The sky is the palest shade of gray, almost pearl, layered in clouds like rolling mountain ranges. I slept in this morning after a hectic weekend. After I taught the Final Edit workshop for the first time on Saturday I dashed home and entertained family (four kids, four adults) in my small space. Now my older brother is back in Korea, my younger brother and his boys are back on their farm in Washington, and I’m back at my desk, trying to figure out which chapter of my Bad Guys book to tackle next.

Last night I came home and was cleaning up, watching television, and reading a bit. 60 Minutes was at its best running a segment about how Timothy Souders, who suffered from bipolar disorder died of dehydration in a Michigan prison. That segment, much of it taken from actual prison videos of Souder’s death, also reported that 300,000 mentally ill people are incarcerated in the U.S. Surely as a country we’re ready for better policies for our mentally ill population so that they’re not jailed or roaming city streets where they’ll die from exposure and other causes?

Then I starting watching the Grammys which launched with The Police reunited and Sting, hot as ever in a leather vest. There were some tacky moments as when Tony Bennett started extolling his sponsor, Target and Mary Blige’s tattoos just not jiving with her evening gowns (she had the most wardrobe changes of the evening) but mostly the show was fast-paced and fun and awash with great music. When I fell asleep the Dixie Chicks had won three Grammys, but when I woke up they’d won five for their song Not Ready to Make Nice from their album Taking the Long Way. They’d worked with the talented Rick Rubin on this project and I hope all the crazed let’s burn the Chick’s CDs and ban them from our country station types (after Natalie criticized Dubya for invading Iraq) are taking note that artists throughout time have commented on culture and politics. That the human condition is expressed in every art form, and every artist is allowed his or her opinions. I don’t think Dubya, with his approval ratings in the twenties, also called the toilet, could manage such a sweeping comeback.

But let’s get back to writing. I taught a workshop on Saturday called The Final Edit. Now, Mark Henry one of the participants who drove in from Washington has posted a shoutout for me and the workshop on his blog at http://theburlesqueofthedamned.blogspotcom. Henry has just garnered a three-book deal from Kensington and seems to be bubbling with ideas and fun and is the sort of person who I want to hear stories from. The other participants had manuscripts in various states of completion, some having worked on them for years.

I was puzzled about how I could take my process of editing clients’ manuscripts and translate this process into their own work. You see, I have a big advantage when I work on a manuscript because although I approach it with a lot of empathy for the writer knowing what it takes to churn out a 300-page story, I also tackle the pages with a frigid heart and a colder eye.

Here are some of my recommendations. Start each writing session with light editing and revising so that by the time you finish the first draft it’s actually a second draft. Once this draft is completed, let it rest a few weeks. You need the distance so that you can be surprised by your own writing on the page when you approach it. Then, format the manuscript in a font different from the one you wrote it in because you’re more likely to spot errors in an unfamiliar font. Print it out and go someplace other than where you wrote it, and then read it while taking notes. In this first run through, you’re looking at the story from the macro level. You’re looking for plot holes, inconsistencies, viewpoint problems and you’re ruthlessly judging the effectiveness of the beginning and end.

I told my students in this draft you’re using a backhoe, bulldozer, or other heavy equipment to excavate and relocate. Make all these big corrections on your computer and print it out again. (Alas, writers need to use a lot of paper in the editing process. If your conscious is bothering you, perhaps recycled paper might salvage it). In this draft you’re using a hammer and saw and perhaps a few chisels. Now, at this point it might be helpful to create a chart or scene cards or both if you haven’t done so already, so you have a method of tracking what happens when and who is in each scene. In your second major edit you’re especially analyzing pacing and whether individual scenes contain a mission and obstacle. You want to make certain that you zip past less interesting stuff and slow down for the more intriguing and dramatic moments. You are also working on setting, exposition, introspection, noting the proportions and appropriateness in individual scenes. Your aim now is to create a story world that’s so authentic that the page disappears and interesting lives will rise into existence in its place

You keep hammering and sawing, perhaps trimming dialogue or amping it up. Once this edit is done, you make the changes on the computer and you let it rest again and then print it out. The last revision is for honing in on language, adding music, and making certain that you’re writing for the ear. Your tools are feather light pens and perhaps you’re also striving to replicate the heart-twisting sounds of oboe and cello in this draft. This is the draft for stripping excess language, polishing, and adding nuance. Perhaps you’ll want to examine the opening and closing paragraphs and asking yourself if they might echo each other somehow. You’re slashing excess modifiers, tossing out wimpy verbs and exchanging them for their more muscular cousins, and hacking out clichés and trite expressions. Then you’re also adding comparisons and figurative language so that ideas and images resonate. By the time this draft is completed you can justify every word on every page.

Of course I had lots more to say with lots more details in my workshop, but that’s the big picture. Just imagine that your veins run with ice when you edit your manuscripts, I swear it helps.

Better that you should take the chance of trying something that is close to your heart, you think is what you want to write, and if they do not publish it, put it in your drawer. But maybe another day will come and you will find a place to put that. Gay Talese

A powdery sky laced with low clouds is emerging this morning. The news is broadcasting that another transport helicopter has gone down in Iraq—the fifth in a recent flurry of crashes and losses.

It is also the 75th birthday of Gay Talese, journalist, author and essayist. When Robert Altman died last year he was making a movie and I started thinking about how artists of all types are fortunate in being able to carry on with their craft throughout their days. Talese is currently working on a new book and penned one of my favorite quotes about writing: Most journalists are restless voyeurs who see the warts on the world, the imperfections in people and places. Gloom is their game, the spectacle their passion, normality their nemesis.

Talese, along with Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailor, Joan Didion and other writers is often cited as one of the founders of the 1960s "New Journalism". This type of writing is also called creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction and narrative nonfiction and means that writers are using narrative techniques to tell a true story. Most of these early new journalism pieces were essays written for Esquire—the magazine most responsible for launching this writing genre. Talese has always evaded labels, insisting that his "stories with real names" don’t represent a reformist movement, but rather his own response to the world as an Italian-American "outsider."

In fact, despite his well-earned celebrity, Talese has always identified with losers, underdogs, and outsiders, chronicling their stories and struggles. He began his writing career at fifteen when he began reporting on sports. He went on to become a reporter for The New York Times from 1956 to 1965. Since then he has written for Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other national publications. He is the author of eleven books. One of his most famous pieces is Frank Sinatra Has a Cold written for Esquire: “Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it not only affects his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability.”

During Talese’s career he has collected odd facts, kept his ear to the pavement especially in New York, and tailed subjects so faithfully and often that he feels confident writing their interior monologues. He was one of the first writers to break the code of silence and write about the Mafia and has written about bridges and boxers, statues, immigration, family legacies, sexual mores, the civil rights movement, the inner workings of a writer’s life, Frank Sinatra, and Joe DiMaggio. A writer who is endlessly curious, passionate, persistent, obsessive, a relentless fact checker, fascinated and fascinating he has a flair and ear for language, and is an impeccable researcher. In other words, we can all learn from him.

The morning sky is tinged with a pale rose. Rain is not in the forecast. We all need to remember an important writer, Molly Ivins, who died on Wednesday because the world will be a quieter place without her. We’ll certainly laugh less, but I hope we won’t think less even though we’ll miss her keen political insights.

A journalist, columnist, author, hell raiser, and wit you gotta love a woman who named Dubya “Shrub” from the title of one her laugh-out-loud books. She was rascally and wise and brave and rare. If you heard her speak, you’ll never forget her gravelly voice delivering Texan witticisms or her delight in life. She was a powerful presence, especially after the 2000 election when she believed it was her job to travel around the country and cheer up liberals. And did. I’ll never forget her advice to drink beer, eat pizza and carry on despite the sorry state of the union.

Her deadpan humor and calm seemed to come from her many years of up-close observing Texas politics which are so scandal-ridden and inept and corrupt that she knew the world of politics was also absurd theater. Once I saw her in a smack-down debate with conservative William Kristol of the Weekly Standard and I ended up feeling sorry for him.

Molly Ivins was passionate about politics, about fun, about truth. She knew how to communicate her ideas coherently and often skewered her opponents with their own words and logic. She could make us laugh and cry at the same time. She believed that people in this country and especially the press needed to be involved and needed to invest in truth because after all, “The president of the United States does not have the sense God gave a duck.”

She had been fighting breast cancer since 1999 and wrote until the end, dictating her last two columns. Her final column was called Stand Up Against the Surge in which she reminded her readers that the American people are overwhelming against escalation in Iraq and only 38 percent of active military troops want more troops sent. She wrote: We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"

If Molly was able to continue writing just days before her death, think about what we can do with our lives. How we too can use our passions and rage and outrage to fuel words on the page. I think she would advise writers to write, write, write and ask questions and don’t swallow the pabulum of our times. She wanted us to see through the smoke and mirrors of the Neocon Chicken Hawks, and be informed, get involved. She’d remind us that expression is our heritage and that we shouldn’t allow this administration to steal our rights that have existed 800 years with the Magna Carta. So never be silenced, never stop caring, and laugh when you can. As Molly once wrote, "Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don't much care for." To read more of Ivins syndicated columns go to www.creators.com.

The sky has dawned a sweet, soft blue. Twelve days without rain. It’s my favorite winter weather, since when you return home from a walk your cheeks are pink with the cold, but you’re not numb. Today is my birthday and since lately my back has been bothering me a lot, I feel like I could tack another ten years onto my age.

Now, I’m the sort of person who can turn off the television for six months at a time, since I figured out long ago that to be a writer you need to give up certain activities to make time for writing. In fact, I’ve missed whole decades of television programming and have never watched Friends or Desperate Housewives or House or even Seinfeld. I have never watched a program with a laugh track because I’d rather sit and pull my eyelashes one by one than listen to canned laughter. I also don’t spend a whole lot of time on the phone, rarely read newspapers, and hardly ever volunteer. I don’t make appointments for my writing hours (6 a.m.-2 p.m.),and try to avoid get-togethers that waste my time and steal my energy

But my guilty pleasure besides several incredible HBO series (which I usually watch on DVD) is American Idol. I know it’s trashy and shallow and way too much hype. I know it’s the friggin Fox network, which I normally ignore since their programs often present the worst of humanity; and their news department is the propaganda arm of the Republican party; and they if their talking heads’ lips are moving, they’re lying. But American Idol is such a train wreck of neurosis and delusion and glitz, that I cannot resist, particularly in the opening months as they’re searching for contestants so they can say, “You’re going to Hollywood, baby!” or “No way, dawg.”

In case you’re unaware, it’s a talent contest with millions of viewers phoning in votes for their favorite singers. The winner is chosen in late spring and is awarded a recording contract. Usually the best singers and most engaging personalities don’t win and often are voted off the air early in the season or booted off in the finals, similar to the Academy Awards, now that I think of it. So you’re often disappointed at the outcome. The judges, Simon, Paula and Randy, are fascinating, particularly Paula who seems to have chameleon-like mood changes and odd behaviors. If she’s straight, perhaps she needs some chemical help. But I digress.

In the early months the judges travel around the country and audition thousands of wannabes. And the results are strange and wet-your pants hilarious, but what really gets me is the number of people who are simply delusional about their talent or the lack thereof. Lately the auditions have been held in Memphis and Hollywood and the people that the judges turned down have become hysterical, desperate, and down-on-your knees pitiful.

But what I want to return to is the delusion factor and the drama inherent in these sort of contests. Last night Simon remarked that one of the hopefuls sounded like Cher after a trip to the dentist. Some of them sounded like a cat meowing, some could not carry a tune, or hit a high note, some were just not singing. Voices that hurt your ears to listen, like sitting through really bad karaoke.

So apparently some humans lie to themselves a lot and a good portion cannot judge things fairly. I’ve met writers like this—have heard more than one person of mediocre or little talent claim she deserved a major book contract and representation from a top agency. I’ve read stories that are incoherent, sloppy, and awful. I’ve read memoirs that were so mean-spirited or self-aggrandizing they made my right eye twitch for days. And luckily I also get to read stories that contain grace and magic and hilarity to make up for all this.

So somehow we must develop discernment and the ability to judge our own work fairly and critically. So that this task doesn’t fall to people like me. Because I hate feeling like Simon Cowell in a bad mood with a hangover. I think it helps to have a smart reader or two in the beginning of your career (preferably not a family member). I think it helps to hire a book doctor—if they’re good at what they do and not a hack that preys on writers. It also helps to line up your opening chapter or essay, or whatever you’re writing, side-by-side next to an author you want to emulate. Compare opening paragraphs, level of detail, metaphors, dialogue, verbs. Notice how quickly published authors jump in and out of scenes. Notice how and when they weave in backstory and that it arrives after the front story is off and running.

So compare and analyze and set high standards. In fact, be ruthless when you edit and revise. A lot of the people who try out for Idol have no standards, and worse, don’t have people who are honest with them about their dreadful lack of vocal ability. Along with story people with secrets or lies or give your characters delusions. In real life these types are a misery and so we avoid them. In fiction they bring a lot of tension into a story. And when it comes to your level of craft, keep it real and keep improving.

The sky is the palest blue this morning, and we’re promised more sun and temperatures in the fifties. It seems that wherever I go people keep talking about the weather and what it might become and how it once was before global warming. I was teaching at a conference in Ocean Shores, Washington over the weekend. The town is located in one of the only ugly places in the Northwest—near the Quinalt Indian reservation which to my eyes looks like a vast wasteland of stumps. There are also few evergreens in the area, so the landscape was mostly gray, unusual for our part of the world, and even the shoreline is ugly. You cannot see the ocean from the town (which lacks charm and character) and instead you walk through a sort of swampland and dunes to reach the beach and when you reach the sand, it’s littered with debris, the color is nearly black and yokels are driving their trucks on it.The whole place lacks chi, so it’s very odd and you cannot hear the waves while you’re in town. In fact, the waves are weak instead of the crashing beauties I’m used to thundering into the shore when I’m on the Oregon coast.

As usual, the people at the conference were lovely and interesting including Aaron Elkins the suspense writer who was the keynote speaker at lunch on Saturday. Elkins has won the Edgar and other awards and has created Gideon Oliver a forensic anthropologist with far-reaching adventures. What is clear is that Elkins takes his research seriously. Each of his novels are set in a new locale and he always visits the setting of the story and takes copious notes on everything from the flora and fauna, to how people answer the phone when they pick it up, to the local food and beers and then visits the local police station and asks questions about police procedures. Although apparently at least one of the books was set in a place where it was inadvisable to visit the local coppers.

Since his character has a job that requires great expertise, Elkins knows his way around a skeleton and can differentiate various skull fractures, bullet wounds, and the time of death of the unfortunate victim. Elkins is a former anthropologist and has been writing since 1982 and has written a second series featuring art curator-sleuth Chris Norgren and collaborated on five books with his wife Charlotte featuring a woman golfer, Lee Ofsted. He’s also written two stand-along novels, Lost about the effects of the Nazi art thefts and Turncoat which also explores a similar subject.

One of Elkins reviews says of his work: “Aaron Elkins is that most cherished of authors, one who leaves you feeling you've absorbed important knowledge you never knew you lacked. . . . The essential key to unlocking the (mysteries) . . . is a forensic tidbit no reader will ever forget.” This seems like high praise because I particularly enjoy learning something new when I read fiction as well as deep explorations of the human heart.

So here’s what I think: every chance you get, meet working authors. Listen to their tidbits about how they research, plot, edit, and manage their time. Notice how they consider writing a job and how (usually) they're grateful and humble and hardworking. Notice that when they talk to an audience that their storytelling skills are apparent.

The fog has burned off and now at midday cumulus clouds are crowding an indigo sky. After last week’s snow, it seems like spring is about to appear. Yesterday I went for a short walk and the air was soft and buds are starting to appear. If nothing else, the weather in the Northwest is changeable as a teenager’s moods.

I’ve had such a heavy cold the past few days, it’s the kind where you feel like you’re a prisoner of your own body. No escape and no matter what you do it’s as if each moment underlines how lousy you feel. So I rose early, wrote for 2 or 3 hours and then went back to bed. Tomorrow I’ll put the finishing touches to my anti-heroes chapter and send it to my editor and move on to another chapter. Although I’ve managed to keep up with a writing schedule, I’ve fallen behind in my editing work. When you’re self-employed it’s so difficult to take time off, because you’re always behind anyway and can never afford to get sick…..

Anyway, when I emerged from under a pile of quilts yesterday I joined a friend at the Portland Art Museum to see an exhibition on the ancient Egyptians. It’s an amazing show full of relics, jewelry, everyday objects, mummies, several sarcophagi and a re-creation of a tomb. The show, called The Quest for Immortality, Treasures of Ancient Egypt is focused on the Egyptian obsession with the afterlife and burial customs. I’ve seen shows of this type before, and can still remember the stunning artifacts housed in Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and a King Tut exhibition I saw there.

But for me the question is why. Who was the first worshipper or priest or king who decided that the afterlife trumped the daily life? How many centuries did it take for these beliefs to take hold until their culture was entwined with their quest for immortality? Years ago I taught an Elderhostel class on ancient China and remember my surprise at learning the large number of artisans who were assigned to work on royal tombs and their accoutrements.

It seems too that an enormous percentage of artisans (and of course slaves) must have also been employed in ancient Egypt for the glory or the royals and the assurance that all would be well after they passed. What was particularly striking was the intricacy of the many designs carved in stone or shaped in gold or built of wood. And how all this was accomplished with what relatively rudimentary tools (compared with the drills and such of today). As I woke this morning my dreams were embroidered with some of the colors of the exhibition—deep gold and bronze, lapis and turquoise and orange and green. Colors so rich and lasting and gorgeous that I feel like my senses have been branded with them.

But while the artifacts are outstanding, the burial rituals fascinating, it still all gets back to why. The why of things is what readers want to know when we write fiction and memoir. Why lies at the heart of every story. Because humans have always wanted to understand why people do what they do. Why they lie, cheat and steal. Why they sleep around and hate their mothers and envy their siblings. Why they live with or without hope. Why each of us hurt and triumph and wonder and trudge along against huge odds.

And if you’re suffering from some malaise and looking for a sickroom distraction you might want to check out George Pelacanos latest novel, The Night Gardener. And then somehow try to contain your envy at his spot-on dialogue that is so crisp and real and true that you’d swear the characters are in the room with you. Notice too how he manages to talk about social issues, especially racism, in such fresh and human terms.

The dawn is finally breaking through and revealing a pale, sooty sky. This morning it is above freezing and the snow has been steadily melting, asphalt appearing all over town. The background sounds a constant drip, drip, drip.

Last week as I was getting ready to teach a workshop at Evergreen College I searched for poems to read during the class. I ended up selecting about six by Billy Collins. And as I was rereading Collins I decided that I’d return to an old habit and each morning pen a poem. Now, since I’ve gotten off to a late start, and since I occasionally miss a morning because of some form of sloth, I’ll likely end up with 300+ poems, but not the full 365. But even so, this habit stamps my day with a vivid reminder that I’m a writer and yanks me into a stream of words where I’ll remain throughout the day.

And the more poems I write, the more precise my language and my ease with metaphor. This morning as I wrote about waiting for the dawn to break I wrote how winter holds onto darkness like an old woman clutching her purse at the county fair……probably not great poetry, but I love it when these images arrive as if an expected visitor from another land far away.

I was thinking about William Stafford this morning—a great poet and great man. He was a conscientious objector during World War II and was assigned a work detail. During that time he got into the habit of rising early—I believe at 4 or 5 a.m. to write poetry. I also believe, but might be mistaken, that he wrote a poem on the morning of his death. No matter, his body of work was prodigious and his poems often sounded like a conversation with the self or a dear friend.

Here is an excerpt from Stafford's essay "Some Arguments Against Good Diction," in his essay collection Writing the Australian Crawl published 1978 by University of Michigan Press:

“The process of writing that I experience has little connection with the formulations I most often hear. Where words come from, into consciousness, baffles me. Speaking or writing, the words bounce instantaneously into their context, and I am victimized by them, rather than controlling them. They do not wait for my selection; they volunteer. True, I can reject them, but my whole way of writing induces easy acceptance--at first--of any eager volunteer. I want to talk about these volunteers, but first want to consider another reason for trying carefully to set the record straight, about attitudes toward language. The point concerns how a writer feels about language, in general. Many opine that a writer, and particularly a poet, for some reason, must love language; often there is even a worshipful attitude assumed. I have noticed this assumption with particular attention because it happens that insofar as I can assess my own attitudes in relation to others' I have an unusually intense distrust of language. What people say or write comes to me attenuated of thinned by my realization that talk merely puts into the air an audio counterpart of mysterious, untrustworthy, confused events in the creature making the sounds. "Truth," or "wonder," or any kind of imaginative counterpart of "absolute realities"--these I certainly do not expect in human communication.”

The sky is still the color of fog and snow dollops the rooftops and pines as picturesque as a Christmas card. Yesterday morning it snowed and snowed, fat lazy flakes, then faster, finer ones. As is my habit, I raced out to walk among the flurries, afraid I’d miss the experience, the stillness, but when I returned it just kept dropping from the sky. We so rarely have snow that lasts more than a few hours before melting, so this freeze is unusual and in my opinion, delightful. Besides the aesthetics of snow, I appreciate how it kills all the mold that lives here. Don’t know which place on the continent has the most mold and allergens, but the Willamette Valley is surely in the running.

And it was fun walking around the neighborhood noticing how the snow seemed to change people and how weather brings out a certain kind of camaraderie. At the New Seasons in my neighborhood some of the shelves were skimpy because trucks couldn’t get through and everyone was talking about the snow. At the middle school a girl posed near the door next to a “No School Today” sign as her father snapped her photo. In one affluent neighborhood that borders a golf course and is made up of mostly expensive Tudors, neighbors gathered in the street and kids made forts from which they volleyed snowballs. Here and there was the rare sound of a shovel scraping off a sidewalk and cars equipped with chains clicking along the streets. But mostly there was little traffic and mostly it was quiet.

Before I lived in Portland I lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (there is also a Milwaukie, Oregon) and when a big storm hit the city geared up as if were D-Day. Nighttime sounds were the sound of snowplows rumbling through and scraping the streets raw. But the city services are much different in the Midwest. First, those cities have giant fleets of snow plows and such. Second, they salt the roads (hard on cars, but it works). Here, there are few snow plows, and they sprinkle a sand/gravel mix onto the roads that is mostly ineffective.) In Milwaukee the city picks up your garbage, so during storms, the garbage fleet is also equipped with plows and attacks the white enemy. Here, most of the side streets are rarely plowed.

Now living in Portland, I don’t drive in the snow because it puts you out on the road with amateurs and people terrified of snow and simply because the road conditions are sometimes treacherous. This morning I kept remembering a long-ago New Year’s eve when I catered a big party. It was sometime in the 80s and although the food was fabulous, by the time I set out the midnight buffet, the guests were all so coked up few guests ate. And snow was coming down in buckets so people were bailing out. It took us hours to reach home through three or four feet of snow, and we stopped several times to shovel a path, free stuck tires.

As for writing, I’m still struggling with my anti-heroes chapter, racking my brain over books I’ve read years ago and wondering which of Shakespeare’s characters were true bastards. I’m writing a section about the historical precedent for using anti-heroes in literature. Recalling a course in Chaucer I took years ago when I was going through a bitter divorce and was distracted and stressed out and read little of the course requirements, but aced an A+ on the final written exam. (This was a few years after the catering gig) I remember that the professor phoned me and asked me to type out my exam booklet so he could use it for future classes and I foolishly explained that I hadn’t read the materials and instantly regretted my confession. I never typed it out for him and I suspect now that it was a case of guilt. One of the many reasons why I stopped getting married, but I digress and am going to search through my books for The Pardoners Tale and Henry IV.

Wisps of cirrus clouds are feathered across a pale sky like an old man’s beard. My place is cold although the heat has been running for an hour. The morning seems to spell winter. I was in Olympia yesterday teaching a workshop at Evergreen College and snow and ice frosted the landscape and everyone seems surprised at such a showy display of weather.

I’ve been thinking about early scientists and explorers who named the cloud types, the stars, the lands that their ships reached. The clouds have names of Latin origin and refer to how the clouds look from the ground and are classified by their height and formation. Luke Howard, a pharmacist, presented a paper in 1802 to a group of amateur scientists in which he classified the clouds and said, in part, "They are," he said, "subject to certain distinct modifications, produced by the general causes which effect all the variations of the atmosphere." Therefore, he proposed, "in order to enable the meteorologist to apply the key of analysis to the experience of others, as well as to record his own with brevity and precision, it may perhaps be allowable to introduce a methodical nomenclature, applicable to the various forms of suspended water, or, in other words, to the modifications of cloud".

Apparently in the same year a scientist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck also attempted to name and classify clouds, but his names didn’t stick because they were in French rather than the more commonly used language of science, Latin.

I rode the train to and from Olympia and last night the train I traveled home in had been stalled for hours after leaving Seattle. When I stepped onto the train, it was like being involved in a bizarre psychological experiment. Most of the people were tense and pissed off, about half were drunk and the conductors were struggling with crowd control. At first I tried to read a novel, but then abandoned my plan and just watched and joined in the chatter, fascinated. There was a darling ten-year-old girl traveling alone and alternating scenarios played out as drunks were chatting with her, grandmothers were advising her not to talk to the drunks. The girl was the youngest of five children and had been visiting an older sister in Seattle. Her mother had recently had some sort of break down.

Another woman had arrived in Seattle for a family reunion then got stranded there because of icy weather, and spent eight days at her daughter’s one bedroom apartment, sleeping on a fold-out couch. She was longing for home and began describing her daughter’s situation (husband unemployed and verbally abusive) and when we reached the station in Portland her husband of a twelve years (her first husband, an ex-boxer had died of dementia) grabbed her with such ferocity that it seemed a happy ending as meanwhile, the conductor was delivering the girl to another grown sister.

During the workshop some of the students read out loud the essays they had written and then the group chimed in with comments and compliments. The essays described a dance lesson that happened when the writer was ten, a long-ago visit with a grandfather, a forbidden trip to a pool hall. What brought the essays to life were sensory details and the precise naming of things and people, as when one man named the rivers in Alaska that he had flown over in a prop plane and the rivers seemed to flow into the room with a kind of icy magic. Clouds have precise names, and similar to animals are subdivided into genera, species, and variety. And so we should bring this precision to our writing.

Friday morning and the sky a pale blue, like a bird’s egg. Like a promise. Yesterday morning I was writing away when I looked up (there is a large picture window behind my monitor) and the most beautiful fat snowflakes were falling, like miniature doilies, like lace, like silence in form.

I dressed as fast as I could (I have a serious habit of writing in my pajamas these days) and dashed outside feeling like I was six. And oh, it was lovely. The snow coating the branches and shrubs like whipped cream, like the 7-minute frosting my mother taught me how to make as a girl and haven’t made since. And so many winter memories rushed into me that I felt like I had stepped back in time. I encountered a woman snapping photos of her toddler son, Parker, who was so bundled in a snowsuit he was extra unsteady and waddled like a penguin and a man in the park with a black Labrador. But mostly I had the white world to myself and so strolled along remembering who I once was when I lived in a place with snow, and winters spent in cold and muffled in white.

I’ve been working on a chapter about anti-heroes and have been searching my personal library and remembrances for female anti-heroes. Somehow in the last 50 years or so fiction writers have come under the spell or a strange dictum that writing fiction requires likable characters. I want to help break the spell. I suspect that this notion was influenced by Puritan and Victorian notions, then underlined by Hollywood’s sugary concoctions.

But good characters are inherently dull while complicated, paradoxical characters are fascinating and often not so good. And I just want to point out that if you create an anti-hero for your story he doesn’t’ need to be redeemed or saved or brought to his senses. He or she can still commit unpardonable acts, can drink too much, sleep with strangers, break hearts, and mess with people’s lives. Most of us in the real world are flawed people trying to do good. But fictional characters generally have deeper flaws than the rest of us mere mortals. And sometimes anti-heroes perform good works, sometimes not, because their morals and values are tarnished, therefore realistic. When he or she shows up on the page, it is with a bundle of contradictions. They walk in light and dark and shadow and trouble follows.

And here’s the trick that I’m teaching in this chapter: when you create anti-heroes, color them grey and realize that, they always possess an underlying pathos.

Also, if you want to vote your favorite villains or anti-heroes into my book, please contact me via the e-mail address at my web page. I’m especially looking for fictional bitches and bad girls.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom taking the world into my arms...I don't want to end up simply having visited the world .~ Mary Oliver

I don’t know about you, but I’m a big Mary Oliver fan. A bride married to amazement. What a thought-provoking image…..The endless winter night hasn’t disappeared yet, so I cannot describe the morning skies, except that the radio just predicted snow this evening. Weather forecasting in this region with its Pacific influences--brisk winds racing in from the east along the Columbia River gorge, mountain ranges and sometimes Artic influences-- is a tricky endeavor. Forecasts come and go, sometimes with more hype than accuracy.

Today Ted Kennedy is going to propose putting limits on Bush’s power to send additional troops into Iraq without the approval of Congress. Perhaps every citizen should send an email or call to their representatives and remind them that only Congress has the power to declare war. And that no one can declare war on a tactic (terrorism). Perhaps if we start sending troops HOME that will send the message to Iraqis to take over their own government and oust the criminals that are destroying their country. But I know people ask how can we leave when it’s a lawless shell of a country? I don’t know, but I know our troops don’t belong in the middle of a civil war that’s been going on for centuries.

Back to writing—I’ve sent my editor at Writer’s Digest five chapters that I’ve trimmed and edited. It was mostly a matter of cutting out excess and the more I cut, the better the writing became. It’s so easy to bury ideas and repeat ideas. For example I just read Kim Edwards first novel, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. Now, first it’s a captivating book because Edwards is an able writer and the story concept is strong. It begins in 1964 with a woman going into labor during a freak snowstorm in Kentucky. Norah is married to a surgeon, Dr. David Henry, eleven years her senior and because of the storm, he ends up delivering her baby at his medical office with only the help of his nurse.

However, unknown to them, Norah was pregnant with twins. The first baby, a boy is delivered safely. But then a girl arrives and the doctor recognizes that the tiny infant has Downs syndrome. David makes a quick decision and asks his nurse to take the baby away to an institution and then tells Norah that she died. He makes the decision based on childhood experiences with his younger sister with Downs syndrome who died at twelve. This terrible deception becomes a cancer at the center of their lives and marriage.

But here’s the problem: The book alternates viewpoints and tracks the characters as they age and change, but in each section, Edwards reminds the reader that the secret about the child lies between them. By the time the reader has been reminded of this for the third or fourth time it is overkill, but then Edwards keeps hammering away at this point, again and again.

Now Edwards is one of those authors who wrote a long and detailed Acknowledgments page thanking everyone from departed friends to pastors to her agent, editor and fellow writers. Frankly these sort of acknowledgments make me feel insecure—my own seem skimpy in comparison. I don’t belong to a writer’s group or show early drafts to anyone except my editor. So I’m wondering why the editors at Penguin Books didn’t notice this excess? Does this mean I’m just becoming a crank at this point in my career?

I honestly don’t think so. I’ve worked on hundreds of manuscripts at this point and with thousands of writers. And what I see most often is that stories drown under excess and that writers bludgeon readers when they should merely nudge them. Excess is especially deadly when it’s linked to themes, because themes, like foreshadowing should whisper in the story.

The sky is sullen and seems to be threatening snow, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to fall on the valley floor today, it’s supposed to arrive with an artic front in the next few days. We are apparently in the midst of an El Niño winter. This means the trade winds in the mid-Pacific relax with consequences for weather around the world. It’s been warm here this week like it is in much of the country, but the two weather patterns are about to collide.

I’ve been rereading the 50,000+ words that I wrote last summer and early fall on my upcoming book. It’s being published in February 2008 by Writer’s Digest Books and is going to be called Bullies, Bastards & Bitches, The Bad Guys in Fiction. I’m hoping the publisher won’t change my title because I like the sassiness of this one.

In On Writing Stephen King suggests to writers to set a finished manuscript aside and allow it to cool a few months before you begin revising it. I don’t usually have the luxury of enough time to walk away from a manuscript (this one is about half finished) but my deadline is not due until June, so I’ve set is aside since about October and still have time for lots of rewriting and revision on the first chapters. Revision is the crucial word here because at some point in writing you need to see your draft with new eyes, perhaps with a cold, calculating mindset. And in the past few days I’ve come to realize just how startling your vantage can be after a few months away from your own words. I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I read something I’ve written in previous years, it’s sort of amazing to encounter myself in my words. Often I’m pleased with what I wrote, though at times I find the shortcomings or problems in a piece that’s already been published. Or, I can tell that I was pressed for time or my logic doesn’t quite hang together.

When I wrote Between the Lines I complained to my editor at Writer’s Digest, the talented and patient Kelly Nickell, that I felt like I was giving birth to an ugly baby. Kelly kept reassuring me that the book was going to turn out fine and it did, after a LOT of editing on her part and rewriting on my part. I was so stressed and overworked at the time and my writing was hampered by the fact that I was taking too much thyroid medication and was jumpy and anxious. Luckily, my symptoms became extreme so that I was forced to see a new doctor and I’ve since had my meds readjusted. At the time, I was feeling like a nutroll and was constantly berating myself for being so anxious. It’s not exactly the best frame of mind with which to write. So these days I’m much calmer, the writing comes easier, and I usually know what I want to say before I say it on the page.

But reading through these early chapters, I’m discovering that the distance I have now is providing a startling clarity. And I’m having those ugly baby blues again. The writing feel dense and overwritten and repetitive—my usual weaknesses. I’ve just spent six hours reworking one chapter and am still not satisfied with it. So in case anyone is reading these missives, I’ll let you know how this new vision works out. For now, I’m working on a short chapter (8,000 words) that seems the least dense and overblown. And this too is the writing life.

The day has dawned bright and lovely and still. All last summer I bitched about global warming when heat wave after heat wave plowed through and roasted this place, but fickle gal that I am, I appreciate its benefits in the winter months since we simply get much more sun in the northwest these days. I awoke to the news that Sadam Hussein was hanged, that 60 + people were killed in Iraq since his death and many more injured. Curiously, last night I started watching the first season of HBO’s Deadwood which begins with a hanging by one of the series leading characters, Seth Bullock. He is leaving the Montana Terriory where he is sheriff and heading to Deadwood in the Indian Territory to sell hardware and make his fortune.

I am watching the first two seasons of Deadwood again because the third season is going to start in January and I wanted to refresh my memory on the intricacies of the storyline. If you’re a fiction writer and don’t watch Deadwood and are not familiar with David Milch its writer and creator, you’re missing amazing insights in storytelling, particularly how themes are woven into a complicated plot with an ensemble cast. Milch is simply one of the great writers and geniuses of our times. After teaching English at Yale, he began writing for Hill Street Blues and as his influence permeated the series, it told the truth about cops in ways that weren’t shown back then. He went on to work with Steven Bocho again, creating NYPD Blue, another series known for grit and truth.

In an interview Milch was asked when a writer writes about cops using their real-life experiences, how much truth is allowed. He replied: “You must be completely true to the ‘very truth’ as Conrad said. You have to render the emotional truth of the experience. The involved – the illusion of certain lived facts to bring to life the very facts of the situation. The truths of storytelling are the truths of coherence. The truth of facts are verifiable to a totally external set of facts. Whether or not they respond to an external reality is none of my business.”

Milch is a disciple of Robert Penn Warren, who he studied under at Yale and who encouraged him to write fiction. He still regularly reads Warren’s poetry for inspiration, and also said, “I continually discover levels of meaning and experience in my work which I had not known could exist before.”

If you’re thinking that you don’t like Westerns, especially the sanitized and whitewashed versions most of us are familiar with, forget everything you know about them because Deadwood simply doesn’t apply. Set in the 1870s and depicting mostly actual events and people of the time that include Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok, the central story concept in Deadwood is that a population whiskey-swigging misfits, gold miners, criminals, opportunists, gamblers, and crackpots have gathered in a gold-mining-slash-bordello settlement where honesty, compassion, and trustworthiness are rare. Milch is fascinated with concepts of law and order and how civilizations evolve and how community and family units develop under strained circumstances.

Because Hickok was gunned downed in Deadwood, he only appears in the first episodes, but the town has plenty of other characters including an Eastern tenderfoot and his laudanum addict wife, a demented preacher, a passel of whores, and the chief protagonist the diabolical Al Swearengen (played brilliantly by actor Ian McShane) owner of the Gem Saloon. Swearensgen, who also was a real-life person, is one of the most fascinating, complex and unlikable protagonists you’ll ever love to hate. And sometimes, love him, despite yourself and his shoddy and violent behaviors. Swearengen's principal foil is Seth Bullock (played by Timothy Olyphant), another flawed and fascinating character who believes in the taming value of law and order.

Deadwood proves that Milch’s storytelling abilities have deepened and the show has, I believe, the most intense emotional atmosphere that has ever aired on the small screen and the deepest layers of subtext. And although the series is dark and swarms with brutality and cruelty there are also revelations about humanity that you’ll never forget and small kindnesses and moments of hope and redemption.

After Milch’s early television successes he delivered a series of free lectures at the Writer’s Guild. He told his students, "No one can teach you anything that you don't already know. And each of you has, in your heart, the capacity, when encouraged by a benign organizing presence, to identify the deepest truths of the human story."

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

The sun is rising on a sky cast in gloom. Last night a storm passed through and we are a wet and saturated world. Yesterday a heavy city truck was driving along one of Portland’s main street when it simply sank, injuring both workers. City officials are not sure how the sink hole developed, but its clear that the ground cannot hold much more water and we still have months of rain ahead.

I’m in the midst of cleaning up after houseguests and festivities and excesses. Also back at my computer after a few rare days off and a case of the stomach flu. It seems to me that every writer needs to be able to restart him or her self after an absence from the computer. To jump back into the stream of words and ideas.

What I’ve noticed in the past few years is that the writing life, with all its stresses and isolation, not only brings amazing rewards through connecting with readers, but also solace. To be able to sit alone and write amid the spinning planet, whatever it may be—a downturn in the stock market, more senseless deaths and outrages in Iraq, corrupt politicians exposed, or muddling through personal tragedies—this place called writing can be a haven.

We can find ourselves in writing because it has amazing therapeutic powers when we tell our stories and explore our pasts and own our fears and sorrows. As we develop our craft we also build confidence and esteem and worth. As we spin yarns or remember the past, we get to live twice. And what can be better—this extension, this expansion, this balloon that carries us up to the clouds.

The morning has dawned clear, but now clouds are moving in so it looks like we'll have another reprieve from the storms that have lashed the Northwest lately, but that it won't last. Meanwhile, searchers are still looking for the three missing climbers on Mt. Hood today. But they've been up there for 11 days now and although there is little wind today, in the past week winds on the mountain have been raging up to 100 mph.

Hood looms over the city, easily seen from many places in town, just as you can see Mt. St. Helens with it's flattened top from higher vantages around town. What I like about Hood is that you'll be driving along, and you'll turn a corner and there it looms, huge and white and majestic. Not always visible because of the cloud cover we have here so often, but when in sight it seems to lend solidity to our landscape. Yesterday, as I was running errands, Hood seemed so placid and still, not the site of a desperate search, not a place swarming with search teams and helicopters with heat sensors.

I keep trying to understand the need and thrill of mountain climbing, but it eludes me. In Jon KrakauerÂ’s Into Thin Air, he describes the circumstances that lead to so many deaths on Mt. Everest in May of 1996. Krakauer is a gorgeous writer and used a frame structure to tell the tale. When you use a frame, the ending is revealed in the beginning and then usually the second chapter backtracks to the beginning of the events covered and proceeds forward. Since the ending is known, a frame structure requires extra skills to create the tension and suspense necessary to keep the reader turning pages. When writers craft novels with a frame structures it's usually because the writer wants to explore the why of the ending. It works well for stories where the writer puzzles out the psychological ramifications of characters' actions. It also works well for memoir as Krakauer's book illustrates.

Into Thin Air is a survivor's account of the mountain's worst disaster when 9 people perished on Everett , examining why men and women climb the pitiless mountain and the terrible price of ambition. If you haven't yet read Into Thin Air , here are the opening paragraphs that create one of the best hooks in nonfiction books: "Straddling the top of the world, one foot in Tibet and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently at the vast sweep of earth below. I understood on some dim, detached level that it was a spectacular sight. I'd been fantasizing about this moment, and the release of emotion that would accompany it, for many months. But now that I was finally here, standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care.

It was the afternoon of May 10. I hadn't slept in 57 hours. The only food I'd been able to force down over the preceding three days was a bowl of Ramen soup and a handful of peanut M&M's. Weeks of violent coughing had left me with two separated ribs, making it excruciatingly painful to breathe. Twenty-nine thousand twenty-eight feet up in the troposphere, there was so little oxygen reaching my brain that my mental capacity was that of a slow child. Under the circumstances, I was incapable of feeling much of anything except cold and tired.

I'd arrived on the summit a few minutes after Anatoli Boukreev, a Russian guide with an American expedition, and just ahead of Andy Harris, a guide with the New Zealand-based commercial team that I was a part of and someone with whom I'd grown to be friends during the last six weeks. I snapped four quick photos of Harris and Boukreev striking summit poses, and then turned and started down. My watch read 1:17 P.M. All told, I'd spent less than five minutes on the roof of the world.

After a few steps, I paused to take another photo, this one looking down the Southeast Ridge, the route we had ascended. Training my lens on a pair of climbers approaching the summit, I saw something that until that moment had escaped my attention. To the south, where the sky had been perfectly clear just an hour earlier, a blanket of clouds now hid Pumori, Ama Dablam, and the other lesser peaks surrounding Everest.

Days later, after six bodies had been found, after a search for two others had been abandoned, after surgeons had amputated the gangrenous right hand of my teammate Beck Weathers--people would ask why, if the weather had begun to deteriorate, had climbers on the upper mountain not heeded the signs? Why did veteran Himalayan guides keep moving upward, leading a gaggle of amateurs, each of whom had paid as much as $65,000 to be ushered safely up Everest, into an apparent death trap?"

The story goes on to explain how a climber's obsession to summit an ancient and dangerous mountain inevitably meets an inevitble fate. And how mountains treat trespassers who make mistakes by burying them beneath the snow and ice of their slopes. Back in 1996 it was a rogue storm that swept in and endangered the climbers. It was a rogue storm that also complicated the lives of the three climbers now missing on Mt. Hood.

I watched my reflection not only in the mirror, but in store windows and across the television when it wasn’t on, trying to get a fix on my looks. My hair was black like my mother’s but basically a nest of cowlicks, and it worried me that I didn’t have a chin. I kept thinking I’d grow one the same time my breasts came in, but it didn’t work out that way. I had nice eyes, though, what you would call Sophia Loren eyes, but still, even the boys who wore their hair in ducktails dripping with Vitalis and carried combs in their shirt pockets didn’t seem attracted to me, and they were considered hard up. Lily in The Secret Life of Bees

When writers gather and talk shop, they sometimes categorize or relegate certain forms of writing into a pecking order. Recently I was reminded of this when writers that I know seem to divide fiction writing into two segments—literary, or mainstream fiction and genre fiction. Literary fiction good; genre fiction bad. Literary fiction sophisticated; genre fiction unsophisticated. Literary fiction the standard by which we should judge all writing; genre fiction as below standard.

But I want to suggest that good writing is good writing, no matter what the genre or format. Colin Harrison and P.D. James who write psychological suspense and the astounding George R. R. Martin who writes fantasy all deserve respect for their talents and storytelling abilities. They all choose perfect words for perfect places, Jonathon Swift’s definition of style; craft gorgeous sentences; weave their stories around themes; and introduce characters with interesting dilemmas that make us want to follow their shattered lives.

Perhaps we can stop assuming that a certain brand of writing is superior or inferior to another and let’s write what suits us.

You see all books are categorized chiefly as a marketing tool. If you walked into a bookstore and found the cookbooks next to the poetry anthologies which are next to sci fi, it would take a long time to find your favorite author. Now, over the years, certain genres such as suspense have come to be written along certain guidelines, and these guidelines are helpful for readers, publishers and writers. But within these genres are dozens of categories and thousands of means to tell a tale. Genre is not a strait jacket—merely a means to attract a certain kind of reader to certain kinds of stories. Although I wish that J. K. Rowling’s had more editorial guidance, anyone who has read the Harry Potter series will recognize timeless archetypes and a timeless structure that makes for good reading. Literary no, rewarding yes.

I want to quote one Robin Cook, to clarify what mainstream means: “ A mainstream novel is not just a story that won’t slip into a category. On closer inspection it does a great deal more. Good mainstream will challenge belief systems, bring on a new vision, upset and reorder social, psychological, emotion and spiritual values and preconceived notions. Mainstream is a piece of reality brought into sharper focus; it is life make larger than life. It ask questions, causes introspection, shakes up rules and makes them unruly. Mainstream can do that with allegory, humor, drama, diary, epistolary and tragedy. Take a few months to read some Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, some National Book Award novels. You will know exactly what this paragraph about mainstream is getting at. Some titles that illustrate mainstream are Sophie’s Choice, The Color Purple, Beloved, Foreign Affairs, The Confessions of Nat Turner, A Confederacy of Dunces, To Kill a Mockingbird.

These novels did a great deal more than fail to be Westerns or romances. Also, the purpose of some of these novels directly defied the requirements of genre in attempting to show the disorder of the world, or the injustice, the failure to resolve. They challenged, provoked, enlightened, created new ideas, illuminated problems and crises, presented new visions of old pictures, and did a hundred things.

Mainstream in not defined as better-than-average genre; it is not
genre. . . .

If you take some time to read award-winning novels, you will have another insight. Some of them are genre novels. The special ones illustrated how vast the range of possibility is in each type. It isn’t necessary to confine yourself to a constricting, choking set of rules that robs you of luxury of inspiring, challenging, illuminating and presenting new visions. Lonesome Dove won a Pulitzer ; it is a Western novel also filled with lust, love, adventure, humor, history, suspense and mystery. It is full and full-bodied and it does not wander off course.”

Happy writing to all—no matter what your choice of subjects.

Last night as I was wrapping gifts that need to be mailed, the rain was beating against the roof and house like the sky had broken loose, and when I woke this morning it was still at it. It’s supposed to rain all week and sometimes during weeks like this when the sky is glowering and changing, the rain seems like it will go on forever.

As I was wrapping gifts, I started thinking about my aunts who live back in Wisconsin. Actually, the ones who are left live there. Two of my aunts, my mother’s sister and father’s sister both died of breast cancer when they were in their early fifties. When I was a girl growing up, I was part of a matrilineal family and didn’t know it. My grandmother, Adeline, called Heidi, came from a family of fourteen, but that in itself is a long story. She bore a son and seven daughters, my mother the oldest daughter. The son died at three and years later my mother told me that she discovered that the disease her older brother died from was curable. I don’t know the details of his death, but only that by the time I was a girl, my aunts were an important presence in my life.

My grandfather died of a heart attack when he was fifty and I was six, leaving my grandmother with her two youngest daughters still at home. My grandmother and her daughters were a family of beauties and I can remember them sunbathing in the back yard of my grandmother’s house rubbing baby oil with a drop of iodine in it into their skin and the neighbor men seemed to mow their lawns more often when they were out there.

My grandmother’s attic was stuffed with their prom dresses—this collection the signature of their glamour. Occasionally if I’m watching the Oscars or an award show, I’ll notice dresses that remind me of these confections. They were mostly taffeta with huge net skirts and were worn with layers of billowing petticoats of net and lace with pumps dyed to match. I can still see the colors of the gowns—turquoise, rose, lime green, yellow. Not the shades found in flowers, but a gaudier version.

My grandmother lived in a small Victorian on a corner lot in a small northern town. The Wisconsin River was a few blocks away and her yard backed onto a railroad track and every morning a short train swept past and the man in the caboose wearing a red cap would wave at us cheerfully and sometimes they’d blow the whistle for us. I imagine now that it was on the way to pick up a load of lumber or paper from one of the nearby mills. When I remember that train steaming past it’s stamped with summertime and there are also the perfumes of lilac and honeysuckle bushes wrapped in this memory.

For some reason the house had a small bathroom that didn’t have a bathtub. Years later one my grandmother’s son-in-laws would install one, but when I was a girl, there was an empty tub in the middle of the attic. The attic, which was not insulated always smelled musty and was baking hot in the summer with dust motes swimming in the air, and freezing in the winter. But we played in there year round, using the tub as a conveyance, and wore the gowns stuffed with nylon stockings to create bosoms. And danced to music only we could hear and became for a moment a princess, a woman.

My aunts smoked Winstons and drank coffee and blotted their lipstick with toilet paper and these lip prints are a sharp childhood memory as is the smell of my grandmother’s bathroom—Lux soap, Ponds hand lotion and Aqua Net hair spray. It was an era of big hair and they would tease their hair into nests and twists. My aunt Kathy spent so much time in the bathroom primping for dates that her husband-to-be called it her office.

But I was remembering my aunts last night because it was from them that I learned how to make bows from curling ribbon. I was making these bows on packages last night because I like their old-fashioned sweetness. (Although I don’t create one for every package because it takes too long.) Oddly, curling ribbon is hard to come by these days—I visited about four stores before I found it at a RiteAid and bought a giant roll of gold, white, green and red. The shelves of stores are crammed with Christmas accoutrements, many already discounted. But I don’t want the gaudy pre-made bows or Chinese imports. I want colored tissue paper and candy canes and chocolates and candies from years past. I want memories.

As writers we all have people who have taught us something important. These legacies are treasure troves to write about and for remembrance of other eras. I can close my eyes and feel the net of the prom dress and the swish, swish as I twirl around the attic. And I’ll wrap more gifts in the coming weeks and remember.

It’s been at least six days without rain now, a lovely reprieve in the midst of a series of storms. I’m still putting my garden to bed and yesterday was dumping compost over my flower beds in hope of improving the soil. Tony Blair is in Washington to be questioned by Congress and everyone is talking about the Iraq War commission’s report. However, only Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, one of my heroes, is mentioning that the people on the commission were never against the so-called war in the first place, and that the time table, such as it is, calls for troops to be brought home in time for the 2008 election. It's time for truth and to deal with the realities of this fiasco.

But back to writing. In a previous post I was talking about what reading can teach a writer and had decided to write my January column about it when I ran across a brief review of Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer, A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. I dashed out and bought it and have been reading it ever since. Prose who is the author of fourteen books of fiction and is also an essayist and critic, is a delight.

She manages to delineate all the elements we find in a novel that inform our writing, but also she is clearly a passionate reader and her passion is contagious. The book is fat with excerpts and the authors she quotes range from Dostoevsky to Chekhov to Alice Munro. I cannot recommend this book enough.

Here is a brief example of her thoughtful approach where she’s describing reading Proust in French while writing her first novel: “Reading a masterpiece in a language for which you need a dictionary is in itself a course in reading word by word. And as I puzzled out the gorgeous, labyrinthine sentences, I discovered how reading a book can make you want to write one.

A work of art can start you thinking about some aesthetic or philosophical problem; it can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction. But the relationship between reading and writing is rarely so clear-cut, and in fact my first novel could hardly have been less Proustian.

More often the connection has to do with whatever mysterious promptings make you want to write. It’s like watching someone dance and then secretly, in your own room, trying out a few steps. …..

To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own—a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.”

We’re having a break from the storms, but skies are still sullen with blue breaking through occasionally. Yesterday it didn’t rain so I spent time putting my garden to bed for the winter, chopping down the dahlias that had frozen, their leaves black and shriveld, stalks filled with liquid. At one point, I stepped back and my shoe slipped off and my foot landed in the grass and it was so soggy and cold it was like landing in a puddle.

Last night I was brushing my teeth and as I did so, was staring at a painting on the wall of the upstairs hallway. It sits above a bookcase that is filled with books related to writing and it’s a collage work that I bought from an artist on Alberta Street here in Portland. He had made a series of collages based on old European postcards and photographs. My work has the silhouette and photo of a young woman facing the camera.

She’s unsmiling, has her dark, sleek hair pulled back into a knot, wears earrings and has a solemn expression. She’s lovely and reminds me a bit of Frida Kalho without the eyebrows. There are two dates: 1839 next to her face. and 1926 handwritten into a postcard that is superimposed beneath her photos. The handwriting is in Italian so I’m unable to interpret it, but the artist told me that the woman was in prison for murder and that most of his collage series were of prisoners.

So as I often do, I wonder who she murdered and why? A husband who beat her? A lover who betrayed her? A child because she’d gone mad with post-partum depression? Was it a crime of passion? Desperation? An accident? She looks like she could be a school teacher or anyone’s favorite daughter.

I imagine the river of grief that must have swelled around her when her case was tried. Her mother, perhaps wearing a veil or kerchief in the courtroom, sobbing. Her father in his best clothes, twisting his hat, again, and again. Both stunned at the circumstances that had led them to the courtroom, by the gossip, by their loss. The grimness of the courtroom when the sentence was announced, the emotions that choked the woman and her family. And then too, was she executed? Did she spend her life in prison? Sometimes in odd moments when I pass her on my way downstairs, I fill in her life with my own version. I imagine a prison sentence that is spent on a lonely work farm, how another inmate, a large woman, also in for murder, rips her earrings from her, leaving her bleeding. How her fresh-faced beauty fades and her skin becomes raw and chapped from the lye-based prison soap. Or worse, a gallows scene.

This morning I was shopping for Christmas gifts and bought a wallet along with other purchases and mentioned to the cashier how mine was worn. She was a woman with long gray hair, glasses and was whippet-skinny. She told me she had owned the same wallet since 1983 and had bought it in Mexico. We joked how it hadn’t seen much use and she said she carried money in her pocket because it was safer than a purse and couldn’t afford a new wallet. And I thought about being in your 50s and working under the fluorescent lights of a department store, the Christmas music a constant background chorus, shoppers in a stream of humanity, their purchases revealing them. How her price scanner wasn’t working properly and she was talking back to it. And how when you’re in your fifties how your back and feet hurt after a few hours of standing, but there will be hours more in a shift.

So many stories. So many paths that people choose, sometimes badly, sometimes blindly. And It seems there for every sales clerk, or gas station attendant, or prisoner, or homeless person, the stories of loss and luck and disaster and passion and heartbreak are around us for the picking. For endless inspiration.

No rain this morning, with some blue (blue!)peeking through. The storms in the past few days have been ridiculous—when I was driving to Thanksgiving dinner I deserted the freeway because the standing water made it too difficult to see, especially when a semi whipped past, drowning my car in a blinding torrent. Now a winter storm is coming (meaning snow). When it snows in the Northwest, the region turns into a bumper car game….

In the past few weeks I read Anita Shreve’s The Weight of Water and The Last Time They Met. Shreve is a gorgeous writer with intricate and finely wrought storylines about fascinating people. The Weight of Water is a terrific read, but I was disappointed in the ending and concept of The Last Time They Met. The two books are related with recurring characters, but set in different time periods. So out of curiosity, last night I rented the film version of The Weight of Water. It is a dreadful film –the sort of story the never takes flight in your imagination and you never feel connected to the characters. Besides the fact that the filmmaker drastically altered the storyline and outcome, if you hadn’t read the book beforehand, you’d have trouble following the story.

But let’s get back to writing. It seems to me that writing advice comes in many forms—how to plunge into the deep waters of writing; how to craft scenes and stories; how to write about your life; how to overcome fears and excuses; how to find an agent or publisher. It also seems to me that the most practical advice about writing is this: learn how to read like a writer. That is, with analysis and curiosity and a deep appreciation of craft.

In On Writing, Stephen King discusses the toolbox a writer needs to go about his craft. The most common tool needed is vocabulary, he says: “Put your vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox, and don’t make any conscious effort to improve it. ….One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up the household pet in evening clothes.”

According to King, also in the top shelf of your toolbox is grammar, then comes nouns and verbs “the two indispensable parts of writing.” King goes on to describe how style is formed by using the active voice and meaty verbs and avoiding adverbs. He then goes on to advise: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”

A few pages later, King proclaims: “Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.” And so it is, but while we read because we love getting lost in a story and in a sense living two lives while we’re reading a novel, we also read with our critic’s sensibilities fully engaged. Pay attention to the writer’s organization and structure, language and sensory details, character development and twists. Sure you’ll read for fun, but reading is grounded in a study of technique--each novel, memoir, or short story that you read is a miniature writing course. So dissect and ask questions about secondary characters and subplots, surprise endings or prologues. Keep asking why and how and then read some more.

If you haven’t delved into Timothy Eagan’s The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, I cannot recommend it enough. It recently and deservedly won the National Book Award. But notice how although the events have been over for decades, he imbues it with such tension and suspense, especially his descriptions of weather and climate conditions, that you cannot bear to set the book down.

Last night a storm swept in here like a runaway locomotive, but this morning there is a temporary lull before the next storm hits with lots of rain and snow in the Cascades. I haven’t been feeling well so am easing into the day by reading salon.com. Garrison Keillor’s essay, A quiet life among autumnal people is about how “Gluttony and lust and pride start to fade late in life, leaving us thankful for simple blessings. “

In the final paragraphs he writes: ‘It's a good life. A November morning and you walk home under the bare trees, listening to a frenzy of questions -- Why do we live here? Why do other people live in California? -- and you open the door to the smell of coffee and cinnamon. You make a fire in the fireplace and ease yourself into an old easy chair that has conformed to your own back and haunches, and dutifully you read the paper, but then you look over the top of the front page at the soft light streaming in, the delicate browns and yellows and greens of fall, the quiet street.

If you had some paint, you could make a painting of this, if you were a painter.”

Perhaps because the holidays are fast approaching, because I have just lost a friend to a sudden and unexpected death, and perhaps because I grew up poor, I always believe in gratitude for the smallest things. And believe that as writers we’re always noticing, always grateful. For example, I’ve noticed that lately between the storms that the birds are massing and shrieking and jabbering and jitterbugging among the treetops. I cannot imagine what they’re up to, but their cacophony is like an overhead circus and I’m so amazed and heartened by it each time I step outside.

And last week I again spotted a Great Blue Heron that lives in the nearby creek. Around the November of 2004 election, neighbors had built a tall fence blocking out the view of the creek in their back yard—a place where the heron was often perched in the mornings when I was out walking. I remember walking along and stopping to watch the heron, my usual routine, but then when the fence blocked my view I felt punched, just as I had by the 2004 election shenanigans and crimes.

I had only seen the heron once since then, but last week I spotted it on a small island at the park that is across the street from the house with the tall fence. I’ve been checking on the creek at regular intervals lately since it’s almost unrecognizable as the babbling brook of past August. Now, when I approach the park, I can hear it from a block away—in the past, the burbles were the softest of lullabies as it wended south.

So I hung around and watched the heron as it waded into the water, then I moved to another vantage where I could see its profile. I love how some birds, especially water birds, look so prehistoric and mysterious. Years ago, when I needed a one-credit class in college I took a dinosaur class. For awhile at cocktail parties I was just a font of interesting tidbits, like did you know that the bony plates of the Stegosaurus are used as a kind of air conditioning for the creature? At that time the latest theory was that dinosaurs had evolved into birds and we studied the similarities of their bone structure. I believe since then this theory has been disputed.

No matter the current theories on extinction, and since those ancient giants are long gone, I like to watch birds, feeling gratitude for some connection to far-away times. And as I watched the heron, it took off and skimmed above the creek with the utmost grace and I realized I was scarcely breathing.

So it’s often the small things that I am most grateful for—the color of sky, the sound of rain on the roof, candle glow, a child’s hand in mine, an unexpected joke. Tomorrow I’ll be grateful for the larger things in life, but for today, I’ll hang on to these small gems and one more time will walk to the creek searcing for the heron.

Today the sun is out for awhile revealing a wet, wet world and the grass glimmering like a field of diamonds. I was awake in the middle of the night and was reading an essay about the healing power of poetry by Amy Bloom in the latest O magazine. Bloom’s essays are always thoughtful and thought-provoking, as are her beautiful short stories. Her essay is called Why Poetry Can Save Your Life. She weaves the essay with several poems she has turned to over the years and writes, “Poetry has stood by me like the most reliable recipes. It has reassured me like dawn after a bad night (that moment where you lie in bed, thinking, If I can get to 5A.M, I will be all right). Jane Kenyon, who was the poet laureate of everyday depression and, fortunately for herself and for us, of happiness as well, sits right by as I am looking for some of that happiness. I can see her pushing back her dark hair and looking at me with the tired, smart eyes of someone who has seen a lot of 4 A.M: “There’s just no accounting for happiness,” she says, “or the way it turns up like a prodigal….”

No, happiness is the uncle you never knew about,
who flies a single-engine plane onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon,
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

And I’m so grateful to have her say it for me, and to be understood by someone I don’t know, I get out of bed feeling less alone.”

Can’t you just imagine that uncle and the blessing of his visit?

I was teaching a workshop on Saturday called Power Writing and talked to my students about reading poetry to really notice the potency of language, especially figurative language. To notice how only a few words can tell a large story, how we feel ripples of emotion from the perfect metaphor.

Yesterday I received a phone call that one of my friends, Barbara Bolender, who is my age, died in her sleep Friday night. I had just visited her the previous weekend when I was teaching at Evergreen College so am so grateful that I saw her recently and so shattered with grief that I can scarcely speak. I talked with her sister yesterday and told her that if I could choose a sister, it would have been Barbara.

This week I had been planning on writing the foreword to her book that she was working on called Silver Lining which is about her experiences dealing with her husband’s Ben’s illness and brain injury. The Thanksgiving card I had already addressed and was about to mail is sitting on my desk. So instead of writing a foreword, I will write a eulogy, grateful for the chance to put loss into words, to reach out to all who are left behind especially when death is so unexpected. And I’m going to quote W.S. Merwin’s short poem, Absence. It goes like this:
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

Yesterday I was driving north on Macadam, a road that runs along the Willamette River. It was raining again, and when I glanced over at the river the low-slung clouds skimming above the river looked like a pod of whales swimming north. Beyond the river the Cascades were painted in shades of pewter, slate and midnight. Today promises some breaks in the rain and meanwhile in Baghdad nine people were gunned down in a bakery and they still don’t know how many hostages are still in captivity from the recent mass kidnapping at the Ministry of Education. In case you don’t know it, there’s a brain drain going on in Iraq because professionals and intellectuals have been targeted, so they’re fleeing the country just when they’re most needed. Who can blame them?

I taught a business writing class to a local company this week and when I started talking about writing I explained that I normally teach fiction writers and memoirists, but many of the principles of writing are common to all types of writing. And just because you’re writing a letter to a customer, it doesn’t mean that it needs to be a lifeless blob.

This is what I tried to explain: When people read, they do two things. First, they subvocalize, or hear the sound of their own voice inside their head. Because of this, you always keep in mind that sound communicates meaning and you try to capitalize on this. You use alliteration, repetition, onomatopoeia, fragments, run-on sentences, parallelism, and dialogue because the brain pays close attention to sound.

The second thing that happens when people read is that they have a sort of movie screen located in their imagination. You want to use words, sentences and scenes that slip images and actions onto that movie screen. Precise nouns and verbs are two main tools for doing so as are dramatizing, action, dialogue and sensory information.

I explained how vivid verbs push along and enliven sentences, but are also visual and physical. I mentioned that I advised fiction writers to put a visual image on every page and advised the business writers to do the same. So then we started talking about how to make their writing visual—for example to use hammer as a verb and to call their job site ledgers a ledger (because this places an image in the mind) rather than job site inventory contro,l which isn’t visual.

And because contemporary readers have a vast data bank of memories, your job is to remind them of the things that they already know. Thus, you can write “school bus” instead of “long vehicle, painted yellow, with many windows, that transports children to and from school.” Contemporary readers know what a school bus is and often when you write the word, can imagine it clearly on their inner movie screens, and often also the cacophony of children’s voices and energy as the bus travels along.

When Jane Austen and George Eliot were writing people rarely traveled beyond fifty miles or so, rarely left their town or parish. So if Austen traveled to Bath or Eliot wanted to paint the country side or a manor house, sometimes it was done lavishly, especially in the case of Eliot, who ran on and on in her descriptions.

But Austen’s novels are still beloved because she was intensely observant—she not only understood the big picture about society, but knew also the territory of the heart, the subtext of daily conversation, the intimacy of family life. And her subjects were timeless-- women and marriage, class and money, scandal and hypocrisy, and all still resonate today.

And Eliot’s novels such as Middlemarch are considered classics, because she too was a keen observer, who wrote with the intricacy of a landscape painter. In fact Eliot and Austen painted word pictures and in the end, that’s what we must all do.

Returned from teaching in Olympia to crazy winds wailing and whipping the land. Before I went to sleep I stood at an upstairs window and watched giant cedars rumbaing in the wind. Over night at the coast winds were clocked up to 100 mph. Not surprisingly when I woke this morning it was to a dream of being caught in a tornado. I was in a car with my brother when wind started whisking us down a street from childhood, although the car’s engine wasn’t on. My brother wanted to bail out, but I warned him we were safer in the car and struggled to wrestle it under control, almost hitting a man walking on the street. We returned home and the sky was blue, but I suggested we head for the basement. He didn’t think it necessary so we went outdoors and checked the sky and a towering black cloud was shifting toward us, with fingers of blackness, grasping toward us.

I rode on the train this weekend again and as I pulled my suitcase along the track on Friday night, I felt like a heroine in a Cary Grant movie. There is just something about riding on the train that pulls you back in time then slips you into a cozy cocoon as you rattle along, the train whistle sounding far-off and mournful and dreamy. I like to read and eavesdrop on my fellow passengers and write in my notebook. Often on the ride home I’ll sip wine and watch the blackness whip past. Yesterday there were a bunch of drunks on the train from the Seahawks game and two of them didn’t get off in time at a stop in Kelso and two more were tossed off because of their drunken antics. The engineer slammed on the brakes—-a huge, hissing din, and the porters were racing around, their walkie-talkies squawking about the ruckus. So a bit of excitement to mar the otherwise pleasant trip.

I was teaching a 2-day workshop on “show, don’t tell” techniques and I was thinking as we rode south into the storm and dark that it’s such an easy and yet difficult concept to grasp. We read a number of examples that I brought along, but then the more you analyze writing, the more you realize that all writing is a blend of showing, or dramatizing, and telling, or reporting. The trick is to know when to report and when to play out a scene, when to summarize and when to linger. It seems to me that one tip for making this decision is to think about the emotions you’re trying to evoke in your reader. The more profound or deeper the emotionas of a moment in a story, the more you’ll want to play it out, moment by the moment so that the reader feels like he or she is there, knowing what the characters know and feeling what the characters feels.

Yesterday we had sun after a week of rain, but today the sky is sullen again and the rains are returning. Creeks and rivers have been rampaging and many are above flood stage. A portion of Mt. Hood is cut off because a creek that once ran under the highway spilled its banks and deposited huge boulders onto the highway. But apparently the worst is over for now because it’s supposed to start snowing in the Cascades.

It’s the day before Veterans Day and when I woke a radio newscaster announced that there are now more than 26 million Veterans in the United States and Puerto Rico, thousands of them from the Afghanistan and Iraq occupation. There are also more than 150,000 men and women now deployed in Iraq. Thousands of lives touched with worry and dread by these people living amid what is already a civil war. More American soldiers killed yesterday from roadside bombs and the Iraqi coffin makers are so busy that they cannot keep up with the volumes as the death squads strike again and again.

The origins of the holiday began about seven months after Armistice Day when World War I ended and the treaty of Versailles was signed on November 11. Armistice Day, officially became a holiday in the United States in 1926, and a national holiday 12 years later. On June 1, 1954, the name was changed to Veterans Day to honor all U.S. veterans. 26 million. I cannot wrap my imagination around that number.

For several years I worked on a book that is going to be published in spring of 2007. It’s called Voices From the Street and is based on hundreds of interviews with men and women living on the streets of Portland. To say the results were fascinating is such an understatement. When I began writing the book, my first job was to create a table of contents and try to sort through the major themes that emerged from hours and hours of these revelations. What became most apparent was that many of the people who are homeless had unstable childhoods. This instability came in many forms –some were born into military families, some were in foster care, some had fractured families they escaped from at a young age.

There are many myths about homeless people. I hear people claim that they’re all crazy, or alcoholic, or drug addicts. In truth, only a portion of the people who live on the streets of Portland and other places in this country have addiction or mental health problems. But about 35% of them are veterans, most veterans of the Vietnam War, although there are also homeless vets from the current military operations.

If you want to honor or help our veterans, there are many ways to do so. When you see a homeless vet, you might want to thank him for his service and buy him a meal. You might want to look him in the eyes and see the person, not his circumstances. Or you might want to get involved by donating to a veteran’s cause. One cause that I can recommend is Operation Helmet. It was founded by Dr. Bob Meadors whose grandson was sent to Iraq. They purchase and ship kits which are used to line helmets. Many of our men and women are damaged or killed by traumatic brain injuries, often caused by IUDs exploding near by as well as other accidents or injuries. The kits help prevent these tragic injuries. Eventually the government is going to furnish the troops with better helmets, but meantime, there are still troops who don’t have these upgrades. You can visit them at www.operationhelmet.org. Each kit costs $75-$100 and they have already supplied nearly 28,000.

Well, it’s not raining at the moment which is a good thing since this place is about to float away. I attended a lecture last night, reluctant to pull myself away from the election results and when I returned stayed up late listening to Air America’s coverage called “Send out the Clowns.” It was so hard to fall asleep with such important issues hanging on the votes--so I lay in the dark listening, hoping, wondering, laughing, celebrating. The American people have not only spoken, we have roared. We are tired of the corruption and one-party rule and corruption and the crimes, especially torture, committed in our name. And did I mention the corruption and the breath-taking arrogance? The lack of real leadership. The name calling and divisiveness. We’re tired of being let down. We want our rights back, our troops brought home, our tattered constitution to be followed first and always.

And to use science and technology to solve our dependency on foreign oil and cure diseases and mend our ailing economy. To fix our elections so that they cannot be fixed and no citizen who wants to vote is turned away, or threatened, or lied to.

And we want congressional oversight, and we want it now, especially oversight hearings about the morass in Iraq and the thievery and crimes going on there.

I know that there are millions of people like me who have had a low-grade case of depression since Bush stole the first election and were made sick by the theft of the second election in 2004. We never forgave Kerry for not forcing a thorough count in Ohio. For not standing up for our aching need for sanity and true leadership. There are so few great leaders in the world now and we live in a time when they are desperately needed. When dangerous hatreds burn like a fever across the planet.

So I say, throw out the bums, the clowns, the yes-men, the criminals, and bring in some new thinkers, new energy, new perspectives. And thank goodness that Kenneth Blackwell, the thief is out of office in Ohio, as is Katherine Harris the fixer in Florida. People like them have made our country the laughing stock and bully of the world.

So they’re still counting votes in Montana and Virginia. Fingers are crossed across the land. Next time I’ll write about writing, but for today, I’m celebrating.

“We do not write what we know; we write what we want to find out.” Wallace Stegner

The sky is ten shades of angry gray with layers of clouds all sweeping past, heading east. Last night I was driving home after a concert and barely made my way through the flooded streets. In some places street crews or firefighters were out unclogging sewer drains, but in some places no one was around and water was two feet high. We’ve already had three to six inches of rain, more is coming and the ground is saturated, so flood warnings and watches are now in place for areas west of the Cascades.

I mentioned a few days ago that I wanted to talk about memoirs. I work on them for clients and at this point have edited more than fifty. I want to remind people of a few facts about memoir. First, memoir is not an autobiography so it will not cover all the years of your life. Like fiction, it focuses on the most interesting and dramatic events of a lifetime. Thus it might cover six months or six years, but it will not be sixty years. A memoir tells a story with a beginning, middle and end. It is narrative, that is written in compelling scenes that are embedded with conflict and this conflict is shown by dialogue and action.

It shows the writer’s mind at work as he or she wrestles with the truth of his or her life. The tone and voice can be sassy or witty or wacky but it is always somehow thoughtful and tied together with a theme. I cannot stress how important theme is in writing fiction and nonfiction. Without theme, events happen but they don’t necessarily have meaning. And memoir is all about meaning. So if you cannot conjure a theme on your first draft, by the time you write the second or third draft, your themes should emerge. If you still cannot find the themes in your writing, give it to friends and ask them to comment on the themes.

A memoir is not a random string of events—the events are tied together via cause and effect and the drama arcs to a conclusion or climax. It shows people changing and under some kind of duress and the influences and people or a person forcing them to change, causing the duress.

Suffering does not equal memoir. A memoir is not venting, airing your grievances about people who have wronged you, or proving you’re a victim. It is honest and sometimes that honesty will prove that you are no angel, that you had a hand in your misfortunes, that you’re human and fallible and weak. If your memoir proves how heroic or noble or amazing you are, readers might yawn. Readers might also yawn if the memoir contains no reflection, no dialogue, no attempt to portray other people in your life intimately and completely. That means your grandma isn’t shown through your child’s eyes as a dispenser of cookies and hugs, but someone with life outside her role in your life.

When readers open a memoir, they want to discover the meaning in the memoirist’s life which will shine a light of understanding onto their own life. Memoir is a path to discovery—it is not a cover up, a sell job, a snow job, a candy-coated confection. It is the truth of a life as best you know it, told with a fiction writer’s tricks, but not a fiction writer’s lies.

So I’m going to start this blog with a confession. Now, I usually start with a weather report because I usually write in the morning and love to watch the sky as I awake and start my day at my desk. But it’s night time and my window is black and it started raining yesterday and I fear my weather reports will be dismally similar for the next few months. Although, come to think of it, one benefit of planetary warming is that if you live in the Northwest, you know that we receive more sun and less rain than in years past. But don’t get me started about all the heat waves of this past summer because I’ve already bitched plenty.

Back to my confession: I don’t own a cell phone. As far as I know there are 18 people like me on the West coast, probably not enough to start a viable support group. It drives most of my friends a bit crazy (although, get this, of the aforementioned 18 noncell owners, two of them are my friends) I always tell my (pro-cell) friends that I hate them and it’s true. They’re much too small and difficult to use even if you have fingers as small as a six year old (I don’t); they often sound like crap or like a train is whizzing past and they cut off the person when he enters a tunnel or some mysterious dead zone; and I hate going through the world, shopping or standing in line at the bank, minding my own business, but forced to overhear other people’s boring conversations. And oh my, most cell phone calls ARE tragically boring. Are your ears red? I cannot help but conclude that we are country of people who are so desperately lonely that we cannot select a bag of dog food or drive down the street without consulting a mate or friend as we push a shopping cart down the aisle or navigate a green light.

Me, when I’m out in public, I’m spying and I’m paying attention. My world too often is circumscribed by the walls of this office (and especially lately with the heat blasting) which can become stifling. So when I’m out and about even on the most mundane errand like buying paper towels or checking my post office box, I want to notice who is out in the world with me, what they’re wearing, what they’re doing, and if they might be crazy or cute or funny. I want to notice who has dyed their hair a really strange shade of burgundy, who has a spooky tic, and who is cleaning their nails in public. And while my spy routine also includes eavesdropping, I’ve heard about three cell phone calls in the past five years that I’ve actually written down. Now, in the last five years I’ve written thousands of words (afraid to claim millions, but I probably have written at least one million…) and so you can see the proportion of intriguing cell phone calls worth noting to my overall word count.

Another reason why I don’t own a cell phone, dinosaur that I am, is that I don’t get a lot of phone calls. Now, e-mails are another thing. Not only do I receive every stock tip, Nigerian bank scam, penis enhancer and Russian slut looking for a husband, but I also hear from writers in Schenectady or some place I’ve never been, who want to know how to write a book (I swear their e-mails are that broad), people who have bought my latest book and have nice things to say, friends, students, and people interested in writing for my anthology. So I can barely keep up with my e-mails and should be answering about 10 of them right now. And of course crazy people write me all the time, but that will be the subject of another blog.

But lately, with the political campaign season hot and heavy and perhaps because I haven’t mailed in my election ballot yet, the phone is frickin ringing off the wall. Bill Clinton just called, I swear to God. When a friend called a few minutes later I thought it was Clinton calling back. You know how he looks kind of drawn and skinny these days? On the phone, he sounds a bit thin too. And then judges and volunteers and fireman and union members and action groups and people who I cannot figure out who the heck they are ring-a-linging, and they all are reminding me to get in my ballot my November 7th. I swear I will. I love to vote. And if you are actually reading this: PLEASE VOTE. THE STAKES ARE HIGH. More soon—because I really need to rant a bit about memoirs and people who should stop and think before they start writing them.