchanted readers.

I wish you excruciatingly frustrating days in The Chair--when, let's face it, you really, really, really hate the writing--because this is what builds and proves your writerly mettle.

I wish you good health. A water-tight house and a relatively peaceful home-life, whatever that is for you. I wish you strong coffee. Comfortable shoes. Leafy greens. The relief and pleasure of a bed and a little mental peace at the end of the day.

If you're reading this blog, I'm grateful for you. Thank you for bothering, and thank you for valuing so many of the things--the writing, the living, the reading, the hope--that I value. My very best to you in 2012.

My Piggy Sneed Ending, but True: a Christmas Story

2011-12-27T20:04:00.003-05:00

In his essay, “Trying to Save Piggy Sneed,” John Irving describes how his first impulses to create fiction came from his childhood recollection of a retarded man who died in a barn fire. Young Irving began spinning wildly unlikely escapist scenarios of how the mentally challenged man had really set the fire on purpose to draw attention away from his flying away, running off to retire—as a rich man—in Florida. Or, maybe he had gone to Europe. In any case, Piggy Sneed, in Irving’s version, duped them all; Irving had saved the man—and maybe himself, as well—through fiction.

I was about the same age as Irving was when he spinned the Piggy Sneed tale when Iexperienced my first real kiss. It was in between the sixth and seventh grades, playing Truth or Dare with my best friend Temple and two boys while my parents were in Europe.

By the time I was twelve-and-a-half, I was getting into trouble for making out with my boyfriend at the school dance. And at a church-sponsored hay-ride. The J.C. Penney shoe department.

Oh, my mother reads this…I’m not sure I should go on…

I’ll just say it was never a good thing, me and boys. I left the school-dance boyfriend behind in middle school, but in high school I kissed boys in closets and at bus stops and at goofy teenage keg parties and, afterhours, in playgrounds. I kissed one in the backseat of a go-cart. In a hot-tub, at Spring Break. By the swimming pool. In the ocean. Once, in the middle of the night, on a golf course. In back yards, and—of course—on my very own front porch.

For my last year of high school and the first two years of college, I dated a pottery major who was sweet, but it was too much, too young. Breaking up with him was one of the hardest--and most important--things I've ever done.

After him, there was one guy who, on our first date, invited me to his apartment after dinner where there happened to be—oops—a pile of pictures of his naked ex-girlfriend on his coffee table. He claimed he had forgotten they were there, and I was the dummy who believed him.

When I was in my early twenties, there was a boy in Russia, where I was living for a while, who asked me to serve him his tea at a party. This request was, in effect, a traditional Russian mating call. He also asked me if I had ever kissed a boy before. He confessed that he hoped I would say no, and that our kiss on our wedding day would be two sets of virgin lips, touching for the very first time…

Uh, no.

And then, I returned, dated a couple of weirdos, and then, and then, and THEN…there was Danny. Danny. The friend of a friend who came to help me set up my computer and then stuck around to ask me to a movie.

I was no retarded man caught in a barn fire, but there’s no question—I was in trouble. And no question, Danny rescued me.

This is all to tell you what my favorite Christmas present of 2011 was. I like it because I like it—it’s a really nice perfume gift set—and also because in a Piggy-Sneed-happy-ending-sort-of-way, it’s just really perfect. The writer in me—and the girl—just loves it.

Here’s what he did: my Danny, my man who wears the same outfit every freakin’ day—and those of you who know him know I’m not exaggerating—teal-green scrubs for work; black t-shirt and khaki pants for the rest of his life. Who wears a beard to cut down on time doing stupid stuff like shaving, who never enters a shopping mall unless he has to, this was the man who walked into a department store a little over a month ago and visited every cosmetic counter. Bless him.

I have to picture it. That’s my gift, my very special Piggy-Sneed-like justice, my Danny, wandering around the department store, a string of overly made-up middle-aged women in white cosmetic smocks shuffling around him in their high heels, vying for his attention, spraying him with perfume. Him, facing that after all the losers I’ve kissed. And coming away with the perfect, perfect thing.

My Piggy-Sneed moment, but true.

Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. I hope you got what you wanted.

Giveaway: The Winner!!

2011-12-22T11:14:00.002-05:00

Stefanie Hutcheson, come on down!!!

Thank you, everyone who participated. I really loved reading your comments on the lines that "saved your life." From the literary to the spiritual to the intriguing to the thought-provoking, your lines gave me so much to think about...how very much the printed word can do. Freakin' amazing.

Love to you all, and Merry Christmas!

Never Love a Wild Thing, Mr. Bell

2011-12-17T10:05:00.000-05:00

From Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote:

"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell," Holly advised him. "that was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky."

"She's drunk," Joe Bell informed me.

"Moderately," Holly confessed. "But Doc knew what I meant. I explained it to him very carefully, and it was something he could understand. We shook hands and held on to each other and he wished me luck." She glanced at the clock. "He must be in the Blue Mountains by now."

"What's she talkin' about?" Joe Bell asked me.

Holly lifted her martini. "Let's wish the Doc luck, too," she said, touching her glass against mine. "Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc--it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear."

First Lines: A Giveaway

2011-12-12T20:40:00.004-05:00

Sometimes, a book comes into a person's life at the exact right moment.

They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy.

These are the first two sentences of Ian McEwan's on Chesil Beach, and I knew the second I read them that they had saved my life. I went on to read the whole book, of course, and it was wonderful, just exquisitely written, and yet, for me, at that moment in my life, the first two sentences would have been enough.

This was about three years ago. I was working on Goliath, which insisted, from the start, on an omniscient point of view. This book, my book was scaring the life out of me. I mean, who did I think I was, writing omniscience?

Which is why, on this afternoon, in the world's tiniest public library, Ian McEwan saved me.

I like these lines for what they do with distance, how they define certain parameters of the novel. I also like the first line, in a way, for its clunkiness--it seems to sort of stair-step down on the story. To me, it's a bit like the first line of Anna Karenina, and I like that it almost is fairy-tale-like, once-upon-a-time, again, the parameters, the spiraling into the story.

I love how the two opening sentences work together. The variance in structure, in rhythm, for one, but also because of, again, what it does with distance. I like that the first sentence is almost formal-sounding, dryly historical in a way, and the second is so much chummier, drawing the reader in.

I like the motion of holding the reader at a pretty sizable distance, and then drawing him in.

Most specifically to the technical issues I was dealing with in my own work, I love them now for how they give the writer such elasticity when it comes to psychic distance and point of view later in the novel. In these two sentences, he's established the rules of this story: he can draw way back, and he can swoop in, very close.

First lines establish setting. They set up expectations. They launch voice. They give us the rules by which to read a story.

At other times, other opening lives have saved my life. Aimee Bender has done this. So has Richard Yates. And Charles Baxter. Elizabeth Strout.

Tell me: who has saved your life? Give me the author, the book, the line or lines, and I'll put your name in a drawing to receive a signed copy of my novel, Goliath, when it comes out in April.

Any takers? You have until midnight next Tuesday, December 20...

Something Rare and White and Perfect, Like Snow

2011-11-29T05:38:00.005-05:00

So, maybe middle school was the best preparation for the writing life.

Besides the fact that it was the first place I ever read a real short story--Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, Mark Twain--it was also where I learned to carry my own awkwardness around with me. All day. Perpetual uncertainty. It was especially bad in the cafeteria, where it felt like the whole world was watching me to see if I was going to drop my tray. A catastrophe that never actually happened, but one I played through my imagination--my fears--constantly.

It was the late eighties: everything in my life was encrusted with a gritty, sticky layer of hairspray. I was goofy and sad. Sociable and lonely. One day I was pretty, and the next, there was a boy in my homeroom who told me I looked like a frog. I failed my pre-Algebra quizzes. My friend Kary Gerwe taught me how to drink coffee, with gallons of half-and-half.

The rumor was my seventh grade Social Studies teacher, who had a wrinkly, tan face that you could tell had once been very beautiful, used to be a Playboy centerfold. Another teacher--my eighth grade Language Arts teacher--was a closet drinker. Literally. We kids talked about it, how she went into the supply room between classes and drank rum.

I was simultaneously too smart and too dumb. Too skinny, too fat. I daydreamed. I hated P.E.

I had one shining moment when, in the eighth grade, at a Halloween party, a boy I liked chose me over another girl. Do you know, it's been nearly twenty-five years and I can still remember exactly what it sounded like, his voice, the very words: Will you go with me?

The rest of my life was pure rejection. Or, it felt that way.

I was always trying to find the right way to stand, the right thing to say. I had to re-fuel by spending lots of time alone, in my room, looking out the window. I became enamoured with dogwoods, and with trees in general. With quiet things. Easeful things. Things that weren't covered in hairspray. I believe it was then, in that quiet, that I began paying attention to the rhythms of speech. Me, trying to get out from under that terrible awkwardness for a single moment, parsing out my thoughts, searching for meter. For pattern. For something to come along and make everything make sense.

It took me years, too, to discover why I liked the dogwoods so much. When the wind blew, a few blossoms fell. It looked like something sad, like tears, and also, like something pretty wonderful, something rare and white and perfect, like snow.

Who Will Teach Me to Write?

2011-11-26T09:43:00.001-05:00

Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.

The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time's scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life's strength: that page will teach you to write.

There is another way of saying this. Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.

from Annie Dillard's The Writing Life

What Revision Really Is

2011-11-21T19:25:00.001-05:00

From “What Stories Tell Their Writers: The Purpose and Practice of Revision”

By Jane Smiley, found in Creating Fiction, edited by Julie Checkoway.

Think about waking in the morning and telling a dream. Almost always, when you are telling a dream to someone else, the only thing that interests him about your dream is whether and how he himself appeared in it, and how you felt about that. If he has not appeared, he tends to view the dream as a symptom of some pathology on your part, and he tries to intrude upon your dream with some interpretation of his own. As a story, your dream will usually be disjointed, random, and without certain essential connections and facts. In your telling, you may try to plead for the fascination or the importance of the dream, repeatedly drawing your friend’s attention to this or that aspect of the dream, but you will readily see that he is unconvinced. Perhaps you will only get a shrug and the response, “Well, that’s pretty interesting.” But don’t lose heart. In unsuccessfully telling your dream, you have learned the first lesson of story writing: that your idea is far more interesting to you than to anyone else, and that you need to work with it, formalize, and understand it before you can communicate it in a way that makes your friend, or any audience, want it for his own.

For many years, I didn't understand what revision was.

I thought it was an exercise in wincing. In chiding my first-draft-self for what it had dared to put down. What it had tried to get away with, what it had shied away from, what it had missed. I thought it was about alternately hating and loving my work. That to revise, I should make sure everything sounds the way I want it to. That good revision was all about making the prose--the sentences, the words, even the scenes--better.

But making the work better is only part of what revising is about.

What I love about this piece of advice from Jane Smiley is what it reveals about the purpose of revision: to make your dream--your story--something someone else can step into, can care about. It's not about making the work better so much as it is about making the experience of someone else reading the work closer to how I dreamed it. To reducing the space between what the reader experiences while reading closer to what I dreamed while writing it. To drawing the reader and the work closer together.

And so maybe what revision is mostly about is getting me--the writer--out of the way. Of re-organizing, cleaning up. Of removing the things I needed to get down when I was writing to understand the story and its characters. These things, hints to myself, cheat-notes, that my readers really don't need. Of adding depth and fullness to the places where too much of the story stayed in my head. Where I, creating it, didn't need to put it on the page.

Still a mystery, though. Always. How to do it, reduce that space, reader to story. Simultaneously drawing those two close while I, the writer, having built the dream and invited the reader in, slip away...

The Unknowable

2011-11-15T06:14:00.001-05:00

When I was eight years old, I confessed my greatest aspiration to my friend Ginger: "By the time I'm twelve, I will have my first book published." We were in my neighbor's back yard, gathered round the kiddy pool, and, after I explained what "published" meant, Ginger was impressed. "Wow," she said.

I also, at this point in my life, wanted to marry John Schneider and believed I could wish into existence a magic cape that would allow me to fly. I thought my life would be complete if I could own a pair of red leather high heel sling-backs and score one--just one--goal in soccer.

Besides the shoes, which I finally managed to adopt from a friend's neighbor's rummage pile when I was in high school, I accomplished none of this. Not even the soccer goal. (Maybe especially not the soccer goal--I have never, by any stretch of the imagination, been athletic. Never.)

And yet, I think there's value to this kind of wild-wish-hoping/goal-setting. I said I would publish the book by the time I was twelve, four years away. Half my life. Seemed like plenty of time.

This was a dream-goal. Which is one kind of goal. Dream-goals are important because they give us courage. Audacity. You have to be just a little bad-ass--and a little stupid--to dream them up.

But dream them you should. Not because they really might happen (though they really, really might), but because there is value in the dreaming. Because, unlike more practical, everyday goals--word counts and such--dream-goals force you to look out into the great wild. Into the great black emptiness--the beyond--where time is measured not in seconds and deadlines and months and years but in the amount of time it takes a single pinprick of light to travel across the cosmos. Centuries of unknowable space.

So, let's leave kiddy pools behind. If just for a little while. For a minute or two of hard, forward-looking. Let's don't think about submission guidelines or query letters or e-books or the doomed future of publishing. Forget your cache of rejection letters, forget for the smallest moment how very impossible it is, at times, to write a single sentence. Realize: you are working with words, a vastly pliable medium. This is better than deep-sea diving, better than John Schneider. Draw your child-sized lawn chair close to your own imaginary Ginger and whisper it to her. Your bad-ass goals. Explain this to her: words--prose--are virtually inexhaustible. Tell her there is no end to what you can do with them. No end to what you will do with them.

National Novel Writing Month

2011-11-07T17:47:00.001-05:00

Okay, first, I confess: I am not nanoing this month…but I have nanoed in the past. The first of my nano novels, which I actually wrote several Januarys ago, is dead and gone. Best forgotten.

But, I will say: there is something really wonderful and useful to the practice of writing 1500 or so words a day for an entire month. For me, it worked out to be about an hour and a half of hard writing, type-type-typing, a day. Great practice.

The second time I nanoed, this time in July, I salvaged some of the material and turned it into a short story or two.

The third time I nanoed, finally in the actual nano month, November, I finished up on November 30, and put the novel away. I think I slept the entire month of December. And then, January came, and low and behold, I dragged out that old novel. Or rather, I dragged it out of my mind, my memory, without actually opening the file on my laptop. I started the same story all over again. This draft took me two years to write; eventually, I titled the thing Goliath. It’s coming out in April.

I still haven’t opened that file.

So, I believe in nanoing. I believe writing really, really fast can be an exhilarating, somewhat harrowing, and incredibly freeing endeavor. I think there’s something wonderful, too, about committing a month to a single, crazy, throwaway-able (or not? Who knows?) project.

I always approached nano like this: let’s make writing fun again.

Over the course of my three successful nanos—successful only in that I made 50K each time—I picked up a few practices that I found very helpful. I’ll share them, in the hope that they’ll also be helpful to you.

First, I always wrote three pages before I allowed myself to check my word count. And then, after page three, I was allowed to check ONLY every time I finished a page.

I filled my freezer with lasagnas and frozen pizzas and my pantries with Froot Loops and chocolate-covered espresso beans. (I’m not saying nano is an especially healthful month…)

I made outlines, and then discarded them. I kept a stack of index cards beside my laptop and scribbled down upcoming events as the ideas came to me. Then, on slow mornings, I simply plodded through the notecards.

I always woke early to write.

I never went to bed without hitting the day’s word quota.

I changed scenery—mine and the characters’—often. Especially mine. The first time, we had just moved my daughter from a crib to a toddler bed, so I sat in the hallway, guarding the door, typing away. I wrote in coffee shops and, in the old days when such things still existed, the snack bar at Walmart. I wrote in my car (not while I was driving…) and on my front porch and at my in-laws’ house and in my kids’ tree house.

I sent my nanoing friends candy and encouraging notes. It encouraged me to encourage them.

I wrote a ton of descriptions. The characters’ living rooms, their kitchen drawers, the detritus in their pockets and purses. The color of the sky, the smell of boiling turnips, the sound of a little boy playing race cars on the floor. (The last part was inspired by the reality of the current situation in my house...)

I killed off characters, and then wrote long, sad funerals. I sent them winds of good fortune and bad--actual hurricanes. They scrubbed their kitchen floors. They went on road trips. They poisoned each other, played Frisbee. They drank coffee. They spilled coffee. The coffee spills took on the shapes that brought to mind their greatest fears, regrets, secrets...

I messed with my characters.

If I changed my mind about something, I typed in notes to myself, as if I’d ever go back and redraft. Something like: GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING AND MAKE MARY SUE SIXTY-FIVE INSTEAD OF SIXTEEN. Or, simply: MARY SUE IS SIXTY-FIVE.

I. never. deleted. a. single. word.

Ever.

Happy nanoing, everybody. May your words be short and many.

(Btw, I’m leading a seminar on the nanoing adventure—and also a bit about the novel-writing process in general—in a few weeks. The seminar will be here in NC; if you think you might like to attend, please shoot me an email and I’ll get you some more info. susanwoodring@gmail.com.)

Loving the Blurb Love

2011-11-06T05:58:00.001-05:00

Many of you who read this blog regularly already know how much I admire the work and character of author Bret Lott. I blogged about it here, but I can sum up like this: I first read his novel Jewel in 1999, on my honeymoon, and then, I began writing. For me, Bret Lott started everything.

He's a generous, very kind person, and after a little polite stalking (Besides entering contests he judged and sending submission after submission to TSR when he was their editor, I tracked him down at AWP in DC a few years ago and then again when he came to read at my alma mater the following spring), he agreed to read my forthcoming novel. I was so thrilled. Even better, he offered a blurb:

"Goliath is a beautiful and quietly moving story of love, grief, forgiveness and redemption — heady themes handled here with a big heart and a deft hand. In prose exquisitely clear and with details that will make your heart ache, Susan Woodring has written a meaningful portrait of small town life, and what it means to move through grief toward love."

In a sense, this is what I've worked ten-plus years to achieve. I'm so grateful.

Cat and Mouse

2011-11-02T07:23:00.002-04:00

There. She had it at last. The weeks it had devoted to eluding her, the tricks, the clever hide-and-go-seeks, the routes it had in all sobriety devised, together with the delicious moments it had, undoubtedly, laughed up its sleeve—all to no ultimate avail. She had that mouse.

From Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks

The first time I saw it, from the corner of my eye, me, at my desk, early, working, I thought it was a roach. Saw nothing but a spot of black moving past, formless in my peripheral vision. And a roach was bad enough. Bad enough I pulled my feet up onto my chair and called for my husband. It should have been in our vows: Do you, Danny, promise to rise up from the dead of sleep in the wee hours to hunt down any real or imagined intruder, no matter how small or how big or how yucky, when your wife calls for you? Yes, he will; he does.

But it wasn’t, as it turns out, a roach.

The next sighting was worse. I was working in the kitchen since my office had been barricaded, the door sealed off with towels stuffed at the bottom. (I told my friends that when I saw the mouse, I thought we'd simply move out. Let him have the house. In truth, I only let him have the one room.) Also, we’d never seen a mouse in the kitchen. (Although it seems obvious to me now that the mouse we had barricaded in the office had no interest in my books, my paper-clips, my piles of magazine and half-completed manuscripts and junk. No: he wanted food.) I heard something hurrying, fluttering, it sounded, behind me, and I yelled, of course, for Danny. Who came.

I was standing on the table when the disgusting thing scurried from beneath the oven and darted into the tiniest, narrowest crack between the dishwasher and the cabinet.

There I stood, on the kitchen table, screaming, hyperventilating, crying, praying, shaking, gripping onto my husband’s shoulder. He wanted to go check the kids, make sure they weren’t too terribly frightened by all the screaming I was doing, but I begged him: Don’t leave me. You can’t leave me.

So, he had to eventually carry me out. And tuck me into bed. And lie down beside me. And fetch my xanax.

And now, we have a cat. Lucy. Who sits on my lap or at my feet while I’m working. My guard-cat.

But, what I really wanted to say about this whole thing is that, ironically, during the several days of trauma, before the cat came to live with us, I was more determined than ever to get my writing hours in. I wore my sweats to bed, rose early, put my shoes on, and drove to Denny’s. I spent a few nights at my in-laws’ house. I wrote in bed, where I was reasonably sure they couldn’t get to me. I wrote in the evening, when Danny was awake to protect me. I wrote in snatches during the day, while the mice, I imagined, slept inside the walls. I wrote and wrote.

It reminded me of the early days of motherhood. When Abby slept, I wrote. I wrote right away, without googling anything or checking my email or facebooking or fidgeting. Because I never knew how long she would sleep. Or when she would sleep again.

So, for a few days, it was almost a good thing. That stupid little mouse. An enemy of my writing. Giving me a force to fight against. I imagined the thing didn’t want me to write. That its purpose was to stop me. And though I did give it the office, for a few days, I never let it take my work away from me. I kept writing. I won.

But now, there’s no tiny brown disgusting horrifying invader driving me out of my house. No, if anything’s going to force me to get up, drive to Denny’s, and write, it’ll have to be me. Just me, fighting me.

(Still, I don’t miss the mouse.)

Resistance

2011-10-10T06:08:00.002-04:00

This image was floating around facebook for a few days, and it got me thinking about resistance.

Okay, this image plus my everyday writing life. The truth is, I think about resistance all the time.

It's the dual nature of the beast: writing is like breathing to us--essential--and yet, we kind of hate doing it.

So what to do?

For me, it's something like working out. It's such trouble to begin with, to get up, put the sports bra on, lace up the shoes, and get out there. Get running. The first mile is usually pretty laborious, my blood is cold, slow to move. But, better, once I get started. I hit a rhythm, I'm making progress. And, for me, it's never easy--I'm always working, working at it--but there are times when, even though I'm working hard, even though there's a part of me that wants to quit, I'm also loving it.

My latest avoid-the-resistance project is to plan out my writing time in advance. At the moment, I'm shooting for fifteen hours of writing for the week, not a huge amount, but enough so I feel like I'm going. I look at my schedule, when the kids are going to my in-laws, which nights are free of soccer and church, and I plan it out. I make a deal with myself.

But, still, this is me plodding along...

Sleeves (Make Two)

2011-09-27T05:50:00.001-04:00

When I was in college, I purchased a big plastic bag of beautiful blue yarn--good quality cotton--and set about making a sweater. I was adapting a pattern for a man's sweater, using the wrong size needles, the wrong size gage, but I was patient. I adapted. I liked the process of knitting, the feeling of working with pure color--that gorgeous blue.

I was living in a trailer about a mile off campus. I had two crazy-fun roommates whom I'm still close to. One, Becky, pointed out the instructions on my knitting pattern: Sleeves (make two). She was pointing this out for two reasons. First, because this particular instruction seems to be pretty innane. Unnecessary. Of course it's two sleeves.

But then, when she pointed this out to me, I'd made three or four.

I was struggling to get the size right. The increases right. The shaping. The length. Making all the necessary adaptations: men's sweater pattern, wrong size yarn, wrong size needles.

Today, I'm struggling again. Writing this stupid novel of mine. Wonderfully, maddeningly, precariously complicated. Too complicated. I've come to chapter ten, somewhere near the middle of the story.

But, something's wrong. I only need one chapter ten, and yet I've written a half-dozen. I can't get the shape right, the gage. The feel.

I've been remembering my old knitting days, how it took me a number of sleeves to get the right two sleeves made. That it's not supposed to be as easy as sleeves: make two. That you have to over-write, then slash, then start over, then despair, then grow giddy, hopeful, then avoid it all together. Steer clear of any substantial writing time altogether.

Hemingway tells us, "For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment."

But what if the story is truly is beyond attainment? What if I write a half-dozen more chapter tens and they all suck?

What about chapter eleven? Will I ever be able to face chapter eleven?

What if the book went off track in chapter two and I'm too stupid or too invested to see it?

I've made sweaters I've never worn. Misshapen, ugly things no one could love.

The irony is that I know the uncertainty is part of it. That the uncertainty is as positive a sign as I'm going to find.

That uncertainty in writing fiction is the only certainty we have.

Unravel. Rework the yarn. Re-cast on the stitches. Freshen my coffee. Start again.

(I can do this, right?)

A few writing exercises for your Wednesday?

2011-09-21T07:06:00.001-04:00

Or tomorrow. Next week. Don't worry--they'll keep...

1. Child Narrator/Adult Narrator:
This one was inspired by the novel Father of the Rain by Lily King. The first part of the novel is told from the pov of the narrator as a child, and the second and third parts are told from the pov of the narrator as an adult.

In the child section, the narrator is all perception--"My father hates all my mother's friends."--and every observation is immediate, the narrator intuned to any change in her environment: "Three days ago my mother told me she was going to go live with my grandparents in New Hampshire for the summer. We were standing in our nightgowns in her bathroom. My fahter had just left for work. Her face was shiny from Moondrops, the lotion sheput on every morning and night. "I'd like you to come with me," she said.

In the following sections, where the narrator is first in her twenties, ready to accept a prestigious anthropology fellowship, and second, thirty-something, with children and a husband, her perceptions are filtered through experience--she has come to a firmer grip of how she feels about her past and what else is happening around her: "I look at her hard because she should know this if she's going to be a shrink someday. 'Some people are just assholes.'"

Here's the exercise: Take your character and write two scenes or maybe just two descriptions, small perceptions, in the present tense. The first should occur when your narrator is a child, the second when he/she is much older. Think about your narrator as a child--what she/he saw and how she/he experienced it--and think about how these experiences shaped your narrator's perceptions of the world as an adult.

2. Exclamation Points Are Your Friend!!!
This is just for fun: take a piece of writing advice or a kind of well-known dictum--only rarely, and with great trepedation, should thou use exclamation points--and go against it. You never know when this will work, when ignoring good advice will work to your advantage.

I dreamed up this one while reading Joyce Carol Oates's The Gravedigger's Daughter. The book is chock-full of exclamation points, especially in the beginning. Only JCO can get away with such a thing, and for her, in these opening sections, they communicate the nervous, trembly, awkward main character perfectly.

3. Draw Something
A few weeks ago, I heard Audrey Niffenegger speak at the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival on her dual art: visual and literary. She presented a slides show of her artwork and I was transfixed--so beautiful, so haunting. She made me think about how art melts and overflows into all sorts of mediums. As habitual writers, we are also habitual artists--we should constantly be seeking new ways to express ourselves and new ways to see the world. She suggested anyone interested in drawing begin with the book Drawing on the Right Side of Your Brain by Betty Edwards. Also, I fell in love Niffenegger's graphic stories, especially The Three Incestuous Sisters. You must check it out!!

The Habit of Staying Immersed

2011-09-14T06:05:00.000-04:00

Love this from my good friend Sheryl Monks: Fanning the Embers: The Necessity of Continuous Meditation.

When the Copyedits Arrive

2011-09-06T07:53:00.004-04:00

First, you get an email from your editor’s assistant that alarms you. She says: the copyedited manuscript is coming. You will get it tomorrow. You think: oh, no! If they are in such a hurry to get the blasted thing to me, they must want me to attend to it in short order! There will be legions of mistakes to fix, words to change, whole scenes to rewrite completely…

You think: what about my new work? Will I ever be able to return to the novel I’m working on now?

It arrives. It is covered in the copyeditor’s red pencil marks and the occasional question, scribbled in the margin in regular pencil, from your editor. Sometimes, she changes a word. Usually, when she does, she writes in the margin: OK?

But mostly, the thing is full of red. You realize: you’ve been over-using commas your entire life. And worse: you’re a teacher. You’ve pushed children into over-using commas, same as you. You thought you had some grasp of punctuation usage; clearly you were very, very wrong.

You should issue an apology to every one of your former students.

There’s a note from your editor. She reminds you of your “stet” option. Though she explains it in the note, you google stet: from the Latin “let it stand,” it indicates to the typesetter to disregard the edits or corrections made by the proofreader or editor.

She tells you, in the note, to use stet freely. You think, God bless my editor. Then: should I really use it? Freely?

But, you get started, and you do. Stet is neatly written at first, four timid letters. By around page 100, though, your stet is brazen. Thunderous, to borrow from Nabokov.

You hate your copyeditor. It seems only the most horrible, stupid creature could ever strike your beautiful word: bloated, on page 3. And then, several chapters later, she tears up a heartbreakingly brilliant paragraph you’ve written on how the coffee in the break room at the furniture factory in your novel tastes, and you have this fantasy that you will fly to NYC, march into her office, fling the manuscript down on her desk, and explain to her just why it is so flippin’ poignant. How the weak coffee is a metaphor for the fading factory town, how you spent a month laboring over that paragraph, how you hope weak coffee—or at least, your description of weak coffee—will haunt her for years to come.

Instead, you write “stet” in the margin. You move on.

You love your copyeditor. You want to weep with gratitude, the humiliating mistakes she’s fixed, your absurd syntaxes, your imbecilic misspellings. You’ve changed characters’ names without realizing it, you’ve omitted words, you’ve invented the names of Revolutionary War generals.

Your editor saves you, too: strikes the word folks. “Too folksy!” the margin scribble declares.

You remember the great black bag she was carrying the day you met her. It was shoved full of papers and you think about how she likely carried your manuscript about with her in the same way, in that same bag. You think what a trouble it must have been for her, lugging your book around. You are amazed: she chose this. She bought the book, chose to edit it. Your. Book.

You are unbelievably lucky.

You remember your first days in Goliath, the fictional town where your book is set. In those days, you dropped your daughter off at preschool and left your baby with your mother-in-law while you trudged up the stairs to the office you kept at your in-laws' house. You wrote the mornings away. You think first: my in-laws are wonderful. You think second: this is that same book. That same book wandered around NYC in that big black bag.

You realize: this is happening. Not only did your agent first, and then your editor choose to work with you on this book, and not only did a copyeditor you’ve never met go over every word—every comma—of the thing with painful exactitude, but there will be still more people working on it. Somewhere, there is an artist preparing the cover. There will be a typesetter, a publicist. Eventually the thing will materialize—a book!—and, with luck, an employee at a book store somewhere will someday put it on a shelf.

And, if you’re wildly, impossibly, wonderfully lucky: a reader will pick it up. Take it home. Open it.

Your words. What started out, years ago, before the upstairs office in your in-laws’ house, a daydream you coddled when you were eight months pregnant, watching your older child take her first swim lessons.

I’ve written stet everywhere. The thing is practically covered in my blue pencil, those four letters again and again. But, what I really want to write there, above every single word, every superfluous comma, every text break, every period, is thank you. Over and over again, just that. Thank you.

On Squandering: a Letter to Myself

2011-09-01T05:59:00.001-04:00

Don’t squander time. It’s a clichéd piece of advice, but so useful: make every second count.

Don’t squander energy. We are all guilty of this one. We give away our energy to all kinds of really stupid things. We give it to anger, to worry, to hopeless pursuits of perfection. We give it to people who don’t deserve it. We give it to our stuff, to fretting and hoarding and to working too hard and too long for more stuff. We give our energy to nursing hurt feelings over perceived or actual wrongs. To comparing ourselves to others. To jealousy. To holding grudges. To desiring something we don’t need…or even really want. To making excuses. To lying to ourselves.

We squander our faith and our energy in longing for things we have little or no control over. We set publication and acceptance as our goals instead of pages written and submissions sent.

Don’t squander creativity. There are days when one derives true joy from spending whole hours adding frosting curlicues to the top of a birthday cinnamon roll and there are days when a quick trip to the bakery section at Ingles will do just fine. Do not invest your talent in gossip or in obligatory cupcakes or in facebook status updates.

Dear self, determine what’s important. Then, pour yourself into it. Picture it: all the little containers—some marked family, others work, then friends, art, faith, house, everything else--and only so much you.

Lapse

2011-08-24T07:41:00.000-04:00

It's been a wonderful summer...

Returning to all my good habits--including this blog--in September.

Another Kind of Waiting

2011-07-27T16:27:00.001-04:00

We’ve already talked about the waiting place. You know, that place where you bite your nails and ignore your real life and haunt your inbox for an acceptance. Where you play mind games to distract yourself, or you convince yourself that if you just don’t think about it, it will happen. Or, if you do think about it, you can make it happen. The power of positive thinking, of love coming to you when you least expect it, the delusions we conjure up because the truth of how much we really do control is beyond disheartening.

Today, we’re waiting for a different thing. It comes from a different place. Before, I cautioned you not to wait—a watched pot never boils—but today, with this different thing, I say hunker down. I say, keep still. Be absolutely silent. Listen.

I hate the term writer’s block because it sounds like there’s something in the way—an obstruction to move. People think writer’s block means you’ve run out of ideas. I’ve never heard of that actually happening to anyone. (Has it happened to you? To anyone you know?) Much more often, the problem is just the opposite. There’s too much. Too many things happening, too many choices, too many characters, too many things you could do with the character and not a one of them seems to fit. Or, they all seem to fit.

Or—and I think, that if you’re any good, this happens to you all the time—you come to realize that what you want to write is just too big. Good writers always want to achieve more than they can. They take on more than they can handle. The good writer has dreamed up something so, so big and important and beautiful, and suddenly, everything’s a mess. Suddenly, everything that you want to work—what you know should work, what has to work—everything that you love about your story or your novel or even just a particular character explodes or fizzles out or evaporates or, worse, turns back on itself—the story begins to fight itself.

First thing, don’t panic.

Second, wait. Wait, but don’t do nothing. Instead of moving forward, move downward. I mean, dig. Dig under what you have there, see what’s beneath it. Deepen. Sit still and ponder. Take a break. Do not be anxious, do not be in a hurry, but do be diligent. Be thorough. Be exact. Do not waver, do not settle. Just wait.

Take a deep breath. You’re okay. The answer--the next sentence or word or chapter--will come.

I'm Outta Here

2011-07-11T19:33:00.000-04:00

So, the other night, we’re dining at our friends’ house. Indian food. (I don’t cook, so I like to seek out friends who do…) My four-year-old son, dressed up as a princess. He breaks a plastic Cinderella heel in his exuberant princessness. Our friends’ three-year-old, who is a princess. A nineteen-month-old baby, terribly, terribly cute…jumping and screeching and shoving food into his cute little face. My eight-year-old, afraid to touch any kind of food that has been touched by any kind of spice. Or, any kind of food that is not string cheese or apple slices. Or brownies. My husband, telling odd and all-too-true stories about himself. (I love you, dear.)

The conversation turns to vacations. Our friends have just been to Israel and Egypt. My daughter perks right up to match them with this: “We’re going to Illinois later this summer for a family reunion. We’re driving there.” (Her mother, who doesn’t want the expense and trouble of flying like we did last time, has convinced her that eleven hours in the backseat with her little brother will be the ultimate adventure…)

Our friend asks, “Chicago?” She’s hopeful.

Uh, no. Gilman.

“Oh.”

“But, guess where I’m going next week?” I’m excited. “To the beach!! Guess who I’m going with?”

“Your writing friends?” Again, she’s hopeful. She’s remembering that I do take an annual trip to the beach with my friends. But not this time…

“No. No friends, no husband, no kids—just me!!”

I get a little flutter-hearted, just saying it. I know the very spot at my parents’ beach house—at the kitchen table, in a big room whose blinds I intend to keep shut—where I plan to think a lot, drink a lot of coffee, and write, as madly and long as I can. I plan to read Cloud Atlas. I will re-read The Great Gatsby. The Idiot’s Guide to Einstein. Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. I will watch really bad television, eat diet microwave pizza, and knit—I have a new pattern! New, yummy yarn!—into the wee hours.

I can hardly wait.

“Oh.”

We writers are weird. We’re solitary creatures. Kind of. I like what Audrey Hepburn has said on the art of being alone: “I don’t want to be alone. I want to be left alone.”

Next week, I’m removing myself. I’m eating Lean Cuisine, drinking coffee at all hours. Holing myself up in a beach house and barely touching the actual beach. I can’t wait.

Wild with Hope

2011-07-05T07:00:00.001-04:00

When I hit the long-awaited 12-week mark in what would prove to be my first successful pregnancy, I rushed out and bought a triple-pack of Gerber's one-piece sleepers. Size newborn, in non-gender-specific colors. I hit Barnes and Noble for a copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting and, taking the book to the register, I tried to look like a person who was purchasing it for someone else. As if maybe, if I let my guard down and wore the expression of someone who was newly pregnant and optimistic about it, I would jinx the whole endeavor.

My sister had cautioned me not to buy anything at all until I was at least twelve weeks. Waiting longer would be better. She was looking out for me, of course, worried that if things didn't work out, I'd have tangible reminders of what I'd dared to hope for. This was practical and very wise, but I was a person who really, really wanted a baby. I tried to ignore my condition not to guard my hopeful little heart, but because I believed that wanting a thing too badly was the surest way to lose it.

After all, I had so little proof. A little queesiness. A pink line on the pregnancy test stick. A blinking dot on the ultrasound screen. Could a real-live human--only the size of a grain of rice at this point--actually be growing inside of me?

I've treated my writing aspirations with the same white-knuckle restraint. If I wanted it too badly, it just wouldn't happen. I wrote on the sly, literally hiding away in closets and attic knee-walls, perched atop a pile of scratchy pink insulation.

When I was pregnant, I became an obsessive food label-reader. I quit eating hotdogs and feta cheese and tuna. I never, ever slept on my back, and I regularly took my prenatal vitamins even though they made me horribly nauseous.

Amazing what we think we can control. What good-luck rituals we cling to. On some level, I knew it was completely ridiculous to believe that my not eating hotdogs was what was keeping my gestating fetus alive. That my baby would be born, healthy and perfect, if I kept myself back from stocking up on too much dreft detergent. That writing where no one could see me would somehow make the writing better.

We try not to get our hopes up. We try not to be too audacious, to think too much of ourselves.

The irony is, of course, that these little rituals are fueled almost entirely by hope. By a bloated--and deluted--sense of our own power.

Of course, writing a book and carrying a baby are completely different in a number of ways. My body really did put that little person together with little help from my consious self, but I have to engage in a whole different level--I have to work like hell--to get a book or a story or even, sometimes, a sentence together.

And while I feel that, in either case, it really is important to keep our expectations in check, I also think there's something to be said for hoping. Essentially, to me, writing anything is about hoping it into existance. It's about building the baseball diamond and waiting for the players to emerge from the cornfield. Or about building the arc and waiting for the rain to start. Buying the three-pack sleepers and waiting for the thing inside me to undergo untold numbers of cell divisions, the growing and growing and growing--all those months of hope--into a tiny creature large enough and strong enough to inhabit what I've prepared for it.

Writer at Play

2011-06-29T06:14:00.002-04:00

If I had remembered the thingee that connects my netbook to my camera, I’d post pictures. Me, this week, having fun at the beach with the family. If I had remembered, you’d see me playing swim-tag with my kiddos at the pool. Or, using a rather complicated network of foam noodles and Toy Story boogie boards, one kid dragging me, the other dragging my husband Danny, across the pool. See who gets there first. In the pool, with my daughter Abby, everything is a race.

At the beach, I hold my little guy’s hands and together, we brace against the rushing waves. We went out last night at high tide, the water choppy, everything near the water so misted over with saltwater, you could hardly see. But, it was fun. Farther off, Abby and Danny, diving into the waves.

We eat turkey sandwiches. We play legos at the beach house. We engage in a week-long Monopoly game—the only time all year that we actually begin and end an entire game, all the way through to bankruptcy for all but one. World-wide economic dominion for the last man standing. (Last year it was Abby; I was the first one bankrupt.)

Though I’m not really blogging here—this doesn’t count—I do write. A little. I dabble around in my wip, mostly to keep it alive in my brain. Last year, at the beach, I had just received my editor’s revision notes for Goliath and, though I didn’t even bring my netbook with me, I wrote the whole week long, but only inside my head. I processed those notes. I scribbled down a few notes.

This year, I open up the document in spare moments. Poke around. Write a paragraph. Call it a day.

Jack London said he wrote a thousand words every day, no matter what. On the road, on the sea, the glacier, wherever he was. Joan Didion has said she needs to sleep in the same room as her novel-in-progress to keep the story with her.

Others need to take breaks. Leave it completely. They return revived, fresher for the work. Energized.

Know thyself. Good advice for any writer, particularly in the area of process and the accumulation of writerly habits. Know thyself, and more: tell thyself the truth. I would love to work like normal all week, but I know that’s not possible. Not with all the wave-jumping I need to be doing with my little Aiden. All the monopoly-playing me and Abby have planned.

Alternately, I would love to forget the work completely, but that’s equally impossible. Or, in the least, a dangerous practice. To leave it behind completely would be to risk losing the story.

So, this week, I’m playing. And writing (a little.)

From Here to There And Back Again: Getting Published (Sigh.)

2011-06-22T07:57:00.002-04:00

About a month ago, I sat in on a panel of Queens alums on the topic of getting published. We were asked to speak honestly on our experiences, though the moderator of the discussion pointed out that this might prove difficult for me specifically since my agent happened to be in the audience.

No matter, the moderator joked. Susan, you've been entirely, uncategorically, ecstatically happy with your experiences, right? Wink, wink.

Right-o.

The truth is, I love my agent. He loves my work, he sold my book, and he continues to profess the belief that I will write more good stuff. What's not to love?

(The truth is also: my agent reads this blog.)

We were asked to share our stories. I spoke of how I started by tentatively sending out stories and happened to place one in an anthology published by a small, local press. I asked the editor, could I send him a novel? He agreed, then took the novel, which had been my graduating thesis. A few years later, I had a collection of short stories and a writing friend, who had read most of the stories in workshop and who was then an editor at another small, local press, asked to see the collection. She took it, and we put a picture of my mother, age 14, in her confirmation dress, superimposed over a Martian landscape, on the cover.

A few years later, I had another novel and the same friend, no longer with the press, encouraged me to take it to a conference and show it to an agent there. Another friend threatened to stage an intervention if I tried to take this one to a small press. It's time, she said. You need to find yourself an agent.

So, it all happened. An agent who represented one of my favorite authors happened to be at the upcoming North Carolina Writers' Network Fall Conference, and he liked the pages I brought him. He took on the book, sent it out, and sold it to St. Martin's.

We were also asked to talk about our regrets. I have plenty. I have a number of things I'd like to change about my first book, but I'll not get into them here, except that I wish I had done a better job with the ending. I regret how I left my characters, especially the mother. She started out lost and ended up just as lost. Not much of a character arc there.

But, at the panel, I asked to instead speak on what I had done right. I said I was glad I didn't rush right out and try to find an agent for my first book. I spoke on the years I spent after earning my degree, burrowed down into my little writing hole. Outwardly, I carried on with my life, plunged into my thirties, started a family, began the long, wondrous, and bewildering work of learning how to be married. (Still learning!) I knew my work wasn't yet ready and I also knew my little writer's heart wasn't ready. The agent-search, I observed in writer chat rooms and blogs and in the lives of some of my friends, is very, very tough. I didn't want to risk it, not yet.

Another panelist, a memoirist, had a different story to tell. She faced all of the obstacles of finding the perfect agent, and the excitement of signing with the perfect agent, from one of the big-name agencies, only to have the perfect agent vanish on her. She relayed her experiences communicating with various editors with verve and resilience. Her refrain: "I got angry." She said, "And things happened when I got angry." She pressed on, found success, while I cowered away and waited. I admired her determination, her fortitude, but I knew myself, my own limitations.

This business is anything but one-size-fits-all.

But that was, ultimately, the point of the panel. The people we were speaking to, all Queens alums, are well-acquainted with all the processes, the writing of query letters, the submitting, the benefits of working with indie presses versus big houses and vice-versa. What they needed to hear instead were our testimonies.

And, here's something I came away with. I think workshops and all the rest are really good at helping us seeing our strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the craft of writing. We might be good at building characters but need to work on pacing. We might have a knack for evoking setting but fail to produce good dialogue. I think workshops are good at showing us these things. At helping us see what we need to do to improve and even--if we're really lucky--how to go about improving it.

But, submitting and querying and publishing, that whole terrible beast, this is where a different system of strengths and weaknesses emerge. Here, we get to know what we're made of. Emotional strengths and hindrances, where our phobias and self-doubts and confidence and charm and resilience come to light. It's good to hear others' stories because it reminds us what all is possible. All the different ways to get there.

And, of course, we're not there yet. None of us are, wherever there is. We say, we'll know it when we find it. But, it gets away from us. That's why we have to keep having panels.

Setting Changes Everything

2011-06-13T18:17:00.002-04:00

When we were little, my younger sister Jill and I often came as a pair. Our mother made us matching sundresses, bought us matching white Stride-Rite sandals, and we were always gifted, from parents and relatives and the like, with matching presents. If she got a pink unicorn clipboard, I got a purple one. We were one grade apart in school while our older sister Shelley was eons—five and six years—beyond us. When Shelley started junior high, boys began bicycling into our cul-de-sac with blue-frosted cupcakes and other small treasures for her, or else just came visiting, and we younger two bobbed around in the front yard with a soccer ball or behind the front door, ostensibly hidden away. We giggled together.

Once, we were four and five years old, our grandmother, an Avon-product-junkie, gave us each a canister of monster-themed talc powder for Christmas. Let the record show: it was Jill’s idea to dump out the powder on our play-kitchen table and pretend-bake with it like flour. It was Christmas Eve. We were bathed and combed and dressed in our red plaid dresses, all ready for evening church services. Now, we—and our pretty dresses—were covered in monster talc. Mom was annoyed; Dad took pictures.

We also tried, from as far back as I can remember, to be different from each other. Isn’t that the natural bent of sisters? To distinguish ourselves from each other? Jill was quiet in school, me not quite so much. Later, in high school, Jill excelled in science and math while I became a humanities nerd. She played tennis, and I started chasing boys as my major sport. I grew obsessed with the color purple, Jill with getting her hair just right, and eventually, I went to a small mountain college and Jill went to the largest university in our state.

Now, I became the quieter one, isolated, and Jill accumulated crowds of friends. We both graduated with honors, Jill in science, of course, me in middle grades education. She went on to graduate school and became an anesthetist; I was a teacher first, then a fiction-writer. It’s something of a joke now: Jill puts people to sleep. I try not to.

We both became mothers. And here, in having babies and seeing those babies through toddlerhood, we were back on common ground. We talked breast-feeding and ear infections, tummy-time and nap schedules. She had happy babies, two boys and a girl, and attributed their happiness to eating chocolate while she was pregnant. My sister, the science-hearted girl. My first, my baby girl, has always been fretful and cautious—she seemed to worry too much even as a baby—and my second, a boy, free-spirited, fell into laughing and screaming and running with his cousins at every family gathering.

Our oldest ones began school, and Jill and I deliberated over education choices. I started home schooling and Jill found a brand-new magnet school. Now, we talked reading levels and penmanship. Little-kid friendships. Eating habits. Swimming classes. Toy Story characters. Birthday parties. More ear infections.

Last week, though, at a hokey-but-fun Western Frontier-theme amusement park, a glimmer of something different and yet familiar shone through all our grownupness. We had our children and our parents with us, and dispensed with all of the automatic motherly concerns—sunscreen, snacks, bathroom stops—as we always did. But I saw something I’d only caught glimpses of in all the seriousness of adulthood, in all the dizzying multi-tasking of motherhood: there was my little sister Jill, on all the rides, having fun.

We weren’t in my parents’ living room at Christmas or Thanksgiving, trying to keep the kids from jumping on the couch. We weren’t cutting strawberries for their lunches or snatching them up to wipe their sticky hands. We weren’t thinking reading levels or age-level social norms. There was nary an ear infection among us.

Instead, we were back in the basement playroom of so many years ago. The playroom was a cowboy-and-Indian-filled amusement park and the monster talc was the Tilt-a-Whirl, my sister Jill so brazen, dumping out the powder, riding the spinning, jerking thing again and again. Just happy and free.

All it took was a change in setting. From our normal, housekeeping, kid-keeping lives to this assortment of rides and funnel cakes at a crook of a mountain town known for nature walks and outlet shops. Here, in this place, my little sister was simply fun.

Okay, I’m taking a long time to get here, but here it is, the writerly connection: setting changes everything. Everything. Or, I should say, a change in setting throws new light on your character. Take your young, serious, part-time medical professional mother of three and put her in a goofified ghost town with put-on train robberies and make-believe salon brawls. See what happens. What surfaces.

(This, btw, is coming from a person who is NOT her best at amusement parks. True confession? I—usually—loathe such places. Maybe that’s why Jill’s energy for all the hysteria impressed me so much.)

You do this—the change in setting—for your character, because even made-up people deserve to be seen from more than one angle. Nobody is ever just one thing.

But you do it for your reader, too. Or, for the character's sister. For a new angle on the relationships in a story. Amazing how something happening right now can harken back so neatly to the past.

I needed to see Jill act like a kid once again. A sort of real-life rhyming action moment. I needed to see her be an avid Tilt-a-Whirl-rider and a still-on-top-of-everything mother at the same time. I needed to re-remember a thing—really, a person—I’d known long ago. A person who, as it turns out, is still around.

Do not hurry; do not rest.

2011-06-08T07:05:00.002-04:00

You’ll notice: today is Wednesday. I usually blog on Tuesday, but I have a number of good excuses for my tardiness. Summer has begun. My kids are practicing for a musical at church. The practices are weekly, not bad, but the practice CD has taken over my life. We’re planning our beach week, summer camps, birthday parties. Monday, we went to Tweetsie Railroad, a Western Frontier style amusement park in Blowing Rock, NC, and I may never recover…

But, there will be more on Tweetsie next week.

Today, I’m not so much blogging as I am sharing my newest mantra. It’s from Goethe and it’s the epigraph to the first chapter in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.

“Do not hurry; do not rest.”

I have been lax with the blogging, but am working steadily on the new book. It’s this quote that keeps me going. This writing thing, like my kids’ musical, like making it through the long, hot days of summer, is about pacing. Getting into the writing-groove and staying there.

I’m doing 500 words per sitting. A good pace. I’m sharing daily word counts with a few writing buddies. Not that they particularly care, but it keeps me honest.

It’s what I think, these days, when I’m jogging in the morning. When I’m writing. When I’m facing the bottom-less laundry hamper. Do not hurry, do not rest; Do not hurry, do not rest…

A beat to dance to.

When I First Fell in Love

2011-05-31T06:09:00.004-04:00

I was sixteen years old the first time I became so immersed in writing, I lost hours to it without realizing it. I was alone in the house, writing a story upstairs at the family computer, and when I finally finished and started down the stairs, the light had changed. The outside world had gone from full daylight to dusk, and I experienced that beautiful displacement. I’d forgotten myself completely, so deep was I in that story.

It is that feeling, that disconnection—a kind of un-being, of escaping into my own head--that I have sought like a drug ever since.

In many ways, it was a heck of a lot easier in those days. I had no idea what I was doing, so the writing was fitful, bold, sentimental. Even better: I had no idea how bad the writing was. Not knowing gave me a certain brazenness. A courage. I plunged in, blissfully ignorant of the distance between the story as it existed—whole—in my imagination, and the barely coherent jumble of sentences before me, both too messy and overly tidy, too abstract, simultaneously melodramatic and intolerably boring.

John Cheever says he can’t write without thinking of the reader, but I have to peel the world off completely. As completely as I can, anyway.

There’s a price to be paid for experience. For learning, in some small degree, bit by bit, what the heck I’m doing. Because it gets so much harder to peel the world off, to enter that place. In fact, the longer I write—the better I get—the more discriminating I am. The more I can see just how much I suck.

I think that when people say writing requires bravery they mean a number of things. In a sense, it’s what I keep writing about here, in this blog. How to overcome your writerly fears. You’re afraid of what you’ll encounter—what truth you don’t want to see—and you’re afraid you’ll give too much of yourself. You’re afraid you’ll give years of your life to a pursuit that will never pay off. You can do the math, count up the number of aspiring writers versus the number of success stories. You’re afraid you are a fool to keep at this. You think: I’m wasting my life! I could be out there, jumping on the trampoline with my kids.

You’re afraid, as I am, that you suck. You’ve been writing for a while, reading, learning, discussing, studying, and now, God help you, you no longer simply fear it: you know it. You know you suck.

Here’s your chance for bravery. Prove your mettle. Because good writing is not about not sucking; it’s about writing anyway. It’s about having eyes to see your own weaknesses and pushing past them. You have to see how bad it is before you can make it better.

I love what Michael Cunningham has said about dealing with your own shortcomings: “Fearlessness in the face of your own ineptitude is a useful tool to have.”

So there it is: be fearless.

You’ll never fully regain the euphoria you first felt that made you fall in love with writing. Or, maybe you’re not like me: maybe you experience it all the time.

Or, maybe, like me, you’ve decided there’s something really wonderful to the act of pursuing. To trying to recapture the giddy recklessness of those early writing days. To writing with that kind of heart and with the discriminating eye of experience. The pressing on, trying to get better, trying, always, to find your way in.

Finally, that’s all any of us have, isn’t it? The reaching?

The Winners!

2011-05-18T16:45:00.002-04:00

Thank you so much to those of you who commented on my Short Story Month post, thereby entering to win one of my favorite short story collections!

And, the winners are...

Mary Akers will receive a copy of Bret Lott's How to Get Home.

Pamela Erens will receive Aimee Bender's The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.

And, finally, Katrina Denza will receive Stacey Levine's The Girl with Brown Fur.

AND, speaking of short stories, my friend Sheryl Monks has a really fabulous post on short story endings at her blog, 50 Shimmering Pages. You should check it out!

I Used to Be a Star

2011-05-17T07:34:00.002-04:00

I used to be a star.

On Thursday mornings, from nine a.m. to noon, at Lower Creek Baptist Church in Lenoir, North Carolina. I arrived with my toddler and her suitcase of toys, everything she needed to keep occupied while I did my magic. My TEACHER AT WORK bag, full of graded papers, candy, my homemade version of Balderdash, highlighter pens, poems, Thirteen Steps to Better Writing, chart paper already marked up with writing prompts and story-openers, sentences to imitate, brainstorming space. I had a roll of masking tape to put it all up with, my once-a-week writing classroom in a bag, and a 20-oz. bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper to keep me juiced up. Energetic. The perfect pitch of happy-crazy-enthusiastic.

Ready for them: three classes of homeschoolers, ages 9 to 17. The boys who came with a pencil behind their ear and a scraggly spiral notebook. Who sat back, tipping their chairs while I did my thing. Writing exercises. Writing workshops. Critiques. The older girls in cowboy boots and lip gloss. Giggly, everybody half-flirty with each other, ready to show off a little to me, a lot to each other. Me yammering on about parallel structure and the fluidity of really good prose. Me, the co-op writing teacher, the one who liked to talk about strong verbs and concrete nouns.

I wanted to give them to the tools to write about their own lives, lives they carried with them in their trinkets and souvenirs. Ordinary pocket-stuffings. The younger girls with their sparkly purses and photographs of their pets, their airplane trips, their snowy backyards. They came to me with their whipped-cream-topped coffees, their bubblegum, their music instruments, not to play, but just for me to see, nestled into the padded, soft cases. I had a boy who played the banjo like nothing I’ve ever heard, who aspired to be Earl Scruggs. A girl who hand-knit dozens of outfits for her dolls. They raised tadpoles and bunny-rabbits, hunted deer and turkeys. They wrote science fiction. Essays. Opinion papers on tattoos and Edgar Allan Poe. They wrote about the history of cheese and the glory of skate parks.

I asked a lot of them, workshopped their papers until their eyes glazed over, unable to hear another word about where they could be clearer, which sentences needed more punch. I threw pens at them when they weren’t paying attention. They wrote and they wrote and they wrote. I tried to make things fun, or at least, lively, and they repaid me with over-the-hill birthday parties, hand-woven oven mitts, and some of the best-written, funniest, and most touching papers any teacher ever got to read.

They also wrote really awful papers, boring ones, stuffy ones. Ones that relied too heavily—almost comically—on their thesauruses. Illegible ones. Bare-bones papers, run-on sentence papers, papers without any direction whatsoever. Really, really bad papers.

But, we worked through the awful together. We worked through and they each—every single one of them—came away with something great.

That’s why they loved me. Why they prattled after me in the hallway, Mrs. Susan, Mrs. Susan, guess what? I want to show you something. I wrote five pages! I was a star on those Thursday mornings—the mothers loved me, too; I had saved them from the task and struggle of teaching writing--but it wasn’t really me at all. It was them. The students. It was what they wrote. Their own lives. The accomplishment of working through the awful, getting to the good.

I love teaching writing. I love it. I love it almost as much as I love writing. I love helping my students, young and old, cut through the awful, find the truth of what they’re trying to say. Turn a portion of their lives, their experiences, their passions into a glimmering, wonderful thing on a piece of paper. Recorded, there, in black and white. Tangible.

One boy, a boy named Luke, came to me first as the brother of a star student. His sister wrote fluidly, beautifully, expansively about nature and God and family; Luke, a little guy then, hid under the table. Created mayhem. Talked too loud. Interrupted. His mother shooed him out, but then, a few years later, and there he was, looking uncertain, worried, and maybe just a tiny bit hopeful. There, in my chart-paper and masking-tape classroom. Ready. Luke was not the natural writer his sister was, but he was a natural story-teller. He was ready, readier than he thought he was.

Do you know what I remember best about my students? I remember their hand-writing. The way their words actually looked on the page. Luke wrote a story about spiders, and I can still see that single word—Spiders—on the top of the loose-leaf paper. His mother helped, and it was a good paper. Then, with revision, it was a great paper and Luke, the non-writer, the boy who hid under tables, who created the occasional mayhem, earned the coveted check-plus, the highest grade I ever gave—and gave sparingly. He wrote a thing about his own life, wrote that word Spiders at the top of the page, and came away with something wonderful.

I got to be a part of that. That one moment in that excitable, talkative, passionate, outdoorsy, non-bookish boy’s life.

He died, unexpectedly, last week. Sixteen years old. In the picture in the newspaper, he was a great, big, hulking fellow, a football player. But I remember the ten-year-old. The look of that word—Spider—at the top of his paper and the look on his ten-year-old face. A check-plus. He earned it, dear boy. He had written something wonderful about his own life.

I was no star. They were the stars. I am so grateful I got the chance to work with them, to help them discover the power of writing. Such a gift! The writing, the sharing of it. To see them see the amazing and the funny and the powerful and the poignant and the deeply, deeply true things in their own lives. To help them struggle through, pin it down on paper. I was blessed those Thursday mornings. Blessed beyond measure. Blessed always, remembering.

It's Short Story Month: A Give-Away

2011-05-11T07:11:00.007-04:00

My very first short stories were usually about a woman performing some domestic task and agonizing internally, invisibly. I was in love with Tillie Olsen’s “As I Stand Here Ironing,” and Bret Lott’s Jewel, particularly a scene where the protag is drying a dish and watching her children play through the window.

I wanted to do what they were doing, to sculpt such beautiful, powerful interior monologue that little else was needed.

Ever notice how your writing evolves with your choices in reading? Or vice-versa?

A few years of trying to be Bret Lott, and I found another, drastically different writer to emulate: Aimee Bender. Here, this wild woman of surrealism and the wonderfully bizarre. She did for fire-handed girls and fathers with soccer-ball sized holes in their stomachs what Lott and Olsen did for heavy-hearted mothers: she told their stories. Everywhere, in domestic fiction, deeply committed to reality, or in fantasy and surrealism, deeply committed to exposing a kind of reality beyond this present, seen reality, the aim is always, always, the story. Tell the story. Make it real.

“My lover is experiencing reverse evolution. I tell no one. I don’t know how it happened, only that one day he was my lover and the next he was some kind of ape. It’s been a month and now he’s a sea turtle.” So begins the first story, “The Rememberer” in Bender’s second collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. “Drunken Mimi” begins, “There was an imp that went to high school with stilts on so that no one would know he was an imp. Of course he never wore shorts.” And, the last sentence of the entire collection killed me. (You must read this book!)

Ultimately, I gathered courage from both Lott and Bender. Courage to fully imagine what was before me: the woman at her kitchen sink, the girl setting free her lover, devolved into a salamander.

And now, I’ve discovered another fiction writer whose work both emboldens me and humbles me. It’s the best thing for an aspiring fiction writer: work that challenges, that makes you see again the possibilities—what fiction can do!—and yet also chastises: if you’re going to do this, do it all the way. Fully imagine.

That work is Stacey Levine’s The Girl with the Brown Fur. In this short story collection, humanity is shown at its bleakest, most yearning, its most bizarre. Every character is an outsider; every character’s humanity is shown in its quest for comfort. For companionship. Reassurance.

Again, as with Lott’s pining mother, as with Bender’s mourning lover, the genius is in the rendering of human want. “Milk Boy” begins: “Everyone called him ‘Milk Boy’ because he was just like milk: thin, rushing everywhere, tinged with blue; he poured himself all around because he needed to; he was nervous and jiggled all day just like a happy little clown, as a matter of fact, he was a clown, laughing all his life, compromising himself, jerking upon the office floor.” And sometimes, non-human want: “Imagine being a bean,” Levine’s story, “The Bean” begins: “a pale supplicant, rimy dot, a belly-wrinkled pip, lying enervated on the kitchen chair, trying too hard all the time.”

Levine’s book is a must-read for writers. It is precise and bizarre in the most beautiful, frightening ways. It edifies the writerly soul.

So, I’m giving one away. It’s short story month and it’s spring: let’s just go crazy. I’ll give all three books away: Lott’s “How to Get Home,” Bender’s “Girl in the Flammable Skirt,” and Levine’s “The Girl with Brown Fur.”

Thank you, blog readers. Beautiful writers. Thank you for reading and for commenting and for, some of you, the extraordinary and heart-felt emails you send my way. Comment below. Please. Tell me your favorite short story or how you're feeling today or anything else you want to share. I'll put your name in the hat. Me and each of my kids will draw a name. Oh, happy May! Long live short story collections!

The Last Alchemist

2011-05-02T19:23:00.000-04:00

The last alchemist was a poor German man named Hennig Brand. He married a rich woman, used up all her money on his experiments, then married a second rich woman. Carried on with his work.

He was seeking what all the alchemists who had come before him had sought: the philosopher’s stone. A magical substance that would turn a base metal, such as lead, into a precious metal, like gold.

Maybe there was something Freudian about his obsession with urine. Or possibly, despite his fortuitous coupling, he opted for a material that was cheapest and easiest to come by. Perhaps, it was its golden-amber hue that convinced him that by boiling the stuff down to a thick syrup, skimming off the frothy top (think of the stuff you scoop off the top of jam), cutting out the salt layer at the bottom, remixing the top with the middle layer, and voila, the philosopher’s stone.

Except, of course, it wasn’t. What he discovered instead was a substance that glowed on its own. That was highly dangerous; left unattended, it burst into flame. This was, his contemporaries claimed, solidified fire. (When they found out, of course. Brand, like every other alchemist, kept his discovery under wraps at first.)

What it really was was phosphorus. Fertilizer.

Though he didn’t find the philosopher’s stone, he found a substance that glows in the dark, as if from its own life force. And he made it from pee. Not strictly a miracle, I suppose, but still, pretty bloomin’ spectacular, wouldn’t you say?

You, writer, are an alchemist. You mix real science—procedure, observation, and logic—with hope and courage and imagination and the result is a new substance. An impossible discovery. True alchemy.

Or, more practically, it’s an element that’s always been here, on this planet, isolated now, at last, in a beaker over your fire. In your own dark attic. And the glow of your distillation—solidified fire—lights the window, burns the house down, warms your hands, shocks the world.

Go. Write.

Sad but Good

2011-04-25T19:19:00.005-04:00

Some years ago, I journeyed home from a year of teaching abroad via a rather convoluted route. My teaching buddy Lisa and I began with an overnight train from Vologda, Russia—where we’d been living—to St. Petersburg. The next morning, we caught another train to Helsinki, and there, at the airport, Lisa and I parted ways. She flew to NYC and then to Richmond. I, on the other hand, flew from San Francisco to Los Angeles to Cincinnati to Greensboro, NC, where my parents lived.

It had been a wonderful, absurd, terrifying, lonely, and exhausting year. We had been living in a dormitory with swampy bathrooms and a door-less toaster oven and a hotplate for cooking. It was Russia; it had been cold. I spoke embarrassingly little Russian. We ended up, through one adventure, thrown out of Ukraine. We were stranded in Moscow. We had slogged through months of mud. (The muddy months were a thousand times worse than the snowy ones.) We had each survived the year on a single suitcase’s worth of clothing. I had gained, over a year of potatoes and blini and ice cream Snickers bars, twenty pounds. Twenty. Pounds.

Our students had thrown us a big end-of-the-year party, complete with dancing, Irish poetry, gifts for us, and awards for our students. A few months earlier, we had spent the night at a student’s dacha where we buried something to cook it—I think it was a chicken--drank too much bad beer, told jokes around the fire, used an outhouse, and crossed a broken rope bridge.

Before that, there had been a spectacle of winter sports that I really, really, really sucked at: ice-skating, cross-country skiing. Walking on icy sidewalks. (I fell. More than once.)

We had marathon tea parties with our friend Olya. A parody of the Dating Game in our American Cultures class. A fifty-something businessman in our adult class who, struggling with American idioms, announced, I feel myself very horny. (The sentence is modeled after how emphasis is done in the Russian language; the horny was a slip. He meant to say corny.)

Months earlier, when we first arrived, we gobbled Pepto Bismol tablets constantly. I went into a store on one of my very first solo shopping missions to purchase a can of tomatoes and came away instead with Italian canned bovine. A little girl stole food from our makeshift kitchen. Lisa and I cut each other’s hair. We—two non-singers with bad colds—sang “Country Road” to a packed auditorium.

The night we left, fifty-some students gathered at the train station to bid us good-bye. That was almost all of them. Lisa and I cried together in our little sleeper-room, the train pulling out. We waved good-bye.

There, on the platform, our beautiful Olya stood holding a scrap of paper on which she'd written: “SAD BUT GOOD.”

Olya, one of our least proficient English-speakers. She understood us perfectly.

Before we left, Lisa had told me I should call the airlines, get a more direct route. It was crazy, what I was doing, zigzagging across the country like that, spending the night in a Los Angeles hotel. I had the same suitcase I'd come with but its contents were completely changed; I’d thrown away almost everything I brought--most of my clothes had disintegrated--and kept the birchwood trinket boxes, the silver ring my students had given me, and a year’s worth of photographs. I flew home wearing a gift from Lisa, a t-shirt with scraps of fabric sewn to it. The scraps were Cyrillic letters that read, Co-ed Naked Banya Team.

I could have called the airlines, but I didn’t. I’m glad I didn’t. I realize now what I dimly recognized then: I needed the journey home to be long. I needed to spend hours in airplanes. In airports. Places that didn’t feel like places at all. I needed the first people I heard speaking English in public-—too loud!!—-to be strangers. I needed to sit in a plastic chair at an airport in Cincinnati, before the last flight into NC, and just watch people walk by.

I was going home to start my life. I’d already applied for teaching positions, already had some ideas about where I wanted to live. On my own for the first time. Already had plans to re-connect with friends, to spend time with family, to drop twenty pounds.

Before, I had thought my year teaching abroad would be a throw-away year. A year between college and my real life, a year when I wouldn’t really accomplish much. Just a year to live elsewhere, to see some things, do a little traveling.

SAD BUT GOOD, Olya had written on that scrap of paper. SAD BUT GOOD. Sitting in that airport, waiting to board, I began to put it together. SAD BUT GOOD, yes; but also, it was SAD because it was GOOD.

I rarely get a chance to fly anywhere, but when I do, I still like layovers. I arrange them. I like time off the road on trips across the state to the beach. A half-hour in the McDonalds in the middle of a town I’ll never be in again. I’m there in the restaurant, but I’m not really there, in a town whose name I likely don’t even know. Pausing between where I've been and where I’m going. Drinking a diet coke. Thinking. And sometimes, yet, I wonder: is it really possible to waste time? My throw-away year wasn't throw-away at all. And neither is the time in between.

Desire and Humility: A Glimpse in the Mirror

2011-04-18T18:37:00.018-04:00

Two books you have to read: How Fiction Works by James Wood, because it does exactly that, and From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler because I have never, ever, ever seen anyone explain the intuitive level of fiction-writing the way Butler does in this book.

If Wood is mostly--and exactingly, almost painfully, absorbingly--concerned with the mechanics of fiction, Butler is concerned with its alchemy: "Please get out of the habit of saying that you've got an idea for a short story," Butler says in the first chapter, "Art does not come from idea. Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white-hot center of you."

Fiction is a most magical, true artform. It has to come from a magical, true place.

And yet, there's trouble here: if fiction comes from dreams, its origins are as mysterious as dreams' origins are. Which are as mysterious and unexplainable as the human psyche itself.

Butler says we must write from where we dream, but where is that? It reminds me of birthing class. The instructor tells expectant mothers on how to push the baby out: "Push from the same place you use to blow up a balloon." Excellent advice. But, then, how do we isolate that muscle and call on it specifically when there is no balloon to blow up? It's different from ordinary breathing, even ordinary blowing--it's more focused--but it's very difficult to pinpoint exactly how it's different. Or where, precisely, that muscle is.

In the same way, how do you locate--and write from--"the place where you dream" in waking life?

Butler discusses at length what "the zone" is--this white-hot center of the writer--and how to get there, and he outlines a very doable approach. How to literally take notes from the musings and impulses of your intuition. He also explains, in chapter three, titled "Yearning," what we're, in our first drafts, looking for: "Once you have that link to your character's yearning, only then does the real work of literary fiction begin."

Desire. In both real-life and fiction, our most basic, most gutteral desires are the truest expressions of our deepest selves.

And this is where we need to pause and realize just what an act of humility fiction-writing is, or what it should be. I believe that in order to identify and really grasp that yearning in our character, we have to humble ourselves, own up to our humanity.

We go about our lives with a trained aversion to looking down, into our murky, odd-smelling desires. We don't want to glimpse the things that are way down deep there, our most embarrassing selves. This aversion to looking--the keeping of our gaze at a comfortable level--protects us. It keeps us from going crazy. To carry out the tasks of our day-to-day lives, we need to avoid looking down. And yet, as fiction-writers, we also have to go there. We have to look. I believe this is one facet to Doctorow's assertion that writers are "not just people who sit down and write." Instead, he says, "Writers hazard themselves."

I'll give you an example I've used in this blog before. Frank Wheeler, in the opening chapters of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road goes in to comfort his wife, who has just bombed on the stage of community theater, and he casually, unconsciously, resorts to pampering his own ego. He is standing behind his wife April who is seated at her mirror, removing her makeup: "He looked at himself in the mirror, tightening his jaw and turning his head a little to one side to give it a leaner, more commanding look, the face he had given himself in mirrors since boyhood and which no photograph had ever quite achieved, until with a start he found that she was watching him. Her own eyes were there in the mirror, trained on his for an uncomfortable moment before she lowered them to stare at the middle button of his coat."

Here is desire in a character that only a writer who has allowed his own eyes to slip down--to see himself--can portray. This is bald, embarrassing humanity.

Because we've all done it, haven't we? Made faces in the mirror? Looked for just the right angle, the exact right tilt of the head, the wrinkle in the forehead, the precise somberness that renders us beautiful?

I haven't got it entirely figured out. How the dream-self ties into desire in the character which in turn ties into desire in the writer which is only accessible to the writer through the writer's humanity which is in turn accessed largely through the writer's humility.

I know that humility is a tricky blessing. Hard to want, good to possess.

And, what do you think? Does this morning's rambling make any sense??

The Waiting Place

2011-04-12T04:40:00.008-04:00

For my hair to grow. For the coffee to perk. For two pink lines to show up in the little window. Christmas. Sunshine. Vacation. Weight to drop. Husband to come home. Quitting time. Nap time. Dinner time. The snow to melt, the roads to clear, the cookies to cool. The glue to set, the paint to dry. The checker to check, the waiter to wait, the reader to read. The words to come. Nighttime. Daytime. The mail to come. Good news. Bad news. Any news.

We are writers; we spend much of our lives in the Waiting Place. (Thank you, Dr. Seuss.)

I was nine years old when I sent off my first story. It was about a pair of orphans, a brother and a sister, who lived in a tree. My mother read it when I wasn't looking and lamented: how could I write such a sad story? They had hammocks in the tree, I pointed out. And each other. I can't remember how the story ended, but I'm pretty sure I left them in that tree. Yes, sad, but at the time, I thought: brilliant.

I sent it off to Highlights on the sly--I didn't want my mother or anyone else to know I was trying to become a published writer, in case I failed--and haunted the mailbox for weeks. I told my mother I was waiting for a reply to a letter I'd sent to John Schneider, which was true, though I don't know why I thought fan mail to Bo Duke would be any less embarrassing than trying to be a short story-writer for Highlights.

The wait was short in ordinary human time--just a few weeks--but those few weeks dragged on for what felt like years. Not surprisingly, Highlights passed. My first rejection.

Is it the worst part? The waiting?

The hardest time I ever had with this was when the man who would become my agent was reading my novel. He sent me an email about a week after I sent him the ms and said he was "really enjoying it so far" and would be in touch "in a few days," when he finished the book.

Do you know what I did? I actually googled "few" to see what other people thought "few" meant. An unbearable weekend came and passed. I tortured myself by googling the agent and everyone on his client list. It was around Thanksgiving; my kids' activities were suspended, there were family gatherings, Black Friday to celebrate--my mother and I may not agree so much on what constitutes great literature, but we are a formidable shopping team--and every night, there was laundry to fold. This was my allotted worry time. I buried my face in warm towels straight from the dryer. I closed my eyes. I prayed-hoped-worried-waited.

There was a happy ending to this particular waiting season, but it doesn't always work this way, and regardless, the waiting is hell. It turns out that in this arena of the writing life, an obsessive nature--incredibly valuable when you're trying to get a scene right or when you're working on draft number 48 of your novel--is a major handicap.

So, how to get through? I fold laundry. I drink cheap jug wine and watch last season's 30 Rock on Netflix. I call emergency meetings at Panera Bread with my best writing pals. I get up early and run the loop around my house until I'm too weak to worry. I bake. And sometimes, I just give into it: I simply sit at my laptop and hit the refresh tab on my inbox page again and again, hoping, hoping, hoping something will come through. Right now.

The best advice is to get back to work. Plug right back into it, get on with your life, already.

I agree with that. But, I also say this: let yourself hope a little. Whatever it is you're waiting for--and, you're a writer, so I know you're waiting on something--remember, it really could happen today. Celebrate that. Living the writerly life--one where you're actively or at least infrequently submitting--means good news really could happen any second. Somewhere out there, an editor could be reading and loving your story. It could be happening now, as you read these words.

Also, remember that you are a writer but that's not everything. I love writing--I would count it one of the most important things in the world to me--but it's not everything. I was put on this planet to build relationships and to ponder really exciting things, big and small, and writing is a celebration of this--it's a celebration of everything, I think--but it's not everything.

I'm thinking of you today. Whoever you are. I'm thinking of you, there alone in your waiting place--I'm thinking of all the wait-ers--and I'm rooting for you. I'm hoping today is your day.

A Planet Named Tom

2011-04-04T19:12:00.004-04:00

So, the other day, I’m in the supermarket with my four-year-old, and as we’re turning to corner into the cereal aisle, he remarks, “Hey mom, guess what? There’s a planet that rhymes with mom. You’ll see it on your way to heaven. It’s a surprise.”

People wonder how I can stay home with my kids, homeschool my daughter, and write. And, it’s true, it’s a very full life—often, overwhelming. But, then, there are little gems like this, my little boy making up a planet at Ingles, him riding the back of the cart which I hate for him to do because I’m scared to death he’ll fall. I let him do it anyway since my thoughts at the supermarket go: okay, lettuce, where’s Aiden, turkey breast, where’s Aiden, peanut butter, spaghettios, hurry, almost time to pick Abby up from choir, coffee, eggs, milk, what time is it, green beans, tomato sauce… And, there, in the middle of all that, a planet named Tom.

In his book From Where You Dream, Robert Olen Butler says something I really love about art and the intuitive process: “Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white-hot center of you.”

So, the planet-thing was nothing grand, really. Just a flight of fancy. A blip among a zillion thoughts, impressions, and fantasies that stream through my funny little boy’s mind constantly. And yet, to Aiden, to children, it’s the instinct that’s right. The imagining. That stretch.

We grown-ups, I think—we serious writers, ahem—are too often timid or inhibited or literal-minded to take that imaginative stretch. We dismiss the looming planet gathering at the hazy perimeter at our imaginations before it even fully materializes. I think we would do well to let such oddities, such embarrassing ruminations, capture our focus—even our adoration, our passion, our obsession—from time to time.

So, try this: dream fully, deeply, wildly. Build your imagination as you would a muscle. Work it, stretch it, see just how limber you can get.

Aiden’s planet-fancy, however, isn’t the white-hot center of him: he’s four—I’m not sure he possesses such a thing. He’s all impressions and fantasy and very little experience. He doesn’t possess the intuition one finds with experience, and he doesn’t know how to keep his gaze steady on an imagined thing or a musing or a possibility or a leap of his subconscious long enough to coax it into being. Into something more than a thing to say to one’s harried mother in a supermarket. Likely a ploy to distract her while he loads the cart up with Pop Tarts.

So, then, we have to be both young and old. Given to fantasy and rumination. To wild, ever-impossible imaginings as well to patience and wisdom. Young-hearted faith and old-souled discernment. It takes everything, doesn't it? This writing thing? It takes everything we used to be, every place, every season we can imagine, dream or dread encountering. Young, old. Naivete and experience. Every. Thing.

The Man Who Missed His Iceberg

2011-03-25T04:35:00.005-04:00

In the latest issue of Science News, I read of a glaciologist who spent a summer waiting for Greenland’s Petermann Glacier to calf an iceberg: “Everything signaled the glacier was ready to go. Melt ponds were pooling on its surface, and massive cracks were opening on the icy tongue that stretched offshore…”

A year later, on August 4, 2010, a piece of ice four times the size of Manhattan broke off that same Greenland glacier. Here’s the thing: Jason Box, our determined glaciologist, wasn’t looking.

When I read that part, I thought, Of course.

To the fiction writer, there’s no other way it could have gone. He had to miss it, the same way Gatsby had to fall in love with a girl who could never love him back. The way Captain Ahab had to be injured—but not killed, at least not in their initial encounter—by Moby Dick. And, Holden Caulfield’s brother had to die. He had to. (Each of these events, btw, happens before the story begins—a lesson in itself.)

We are fiction-writers. Our job is to save our characters. To swoop in and rescue them from the sort of big and small dangers we can all identify with. The very same things—lost love, missed opportunity, fractured families—we all fear.

In this way, we work like super-heroes.

Or--better--we give them a chance to save themselves. A means to right their own lives, to make their own peace with their pasts, to write their own endings. An opportunity to find, or to shun, redemption.

In this way, we work like God.

When novelist John Irving was a boy, he recovered the charred remnants of a poor, mentally retarded pig farmer from the deceased’s burned down barn. In the wake of the tragedy, Irving started spinning stories to his friends. The body, burned beyond recognition, wasn’t Piggy Sneed's body at all, he said. Piggy Sneed had escaped. He’d retired in sunny Florida. He burned the barn down for the insurance money. Yes, Piggy Sneed, whom everyone had looked down on, was the cleverest of us all. He’d had it planned all along.

He tells the story in his essay, “Trying to Save Piggy Sneed,” found in the same-titled book, and likens the event to his work as a novelist: “…I realize that a writer’s work is setting fire to Piggy Sneed—and trying to save him—again and again; forever.”

Okay, now, it's your turn. Set the fire, send the iceberg into the sea, kill the big brother. Go, do it. Create the catastrophe—and every catastrophe, I could argue, is ultimately the reckoning of loneliness. It could be that the only thing we really fear is being alone.

Create the doom, then, light the path. Make a way—any way—and give your character a chance to take the path. This is the dignity in fiction, that we treat characters humanely, decently: we let them choose.

A Little Something for My Goddess File

2011-03-19T03:00:00.005-04:00

I once heard of a writer who kept something called a goddess file. Anytime she had a darling to kill--a gorgeous, gorgeous sentence or phrase or paragraph or scene that had to be cut for the good of the story--she clipped it and put it in her goddess file. On her darkest days, she looked through for proof of her writing genius.

I'm working on my Kmart story. I wrote a bit about Michael Jackson, decided it was too intrusive, and cut it. Sigh.

Do you remember Hemingway's Iceberg Theory? He said, "If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing."

So, the Michael Jackson part, which I'm pasting below, will have to stay under the surface.

Probably the older sister of the Lost Little Girl Family was asking her mama to buy her one of the Thriller t-shirts. Michael Jackson, dead almost two months now from do-it-yourself anesthesia.The girl was probably holding up a t-shirt commemorating an album released years and years before she was even born. And then, there’s the rest of us, the ones who saw him dancing with the zombies, the ones who saw the first moon-walk, who remember the Pepsi commercial, the chimpanzee. The ones who clucked our tongues and shuddered, both amused and horrified, this pale, skinny man in silk pajamas coming to court to answer the charges. Pedophile.

But damn, I told Thalia when the news reports first came in, when they were hunting down his Beverly Hills doctor, damn, I told her, could he dance. The creepy little high-pitched woman-man with his weird marriages and his white fetish and his Never-Land giraffes, he could dance. Like nobody else in this world, that man.

How does a writer know what to cut? Instinct, I say. Plus, a sort of pitiless honesty. It's a decent piece of writing, but it simply does not work for the story.

Okay, now. Back to it.

Story in Progress

2011-03-15T05:06:00.003-04:00

I'm working through another draft of my Kmart story, and I'll post it and a few notes on my process in a few days.

In the meantime, I came across this great blog on the story-writing process and wanted to share.

The Story Machine Part V: Bring the World In

2011-03-14T04:48:00.008-04:00

Okay, finally, finally, I'm pulling my Kmart story up and play around with it a bit, narrowing the conflict where I can, cleaning it up a little, and adding an outside conflict. I've decided this summer, the summer of my story's setting, will be the summer Michael Jackson died.

I have my reasons. I think my story is about the glory and the riches of motherhood, and also, the large and small humiliations of it. As mothers, we are at once moon-walkers, unbelievably agile dancers, and haters of our own faces. We are crotch-grabbers one minute, sweetly soulful--the woman in the mirror--the next. We are all suspected criminals.

Also, readers of this blog will remember that I once proclaimed I should have married Michael Jackson. My own personal response to his death surprised me and there were certain aspects of it that were emblamatic of my own hardships that summer. I was going through an I'm-a-miserable- mother-and-human-being meltdown that July, the perfect set-up for feeling a bizarre sort of guilt over Michael Jackson's death. I felt guilty about how I'd once loved Michael Jackson--my first celebrity love in the fourth grade--and how, when I was in college, watching the TV shots of his arriving for his child molestation courtdate emaciated, in pajamas, too frail to even hold his own umbrella over his head. I'd outgrown him, and worse: I'd turned against him. I used to love him, and now, a snotty college kid, I couldn't believe my own past affections.

Of course, MJ gave his fans plenty of reasons to turn against him, and I'm completely disgusted by the allegations against him, but what I'm trying to say here is that my response to Michael Jackon's death had nothing to do with Michael Jackson. It was me, a person, a mother, a daughter, facing her own season of grief and regret. I looked at this man, so ridiculed and so loved, and I thought: if his memory could be redeemed, then surely I, the mother who couldn't mother very well anymore, had a chance at redemption.

This might be the first blog post ever that I'm hoping nobody actually reads. This is the part of the story--the story of the story--that writers rarely feel a need to expose. And sometimes, I think we writers don't even know this part of the story, or address it head on in our own private minds. It's a little terrifying and wonderful, too: the beauty of the subconscious, that we know Michael Jackson's death somehow fits into a story about a regretful cashier in a Kmart.

So, back to your story. This is one of the steps in Antonya Nelson's ten-step process: bring in an event from the outside world. This could be anything happening anywhere in the world at the time of your story, real or made-up. A hurricane, a war, a UFO sighting, an election, a celebrity death, any news item. Anything. Antonya mentioned 9/11, then said, if that feels too intrusive, make it the anniversary of 9/11. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. A made-up criminal escaped from jail.

What this does is bring another dimension to your story in terms of setting, conflict, and character. Once you bring something like this in, however glancingly, it brings with it the reader's connotations and, possibly, the reader's own personal memory or feelings about the event. Stored images. Regrets and sadnesses and maybe some bittersweet combination of digust, hope, admiration, and guilt.

Okay, tomorrow, I'll dive back into drafting, keeping in mind all that we've been talking about in terms of conflict, interpersonal and intrapersonal, good and bad epiphanies, and my outside force. My Michael Jackson. Stay tuned.

Good Epiphany, Bad Epiphany

2011-03-10T18:29:00.004-05:00

Ephiphany: Literally a manifestation or showing-forth, usually of some divine being...It is...an intuitive grasp of reality achieved in a quick flash of recognition in which something, usually simple and commplace, is seen in a new light, and, as Joyce says, "its soul, its whatness leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance."
(From Holman and Harmon's A Handbook to Literature, 6th edition.)

It seems important in our discussion of conflict and plot and the shape of a story: epiphany. I attended a panel debating the relevance of this particular device last month at AWP and found Josh Allen's take on the subject incredibly helpful. The other participants largely spoke against epiphany--too contrived, outmoded--but Allen argued there are two different kinds of epiphanies: good ones and bad ones.

Allen used the classic movie, The Wizard of Oz, to illustrate.

The Bad Epiphany

Surely you remember the moment? Near the end of Dorothy's tale, when the wizard's hot air balloon has taken off without her, and she's sobbing, oh no, she'll never see Auntie Em again. What should float down from the sky but a bubble containing a good witch who reveals the magic secret: It's been with Dorothy all along. And, the leading question: Dorothy, what have you learned? Why--big epiphany--there's no place like home. There's no place like home. There's no place like home.

And, just like that, all her problems are solved! She's home! Never to wander again, so profound has been her enlightenment on the wonderfulness of home, however simple, however un-rainbowish.

What makes this a bad epiphany is that, first, it is handed to Dorothy. She doesn't have to seek understanding, it simply comes drifting down to her. Also, it solves all her problems. Real-life truth--obtained in a instant or not--does not solve all your problems. Which leads us to...

The Good Epiphany

Another classic moment: the man behind the curtain is revealed. Dorothy has come to what she believed was the end of her journey, the Wizard of Oz. She is terrified of him but seeks him nonetheless, dares to step forward, kill the wicked witch, bring the broom, and then, when Toto goes nudging at the curtain, she takes action. There's no bubble descending, just a scared little girl in a moment of courage approaching the man behind the curtain, pursuing the truth.

There's the first thing: she comes to the epiphany by her own hand.

Also, the truth, when she encounters it, does not make all her problems go away. In fact, the revelation that the wizard is no wizard at all complicates her situation remarkably. There is no easy way back to Kansas: What will she do now?

I think about Richard Bausch's wonderful story, "Aren't You Happy for Me?" The more that is revealed, the more complicated the father's situation becomes. Ultimately, what he sees is how distant his wife is, and what a difficult road his daughter has chosen.

Revelation, in some form, is vital to any story, but like so many other aspects of fiction we're discussing here, it should be about deepening the story and its characters. By showing how a revelation really impacts the characters, we're portraying their exquisite humanness. It's this quality, our characters' depth, that make them both heroic and flawed. They are curtain-puller-backers, they are in seriously trying situations, and we, the readers, identify. It resonates with us because it's real, because we're just as bummed (and intrigued) to see that Dorothy's journey isn't over yet...

Binary Forces

2011-03-10T06:08:00.006-05:00

They're easier to see in movies and fairy tales. Snow White versus her evil stepmother. Farmer versus town who thinks he's crazy to build a baseball diamond in the middle of his cornfield. Dorothy versus the Wicked Witch of the West. Wrongly accused man versus the crooked warden.

But even in the movies, you can boil them down to conflict types. Good versus evil, of course, a classic. Along the same vein: light versus darkness. Justice versus injustice. Man (or woman) versus the natural world. True love versus obligation or tradition. Faith versus disbelief.

Look at the story you've been working on. What are the binary forces at work here? In one of my favorite stories, Lorrie Moore's "Which is More Than I Can Say about Most People," there is mother versus daughter tension, which is a symptom of the larger conflict in the story: fear of speaking versus being compelled to speak. Which you can boil down to the most basic conflict in any story: self versus self.

In just about any story, I think, the conflict is two-fold: interpersonal--person versus person--which almost always echoes the story's most graceful, most intriguing, most heartbreaking, and often, the most convincing thing about the whole story: the intra-personal conflict.

How is your character at odds with himself?

Birthday Brownies

2011-03-09T06:03:00.004-05:00

Today is my birthday. So, instead of my usual fiction-writing ramblings, you're getting brownies.

Caramel Brownies

German chocolate cake mix

2/3 c. evaporated milk

1 (14 oz.) pkg. caramels

1/4 c. melted margarine

1 c. chopped nuts

1 c. chocolate chips

Combine caramels and 1/3 cup milk. Cook on low until melted; set aside. Combine cake mix, melted margarine, 1/3 cup milk, and nuts; stir all together. Press 1/2 of dough into 9x13 inch dish, greased and floured.

Bake at 350 for 6 minutes. Remove and spread caramel mixture over baked layer. Sprinkle chocolate chips over caramel. Crumble rest of cake mixture on top. Bake 15 to 18 minutes at 350. Cut into small bars.

(Thank you, Lee Worden of Community Bible Church in High Point, NC!!)

We're Never Really Fighting About What We're Fighting About

2011-03-08T00:41:00.003-05:00

When I went off to college a million years ago, I wore out an Amy Grant tape on the four-hour drive up the mountain. I had a retreat to attend prior to moving onto campus, and so I went up by myself. The Amy Grant tape was old even then, salvaged from the floor-board chaos of my older sister's Volkswagon Rabbit. Lead me on, lead me on. Four hours in a car by myself, the same songs over and over again. I didn't listen to them so much as pray them. I watched the landscape around me change and I prayed those mid-eighties Amy Grant songs. Age to age, You're still the same, by the power of your name.

I was terrified.

My parents arrived the following Sunday, freshman-move-in day. Rainy, of course. I wanted them to see that I was okay, so I introduced them to some of the girls I'd met at the retreat (Look! I already have friends!) and tried to give them the bum's rush once they'd fed me and hauled all my junk up to my room. I needed them to leave. I was prayed-up and ready. It was now or never. Mom and Dad, thank you very much for raising me and buying me a new plastic broom for my new dorm room. For supplying me with everything I've needed and most of what I've wanted these past eighteen years. Thank you for lunch at Grandma's Pancake Barn. Thank you for putting up with cranky-baby-me, a terrible spitter-upper, four-year-old me, a terrible know-it-all, thirteen-year-old me, terrible all the way around...the only way to get to eighteen-year-old college-me standing before you today. In this cramped, hot dorm room on this muggy gray August afternoon.

But, I need you to leave now. Now.

My mother, however, insisted on making my bed for me before she left.

And, I do mean insisted, despite my begging her to go. I clenched my teeth. She laid out the foam egg-carton cushiony-thingy meant to supplement the standard-issue dorm-room quality mattress. She snapped open the sheets, smoothed them down, tucked everything in, and then left.

Here's what I'm saying: in life and literature, we're hardly ever fighting about what we're fighting about. We're praying our way through Amy Grant songs and making our college daughter's bed once last time. We are always, always negotiating our relationships, always always going through these different rituals, resisting them and welcoming them and moving beyond them, towards new rituals. We never fight, really fight, with another person, an outside force, without confronting some part of ourselves, without coming to terms something we know to be true about the human being we are, or the human being we're becoming.

We are always dealing with the Big Things, but we never call them that. We call them egg-carton cushiony thingees. We call them rainy days, long drives, getting ready for freshman orientation.

The Story Machine Part IV: Conflict

2011-03-07T04:34:00.005-05:00

What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.
André Gide

Love means paying attention.
Steve Almond, during a Tin House lecture on the relationship between the writer and his/her characters.

To me, it makes perfect sense to attend to conflict after so many other matters have been considered: point of view, setting, character, and, in our ongoing discussion here, props.

Conflict follows life. If you have fully dreamed up your characters, they will reveal the story's chief conflicts. Our job as the writer is to pay attention.

Also, I wanted to talk about the story's props before mentioning conflict because I think considering the story's props is a sneaky way of getting at the story's conflict. The tangible pieces of our stories exude the emotional/interpersonal ones. By thinking about cats and pencil cases instead of selfishness and coming-of-age, we are inviting our stories to address not just bald emotion and conflict, but the subtler, ever-slippery range of the unspeakables. This is the magic of fiction-writing: we can portray--with cats and bubble gum (see Nabokov) and pencil cases--unsayable feelings and truths.

And, since we started this story with a true story, there were a number of little tensions and such already in the material before we even began to shape any of it.

So, what we do now is look over what we have, take a long walk or go sit by the window for a spell and simply think about the conflict in your story. Get at it this way: What is my main character really after? And what's the problem? What's getting in the way?

When you return to your story, see if there are places where the conflict can be sharpened. Lean on it a bit. In one story I wrote a few years ago, for example, there's a dinner table scene where a teenaged boy is torturing a middle-aged, delicately arranged woman by haranguing her with grosser-than-gross jokes. I really liked using the jokes as the weapon because it's the perfect weapon for my teenage boy's brand of villainy, and it was exactly the worse thing he could do to this particular woman at this particular moment. I made the jokes as bad as I dared, but, more importantly: I zeroed in on the delivery. Gestures. I also got down to the nitty-gritty of this woman's response, getting as precise as I could in how her hands trembled as she smooth and resmoothed her napkin, how she kept looking at the door, hoping her husband would arrive home.

So, what I'm telling you, is look and see what's already there. Tighten it. Increase the stakes. Focus on the telling details, the tiniest of gestures. Shade the obstacles in, make them a little bigger, a little darker. The best kind of conflict, I think, is not easily defined. You want to think about helping your reader experience it.

Flannery O'Connor's Cat: More on Props

2011-03-03T18:52:00.007-05:00

Sometimes, I have a really hard time getting my story to move.

Ann Hood says the story must "flip." David Payne says if the flag on the mailbox is up at the beginning of the story, it had better be down by the end. Or vice-versa.

Here's a trick I've learned from what has to be the most widely anthologized story ever.

There is one prop in Flannery O' Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find," that I believe is especially apt at facilitating movement in fiction. And, it also works as an example of Charles Baxter's rhyming action.

Pitty Sing makes three appearances in the story:

1. Early in the story, the cat--and the grandmother's doting on her--are useful in fleshing out the grandmother's character. She hides the cat in her basket when the family goes on their trip; this woman is deceptive and a little coniving--also selfish--but, at this point, in a sort of blandish, mild way. The grandmother's hiding her and bringing her along despite her son's wishes also provide the potential for conflict. The reader is thinking: hmm...What about when the cat is discovered?

Here, the cat is funny.

2. Halfway through:The cat's jumping out of the basket causes the crash which causes the Misfit to stumble upon the family. So, using our standard story-writing lingo: the cat provides the story's complication.

Here, the cat is trouble.

3. The end: The cat is the only member of the family who survives. In fact, just after the grandmother is killed, the cat rubs against the legs of the Misfit. Here, now, the only creature the grandmother has shown much of any affection for at all--otherwise, the closest she gets is teasing the children and momentarily playing with the baby--snuggles up to her murderer a half-second after she drops.

Here, the cat is chillingly ironic. This is the story's tragic ending. The cat has flipped--gone from funny to tragic--and so has the story.

Think about the props in the story you're working on. Put that prop on a spiral if you can, so that when the story turns, we encounter that prop again...the same, but different. Same prop, now on a different loop on the spiral. See if it doesn't help move your story along...

A Few Thoughts on Charles Baxter's Rhyming Action

2011-03-03T05:00:00.004-05:00

The biggest events of my life: my wedding day, the births of my children, my first latte, my first publication, and the season seven premiere of Gilmore Girls.

I'm kidding only a little. I mean, I really do love lattes, and I think they've had sizable impact on my life. My first pub credit was tiny, but it helped me feel legit.

And, I'm so completely addicted to GG, I've inflected my obsession on my eight-year-old daughter. I still mourn the loss of the show, years after its demise, and I own all seven seasons on DVD. On Sunday afternoons, me and Abby fix microwave nachos and return to Star's Hollow. Oy with the poodles already, I tell her whenever the situation arises. Which is surprisingly often. It's a great phrase. I hear they're even putting it on t-shirts.

This past Sunday, though, my GG fix led to a contemplation of something very literary, and so I feel my devotion to the show is completed warranted. It seems to fit in with our discussion of props in fiction.

Here's what happened: Sookie is getting married. At the beginning of the episode (season 2 finale), the main characters Lorolei and teenaged daughter Rori are helping Sookie pick the music for her wedding. She's stuck on Ella Fitgerald's "I Can't Get Started," insisting it's not too depressing, even though Lorolei points out: It's about a heartbroken woman: I've flown around the world in a plane; I've settled revolutions in Spain;The North Pole I have charted, but I can't get started with you

Fast forward to the end of the show: Lorolei has attempted and failed to connect with the man she's long loved, and the song plays again, Lorolei as maid of honor, completely torn apart.

This is rhyming action: "All ballads love repetitive actions, or cycles of double-events...Prophecy run backward, into rhyming action or deja vu, gives the participant a power of understanding...A reverse prophecy, a sense of rhymed events, is unworldly and has something to do with insight. It moves us back into ourselves." From Charles Baxter's essay, "Rhyming Action" found in his wonderful book, Burning Down the House.

Okay, the GG example is a bit overdone, but I really like what it does. The wonderful thing about it is that its two occurrences play perfectly against each other. In the first, it's ridiculous, funny, that anyone would pick such a song, almost suicidally sad, for her wedding. In the end, the irony is bitter and perfect. It shows so much about the relationship and what Lorolei is coming to understand, and it's just deeply satisfying to the viewer, to have the story bookended in this way.

I love how it spirals: at the end, we're exactly where we started, and yet also, at a different place altogether.

More on this tomorrow. And next week. Props and rhyming action. Oh, the possibilities!!

The Story Machine: Part III

2011-03-02T04:30:00.006-05:00

a single green light, minute and faraway, that might have been the end of a dock

from The Great Gatsy by F. Scott Fitzgerland

It's the feather drifting about in Forrest Gump. The cat in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." The curtains-turned-into-a-dress in Gone with the Wind. Dorothy's red ruby slippers, Alfred J. Prufrock's peach. The cathedral, the disappearing rabbit. The fiddle, the walking stick, the streetcar named Desire.

In the theater, the difference between a decoration and a prop is use: a character lays his or her hands on a prop.

For our purposes, in fiction, a prop--a concept I'm borrowing from the Antonya Nelson talk I've been drawing from--is a thing used in the story.

Look back through the story you've been drafting. What are its props? What are the things used in the story? How do your characters use these things? How are these things depicted? What are their origins? Does the thing float into your character's life? Is it a relic from the character's past? Is it a far-off thing your character gazes at across a body of water?

The trick to making full use of props in fiction is to let them reverberate, allow there to be some meaning or layers of usefulness. Let them appear in the story more than once. Allow them to be utterly concrete: make them as physical and real as possible.

It's a good idea to search your story for props after you've been working on it for a while. The props should arise naturally, not be imposed on the characters or the landscape. First, simply look. What's there?

In the story I've been drafting, my props include: Kmart, a pencil case, a bralette, malox, and the Berlin Wall.

I'm wondering if I can't do a bit more with the pencil case. It's my protag's initial means of connection with the little girl. It's also one of those odd little wonderful things, in my view, of childhood, how important a thing like a pencil case can be, useful and also, kind of a prop within a prop: children use such things to signal how they see themselves, or how they want to see themselves. A shiny vinyl pencil case with a good, non-sagging zipper equates good student. Some level of responsibility. Age. It's also a container, a means to gather other things, carry them along.

I don't want to touch too heavily on the bralette, the malox, or the Berlin Wall, but maybe there's a bit more I could be doing with Kmart. Not essentially a prop, I suppose, but rather a degree of setting I'm not sure I'm making full use of. I'll keep Kmart, though. I like that Kmarts are sort of relics from our pasts. They used to be so ubiquitous, in our pre-Walmart days, and aren't so easy to find these days. It is at once rare and lack-luster. I like that using Kmart means I can naturally evoke Martha Stewart and Jaclyn Smith--all of these, I believe, if used sparingly, carefully, are shortcuts. I can evoke "it's a good thing" and "Charlies Angels" and everything such institutions connote easily and subtly.

Also, among the discount chains--Walmart, Target, the like--I think Kmart is seen as the lowliest. Walmart is a giant, Target is fashionable, but Kmart, to my mind, has the kind of sparse, almost desperate feel I like for this story.

I want to make more of it.

I might have to do a bit of pruning if I find there are too many props in my story. I need to think hard about how my protag sees the props and also what her counterpart--the lost girl's mother--sees in the props. Of course, it's not necessary to state any of this explicitly in my story, just points to ponder before I move on to the next draft. Considerations, questions, and better: possibilities.

The Story Machine: Part II Cont'd

2011-02-28T06:09:00.004-05:00

Here's the draft.

I drafted it in one sitting, this morning, working for maybe an hour-and-a-half or so. Mostly, I wanted to work all the way through to the end, to get a working draft, and to really try out my character's voice. I decided to go 1st person simply because the story was leaning that way, or the voice of it was.

Before I began writing, I heard the first line in my head, and followed it. I haven't yet edited a word.

No title yet:

I seen them come into the store. The mother, all buttoned-up beige and mauve lipstick, stick-straight hair, a woman wanting to look like she’s not a woman, like she’s trying to erase any distinguishing features, any clue. The older girl, dark-haired and fussy. Braces. Squeaky-voiced. And then, the little girl, her looking lost already, tagging along behind the other two. Clear from the start she wasn’t the reason for this shopping trip. The older one likely needed supplies for a school project. Or the mother needed malox or something. Pantyhose. I seen the three of them, and I thought: that girl’s in la-la land.

She looked like the kind of girl like my girl was, growing up. Saw a zippy pencil case on one of the front display tables, Back to School, all the signs proclaim, like pepsi and Jaclyn Smith brand curtains are back to school essentials, but this girl, seeing the pencil case, picking it up, and she’s not in this Morganton Kmart on this crummy muggy August afternoon in the year of our Lord 2009. No, she’s gone, she’s gone to no place, that’s where. Place doesn’t exist for her, not as we know it. Beyond the pencil case, there’s nothing. I could see it, looking at her. My daughter, my Talia, named for the newscaster who brought me reports of the Berlin wall coming down, was always like that, always dropping off into white space. Completely absorbed in a pencil case. Now, she’s twenty years old and she and her little girl live me with and Talia works at a daycare where they let her bring her little girl, my Brody Ann—that’s what she named her—for free. When I bring home a brochure for the local community college’s phlebotomy program or I write down the 800 numbers to the online schools for medical transcription, she says, Yeah, yeah, yeah, mama. She don’t see how good it is, she has me. She has me to help out with Brody Ann, me to tuck everyone in at night. Me to keep the grizzly bear away, I say, and she laughs. It’s our neighbor, a fat man, covered in hair, who walks with his head down, as if he don’t want to be seen, from his car to his door every evening when he comes home from work. He works for a plumber, which surprises me. That massive, dark-haired man, what kind of bathroom sink is he going to wiggle under? People come to their jobs for reasons that are foreign to me.

I make the joke about the big grizzly bear to break the tension, and then, the matter is forgotten. So it goes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, mama, she says about everything. I don’t like the name Brody Ann, and I told her so, back when she was pregnant. She instructs Brody Ann to call me Granny Lee-Lee because my name is LeeAnn, and I hate it. When I tell her this, she says, damn, mama. Who cares? I say, I want to be plain old Grandma.

But, anyway, back to The Family of the Lost Little Girl. I seen them come in. Seen the little girl stop, distracted, at the pencil cases, the pencils with oversized, sparkly erasers, seen the other one trudge along, behind her mother who is pushing the cart and steering hard left in front of the cosmetics: she’s a pro at this, the shopping game. She knows her aisles. Pauses a moment. Come on, she says. She says the little girl’s name, calls to her, but I don’t catch it. Already, my check-out’s full again. That’s the way it works most days, you have a minute or two to look around, to notice that your feet hurt or that the backs of your knees ache and that there’s an a rectangle of light far above, up there in the ceiling, going dim, blinking a little like they do when they’re almost out, and I’m pretty sure it will cause me a headache, and then you notice a few of the customers coming, just watch them, or the customers checking out at the other checkout—even on our busiest days, my manager only opens two check-outs, to keep from having to schedule too many checkers—and you think about what’s waiting for you at home, whether you have the makings for a western omelet in your refrigerator or not, if you should stop at the store, and then you think, maybe I should pick up a diet coke? And suddenly, just like that, there’s an old lady moving like one of those gargantuan dinosaurs who used to take a half-a-billion years to lift its reptile-head to the leaves at the top of the tree. She’s putting her items on the mini-conveyor belt, spearmint gum and Martha Stewart bath towels in peridot green, Special K breakfast bars. I can’t turn on the conveyor yet—she hasn’t reached the end—and there are three customers behind her, shifting their wait from foot to foot and going into that blank-waiting space, their faces gone distant, and they are impatient too, huffy, as if this act, this pronounced exhaling and eye-rolling, will encourage the old lady to move faster or as if, with that hint of displeasure, my manager will fly in, order up another check-out line.

I checked for a while, moved past the old lady, whom I noticed, when she was leaving, was wearing bedroom slippers, and then rang up four twelve-packs of Sundrop, on special. I got real busy and forgot about the little girl until something brushed up behind me, something come into the space behind the counter where the customers aren’t supposed to be. Something that didn’t smell like or have the twitchy-thin feel of my manager sneaking in behind me, checking something on my register, looking for the coupons we handed out to those who made a one-dollar contribution to the March of Dimes when they checked out. This was a small person, a flutter. I turned around, and there she was.

What's the matter, honey? I asked, kneeling down to her. She was crying, jagging on her breath the way little kids do, her hair stringier and blonder than I’d noticed before, her face crumpled up and wet from her tears, flushed pink. It took me a minute to connect her to the girl I’d seen come in earlier, and when I did, I said, Where’s your mom, honey? Where’s your sister?

She didn’t know, she was lost. She couldn’t say any of this, but only cried and nodded when I guessed the right thing, and my customers were piled up, but I just kept whispering to the little girl that it was going to be all right, and she was such a cute little girl, such pretty shoes! I’ve wondered since then, why I chose to remark on the little girl’s shoes to comfort her, but it’s something I know about little girls: they want us grown-ups to notice things like their shoes. The customers in line were losing their sympathy quickly—no one would say it, but they were wishing, I could tell, that I would hand the little girl over to someone else, some lost-child-authority they imagined we kept stored away somewhere, and there was a protocol for me to follow—I should get my manager—but in that second, I couldn’t tear myself away from that little girl. I thought, suddenly: I should quit my job.

In that moment, that little girl sobbing before me, keeping herself wrapped up, half-afraid of letting a stranger touch her, half wanting me too, I could tell, half wanting me to swoop her up and give her a minute to catch her breath, leaning her little head on my shoulder, but really, she was too old for that, and besides, she was mostly scared. I knew her mother was somewhere close by, scared half out of her mind, because it happens to every one of us, every mother knows how it feels to turn and find an empty spot in the supermarket where your own child was standing not a minute before, even later, when I found out the mother had actually left the building, was in the parking lot before either she or her older daughter realized they were missing the girl, even then I thought: look what she’s done to her mother. Look what she’s done to her. I felt that way, sorry for her, and irritated, too, what had she done, wandering off like that? And then, I thought: I will quit this job and take my own self to cooking school or else go in for a substitute-teacher’s job or a job as a receptionist at a dentist’s office and I would let the big grizzly bear get my baby. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Talia says. Yeah.

I was still trying to coax the little girl’s name out of her when the mother came. I had a thought I would announce it myself over the PA—fuck the manager—but here come the mama with the older girl looking properly shocked, her knowing better than the little, lost one what her mother had done, had left her little girl in the Kmart.

I tried to catch her mama’s eye when she come. After she’d stumbled forward in all that good, department-store beige, and swept up her little girl, who wasn’t really little at all, that I saw. I saw that the girl, maybe eight or nine years old, was too big to get lost, to wander away. That she was too big for her mama to do the next thing she done, which was to carry her out to the car, the other one walking, head down, beside her, quieted now. Shamed, a little. But, I was trying to catch this mama’s eye to pass on something of a comfort, a solace. I wanted her to know a thing she already knew: this mothering this is no picnic. She who had no thought, I guessed, about how things might be when the oldest turned twenty. If she’d be any less likely to leave one behind in the Kmart, or if there comes a time, when one wants to. When one simply wants to slough it off, all the mothering. Erase it all, begin again, solitary.

I think that little girl come to me and not the manager, standing at the customer service desk, and not the other checker, a young girl, even younger than my Talia, because I looked, to her, as near her mother as anyone. I could guess we’re near the same age, that we both have that settled-in motherly look about us, and the little girl saw this because she needed to. She didn’t know, I realized, not yet, that her mama was a boring dresser, that her hair was ugly. Or, it didn’t count.

It was the other checker later that I learned what the mother and the older girl had been shopping for, what they’d come to their Kmart today to purchase. Braziers. White cotton, no-padding ones, bralettes, they’re called. And then, I pictured the whole thing: how they come here, to the Kmart across town, probably, from where they lived, the two of them slinking away, little girl coming along either because she begged to, or because they had no place to put her, searching it out, the perfect 32-AA. It’s what we give our children, or try to: a license to grow up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, my Talia says. Yeah.

Come back tomorrow. We'll get started on crafting scene and deepening the conflict.

The Story Machine: Part II

2011-02-25T06:22:00.002-05:00

After I've written my 500-word or so autobiographical snippet, it's time to begin the work of fictionalizing.

Which can be tough. The danger with starting this way--with a true story--is that we tend to resist veering from the way it really happened.

Yet, our number one priority from here on out has to be the story. The story. We no longer care what really happened.

Changes for draft number two: point of view and setting.

Again, let's defer to Antonya Nelson who talks about the "default modes" in fiction. In terms of time and pov, Antonya says we should set our stories in present-day time and use close third pov unless we have reason to do otherwise. At this point--and it may change--I'll use Antonya's default modes. So, I'm going to move the story from early 1980's to today, and I'll replace my first person pov with close third.

Big changes, in a way, but easy enough. And, the story hasn't yet changed substantially.

I want it to. I want to create something.

So, here's my substantial change: I want to make the pov character the store clerk.

I have my reasons for this. First, I think little-girl-gets-lost-in-Kmart is enough meat--just enough meat, actually--to be the secondary story, but my gut is telling me it can't stand by itself. Also, I like the idea of the lost little girl providing a time-frame for the story. Ann Hood calls this the story's container. The story has a natural beginning: little girl lost. Then movement: looking for parents, comforting lost girl. Then ending: the resolution of the little girl lost, i.e., she is reunited with her family.

Your story needs this, your reader needs this: some implied or stated structure. A container. We feel safe now, knowing the story will end. Now, we can focus on our sales clerk.

Another reason I chose the store clerk: I have to make her up. All I remember about the real cashier was her leaning in to hear me and then her making the loud-speaker call, her spitting out some barely recognizable version of my last name.

Now, before I draft again, I have some work to do: Who is this woman? I need to give her an age and a situation in life. I need to give her a reason to have this story written about her. I need to investigate. The age-old character question: What's at stake for her, right now? What does she stand to lose? To gain?

Why should we care about her at all?

Charles Baxter says: create an interesting character and give said character an interesting problem.
Some questions to ask your character:
Why are you in this story?
What are you afraid of?
What are you hoping for? Waiting for?
What are you tired of trying to make happen?
What might you do or think or feel in this story that will surprise even you?

The Story Machine: Part I

2011-02-24T05:24:00.004-05:00

This summer at Tin House, Antonya Nelson gave a talk on a ten-step short story writing process she'd developed for her undergraduates. The talk was excellent, her suggestions inspired, and her little asides about fiction-writing were perhaps the most valuable part of all. A highlight of the week for me.

What I'm going to do here and with a beginning fiction class I'm teaching is to do something like what Antonya talked about but I'm taking huge liberties with it, changing it quite a bit. But, I love the premise so much, I have been wanting to replicate it in some way, to try it out and also modify it to fit my own writing and teaching styles. So, here goes.

Part I: Write a 500-word or so account of an autobiographical event. Antonya gave the example of a tornado she and her family experienced in the family car, parked in a Baskin-Robins parking lot; I chose a time I got lost in a department store as a kid.

Here's my example:

Let’s see: I was about seven years old when I got lost in Kmart. I was a dreamy kid, given to wandering, to getting caught up in my own little fantasy-world, to losing track of real-life. I was there with my mother and my older sister, who must have been about twelve at the time. In my memory, they were bra-shopping, but that might not be completely right, especially since if they were bra-shopping, I might have been more inclined to stick around, undergarments being such a fascinating thing to me at this age and I was also tuned into anything that made my sister uncomfortable or vaguely grown-upish—I would have followed along to be a pest if nothing else. Or, maybe I did exactly that—followed along and made my little jokes or simply gawked—I was always getting caught gawking as a kid. Maybe my sister finally got tired of me and told me to leave her alone and I complied, or maybe, my mother, sensing she would get the job accomplished more easily if I weren’t there, or just wanting to give herself a moment’s peace, produced a quarter from her purse and told me to go watch a cartoon. At this time, in this particular Kmart—this would have been Effingham, Illinois, most likely—they had a little booth in the children’s clothing department where you could insert a quarter into the slot and watch a cartoon. In my memory, it was Tom and Jerry, but I could be wrong about this, too. Maybe it was Bugs Bunny. I used to watch a lot of Bugs Bunny as a kid. I was seven years old, I had an older sister who was just starting to do things like shop for bras. In a few years, I would fake crushes on her boyfriends, I would pretend to snoop on her though I, in all truth, could not imagine her ever actually kissing a boy. She was my big sister, part of ordinary life to me. Boy-kissing was for television. I was obnoxious—What’s up, Doc?--I’m sure, to my mortified, breast-bud-budding sister. No wonder they left me in the store.

They did. To this day, it still astonishes me: I finished up my cartoon, Bugs or Tom and Jerry or maybe Yosemite Sam, another favorite, and exited my little booth, probably with the intention of hitting mom up for another quarter, or hoping like mad it was time to go home already—in those days, my shopping stamina was very limited. I looked about: no mom, no Shelley. Just shoppers and rounds of dark Lee jeans—they only had dark-wash in these days—and the bright, linoleum-tiled floor. I approached one of the registers, crying, and, nodding yes when the sales clerk asked me, was I lost?, I mispronounced my own last name. Something like Susan Yagler or Susan Yeppinstire or the like, not my real name, Yergler, was called out over the intercom.

Another surprise: they were in the parking lot before they realized they had forgotten me. When I tell the story, I like to say it was probably because I was such a good child, so meek and quiet, it was easy to forget I’d been there with them in the first place. More likely, first-bra-shopping—or whatever kind of shopping they were actually doing—was just that chaotic, tense, those two. My mother and sister, each worked up, annoyed enough with each other, to make it all the way to the parking lot before they realized they’d forgotten something.

Try it: Write a couple of pages about an experience you've had or been witness to.

Raymond Carver and Mercy

2011-02-23T06:48:00.007-05:00

Relationships characterize.

In this passage from Raymond Carver's "Careful," a man suffering from having his ear plugged up--and from acute loneliness--is tended to by his estranged wife.

“Don’t be scared,” she said. “It’s just some of your landlady’s baby oil, that’s all it is. I told her what was wrong, and she thought this might help. No guarantees,” Inez said. “But maybe this’ll loosen things up in there. She said it used to happen to her husband. She said this one time she saw a piece of wax fall out of his ear, and it was like a big plug of something. It was ear wax, was what it was. She said try this. And she didn’t have any Q-tips. I can’t understand that, her not having any Q-tips. That part really surprises me.”

“Okay,” he said. “All right. I’m willing to try anything. Inez, if I had to go on like this, I think I’d rather be dead. You know? I mean it, Inez.”

“Tilt your head all the way to the side now,” she said. “Don’t move. I’ll pour this in until your ear fills up, then I’ll stopper it with this dishrag. And you just sit there for ten minutes, say. Then we’ll see. If this doesn’t do it, well, I don’t have any other suggestions. I just don’t know what to do then.”

“This’ll work,” he said. “If this doesn’t work, I’ll find a gun and shoot myself. I’m serious. That’s what I feel like doing, anyway.”

“Farther,” she said. He held on to the chair for balance and lowered his head even more. All of the objects in his vision, all of the objects in his life, it seemed, were at the far end of this room. He could feel the warm liquid pour into his ear. Then she brought the dishrag up and held it there. In a little while, she began to massage the area around his ear. She pressed into the soft part of the flesh between his jaw and skill. She moved her fingers to the area over his ear and began to work the tips of her fingers back and forth. After a while, he didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there. It could have been ten minutes. It could have been longer. He was still holding on to the chair. Now and then, as her fingers pressed the side of his ehad, he could feel the warm oil she’d poured in there wash back and forth in the canals inside his ear. When she pressed a certain way, he imagined he could hear, inside his head, a soft, swishing sound.

“Sit up straight,” Inez said. He sat up and pressed the heel of his hand against his head while she liquid poured out of his ear. She caught it in the towel. Then she wiped the outside of his ear.

The exercise: In exacting detail and using as small an action or series of actions as possible, draft a scene where one character shows mercy to another character.

Listen: you were wonderful.

2011-02-22T06:46:00.003-05:00

Gestures characterize.

From Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road:

Here's the situation: Frank Wheeler, having just witnessed his young wife April's painfully disastrous acting debut in a small-town play, arrives at her dressing room and looks for something to say to her.

She was alone, sitting very straight at a mirror and removing her make-up. Her eyes were still red and blinking, but she gave him a small replica of her curtain-call smile before turning back to the mirror. "Hi," she said. "You ready to leave?"

He closed the door and started toward her with the corners of his mouth stretched tight in a look that he hoped would be full of love and humor and compassion; what he plannd to do was bend down and kiss her and say "Listen: you were wonderful." But an almost imperceptible recoil of her shoulders told him that she didn't want to be touched, which left him uncertain what to do with his hands, and that was when it occurred to him that "You were wonderful" might be exactly the wrong thing to say--condescending, or at the very least naive and sentimental, and much too serious.

"Well," he said instead. "I guess it wasn't exactly a triumph or anything, was it?" And he stuck a cigarette jauntily in his lips and lit it with a flourish of his clicking Zippo.

"I guess not," she said. "I'll be ready in a minute."

"No, that's okay, take your time."

He pocketed both hands and curled the tired toes inside his shoes, looking down at them. Would "You were wonderful" have been a better thing to say, after all? Almost anything, it now seemed, would have been a better thing to say than what he'd said. But he would have to think of better thing to say later; right not it was all he could do to stand here and think about the double bourbon he would have when they stopped on the way home with the Campbells. He looked at himself in the mirror, tightening his jaw and turning his head a little to one side to give it a leaner, more commanding look, the face he had given himself in mirrors since boyhood and which no photograph had ever quite achieved, until with a start he found that she was watching him. Her own eyes were there in the mirror, trained on his for an uncomfortable moment before she lowered them to stare at the middle button of his coat.

Here's an exercise to try: write a scene where one character is trying to say the right thing to another character and failing miserably. Let the characters' gestures betray their true feelings.

Fill in the Blank

2011-02-21T07:33:00.003-05:00

Day 1 of Character-Building Week:

Things characterize. Possessions, accessories, and burdens.

Try this: fill in the blanks below. The passage is from the beginning of a short story. (Bonus points to anyone who can identify the story and/or its writer.)

While the plane was pulling up to the gate on a summer evening in 1974, Karin reached down and got something out of her backpack. A --- which she ---, and a --- which she --- and a ---- which she ----. The ---- and ---- had been filched from ----, and the ---- was something she had bought for herself.

PS. I got this exercise from an Alan Michael Parker workshop I attended some years ago. Alan, btw, has a new novel, Whale Man.

Me, Graceful

2011-02-18T06:46:00.004-05:00

Yesterday, I found myself running, in heels, from the Town of Drexel utility truck. It was a gravel driveway, my driveway. I had been taking out the trash and the guys in the truck surprised me, so I ran from them.

Not one of my proudest--or most graceful--moments. Sometimes I forget that I'm thirty-five, not nineteen, and that a pick-up truck with maybe three or four youngish, oldish guys with messy beards and ball-caps crawling up my driveway to check my power meter may not find the sight of me running away from them especially cute.

But, the entire situation seems emblematic of my life these last few weeks. Must get my life together. Get back into the writing seat, the blogging seat, the normal chaotic but managed life of my busy little family. Get out of the driveway before the utility truck is bearing down on my behind. I'm too old for this sort of disorganization.

Confession: I've already failed my new year's resolutions. Haven't worked on my new novel in a month or more.

Confession: I'm thirty-six. Almost thirty-seven.

But, I'm not dismayed. Guilt is useless; action is what counts.

Coming soon: Tuesday morning story-writing sessions, building fiction from the ground up. I'm back in task-master mode. Join me.

Things I've Seen the Last Couple of Weeks that I MUST Somehow, Sometime Write about:

2011-01-14T06:08:00.004-05:00

1. Volunteer at the library, hosting story-time for the little ones, wears a t-shirt with one word across the chest: EVIL.

2. In the news: woman steals meerkat from zoo, returns on the doorstep of a pet store with a note: she can't care for the precious little mongoose-like wild animal anymore.

3. My friend the other night at dinner at the every-Asian-country restaurant on going off at the saleslady at Victoria's Secret: What do you mean you don't sell nursing bras? Lactating women deserve to be sexy, too!

A Happy Writing Year: Bring It On, 2011!!

2011-01-01T10:21:00.004-05:00

If I put my resolutions here, in a public-ish place, I'm more likely to follow through, right? I'll be shamed into doing what I say I'm going to do...unless, of course, come January 2, 2011 (or any of the following three hundred or so days), I can simply delete this post...

But, I won't, right?

I've never bothered with dieting or exercising resolutions or attitude-adjustments or resolves to keep my house clean or my checkbook meticulously balanced or to increase my children's outside play time or reading time or made any kind of a commitment to a particular self-betterment program. But I like writing goals. And I like New Year's. So, here goes.

But, first, a few thoughts on goal-setting in general. I think that my background as an extraordinary nerd all through high school and even more so in college has helped me so much in this area. I used to plan my summer reading assignments to the page number; I still well-remember the summer I spent reading ten pages of The Scarlet Letter and The Grapes of Wrath. I did this every day, no matter if I was on vacation or babysitting all day or spending the night with a friend. I planned my days around my self-assignment. And, in college, I set up mini-deadlines for each term paper. There was: the initial library visit, the index-card collecting, the outline, the lining up of the previously-gathered cards, the first draft, second draft, proofing draft, and finally, final draft, which I always tried to complete a week ahead of schedule in case there was some kind of snag.

HUGE nerd, absolutely. But it was the only way I could live and not go crazy. Truly.

And today, with my writing, having mini-goals gives me peace. I've learned to vary them according to where I am in a project and what's going on in my life at the moment. When I'm starting something new, I generally don't require a whole lot of myself. Often, in the very beginning, when I'm just thinking and taking notes, I'll commit myself to one hour of writing/thinking. I don't worry about producing anything at this point: I'm not ready to. Then, I'll try to get about a page a day written, and then maybe two or three pages a day, once the story starts to gain a little momentum. Finally, when I'm second-drafting or revising, I get going pretty fast. That's the writing-with-abandon part for me. (Which I guess is actually re-writing with abandon.)

I think goals have to be realistic. I also think they have to involve only factors I can control. For example, I've never made my goal anything like getting a specific story published or landing an agent, but instead focus on what I alone can do to reach those goals. I can't, for example, make an editor choose my story, but I can commit to keeping my story out at three different journals for 2011 or until it gets accepted, whichever comes sooner. Back when I was still trying to find representation, I made mini-goals about query-letter drafts and attending conferences.

Okay, so finally, here they are:

1. I'll set monthly page-number goals as I go. For January, I plan to write fifty pages of a relatively new novel I'm working on, but, if my editor sends a heap of revision notes for Goliath, I'll adjust. On January 31, I'll set a goal for February, taking into account all my obligations and where I really want to go with the novel, and so on, throughout the year.

2. I will explore more options for part-time teaching gigs and presenting talks, etc. at workshops and the like. (I have some specifics for this that are too boring to list here.)

3. I am going to read and study The Complete Idiot's Guide to Einstein. This may sound like a strange goal, but I believing in reading widely as a fiction-writer. Not only does this just give me more fodder for the actual content of my work, but I really believe in trying to get your brain to do new things. I believe thinking and understanding leads to good writing. And, anyway, I'm just curious.

Okay. There it is. It's January 1st, there are still dirty appetizer trays in the kitchen from last night's celebration, and I'm tired, but here we go...

What about you? Any writerly (or otherwise) resolutions?

We Tell Stories

2010-12-14T19:37:00.011-05:00

Some years ago, a writer I greatly admire commented that writing fiction right after the 911 attacks was hard to do. Like television sit-coms and sports, it seemed frivolous in the wake of such tragedy.

I think maybe creating fiction at such a time can actually seem worse than frivolous. Disrespectful, tasteless. Fiction, after all, is merely made-up stories. The stories might be light-hearted, and who can laugh now? Or tragic, which might be worse—to invent sadness at such a time.

I remember watching the news footage of the attacks and their aftermath—those long days, then weeks of searching the rubble—from my couch. I had just quit teaching and was preparing to begin work on my MFA. My husband and I were also trying to get a family started, but that day—September 11, 2001—while our entire country watched the details of the tragedy unfold, I was facing a personal tragedy. There I sat, alone in the house, watching everything on TV, and, at the same time, bleeding through my first miscarriage.

Writing has been good and useful for me over the years for a number of reasons. When I was young, it was fun. It was an intellectual exercise—through writing, my brain learned logic and syntax. Order and creativity. As I grew older, it became cathartic and then psychologically essential. If I didn’t express myself, I would go crazy. Fiction-writing has also been my escape, a means of forgetting my real-life’s troubles.

It still does all this for me. But there’s more: writing is life-affirming.

Joan Didion says, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” She was speaking primarily about nonfiction-story-telling, about how we assign the confusing losses and utter mayhem of this life narratives to cope. (You should read this essay, btw. It’s the title essay of her collection, The White Album.)

She’s right, of course, she’s brilliant, but I might say this about writing, specifically about fiction-writing: We make up stories because we are alive. I believe it is absolutely essential to our humanness. This is one of the--if not the--most fundamental human traditions.

Of course, when I lost the pregnancy, I cried. I crawled into various hiding places. I buried a bloodclot in the backyard. I watched too much of the news coverage.

But then, eventually, I sat down at my desk and re-entered the story-telling tradition.

No matter the country’s or the world’s or your own personal situation in this moment, I think we really must understand how important this writing-thing is. And I don’t mean only for personal fulfillment or to try to inspire another person. These are certainly important, but there's something else, something a bit closer to the marrow. I think we have to write—we have to make up stories—because it is a symptom of our being alive. We humans do these things: we build buildings and empires, we love and we hate, we plant things, cook things, clean things, destroy things, we have babies and we die—and we tell stories.

Gathering Courage from Susie the Bear

2010-11-20T14:38:00.009-05:00

I don't believe in writer's block.

Or, at least, I don't believe in it in terms or there being something in the way or that the muse has left me or that I simply have run out of things to say.

Or, that's not how it's appearing to me today.

Rather: I've lost my nerve.

I'm scared. Actually, physically, butterflies-in-the-stomach scared. It seems, in this moment, impossible. Writing anything. Writing my name. Writing that I am too scared to write my name.

Beginning.

Once, when I was in middle school, my bff at the moment caught me standing at the cafeteria trash can, tray of lunch remains in hand, getting ready to dump it out, but not. Not dumping. Just standing there, mouth slightly ajar, tray extended in front of me. I was thinking something, and who knows what it was. I only know my bf at the time--current FB friend--was laughing at me. She nudged the person she was sitting with and they both laughed.

Susan, what are you doing? I mean, you're just standing there?

Another topic for another blog, maybe, but what occurs to me now is that it's quite possible that every failing moment of my life is actually a select reincarnation from the sixth grade.

Horrifying, isn't it? To think we're living sixth grade moments over and over, to different degrees of humiliation, joy, and absurdity?

Anyway.

What works, at least for me, at least a little bit, now, is to read. It's the same thing that brought me to this writing life in the first place. So, this week, I've returned to an old favorite, my friend John Irving. I'm reading an old classic of his, The Hotel New Hampshire, (such unabashed weirdness!) and I find that Susie the Bear and the prostitutes upstairs give me courage.

No way would I, the girl standing gape-mouthed at the trash can, allow Susie the Bear onto my pages. But I have to. I have to go there and write up a girl in a bear suit or a boy whose ear has been bitten off by a dog or an endearing little midget with a screeching-screaming ordinary talking voice.

Now.

I have to write up to the courage.

Claremont, California

2010-11-14T05:44:00.009-05:00

Some years ago, my family and I lived in a ranch-style stucco with a clay-tiled roof on San Benito Court. This was in southern California. In our front yard, we had a smallish tree with papery bark and in the back, a line of struggling lime trees. Beyond that, there was a playground with an Old West theme and beyond that, the scrubby foothills, legended to be full of rattlesnakes and coyotes. I often rollerskated between two streetlights on the sidewalk in front of our house in the early evening and could hear the coyotes, far enough away that I don't remember ever being afraid.

Further up the street was the house of my friend Elizabeth Stickers, whose brother was old enough to drive, and with whom I once got into trouble for putting up a lemonade stand when her parents weren't home. Out back, on the other side of the Old West playground and sort of adjacent to the foothills (my memory of exact locations is lacking) lived my best friends, sisters Angelica and Monica Guerrerro. It was with them that I got into trouble for another entreupenerial adventure: Together, we set up a sort of mini arts market, selling hand-woven eyes of god, hand-sewn purses (very crudely made) and stapled-together hand-written stories (I was into knock-offs of Gullivers Travels, the book, and The Incredible Shrinking Woman, the movie) out of the pretend jailhouse. I don't remember making a single sale.

I was in the third grade. Knickers and knee-socks were briefly popular. It was still early enough in the eighties that feathered hair was everywhere, though whenever my mother tried to feather mine, using a curling iron, a comb, and a ton of hairspray, it invariably fell out, and I was left with tangled dirty-blonde, shoulder-length hair. A mess. I wore braces in those days. My orthodonist gave me a t-shirt: Beauty and the Brace.

We lived in a cul-de-sac. At the end there was a family full of rowdy boys of various sizes and strengths, an older couple, and a woman across the street who vacuumed in a bikini with her front door open. One one side of my house, there lived an older lady with a precious dog who snapped when my sister and I tried to play with her, and on the other side, there was a woman, a former English teacher at an all-boys private school, who was married to a doctor and had a five-year-old boy named Andy. Her name was Mrs. Carney, and she was the first person to explain to me that the process by which hand-written stories were printed up, bound, and put up for sale was called getting published.

Right away, it was something I wished would someday happen to me. In fact, at the time, I had a half-secret wish--I only told other kids--to publish my first book by the time I was twelve. I remember explaining to one of the girls down the street, named Ginger, what published meant. It meant, I explained, she would be able to go to the book store and buy my book. "Oh," she said, "Wow."

In Claremont, my older sister had her first boyfriend. He was a boy named Scott and he liked her enough to play soccer in the front yard with me and my other sister, both of us little and constantly giggling. Shelley had another admirer who brought her a blue-frosted cupcake. But my father teased her mercilessly about the unusual gift, and the poor blue cupcake boy--named Robby, I believe--was turned away.

She was a freshman and she played clarinet in the marching band. One Christmas Eve, we serenaded our parents: she played and Jill and I sang a squeaky "Silent Night." We lined up in front of the fire place as if it were a stage. It was 1984. I chose a gift from my gruff and funny motorcycle-riding uncle all the way over in Illinois for the my one Christmas Eve present that night. It was a pair of fuzzy blue slippers too warm for southern California, even in December. My mother got us each a little coin purse with a key ring attached. We were moving to North Carolina in the new year, and we would keep the key to our new house on the new key ring. After the move, our mother would work full-time, and we were old enough now to let ourselves in after the school bus dropped us off in the afternoons.

My sister's boyfriend, who complimented me when I turned nine--almost into the double digits, he grinned--who had lived in Claremont all his life, who lives there still for all I know, asked my father, would it be cold enough for the ponds to freeze over in North Carolina? Hardly, my dad said. But there would be snow once or twice a winter, he promised.

Mrs. Carney and I made a batch of cookies and watched "Little Orphan Annie"--she had a brand-new VCR, the first I ever encountered--on my last afternoon at her house. My sisters knew Mrs. Carney, but neither of them ever attached themselves to her as I did. She'd already given me The Secret Garden and other books, but now, as I was leaving, she presented me with a beautiful, full-color illustrated Anne of Green Gables. Inside, she inscribed, To Susan: I hope you grow to love Anne as much as I did growing up.

There were others, in the years to come. I had a high school English teacher who helped me get a story published in a local education journal. Another who told me I could write about anything I wanted and make it interesting. (Maybe the best compliment I've ever received.) And my own father, who, upon reading a story I wrote in the seventh grade insisted I could be a professional writer one day if I wanted to. "It's a lot of work, though," he warned. "A lot of work," I remember him saying again.

Is it possible my father had a gift for that? For directing us towards our specific futures? He laughed at the cupcake boy; he tried to prepare me for all the work ahead of me. He took us all to North Carolina.

This morning, I'm remembering Claremont and my braces, my purple knickers, my friends, Mrs. Carney. My sister's boyfriend. The fuzzy blue slippers.

I'd love to hear about your own Mrs. Carney. Or about your braces. Your post-dinner, sidewalk roller-skating. Your forbidden lemonade stands. The blue cupcake boy of your own past. Please, tell. Tell me something you did as a child, or tell me about the first time it occured to you: I can do this. This writing thing. Tell me about the first time you heard the word published and understood it would be a part of your future.

My Time in Goliath

2010-11-07T06:28:00.007-05:00

Three hundred and ninety-six pages. I finished the rewrite, sent it off, and suffered a day or two of fuzzy/nervous/giddy-tired energy. I cleaned my house, a task that has not been properly attended to in five or six months. I googled recipes with ridiculous confines: low-fat, low-calorie, easy, five-ingredient, chicken. Then, added: fast. I fantasized about having an extravagent holiday open-house, adding a patio to our backyard, actually hanging up the curtains I ordered for the bathroom months ago. Reading every book in my to-be-read pile. I decided I would map out the rest of my daughter's home-school year, week by week. Plan a garden. I will read Einstein's papers, the Bible, Genesis to Revelation.

Then came the exhaustion, the true exhaustion. All the adrenoline leaked out sometime in the middle of the night and I slept like a dead person. I just didn't move. Two new cold sores popped up. A sore back. And, because there were sandcrabs mentioned late in the book, residual sandcrabs flashed at the oddest moments. They simply sprang to mind, and I saw it happen again and again: they crawled into miniature sand-dunes, a wave washed them out, and they went crawling, burrowing in once again.

What I was seeing was myself over the last several months: being washed out of Goliath, the small factory town that serves as a setting for my novel, and burrowing back in time and time again. Trying to find another sweet spot, another place in the wet sand to push in, enter. I think the writer can appreciate the tenacity, the single-mindedness of the sandcrab.

Giddy-energy, exhaustion, and now--always--gratitude. What amazes me is how the work continues to be its own reward. The harder I work, the more it takes from me, the sharper my writerly instinct becomes, the more stubbornness it requires, the better this writing life is.

Geez, I love this stuff. Love it, love it. Am I crazy?

Funneling: A Few Words on Narrative Momentum From My Friend Bruce Black

2010-10-07T06:38:00.007-04:00

The idea came to me one steamy summer day as I was swimming laps. Writing can be such a lonely profession, and I was feeling cut off from friends and colleagues after our move to Florida. But that day the process of swimming–touching water that other swimmers had spent time in, watching other swimmers dive into the water– helped me feel connected to a larger world, and the idea for a blog (with swimming and water as a metaphor, of sorts, for writing) emerged out of that.

These are the words of a children's-book-editor-turned-writer Bruce Black on why he started his excellent fiction-writing blog, wordswimmer. As a college student, Black used to escape to the library to read Cheever and Updike in back issues of The New Yorker. Black, who has published in prestigious children's magazines Cricket and Cobblestone, further explains how he hopes readers will benefit from his blog:

A better sense of how they write and what works best for them, a sense of how each writer is different and needs to find his or her own way into a story, a sense of hope and faith in the power of words to lead them where they need to go. I want readers to come away from each posting with the feeling that writing offers a path to understanding, and that stories are our way of exploring the world, and that writing can illuminate our world and our inner selves if we approach the process from the perspective of curiosity and a sense of adventure and joy in the process.

I'm thrilled to share with you a post on what Bruce calls "funneling," a means of narrowing and therefore quickening/tightening the narrative momentum of a story. I was particularly taken with this particular post, but you should definitely check out Black's blog for yourself. His posts are helpful, specific, and inspired. I'm a fan.

Thank you, Bruce Black!

Sunday, August 08, 2010
Funneling

If you’ve ever hiked along a stream, you may have noticed how water slows where the stream widens and picks up its pace in places where it narrows.

And if you’ve ever followed a stream down a slope, you may have observed how the slow-moving water at the mouth of the stream, where the bed is widest, plunges faster and faster down the slope as gravity and the narrowing streambed exert their forces on the water’s flow.

The same energy and forces that you observe in nature can also contribute to the creation of energy and force in your writing, especially in the opening sequences of chapters, if you let your story pass through a funnel.

A funnel is just another way of describing a way of presenting information, and funneling is the process of moving that information from a broad, wide-angle view in close to a particular point of interest that, like a leaf carried by the current, draws the reader's attention into the scene.

So, funneling means starting out from the slower, wider view of the story and picking up speed as the story flows toward that narrower, closer point of interest.

Here’s an example from a chapter toward the end of Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, an adaptation of the legends of Robin Hood which I picked up after viewing the newest film version of Robin Hood, with Russell Crowe portraying Robin.

The opening paragraph of the chapter begins:

The high-road stretched white and dusty in the hot summer afternoon sun, and the trees stood motionless along the roadside. All across the meadow lands the hot air danced and quivered, and in the limpid waters of the lowland brook, spanned by a little stone bridge, the fish hung motionless above the yellow gravel, and the dragon-fly sat quite still, perched upon the sharp tip of a spike of the rushes, with its wings glistening in the sun.

That’s the wide-open end of the funnel, where the story is presented in an overview of the countryside at first, but then, within the slowly swirling pool of the opening paragraph, Pyle focuses our attention on the dragonfly... so that even within the paragraph itself there’s a funneling effect.

Here’s the second paragraph:

Along the road a youth came riding upon a fair milk-white barb, and the folk that he passed stopped and turned and looked after him, for never had so lovely a lad or one so gayly clad been seen in Nottingham before. He could not have been more than sixteen years of age, and was as fair as any maiden. His long yellow hair flowed behind him as he rode along, all clad in silk and velvet, with jewels flashing and dagger jingling against the pommel of the saddle. Thus came the Queen’s Page, young Richard Partington, from famous London Town down into Nottinghamshire, upon her majesty’s bidding, to seek Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest.
Notice how out of the general picture painted in paragraph one, Pyle then draws (narrows) our focus from the wide angle to the road... and points our attention to the moving figure on that road, the young man who is then described in great detail. (Again, notice the movement from overview to specific details, the Queen’s Page brought into focus much like the dragonfly in the first paragraph).

Here’s the third paragraph, which is where the flow of the story begins to pick up its pace, as Partington’s mission begins to take shape:

The road was hot and dusty and his journey had been long, for that day he had come all the way from Leicester Town, a good twenty miles and more; wherefore young Partington was right glad when he saw before him a sweet little inn, all shady and cool beneath the trees, in front of the door of which a sign hung pendant, bearing the picture of a Blue Boar. Here he drew rein and called loudly for a pottle of Rhenish wine to be brought him, for stout country ale was too coarse a drink for this young gentleman. Five lusty fellows sat upon the bench beneath the pleasant shade of the wide-spreading oak in front of the inn door, drinking ale and beer, and all stared amain at this fair and gallant lad. Two of the stoutest of them were clothed in Lincoln green, and a great heavy oaken staff leaned against the gnarled oak tree trunk beside each fellow.

In three paragraphs we’ve been drawn into the scene... having arrived at the place where the Page meets (unknown to him yet) two of Robin’s men who will ultimately lead him to Robin so that he can fulfill his mission and request Robin’s presence in London Town on behalf of the queen.

Pyle adapted and published the tales with his illustrations in 1883, but the technique of funneling –zooming from wide-angle to narrow, close-up– continues to be used in storytelling today.

Here’s the opening paragraph from Chapter 56 of Daniel Silva's newest mystery adventure, The Rembrandt Affair, which came out a few weeks ago:

The farm lay some fifty miles to the west of Washington, at the point where the first foothills of the Blue Ridge begin to sprout from the edge of the Shenandoah Valley. Residents of The Plains, a quaint hamlet located along the John Marshall Highway, believed the owner to be a powerful Washington lawyer with a great deal of money and many important friends in government, thus the black limousines and SUVs that were frequently seen roaring through town, sometimes at the oddest hours.

Note, as in Pyle’s work, how Silva provides the reader with an overview of the landscape (the slowly spinning water at the top of the funnel), drawing the reader closer and closer (zooming in, narrowing the view), focusing on the specific details –the black limousines and SUVs–to hold a reader’s gaze (like the dragonfly).

Now look at the second paragraph of the chapter:

On a bitterly cold morning in mid-December, a dozen such vehicles were spotted in The Plains, far more than usual. All followed the same route–a left at the BP gas station and mini-mart, a right after the railroad tracks, then straight for a mile or so on Country Road 601. Because it was a Friday and close to the Christmas holidays, it was assumed in The Plains that the farm was playing host to a weekend Washington retreat–the sort of gathering where lobbyists and politicians gather to swap money and favors, along with tips on how to improve one’s golf swing and love life. As it turned out, the rumors were no accident. They had been planted by a division of the Central Intelligence Agency, which owned and operated the farm through a front company.

What just happened?

That’s the effect of funneling–moving from a slow-moving overview of a scene into the scene itself, gathering details in the same way that a stream gathers force and energy as it descends a slope, from a wide-mouthed opening to its narrower bed of swiftly flowing water further downstream.

After These Messages, We'll Be Right Back

2010-09-26T11:35:00.006-04:00

I am wearing my favorite pajamas and sitting in an empty house with my laptop on my lap and a cup of coffee at my elbow. I'm three episodes in the sixth season of Grey's Anatomy and a little over a hundred pages into Freedom. We're in week four of this year's homeschooling--it's multiplication tables and the Crusades at the moment--and my son's preschool class is working its way through shapes and colors. Tomorrow is brown oval day; he's bringing a potato and a dead leaf from our magnolia tree.

My manuscript is open to page 265 of 348 (and counting). I'm revising, rewriting, drafting new bits, implementing a number of edits my editor has requested. Tidying things up a bit. I had hoped to be ready to send it to her by October 1.

October 1 is five days away.

What I want to do is blog. I want to talk about Steve Almond's quote, about how we can/can't convert the non-reading sector of our population and whether or not we should try. (Thank you, btw, to those who commented on the matter here and on FB.)

I want to share with you this wonderful, wonderful post on narrative momentum from Bruce Black who blogs over a wordswimmer. I've been wanting to share this with you for weeks. Sigh.

I want to talk about Richard Yates and Gesture School (as in how to make your characters do more than drink coffee) and I want to share with you what I learned from Antonya Nelson's talk this year at Tin House, and I have more coming from Steve Almond and I want to talk setting as a means to jump start or merely suggest conflict and I want to talk about luck and writing and why writers should be very careful when it comes to throwing midgets off the train and whether or not it's okay for me to write about the place where I live, even though it's not my place--I didn't grow up here--and to ponder the use of the word desultory--is it me or are writers using that particular word too often?

I want to talk about what Robert Olen Butler calls "writing from the white hot center," and a friend of mine who recently, brilliantly, accomplished such a feat here.

But, more than anything, more than a full-fat latte and office supply shopping and sleep, I want to finish my edits.

So today is a non-blogging day. I'm sure you understand.

PS. Go write.

Our Job

2010-09-16T18:53:00.006-04:00

Steve Almond posted this at the Rumpus recently:

Our job...is two-fold: to focus on our own failings as writers. But also to speak more forcefully as advocates for literature. Books are a powerful antidote for loneliness, for the moral purposelessness of the leisure class. It’s our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don’t read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn’t some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning, to an understanding of the terror that lives beneath our consumptive ennui. It’s hard to make this case, though, if all we do is squabble with each other and lament our obscurity.

He posted this in response to the death of Kevin Morrissey at the Virginia Quarterly Review, and while that loss is beyond tragic for so many reasons, what I would like to address here is Almond's notion of what our job as writers is.

So, then, let's consider what he says our job is: first, to "focus on our own failings as writers."

Take the plank out of your own manuscript before you point out the speck of dust in the rejecting editor's/agent's/workshop leader's/reader's eye. Or something like that. Focus on your own work. Blame no one but yourself for its weaknesses.

All right. I'm with him there.

Next, he says we should devote ourselves to "speak more forcefully as advocates of literature." We need to convince the majority who don't read, or who at least don't read literary fiction, of its value. And, I love what follows--how right he is about literature's ability to battle loneliness and the "moral purposelessness of the leisure class." A thousand yeses. I couldn't agree more.

A million yeses. Yes: let's show the world what good fiction can do. I'm so with him.

One question: how?

Readers, help. Any thoughts? Honestly, I'm asking: what can I do (or you do or any of us do) to get people to read more anything? And especially: how do we get them to read more literary fiction?

Or, should we even try? Is it our job, afterall, to both write fiction and try to get others to read fiction?

Talismans

2010-09-16T18:33:00.011-04:00

I keep a rock from when I went caving some years ago on the book shelf above my writing desk. It appears to be somehow sliced open, and while the outside is ordinary grayish-brownish-rough-like rock, the slice reveals its insides: black and smooth and cool as glass.

Like so many things, my caving rock does double duty. I like the heft of it in my hand. I love the fact that it's a rock, a thing that's been around a very long time. If I could rewind time, watch everything I own morph back to their origins like rewinding video feed, so many of my things--including myself--would disappear. My books would wing back to the printer's, and then to trees, and then, to carbon dioxide, light and water, and then to seeds, and then, all the way back to microscopic slips of information: tree DNA inside a parent tree inside a parent tree inside a parent tree.

And, of course, the other part of the books, the words inside them, would lift off the page, return to the mind of the authors, and there, go through all the things that brought them to be in the first place. Whatever those origins might have been.

But my caving rock would survive this far, the walls of my house disassembling, the cinder-blocks in the walls going back to cinder, the trees that were here before re-growing, and on. I'm no geologist, but I'm pretty certain it's been a very long time since my rock has changed.

It's been with me--on my shelf, in a drawer, in a box--for seventeen years. That feels like a very long time to me; not so much to my rock.

We writers spend our days in the physical world, examining a number of psychological and spiritual and interpersonal spaces, writing about physical things that don't exist.

Of course, we don't need these things. These talismans. But, I think it helps, some fragment of this physical world. It holds me in physical space and inspires me as well. The cave itself was beyond magical. I remember a particular passage--called "the birth canal" by our guide if that tells you anything--which was so narrow and short we had to crawl through. But then, it would open up and suddenly, we were standing up in a cathedral-like open, underground space, the stalactites glistening down. It didn't feel like planet Earth. Like real-life.

So, I keep the rock on the shelf above me to remind me of those spaces. To remind myself that I used to do such things--go traipsing through caves. To remind myself, also, what I'm trying to do here, and also to remind myself that the real world, actual caves, exist. It's both a relief and a means to keep everything in perspective: there are spaces beyond my own brain, my own made-up stories. The rock will outlast every one of my ideas.

What about you? Any evidence of the real world you like to keep handy while you write?

Arthur Turock's Wife

2010-09-16T15:39:00.005-04:00

Try this: shine a light on the character next to the one you're trying to portray.

From Thomas Cobb's Crazy Heart:

Bonnie Turock is a large, horse-faced woman in a floor-length print dress. She is from Macon, Georgia, and has never made the switch required of a record company executive's wife. At cocktail parties, she serves home-baked pie. Maybe Arthur has hung on to her because she has the homey touch he doesn't. Around Bonnie, Arthur Turock could pass for a real human being.

Look to the Character

2010-09-08T18:42:00.018-04:00

In my last post, I spoke on faith and writing, and in particular in how you have to lean on the story--believe that it's there, beneath your fears. I encouraged you to step out on it in faith, test its soundness even when the shape of the story isn't clear. Rely on it. Know it's there.

Now, let's talk about how you do this. How do you find the story, especially if it's amorphous and sort of slippery at the moment. You know it's there, you just can't quite get a handle on it.

Too often, when a story is stuck or growing too many subplots or the main plot is drying up on the page, our impulse is to prop it up a little. Add one more subplot or another character, or (my favorite) kill somebody off. Change the setting, make someone commit a felony, add a bizarre catastrophe or something. Bees. I love to add bees. Or a pregnancy to a shaky marriage. Add cancer, divorce, or a tidal wave.

I'm speaking of myself: I do this. Especially the bees.

But, there's a better answer. Listen to Charles Baxter: "Instead of making our narrative events and our characters more colorful, we might make them thicker, more undecidable, more contradictory and unrecognizable. (From his essay, "On Defamiliarization" in his book, Burning Down the House.)

I find such comfort in these words. No need to go to any odd or confusing lengths to save the story. Simply look to the character instead. Almost always, whatever the question or the fear or the confusion, it is the character that brings me back to focus.

I know we all have a million character exercises, but here are a few I really love. And, they're not so much exercises as they are points to ponder:

1. Listen, again, to Baxter: "Sometimes--if we are writers--we have to talk to our characters. We have to try to persuade them to do what they've only imagined doing. We have to nudge but not force them toward situations where they will get into interesting trouble, where they will make interesting mistakes that they may take responsibility for," (from "Dysfunctional Narratives, Or: 'Mistakes Were Made,'" again in Burning Down the House.) Work your way through this: first, ask your character what they've only imagined doing. Next, figure out what would make them do it. Then, there will be the aftermath, and suddenly, your story has shown itself.

2. Three questions to ask your character. This came from a workshop I once attended with Quinn Dalton: Have you ever been close to death? What do you know about the circumstances of your birth? Have you ever been wrongly accused of any crime or wrongdoing?

3. This one is from Elissa Schappell: If asked, what are three things your character would say he/she is proud of? (Write these down before continuing.) Now, which one is a lie?

4. And finally, here's something I wrote in an essay a few years back: "Inside every character, even the most ordinary—boring, even—there exists the exquisite, the invaluable, the suffocation of normalcy, the brilliant and the ugly—the something that longs to be expressed." I've never met a person in real life who wasn't, at some level, suffocating normalcy, or who wasn't exquisite or brilliant or ugly in some way. It should be all the more true for our fictitious characters, shouldn't it? In what ways is your character both exquisite and ugly? How is he/she suffocating normalcy?

Faith in the Story: Believing What You Don't see

2010-09-01T20:38:00.019-04:00

In this writing life, you will encounter fear.

It may come to you in any number of incarnations: fear of giving too much of yourself away, fear of rejection, fear of tripping upon little bits of your deepest darkest self you'd rather not see. Criticism from others, however well-intended, can be crippling. I've feared writing would make me crazy. I've feared not writing: what if I woke up tomorrow and simply couldn't do it? Or, what if I keep writing, but no longer enjoy it? What if, in my pursuit to always, always write better, I start to really hate it? What if, the harder I try, the worse I write?

And, each day, I face a particularly harrowing fear: I'm going to open up the document to whatever I'm working on, and, upon reading a few lines, discover just how much it sucks. More than anything, we fear failure, but, don't you think it's actually fear of exposure? Fear others will see the truth about me and how incredibly stupid and naive and untalented I really am?

Fear, as I've seen it, is a crisis of faith. And this, in my world, is where religious faith and writing faith converge. My bible tells me to be still and know that God is God. In my worst bouts of writer-fear, I have to summon the same brand of faith: be still and know that the story exists. The story knows what it's doing even when I don't--sometimes, especially when I don't. I can't see the story at this moment--just like I can't physically see God--but I have to trust it. It's there. Lean on it, risking falling, or, as E.L. Doctorow says, hazard yourself, and only then can you trust its soundness, how very sturdy and there it actually is.

And, maybe the particular document I'm staring out really does suck. Maybe it's unsalvageable. Maybe I really am incredibly stupid and maybe I've wasted over a decade of my life--more--pursuing this writing-thing.

This is flawed thinking. We as a culture are too worried about so-called "wasted" time on pursuits that don't measure up to money or attention. A topic for another post, perhaps, but I really think we all need to evaluate exactly what we mean by the word success. And, on a personal note, I firmly believe that writing is an act of worship in the same way that cabinet-makers worship God by carving wood: any time I use a thing God has given me in the way he intended me to use it, I am worshipping him.

And even if you can't quite do the God-thing with me, and if you're not quite willing to change how you see success, I'm hoping you will grasp the immense beauty of creating. Fear is about me, but the work is about the work. Even if my creation is ultimately no masterpiece, I've done this much: I've made something.

But, also, let's remember the story. It's spirit rather than flesh, but it exists. I believe in it, don't you? I think that's where we let our fears carry us away, where it separates the cabinet-maker from the wood, we are distracted by how much we suck or how much time we're wasting and we forget why we're here: it's all about the story.

Copycat: Part II

2010-08-17T08:22:00.019-04:00

I've already blogged on how we how useful I think it is to imitate high-quality prose as a writing exercise. The example I gave before was a scene from Updike; today, let's talk about sentences.

Annie Dillard: "A sentence is a machine; it has a job to do."

So, let's get started. Below is a sampling of sentences--lean, generous, flowing, sleek, staccato, energetic, crisp, punchy, and eloquent. Let's use them as templates and see what we come up with.

When I do this, I break the sentence into parts. I'm no grammarian, but I just label what I know or at least put some kind of tag on it so I know what kind of sentence-part I'm talking about.

For example, with the Aimee Bender sentence below:

In the distance (prepositional phrase), the blue hospital (article, adjective, noun/subject) rose (verb/predicate) up in the sky (prepositional phrase), a jellyfish against water (appositive renaming "hospital;" article, noun, prepositional phrase).

Plug in my own words using the template: Behind the church, the thick river sloshed around its rocks, a boozy uncle tripping across the dance floor.

Notice, I strayed from my template--my appositive at the close of the sentence has a different arrangement of nouns and verbs. My sentence simply wanted to go in a slightly different direction, and I let it. Also, Bender's sentence relates a visual image; mine is more about motion.

Interestingly, I caught myself trying to come up with a noun in that last part with three syllables since Bender's jellyfish has three syllables. (I ended up with adjective-noun: boozy uncle.) So, there's another take on this, try to match the cadence of the sentence instead of its grammar.

Or both. The idea here is to play, to stretch, to practice new ways of putting your sentence-machine together.

In some cases, I've included a couple of sentences in sequence, so we can practice catching the rhythm of a string of different types of sentences--structures and lengths, etc.

I would love to see some of you post your imitations in the comments section. I promise to offer effusive praise!

It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old.
Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding

In the distance, the blue hospital rose up in the sky, a jellyfish against water.
Aimee Bender, An Invisible Sign of My Own.

"I liked your egg," she offered, an awkward opening gambit.
Richard Russo, Empire Falls

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Sam was standing over by the side of the house, his pajamas way up high over his tan-and-white shoes.
Raymond Carver, "I Could See the Smallest Things."

The troops resumed their march, striding off to the applause of the townspeople.
E.L. Doctorow, The March

Bending under the weight of their packs, sweating, they climbed steadily in the pine forest that covered the mountainside.
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Down with love, I thought, and all its theatrics.
Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love

There was a family. All were little. Their arms were little, and their hands were little, and their height was not tall, and their feet very small.
Sandra Cisneros, House on Mango Street

He had assumed that she too would be lazy and absent-minded in the daytime; he had pictured her taking long baths and devoting whole hours to the bedroom mirror, trying on different dresses and new ways of fixing her hair--perhaps leaving the mirror only to waltz lightly away on the strains of imaginary violins, whirling in a dream through the sunlit house and returning to smile over her shoulder at her own flushed image, and then having to hurry to get the beds made and the rooms in order in time for his homecoming.
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

Novelist Barbie

2010-08-09T06:48:00.018-04:00

Before I went to NYC to meet my new editor at St. Martins, I bought my first grown-up blazer. It was black, ordered online from the Gap, nothing special, and I paired it up with gray slacks, a white blouse, and a chunky necklace I'd found at my favorite jewelers, Target.

I felt a bit ridiculous wearing the ensemble, like a little kid dressing up for career day. When I grow up, I'm going to be a writer and this is how a writer dresses for a breakfast meeting with her editor. Ironically, my editor showed up at the restaurant in leggings and a cute little summer dress, exactly the kind of thing I had planned on wearing before someone told me I needed that flippin' blazer.

Is this yet another post on one of my favorite writerly habits, trusting your instinct? Should I pontificate on the importance of wearing what you want to wear instead of worrying it over, posting a call for fashion help in a cyber writing-room, taking advice from way too many places and ending up with the dullest, least-individualistic outfit? An outfit so vague, so gray that it only succeeded in making me look ultra-amateurist? An outfit that made me look like what I was: a deeply insecure person trying to pull off confident?

Aah, of course. A lesson in how your true, most central, deepest instinct is the voice to follow. I could open it up a little, extend it to the revision notes my editor sent a few weeks ago, how I now must have the confidence to remember the most important thing: I am the writer. My editor is the editor. While she has the final say and she is arguably the most important person in my professional life at the moment, she is also the woman in the leggings and cute dress. She knows her stuff--she knows my book--but she's not scary.

Her requested edits are--most of them--very, very smart. I'm grateful for them. The trouble is: am I good enough? Can I do everything she's hoping I can do?

Oh, if only we lived in the kind of world where I might have asked her for wardrobe advice. If I could have emailed her to ask when and where she wanted to meet, and please tell me exactly what to wear. Is black really an unspoken requirement? Must I learn how to wear a blazer without feeling ridiculous?

Actually, this post is about not worrying. In a sense, I'm talking myself off the ledge here. I'm forgiving myself. In truth, no matter what I initially thought to wear to that meeting, the fact that I frantically sought help is completely understandable. I had never been to anything like what I was walking into in New York, and it was rather smart of me (if little geeky and spazzy) to seek the advice of others.

Plus, now, I know better. Next time, I'll wear leggings.

Also, as desperately as I want to satisfy every one of my editor's suggestions--and in fact, go beyond them, I want to the book to be so damn good that she reads the new version with tears in her eyes--I am just a person doing the best I can. A terribly lame and cliched statement for me to put in my blog, but my NYC outfit already confirmed my lameness, so there. I can say it. And, cliches become cliches because they're true: I am just a person doing the best I can. That's what we all are.

So, wherever you are today, press on. Don't be afraid to wear a dorky outfit or to write some seriously trite or stupid or out-there stuff. Seek advice. Work like hell. Don't apologize for your stories, for their weaknesses. Just do the work to make them better. Then, it is your job to be your work's biggest advocate.

Remind yourself: This is me, and this is what I can do.

If a Story Opens on Christmas, Somebody Better Die

2010-07-27T14:31:00.014-04:00

In our workshop at Tin House, Ann Hood spoke of an important guideline in story-telling: if a story opens on Christmas, someone better die by the end of the story. (She mentioned who had said this, but I didn't get the name down. Maybe somebody reading this post knows?)

She went on to discuss how a story must move from positive to negative or vice-versa. The narrative must "flip." I remember how one of my instructors from grad school, David Payne, used to illustrate this same point. He said, if the flag on the mailbox is up at the beginning of the story, it better be down by the end. So, if you begin with happy, happy Christmas morning, you'd better head straight to a funeral.

Ann gave some examples from her own novels and explained that this principal of story-telling allows her to know something crucial about the ending once she writes the beginning. For example, in The Knitting Circle, the protagonist's hands are empty. A little detail the reader will sail right past, and that's the beauty of rich story-telling: while the reader intuits on some level what the writer's up to, it is artfully subtle. Mary's empty hands point to emotional scarcity and loss in her life. In the last scene of the novel, Mary's hands are full of yarn--she is now a woman of abundance. The literal mirrors the emotional. The story flips.

Ann's novel begins on the down beat and moves to a more positive place. The funeral, so to speak, happens right off and the rest of the narrative builds to Christmas. This if often, though certainly not always, how fiction works. The beginning of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge portrays Henry, Olive's husband, driving alone to work. He and Olive are so separate, physically and emotionally, Olive is literally off the page for that first scene. Yet, the last scene is one of her physically drawing close to the man she falls in love with after Henry's death. This is the movement of the story, the arc. John Updike's Rabbit, Run begins with Rabbit shuffling home from work, stopping to watch some kids play basketball. He's stalling, he's inactive. And while the ending is hardly emotionally positive, it is at least on one level, a flip: now, he's running.

But it's not just the beginning and the end of the piece that makes this kind of postive-to-negative shift or vice-versa; it also happens at the beginning and end of chapters and in scenes. Ann shared with us a revision method she uses: after the draft is completed, she prints it out, then goes through and marks the beginning and close of each scene with a plus sign (+) or a minus sign (-). Next, she looks for any scenes that have the same sign at the beginning and end: these are, she said, flat scenes. There's no change. She then determines if the scene is necessary; it could be the information could be given in summary. Or, if she decides to include it, she re-works it, giving it more emotional range.

It's important to note: the concept of positive and negative is relative to the piece. A positive doesn't really have to be all that positive--as we might, outside of the work think about "positive"and the same with the negative: the scene/chapter/book must simply step up or down, regardless of where it is on the staircase.

There are a million ways to do this, especially at the scene level. It's a mistake to equate positive with happy and negative with sad when applying this. As in the John Updike example, the shift might simply be a change in energy. Or, a change in setting: something as simple as light dimming or the temperature changing. A scene might begin and end with contrasting images or concepts.

Since I've been home from Tin House, I've gone a little +/- crazy, picking up books off my shelf at random and seeing if this holds true. It usually does, though it's not always easy to see it. For example, the prologue to Michael Cunningham's The Hours begins with Virginia Woolf putting stones in her pocket, preparing to drown herself, and ends with a mother and a son standing on a bridge, watching a group of soldiers march by. Even though Virginia's corpse is there, under the bridge, in the water, it's interesting to see how Cunningham uses the image of an excited little boy and his mother in an otherwise completely bleak scene. Similarly, in Kent Haruf's Plainsong, twin boys sneak out in the middle of the night to investigate a mysterious light in the woods and are deeply troubled when they find a teenage couple having sex and arguing.

This notion is timely for me, as I'm working through edits in my novel. My friend Karen had already advised me on this when I bemoaned to her the fact that my editor was calling for "a little more joy." She pointed out that what a story really needs is range. You just can't keep hitting the same notes. And while I think most writers find this range instinctively, bringing it to the practical level is helpful for me. Often, I find I've written a scene that refuses to come to life and I just can't figure out why.

Ever happen to you?

Home Again, Home Again

2010-07-20T07:15:00.009-04:00

Did anyone catch my last post? The one where I bewailed how my Tin House workshop went? I took it down less than a day after I posted it--it was too whiny and self-indulgent and maybe just a bit too confessional.

I had written about the workshop before I had processed it, which, ironically, might be the most important writing lesson I learned last week. One needs space to write and this space takes on a number of dimensions: a physical space and space of time in which to write, but also psychological space. I cannot write about the things that have happened in my own life until I've processed them, or at least, until I've processed how difficult it is to process them.

My daughter says she sometimes feels like she is falling while she is sitting still, and I know exactly what she means. In part, that's why I think I want to branch out into nonfiction. I want to write about how hard it is to know your own life. I'm not so interested in writing about the life lessons I've learned but rather about what I've failed to learn, or about how murky the thinking gets when you try to step out of your life and examine it.

Abby meant it literally, but I'm speaking of a different, meta-emotional place: I am falling and sitting still at the same time. Exactly.

Despite everything, I feel it's important to own up to how very tough that workshop was for me. Steve Almond presented a lecture on the second or third day--all the days are running together--about what they don't teach you in MFA programs. He said a number of things, but what really stuck with me was this: you are going to care about your stories.

I have a lot more to say about Tin House and my struggle to write nonfiction, but I got an email from my editor last night and though she said she was just checking in to see how my summer was going, clearly she's looking to see how the revision of Goliath is going. So, while I want to transcribe every one of my Tin House notes here, and I will, it might take me a while.

I have long loved a quote from poet Gwendolyn Brooks. She said, "What else is there to say but everything?" Even writing from my boring life, my ordinary experiences, and although even in fiction, there truly are no new stories, but only infinite retellings, there's still everything left to say. Everything.

More on Getting Started: A Report from Tin House

2010-07-12T17:01:00.009-04:00

I'm at Tin House Writers' Workshop this week, taking in lectures and workshops and cocktail hour. I have vowed to attend every lecture...except the one I'm missing now, typing away...

So far, my toothbrush has been stolen, the weather is blessedly cool, and I'm luxuriating in all this writing-talk and creative minds zapping about.

May I share a bit of what I'm learning?

Ann Hood, my workshop leader, says you must know the setting and the frame of the story before you begin. I'm okay with setting as a vital first ingredient--it seems natural that you have to begin somewhere specific in time and space--but I was really interested in what she said about the frame or the container of the story. This is basically the time-period of the story, be it a single afternoon, or a pregnancy, or a decade. But, she says, be specific: so-and-so's illness and eventual recovery, the summer so-and-so learned how to ride a motorcycle, the day so-and-so jumped off a bridge. I like the idea of calling it the container: it's the time period that holds the story.

Every scene should open with the setting and the conflict. Or, how she states it: We need to know where we are at the very beginning and why we are there. I love thinking of it that way. The conflict is our reason for showing up in the scene.

Stay tuned...

The Carnival-Planning Committee: On Getting Started

2010-07-02T01:00:00.003-04:00

A carnival-planning committee gathers in my brain every time I start a new story.

The first to talk is always the wide-eyed girl in a plaid jumper--JCPenney catalogue circa 1979--who wants nothing more than a Ferris Wheel. Make it the highest, truest, most devasting and wonderful Ferris Wheel in the World, she says, hand to heart. The tiny, overly made-up woman with the massive hair-do disagrees: What we need is pizazz! Lights! Sparkle! Her accent is strong but hard to place; she could be from Alabama or London. The quiet boy in the back mumbles, Oh, the humanity. He wants a house of mirrors. A snake pit. Fire. Lizard-lady. There's the farmer who makes a case for tons of livestock. Every kind of animal. Do-it-yourself milking exhibitions. And frozen lemonade, he adds, mopping his forehead with his handkerchief. What we really need, he says, is local flavor.

Ms. Big-Hair is again calling for excitement: We've got to draw them in! Special effects! Wonders! The boy speaks up: Pirates, he says. Ghosts. The nerdy girl clasps her hands together: Oh! This could be so good, if only we could get started! There's a guy in a suit who consults his watch. He doesn't know how exactly he got wrangled into this meeting. He speaks up to say he supposes they could use a tilt-a-whirl of some sort, like every good carnival has, and he wonders, consequently, how long will this production take to put together? The boy groans. You can't rush the perfect carnival. Ms. Big Hair pops a pill. She has a headache, she wants to give up. The boy rolls his eyes. The spectacle of it all, he sighs. The farmer pours more coffee. He examines his fingernails and frowns at a thought he's not willing to express.

And suddenly, they all have places to go: The farmer has something to feed or mow. The Suit is always busy. Ms. Big Hair wants to go check what's on ebay, what might the committee buy? You know, to get inspired? The boy shuffles away to play music, take a rest. Who needs this? Aren't there enough shitty carnivals out there, taking up space in the world?

And the earnest little plaid-jumper girl is finally left alone. She herself has chores to do, emails to check, but if she stays a minute, she just might come up with something. She might be able to shake off all the other suggestions, forget the little boy's angst, the big-hair woman's anxiety, the suit's practicalities. She longs to return to the Ferris Wheel of her imagination. She longs to begin.

The Exquisite Beauty of Truly Awful Poetry

2010-06-23T05:30:00.012-04:00

I love trolling for bad poetry. I search for it, dropping in on community house poetry nights, writers' groups open-mike nights, the culminating ceremony at creative writing night classes. Once, when I was in college, I attended a poetry slam in downtown Asheville. It was a first date, we were fellow counselors at a summer camp for gifted middle-schoolers, and it was pouring down rain. We were umbrella-less, and I was wearing my cutest, littlest top--the kind of handkerchief-for-a-shirt-thing I got away with back then--and torn-up jeans. My date was wearing what my date was wearing--who cares? I don't even remember his name. But I remember the beauty of the event, a hideous naked man hopping around a plywood stage, yelping out his lines, injustices in this world, a hiccup in the outer reaches of space, the outrageous audacity of our comfortable silence. We had better speak, man.

I love really bad rhymes. Milkshake/heartbreak. Tug of war/out the door. Tears in my eyes/it's you I despise. Democracy/We're blind, you see. The girl I love most/choking on charred toast (extra points for alliteration).

Prose writers have a more difficult time pulling off this beautiful awful. In prose, the weak story is made weaker for speaking it aloud, but in poetry, there's the beat. The line and verse. The heady importance of words that rhyme.

Which is not to say that good poetry and bad is indistinguishable. In fact, I think this distinction is painfully obvious. Yet I think there is more than one way to enjoy a poetry reading. There are poems that are so exquisite, you enter into them rather than simply listen to them. The kind that really have to be read aloud to free them from the physical confinements of paper and ink. The kind whose beauty settles into the room like smoke, or like something a person could dine on. Poetry whose technical feats I know nothing of, except that these precisions are translated into something unspeakable, something that transcends the tangible, the worldly. Something so beautiful and pure and true that you can't believe its made out of such a common medium. Words, those things even I use.

And then, there's the poetry that is what it is. The leaping about a plywood stage all skinny and hideous and so very naked, one wants to avert one's eyes. What's happening now is both intensely personal and crucial in its public-ness. Our barbaric yelp. Yes. Here it is, the Thing of It: There's something more beautiful than the work itself--any work. What I'm speaking of, what is often easier to see when the work is awful, what is more breath-taking and startling and lovely. It's the impulse to create. Our humanness, our connecting instinct. We had better speak, man.

John Gardner's Psychic Distance

2010-06-17T10:28:00.009-04:00

Directly linked to the function of point of view in fiction is the concept of psychic distance: the distance between the narrative and mind, heart, and body of the pov character. I first encountered this concept in the classic book of fiction-writing exercises, What If?, but the concept is originally from John Gardner's The Art of Fiction. Here's the example Gardner gives:

1.It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
2.Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
3.Henry hated snowstorms.
4.God how he hated these damn snowstorms.
5.Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul.

Here, from 1 to 5, we get the whole spectrum, from bird's eye to the way it feels to be inside the character's body. I just love this. Don't you?

Try this: Use Gardner's five sentences as a template and go from 1 to 5. Here, I'll go first: (I'm switching to present tense, adding more details, just because I want to.)

1. It is summer, 1988. An adolescent girl, thin and wispy and bikini-clad, steps onto a heat-soaked driveway.
2. Sarah Emily Thornbird has always had pale, un-tannable skin.
3. Sarah hates her paleness.
4. She yearns for a golden, beach-perfect tan.
5. She can see it: a coppery, buttery tan that will cast a softening glow over her bony limbs and create the illusion of sexy.

Now, your turn. Feel free to share in comments. (I'd love to see what you come up with.)

Oh, and I found a really great post on psychic distance on novelist Emma Darwin's blog, This Itch of Writing. You should check it out--she explains not only what psychic distance is, but also, how to use it.

A Few Words on Point of View

2010-06-14T18:39:00.037-04:00

A student emails me: she's just joined a writing group who believes you can tell the difference between professional-quality fiction and the amateur stuff by how consistent the point of view is. This is what they’ve told her at her first meeting, critiquing her first piece. Imagine.

I want to back up and first say that my one-week writing class was her first venture into creative writing. My class's main objectives were to encourage and inspire. We read Ann Lamott and applauded each other’s shitty first drafts. We literally played with language: arranged and rearranged scraps of paper with words printed on them. I encouraged them to seek out a writing group when they returned home--for support--and she did. I'm trying to imagine me sitting down to try my hand at, say, watercolor painting--my student's a gifted visual artist, a professional who teaches art, who has her own work up in galleries--and have somebody point out the many differences between my first tentative brushstrokes and Winslow Homer's light-dappled rowboats.

Which is not to say that her writing group was altogether wrong. There does need to be a reliable point of view system at work in any piece of fiction. This means that a writer must respect the limitations of the point of view he or she has chosen. A first person narrative, for example, cannot suddenly morph into third. Nor can the first person narrator know more than he knows.

But, then again, think for a moment about everything you know. I know, for example, that my daughter’s favorite color is red. Now, she’s not here, and I’m not in her head, but if I were the first-person narrator in a work of fiction, I could tell you straight-out: Abby loves the color red. She will choose the red soda, the red sandals (especially if they’re sparkly), the red notebook. I don’t have to say, “Abby once told me that she likes red.” I can skip all that: “Abby likes red.”

I also know that my younger sister would never get a tattoo and that my older sister would (has). I know that fifty years ago, in this part of North Carolina, furniture was king. I know that, in the spring of 1992, (almost) everyone in my high school graduating class knew at least the chorus to “Hard to Handle” by the Black Crowes. I’m willing to bet most of them still know it. I do.

Of course, I don’t know-know all of these things, or any of them. But, I think it just shows that point of view is a bit trickier than my student’s writing group made it out to be. Little inconsistencies--what I imagine they were talking about--are usually pretty easy to point out. Sometimes, it’s a pronoun slip, sometimes it’s a problem of perspective: it just would not sound natural for me to describe how my own blue eyes are widening at the sight of my younger sister’s brand-new tattoo. And, these little inconsistencies are pretty easy to fix.

But these are the mere mechanics of point of view; point of view is about space and humanity and art and the language with which the story is told. I think one should save most point of view worries for the second or third draft. Most stories simply lean towards a point of view in the early drafts. It’s organic. Pliant, too, at this stage: If you hear a character speaking to you, I say go ahead and write it in first, and if later, you sense a need to put a little space between the narrative and the protagonist, switch to third.

I think sometimes we try to make too many decisions too quickly. We have to be calm and ride out the small and large identity crises our stories suffer through. Uncertainty, in life and in writing, is uncomfortable. But, in both writing and life, uncertainty is a given. It's part of the process. Relax; you're supposed to feel this way.

In any case, I think it’s short-sighted to say that point of view alone determines a story’s worth. Also, I think the real trick is not in avoiding slip-ups but rather in fully realizing the dimensions of a particular point of view. The loss comes not in mis-use, but in under-use.

The Seat of Artistic Delight

2010-06-07T12:29:00.008-04:00

Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame.

Vladimir Nabokov

I love this quote. Love it, love it. It reminds me what I'm doing here. Why if I skip my writing time, if I'm not reading something I absolutely love, I go jittery and stupid and more than a little blue.

It buoys me, reminds me that worry has no place in this process. Don't allow it to settle in. Don't try be too clever; try not to apologize. Don't fidget. This writing-thing doesn't happen in our intellectual selves nearly as much as we think it does, and I don't think it's a matter of heart so much either. This is instinct. It's gut. Writing is tough, absolutely, and just because there shouldn't be any worry doesn't mean there shouldn't be struggle and hard work. But the worry is counterfeit. It's ego. The struggle, though, the wrestling the story onto the page, the fight to find that spot--the place where art, not mere smartness, comes from--is real.

I don't know who I am if I'm not writing, and especially if I'm not writing from that space--the spot between my shoulder-blades. Any time I try to use any other part of me to do the work, it comes out something else. I don't know what it is, but it's not writing. It's the stuff you skim off jam. It's an overly practiced smile. It's plastic and it smells funny and it's gumming up the works.

This practice of writing from the spine, it is an act of worship. It's soul-habit; writers (and readers) are, more than anything, seekers.

Oh, I guess I'm a little dreamy this evening, thinking through all these things. Drifting away from what Nabokov was trying to say. I'm just so blessed, you know? I love to write. There, how simple.

Day 7: Mona

2010-06-07T10:38:00.000-04:00

From Aimee Bender's An Invisible Sign of My Own:

On Saturday, I spend the whole day cleaning the apartment. I make the kitchen floor so white it's a dentist's dream; I vacuum; I scrub the shower grout. I shine the kitchen faucet until I can see my eye on the nozzle. I fill the trash can with a bouquet of dirty paper towels from dusting. I throw out magazines. He shows up at eight...I get [him] a glass of water he hasn't asked for, and he stands up to take it and I know I have to make the first move so I do it fast--he's swirling the water, clear liquid inside hard glass, it reminds me of the hospital, and I step closer, halve the space, and I just spend some time with the inside of his elbows, the burn marks from the science class. He watches me closely. I don't kiss his mouth right away, I kiss instead his neck and the side of his cheek and the inside of his elbow.

PS: Aimee Bender has a new book out: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.

Day 7 (and a half): Goliath

2010-06-06T06:45:00.002-04:00

Because it's my blog and I can do what I want. :)

From my forthcoming novel:

Beyond, at Christmas field, the air was so cold, it turned the trees to brittle sticks and stiffened the grass. The stars above were crystal. The onlookers clasped arms and felt their lungs constricting against the frigid air. They swayed and watched the expanse of black sky, the frozen stars. Ray put his bare hands to the sky, praying, and the people fell silent. They dipped their noses into their scarves, seeking warmth. Those first shepherds had been merely bored, fighting sleep before the angels arrived. The people of Goliath likewise did not know what was coming, what, if anything, they might hope for.

Across town, Rosamond was asleep now, already dreaming. It was the day she first met Hatley Rogers, salesman, and she dreamed it exactly as it had happened. She was in her parents’ house, the same one she was living in now, and she could even feel the thick gold light of the living room that afternoon, a warm fall day, the curtains drawn. The salesman swept his hat off when she answered the door, bowed, and took her hand, warm and moist from stirring gravy in the kitchen. He had eyes so deeply blue that at first they appeared almost purple. The late afternoon sunshine made his oiled black hair gleam. She was dreaming it all away while the others gathered in the stead of the sidewalk preacher. They stood out in the dark, watching the sky for a certain bright star, and Rosamond watched the salesman take her warm hand and, incredibly, pull her towards him until she was close enough for their lips to touch. “There,” he said. “I’ve kissed you now. What about that?”

Finally, then, out on the field, as if it was meant to be a reward for their faithful waiting, their months of spoken and unspoken sorrow, bits of white began to fall on the people’s shoulders, on their outstretched hands. It landed in their eyelashes. “Snow,” they called to each other, laughing. Ray heard them, peering up into the sky himself, still searching. “It’s snowing,” they said, their faces turned upwards to meet it.

Day 6: Reverend John Ames

2010-06-06T05:33:00.000-04:00

Joy amid grief, from Marilynne Robinson's Gilead:

"Strange are the uses of adversity." That's a fact. When I"m up here in my study with the radio on and some old book in my hands and it's nighttime and the wind blows and the house creaks, I forget where I am, and it's as though I'm back in hard times for a minute or two, and there's a sweetness in the experience which I don't understand. But that only enhances the value of it. My point here is that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature. I remember my father down on his heels in the rain, water dripping from his hat, feeding me biscuit from his scorched hand, with that old blackened wreck of a church behind him and steam rising where the rain fell on embers, the rain falling in gusts and the women singing, "The Old Rugged Cross" while they saw to things, moving so gently as if they were dancing to the hymn, almost. In those days, no grown woman ever let herself be seen with her hair undone, but that day even the grand old women had their hair falling down their backs like schoolgirls. I was so joyful and sad. I mention it again because it seems to me much of my life was comprehended in that moment. Grief itself has often returned me to that morning, when I took communion from my father's hand. I remember it as communion, and I believe that's what it was.

Day 5: Clarissa

2010-06-05T09:45:00.000-04:00

From Michael Cunningham's The Hours:

There are still flowers to buy. Clarissa feigns exasperation (though she loves doing errands like this), leaves Sally cleaning the bathroom, and runs out, promising to be back in half an hour.

It is New York City. It is the end of the twentieth century.

The vestibule door opens onto a June morning so fine and scrubbed Clarissa pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths. As if standing at the edge of a pool she delays for a moment the plunge, the quick membrane of chill, the plain shock of immersion. New York in its racket and stern brown decrepitude, its bottomless decline, always produces a few summer mornings like this; mornings invaded everywhere by an assertion of new life so determined it is almost comic, like a cartoon character that endures endless, hideous punishments and always emerges unburnt, unscarred, ready for more. This June, again, the trees along West Tenth Street have produced perfect little leaves from the squares of dog dirt and discarded wrappers in which they stand. Again the window box of the old woman next door, filled as it always is with faded red plastic geraniums pushed into the dirt, has sprouted a rogue dandelion.

What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.

Day 4: Amy and Billy

2010-06-04T14:05:00.000-04:00

This one is like an Appalachian ballad, full of loss and beauty, love and betrayal. Here, Billy has discovered his wife is pregnant by another man.

from Ron Rash's One Foot in Eden:

"What are you going to do, Billy?" she asked.

At that moment I truly did not know. I knew what many another man might do. He'd raise his hand and slap Amy stout enough to lay her flat on the floor. Some would do worse. Then they'd walk out the door and never come back.

"Do you love me?" I finally said, my eyes steady on hers. That was my last question, the one that most mattered.

Amy's blue eyes looked tired, the way they'd been a lot the last couple of months, but she looked pretty, prettier than she'd ever looked, her bosoms and hips fuller, her skin bright and glowing like she'd bathed in a tub of sunshine.

"Yes," she said.

"You swear you'll never be with him again," I said.

"I've done told you that," Amy said.

"Swear it then," I said.

"I swear it," Amy said.

Day 3: The Man and the Boy Share a Coke

2010-06-03T05:59:00.000-04:00

This one isn't happy so much as an enormous relief. As we shuffle through Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic wasteland, we need two comforts: the love of parent for child and vice-versa--which we get throughout the story--and the occasional tiny burst of good fortune.

From Cormac McCarthy's The Road:

On the outskirts of the city they came to a supermarket. A few old cars in the trashstrewn parking lot...In the produce section in the bottom of the bins they found a few ancient runner beans and what looked to have once been apricots, long dried to wrinkled effigies of themselves...By the door were two softdrink machines that had been tilted over into the floor and opened with a prybar. Coins everywhere in the ash. He sat and ran his hand around in the works of the gutted machines and in the second one it closed over a cold metal cylinder. He withdrew his hand slowly and sat looking at a Coca Cola.

What is it, Papa?

It's a treat. For you.

What is it?

Here. Sit down.

He slipped the boy's knapsack straps loose and set the pack on the floor behind him and he put his thumbnail under the aluminum clip on the top of the can and opened it. He leaned his nose to the slight fizz coming from the can and then handed it to the boy. Go ahead, he said.

The boy took the can. It's bubbly, he said.

Go ahead.

He looked at his father and then tilted the can and drank. He sat there thinking about it. It's really good, he said.

Day 2: Lou is in love

2010-06-01T19:55:00.000-04:00

From Annie Dillard's The Maytrees:

After they married she learned to feel their skin as double-sided. They felt a pause. Theirs was too much feeling to push through the crack that led down to the dim world of time and stuff. That world was gone. They held themselves alert only in those few million cells where they touched. She learned from those cells his awareness and his courtesy. Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.

Day 1: I will go to Boston

2010-06-01T05:05:00.000-04:00

From Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies:

So picture me, Silvaney, if you will. I want you to see me plain. It is spring and skittery sunshiny day, I stand on the river bridge already missing my sweetie whose gone to the war, the river spews and boils like Genevas coffee, the wind blows hard and a bugle call comes across the river from the Army camp. I wear a dead womans pretty locket, I am free to come and go as I please. I will go to Boston and see what there is to see. Yet always I will be bound to you my love and my heart and I will come back for you one day soon and take you back to the mountain.

Seven Days of Joy

2010-05-31T10:04:00.000-04:00

The first story in my collection of stories is about a sixties housewife who loses her mind and chases a swarm of bees through a cornfield. In another story, a twelve-year-old boy--a misfit among middle-class middle-schoolers--is hit by a bus. A pregnant teenager is abandoned along the highway in a snowstorm. A tender young mother is electrocuted in her own basement.

Just after the book's publication, I was interviewed by a newspaper guy who observed, "You seem like a cheerful person in real life, but your stories are so dark." Though this wasn't really a question, it seemed like something I needed to respond to. I was at a loss. I'd never thought about it in those terms. I didn't think my work was particularly dark, though, of course it was, it is. And I have never considered myself to be all that cheerful. I mean, there are things I enjoy, things I get excited about--such as a person who has read my book and now wants to ask me questions about it. Even kind of dumb questions like, what gives? Why do you--such an ordinary-mommyish-teacherly sort of person--write such morbid stuff?

I'll take a stab at explaining myself here. When I first started writing fiction, I believed everything profound and interesting and artistic and true had to be full of despair and angst. I couldn't muster up an ounce of joy that didn't feel contrived. I think maybe I've seen too many very special episodes of Little House on a Prairie and, worse: Full House. I want grit, edginess: I want beauty in sadness. I want the stark, perfect ending to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I want that moment at the end of War of the Roses where Kathleen Turner's character uses her last bit of strength to push her husband's hand off her shoulder.

But now, I'm starting in on a new draft of a novel I've written about a dying factory town's last hurrah. Not the most heartening subject, but I do mean to include a bit of hope in the story, and now my editor is very wisely calling for a little more joy. This is not the biggest change she's asking for, but it might be the hardest for me to carry out. I've grown up enough now--as a person, as a writer--to see that my inability to make a happy moment feel complete and organic is a failing as a writer. It's a matter of deepening the emotional tenor. And, I think it will serve the book well: weaving in few instances of carefully crafted happiness will (hopefully) make the story more authentic, not less.

I'm up for this task. I can buckle down and get happy. I want to chronicle it here, in my comfy little blog. I will begin like I begin any huge writing task: I will look to Marilynne Robinson and Annie Dillard. Richard Yates. Elizabeth Strout. I will even call on Cormac McCarthy, who wrote my very favorite desperately bleak novel.

I will begin tomorrow. Seven days of joy for the first week of June. Watch for it here. And, please, please, do for me that thing every writer needs from time to time--cheer me on. Console me and inspire me with times you've seen it done--joy as a believable, non-hokey emotion in film, literature, or real life. Show me such a thing is possible.

Based on a True Story

2010-05-22T14:48:00.000-04:00

I'm trying something new. I'm writing an essay.

The essay is actually a take-off of one of my posts here, that odd little bit I wrote about how I should have married Michael Jackson. For the purposes of this blog, I tried to narrow the focus to something writing-related; I had just finished my book and, as a result, I was suffering from a sort of free-fall. It can feel that way, can't it? We writers need a project. Now. If I don't have a place to blast away this manic writing-energy, I'll spin off into fantasies that are utterly bizarre even for fantasies. I mean, Michael Jackson? When I was eight, I wanted to marry John Schneider. At twelve, Kirk Cameron; Johnny Depp at twenty. And at thirty-five, this wobbly, emaciated, eccentric (to put it kindly), and frail person: half-little boy, half-icon. Both awe-inspiring and pathetic. A man who had had so much plastic surgery his nose was dissolving away by the end.His own sister called him a pedophile. This larger-than-life tragifigure, a generous philanthropist, a gifted artist, and one of the most magnificent entertainers of our time. A damaged soul.

Anyway, the essay. With my fiction, I've rarely been able to draw a clear line between my own life experiences and the events in my stories. My characters are composites, my settings are hugely embellished versions of real-life places I know, and my plots are (usually) entirely concocted. Sure, I use plenty of autobiographical info. for the details, but at least on the surface, the work is not about me. In fact my goal, as a fiction-writer is to get out of the way of the story.

But, now, with my essay I can unapologetically focus on myself. I can ramble on about my odd obsessions and pontificate on what all this MJ-obsession might mean. Is it related to my childhood? My relationship with my father? Does it have something to do with how tragedy and magic and regret and ambition have played out in my own life? Is it because I really do love to dance? I can self-diagnose, self-obsess, self-deprecate, self-pity. I can sit by the pond and bend forward, gazing deeply into my neuroses. Admire them, love them, throw rocks at them.

Yet, of course, all this self-stuff is inherently risky in a way fiction-writing isn't: it's me. No hiding behind a hypothetical father-daughter relationship, no variables, no alternate realities. The tough truths I expose--to myself and to others--are about me. The character squirming there on the page--oh, crap--that's me.

And I still have to worry about the reader. It always comes back to the reader. If I keep the essay so narrow that it never rises up to meet the reader, or, in the very least, to offer the reader a way into the story--then all I have is a diary entry. And, an uninteresting one at that. Even I get tired of myself. Writing is dialogue with the world, even if you do it all alone.

PS. I knew I had to write about Michael Jackson because my response to his death was just way too much. I was painting my kitchen and crying. I watched Thriller on youtube, showed my kids a video of MJ's very first moonwalk. The very first time I spoke with my agent on the phone--when he called to offer representation--I babbled on and on about Michael Jackson. (My agent, btw, is incredibly gracious and very, very patient with me. After I launched into my wreckless babbling, he didn't even try to rescind his offer. Instead, he chuckled good-naturedly and changed the subject.) Anyway, I figured it was time to write it out and be done with it. So much of this writing-thing is about that, writing it out. Anybody know what I'm talking about?

It's the Writing, Stupid

2010-05-18T04:50:00.000-04:00

My friend Karen said it: "It's the writing, stupid." We were talking about persistence, arguably the most important writing habit, but we agreed: persistence is more than torpedo-style submitting. It's more than creating the perfect submittal-organizer database, and it's more than hunting down the perfect agent.

Persistence is about craft. It's about revising your story until there is not a single spare word. Until every line serves its two purposes: advancing the story and revealing character. It's about reworking your prose until your novel, as Ron Rash once advised, is one long poem. Persistence is about sweating it out until your prose is so smooth it makes your reader forget he's reading. It's about the years that go into this, the mornings you rise, and, again and again, confront your words, your story. It's about a level-headed honesty and a belief in the impossible, about pushing your story until nothing about it nags at you, until there are no parts you frown over or try to ignore.

It's about tossing the story that simply doesn't work. Throwing out the novel that, you now realize, after months or maybe years of work, is invaluable only for what it taught you. Though giving up on an entire novel is oh so tough, you can't regret the time you've spent with it. It's about taking those lessons and starting all over again.

Don't get me wrong: publishing is important. It's very important. It is what we're all striving for. And, I've spent my share of time poring over duotrope and new pages. I've spent whole afternoons--precious, child-free writing time--licking envelopes, setting up databases to track where exactly my stories are and how long they've been there. I've cried real tears over rejection letters, I've given up. I've gloried at the acceptance email, I've loved the sight of my words in print. What we writers want are readers--we want eyeballs on our words--and the regular practice of submitting is the only way to go about it.

So, go ahead. Submit. Submit like mad. But don't let it distract you from what is really, really wonderful about all this: it's the writing. It's the butt-in-chair time. This is what we're here for. Why we show up at our desks every morning. What we fell in love with in the first place.

Upon Returning

2010-05-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

There is a chocolate pudding hand print on the cabinet door. A trio of plastic cups--including the Flintstones Pebbles mug from my own childhood--filled with water and pretty weeds, drawing ants on the windowsill. Email messages. Laundry. Notes from preschool. A stained coffee carafe. The pool bag full of towels gone sour with wet. A ruined novel left on the front porch, soaked in the rain.

My children, pinballing off the furniture, unsure what to do with me now that I'm back. My husband, offering me Japanese take-out and vaguely apologizing for the mess. My teacher bag ready for tomorrow night's class. And the story, grown cold on my hard drive.

I attend to these tasks with my own slant on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's a return to balance, beginning at the bottom of the pyramid. First, basic physical needs: chicken teriyaki. Kiss husband, hug kids. Next, stability. I windex away the ants, throw out weeds when my daughter isn't looking. Post the preschool notice on the refrigerator door, teach my class, come home. Sleep. Finally, finally, wipe away the chocolate hand print.

Next, self-actualization: my story, my essay, this blog. I check email and facebook and zoetrope and weather.com. I stare down the file icon on my desktop. More coffee. I need some chapstick, a grocery list, an attagirl, a bit more caffeine, a surge of ballsy. A match, a dance, a jolt, perfect quiet.

Stalking Bret Lott

2010-04-30T05:16:00.001-04:00

I was a middle school teacher in the spring of 1999 the first time I heard Bret Lott's name. It was the end of a day near the end of my third year of teaching and I was going to be married in the summer. I was driving home, headed down highway 18 in Lenoir, North Carolina, crawling through a string of stoplights. A few furniture factory plants, a Little Caesars. An outdoor sunglasses vendor.

Go beyond the call, the radio announcer said. It was a Christian station and this was his bit. His job was to spotlight a believer impacting his community with an outreach of some magnitude or to call attention to a Christian making news in the secular world. He particularly liked to mention Christian sightings in the entertainment industry. Billy Baldwin holding Bible studies in his trailer. An eighties sitcom star who now played a Christian superhero. Kirk Cameron. One of the nurses on ER. And today, Bret Lott, an outspoken believer who wrote literary fiction and whose novel Jewel had just been selected for Oprah's book club. In his memoir Before We Get Started, Lott later referred to Oprah as the Force. Of course, this was going to change everything for him, his book, his career.

And for me: I'm not sure I'd even heard the term literary as a genre used before. I knew I liked John Irving. Margaret Atwood. I knew I didn't like Christian fiction as a genre. I'd been frustrated with how cut-and-dried what I'd read of it made the Christian life and its struggles seem. I knew, even back then--me, young and teacherly, living in a tiny apartment on top of a graveled hill, in my last days of laundromats and Lean Cuisine dinners--that life of any philosophical stripe is gloriously complicated.

I read Jewel on my honeymoon and enrolled in a creative writing class the following spring. By the fall of 2001, I'd quit my job and was checking out MFA programs. My friend Sheryl Monks likens the call to write to Joseph Campbell's notion of the hero's journey: a mentor steps up, wiggles a finger. Come. I've yet to meet Bret Lott in person, but I've accepted his invitation all the same. I've pursued him the way every aspiring writer should seek the creator of work that inspires us: I've read his books. He taught me voice and how the lyric quality of really good prose can elevate and crystallize any scene, no matter how domestic, how ordinary at first glance. A woman rises from bed on a morning in 1943 and knows she's not of the "rightful age" to bear children and already, I know this woman. Already, I'm in her world and I'm worried for her and inspired by her, and at the same moment, I'm the writer, reading to learn. It's Bret Lott, wiggling his finger. Come, he says.

I was finishing up my MFA when he became the editor of The Southern Review, and for the next couple of years, I submitted regularly. I got my first "ink" from TSR: a scrawled few words on the bottom of the rejection slip: much to admire. A few submissions later, and I had it, not an acceptance, but a hand-written rejection from the man himself: Dear Ms. Woodring--The writing in this is wonderful, but I grew impatient with the disparate pieces the story tried to juggle--Keep us in mind! He signed it; here was proof that finally, finally, I'd made contact. He had read my work.

I kept going. Years later, after the publication of my first novel and my story collection, I submitted a story to a literary magazine contest he was judging. It was a story I'd actually written years ago, when I was full-swing in my Bret Lott phase, when the rhythm of his prose beat through my thoughts constantly. I revised it a bit, and was beyond thrilled to learn a few months later that Lott had selected my story as the winning entry. He wrote of my story, "it is a quiet cameo, a beautifully rendered portrait..."

This happened in 2009, ten years after that spring afternoon when the sunlight filled my car and the radio guy implored me to go beyond the call.

So, what about you? Who is your writing mentor? Have you met him or her? Tell me how his/her work has played a part in calling you to this writer's journey. Any good stalking stories?

(November, 2011: update.)

My Son Keeps a Collection of Mommies at Target: Making Up the Truth

2010-04-22T15:38:00.000-04:00

I love that my three-year-old doesn't quite understand the difference between fabrication and life as it really happens. To him, it's perfectly reasonable to claim that monsters come out of the walls of his bedroom in the dark. The trampoline is a cage. The toilet, a goose. He says he has a collection of other mommies at Target. He doesn't believe any of it, but he's not exactly lying either. For him, the line between real and not real is happily blurred.

The line is much more sharply drawn for my seven-year-old little girl. It annoys her to no end for her brother to claim to remember how things were when she was a baby, three years before he was born. He says, "I am a caterpillar," and she is indignant. This simply is not true.

Poor thing. She is burdened with an infuriating cause: she longs to set the world right. Half-truths and exaggerations offend her. White lies are beyond her sense of fairness. If you ask her, did she have fun playing at her grandparents' house this afternoon, she can't just say yes and get on with it. She can't even just say no or shrug noncommitally and skip away. She is left in a terrible quandary: Did she have fun? How does she know for sure? And, even if most of it was fun, does that mean the whole of it can be called fun? What does that word--fun--even mean?

I suspect it's partly to do with their ages. They may stray a bit as they grow and learn things, as their brains allow for more points of view and as they experience life. I think the pathways, though, the means of expression, are essentially set. They at least have their bents, their tendencies.

But it's not just the two of them: we are all looking to understand what we see and feel, and we are desperate to tell our versions of the truth.

Aiden is no liar. He is afraid to go upstairs by himself; to him, the danger of the dark is exactly equal to the danger of the unseen monsters. What he is saying could be, figuratively, a whole lot more true than what is literal and evident. He doesn't actually have ten mommies stored away in the lawn and garden aisle of Target, but his mother is often distracted. So, the sentiment behind it is true: he wishes he had all those loving mothers lined up, at the ready.

As a fiction-writer, I admire his technique. He tells a truth that is all the more poignant for its emotional precision. He must have absorbed it in the womb: show don't tell, the first rule of fiction-writing.

And little Abby. Abby is a philosopher, a theologian. A questioner. Her drive to get it right is the most universal and high-stakes ambition for any artist. That's what we really want to do, isn't it? Get the details spot-on; we won't call it fun unless the story proves as much. Like Abby, we question, we wonder, we linger over our choice of words. We worry over them, sometimes taking a long time to answer, to let go.

It's an oddly satisfying brand of torture, isn't it?

Try this:

Take a character you've been working on and give him/her an absurd physical ailment that somehow mirrors his/her emotional state. There are tons of examples of this out there--Gregor the dung beetle, anyone?--but I especially love how Aimee Bender does this in her collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. In her story, "Marzipan," for example, the father, grief-stricken over the loss of his own father, wakes up to find a hole where his stomach used to be. Another story, "The Remember" begins: "My lover is experiencing reverse evolution." By the end of the story, he's a salamander.

Imagine: a housewife, frustrated by how her family takes her for granted, literally goes invisible. A no-fun executive turns to lead. An elderly person falls apart, piece by piece. A teenager, all hormones and angst, begins to smolder.

Be Aiden: make it wild and unspeakably true. Be Abby in the details. This is what makes it believable, what makes it all the more heart-breaking or inspiring or ironic.

Then, either toss the exercise, just carrying from it a deeper understanding of your character, or find a way to use it in your story. Maybe it is the story?

Writing on the Slant

2010-04-19T19:42:00.000-04:00

Possibly, my greatest talent in the arena of coordination and, well, luck, is skee-ball. I'm not like great at it or anything, but I am good enough so that whenever we go to Hickory Dickory Dock (our local version of Chuck E. Cheese, but with fewer drunken brawls), my three-year-old insists I toss a couple for him. He's desperate for the tickets he can trade in for tootsie rolls and plastic army men.

I take the first ball. As I rear back and aim, I'm also watching my three-year-old climb the next alley. I'm listening to my seven-year-old ask permission to run off to the other side of the arcade. I'm keeping my eye on my purse. My mommy-radar is on, screening all strangers as potential kidnappers and watching out for big kids looking to push little kids around. I'm calculating roughly what time it is, planning what I'll cook for dinner, speculating whether or not my husband will get home from work on time. I'm thinking I'll call my sister on the way home. My three-year-old is pulling on my sleeve. I aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire. I tear off the tickets when they reel out. I never actually think about what I'm doing.

There's a similar disconnect when it comes to writing fiction: we have to relax our focus a little. Allow for the right kind of distractions; avoid over-thinking. This is especially true when it comes to constructing our characters. We must write them on the slant, giving them a chance to surprise us, which is kind of a tall order, if you think about it. After all, we created them, right? We have to find a way to make it up and not make it up at the same time.

Here are a few writing exercises I plan on unleashing on a short-story class I'm starting tonight, all designed to help you come at your character indirectly:

I Don't Know Why I Stole It: Your character walks into a store, a family member's house/bedroom, an office, a coat closet, a supermarket and steals something of no obvious value. Maybe it's a plastic seashell bracelet. An owl figurine. A pouch of chewing tobacco. A spoon. Do a little free-writing, describing the object, where it was stolen, and a bit, in the character's point of view, explaining why he stole it--or why he doesn't know why he stole it.
Party: Your character is at a party. Describe the party. Is it a kid's birthday party? A cocktail party? A college kegger? A little old lady's garden party? Your character either really wants to be there or is there out of obligation, or for employment purposes--maybe your character is the hired entertainment: the stripper, the magician, the caterer. In any case, there is a person at the party your character is avoiding. Describe the person and your character's thoughts about the person. Show your character in scene, ducking the other person, or maybe running right into them. Throughout the scene, try to inhabit your character's thoughts and his/her body: what does the carpet feel like under his feet? How's the food? Is the music too loud? Does your character's smile feel too stiff? Is your character getting drunk?
Okay, Here's a Sex Scene for You: I generally don't like writing sex scenes. They just aren't terribly interesting...unless something goes wrong. Or, try this: Write a scene where a couple is having sex for the last time. Likely, they won't know it's the last time, yet, you as the writer know it and knowing it will color how you describe the scene. Or just one of them will. Or, maybe one of them comes to that realization halfway through the scene. Or at the end of it. Again, you need to fully inhabit your character's point of view here. Besides the obvious, your character will notice things: the quality of light or darkness in the room, smells and sounds drifting in from other places, odd little sexy and unsexy details like a mole on a shoulder or stubble on an unshaven face.

By the way, Madison Smartt Bell wrote a great essay on a similar concept for Tin House.

Humble Bees: My Week at the Folk School

2010-04-11T09:22:00.000-04:00

A soft-spoken potter. A foreign-born artist who became a US citizen the same day Kennedy was assassinated. A court reporter who, in her normal life, works in a jail, but for this week goes around with blue jeans covered in fresh clay, dangly earrings, and a winning--some might even say giddy--smile. A cheerful and funny weaver who retells Garrison Keillor anecdotes and calls to me from the farm house living room, "Wine, Susan?"

To say nothing of my marvelous students: a teacher, weary from her many impossible tasks yet searching for a way to express her own hard-won lessons and dreams, a communications expert for Federal Express with a funny, Wild West novel half-completed, a French-born, English-raised visual artist committed to taking down the family stories her late sister had dreamed of writing but was never able to. I urge them on with passages from Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, a number of free-writing exercises, and my own convictions about how good writing comes about: there is no straight line, no easy path from the confusing din of this, our story-telling impulse, the clutter of our lives, dreams, and memories and the actual story.

My artist-student helps me form the analogy: this story, whatever it is you wish to tell, is a painting trying to emerge from a blank canvas. If you set out to paint a tree, you will likely get a tree. No surprises. But, if you play with it a bit, close your eyes and draw a few squiggles, step back, look, add a bit of color, a little shading, you'll likely come away with a whole different tree--or an entire forest or a house or a girl or a bulldozer or a monkey or a pond--layered with nuance and light and, well, story.

When it's time to write, sometimes what we really must do is play. Cut our sentences up into words, rearrange them, start with the lyrics to an old Prince song or the first line to a Walt Whitman poem or the hint of a memory we've mostly forgotten. Just make a squiggle or two. Step back. Look.

The weather is perfect, which helps with the overall sensation that I've somehow stepped sideways, slipped a few inches outside the bounds of real life. Artists gather at the dining hall to sing Johnny Appleseed, pass the corn bread, and share: how's your project coming along?

Outside, on the path to the writing studio, there is a cherry tree heavy with blossoms, dripping with bees. It's all right, I have been told. Those are humble bees, the kind that don't sting.

And that's me, coming back from dinner. I'll keep the studio open late tonight. Feel free to stop by, plug in your laptop. The coffee's almost done perking.

I'll Meet the Duck

2010-03-30T07:35:00.000-04:00

When I was nineteen years old, I spent a week touring the eastern part of North Carolina with other future educators. We visited turkey farms and paper mills and ate barbeque. The athiests among us refused to bow their heads for the invocation, and my roommate, predictably, snored. We were a caravan of buses; I was in the chicken pox bus, though of course, I didn't know it at the time. Across the aisle from me sat a dark-haired boy sporting the soulfully lost look I found so appealing in those days. He managed to look the way I wanted to feel: the happy loner, so engrossed in his own thoughts he could care less what was happening on the bus and whether or not anyone was talking to him. He was reading a book, whose title I finally, after dozens of nonchallant glances his way, managed to read: A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.

Margaret Atwood has said that wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pate. I get it; I know the author is not the work, just like the actor is not the part and the artist is not the painting. Her comment further seems to suggest that it is somehow almost cannibalistic, maybe rashly vulgar to admire the duck that gives his very essence--his soul--for our enjoyment. It's unseemly, perhaps. Or maybe only this: it is simply asking too much. The pate-lover is bound to be disappointed with the ordinariness of the duck. The adoring reader will not find genius glimmering from the real-life author, or at least, not the same kind of genius that glitters up from the page. When we read it, it feels spontaneous, that we are uncovering the grace and tilt of the story as we go, but in truth, it most likely took that human-ish author months, years, maybe decades to set it up, put all the pieces in place so they fall and rise and crash and clange beautifully when we come along and set them off.

I know all that, but still, I really like meeting the duck. Writers are rock stars to me; I am the blithering fan. Once, I drove two and a half hours to shake Charles Baxter's hand. A few months ago, I sat one person away from Liz Strout at a reading, and I glanced over and thought, those are the hands that typed Olive Kitteridge. When I met Phillip Gerrard, I told him one of his essays saved my life.

Maybe it's partly because I no longer swoon over the loner on the bus. I suppose I'm too old for that kind of thing, too married, too practical, too over it. My last artist-love happened in college. He was a photography major who rode his bike around campus with a tin cup tied to his backpack. From him, and from myself when I was with him, I learned the old standby "just be yourself," is practically an impossibility. We act, we talk, we choose people to be with for that end--to figure out who we are. It's shifting constantly, adjusting, holding back, stepping forward. It's not something we can somehow surmise, then project. Being yourself is too much in the making.

Soulfully Lost became my pen-pal for the rest of the summer, me returning to live with my parents, picking up my own copy of Owen Meany--appropriately enough, at a Salvation Army thrift store--and suffering through a terrible bout of chicken pox--I'd never had it before. I lost that boy's address well before the summer ended, but I kept up with Irving. And while I've never actually met the man, I did manage to attend AWP the year he gave the keynote address. I skipped dinner that night to be first in line. I found a great seat. He did the Owen Meany voice, and I closed my eyes. Yes. I'd waited fourteen years to hear that voice.

The Habits

2010-03-24T06:23:00.000-04:00

Don't be coy. If you write, even if you only do so infrequently, you're a writer. Learn to think that way, then give your art the space in your life that it deserves.
Daydream wildly. Let your stories, your images, your characters walk around with you while you drive to work, do the shopping, boil spaghetti, take a walk.
Take care of yourself. Speaking of taking walks, invest your time in non-writing habits that keep your body and your brain healthy and alert. So, walk. Run, jog, dance. Eat well, sleep well.
Cull your own life experiences for writing ideas, and especially for details.
Be a generalist. Read everything, learn everything. It's all compost, ready to give rich soil and nourishment to your stories.
Imitate. This is our first and most useful means of learning new skills. This is how we learn spoken language, body language, and--more than we realize--written language. Take your favorite passage or poem and try to copy the grammatical patterns, the sound rhythms, or the structure.
Read. This is how you find words worth imitating. Read in and out of your genre. Read the books you love, not necessarily the books you ought to love. By habitual reading, we develop an internal sense of rhythm and rightness, an array of instincts: the structure of a sentence, a paragraph, a story, how to build a scene, when to end an chapter, how to begin and end an entire book, how to characterize, how to stylize dialogue, pacing...so much more.
Cross-Train. Prose-writers should try their hand at poetry and play-writing, and vice-versa. Not only does it extend and strengthen how you use language, but writing in a different form also gives you the freedom of being a novice. Here, mistakes and clumsiness are part of the fun.
Take risks. Every now and again, you must try to get away with the implausible, the overly sentimental, the hokey, the outright out-there. It will free the part of your brain that dreams this stuff up. Plus--and here's the really great part--every once in a long, long while, you actually get away with the implausible, the sentimental, the hokey, the way, way out-there.
Be Persistent. Persistence is called for in every stage of the game. Your drafts must be thoroughly dreamed, then thoroughly, painstakingly revised. You must be persistent in seeking the company of others who inspire you, who will read your drafts and open them up to even deeper revision. Be persistent when you're ready to send it out. Most of all, be persistent in a daily writing habit. Live the writer's life.

These are the ones that I know of, that I strive to practice consistently. Tell me: which habits, either listed here or ones I haven't thought of, do you find the most helpful? Which are the most difficult to keep to? Which do you find to be the most sustaining?

Greener Grass

2010-03-24T05:39:00.000-04:00

In just eleven days, I'll be leaving all this behind. I'm headed for greener grass. Lush, top-of-the-mountain, top-of-the-world outlook. Morningsong. Nature trails. Weaving looms and smithies. An entire week of someone else preparing my meals. Better: an entire week of talking, constructing, and loving the writing life.

I'm talking about the John C. Campbell Folk School, a place I've been dreaming of for years, and the class I'm teaching, appropriately enough, is called The Habitual Writer. Can't, can't wait.

To those who have already signed up for all the fun and those getting ready to head over now to register: get some rest. Read a really great book. Get ready to climb up that mountain, step into a culture of artists of a variety of crafts and callings, and write, write, write. I'll see you there!