In great fiction we are moved by what happens, not by the whimpering or bawling of the writer’s presentation of what happens. This is, in great fiction, we are moved by characters and events, not by the emotions of the person who happens to be telling the tale. John Gardner

The sky is dreary and since I’m heading up to Prince George later today where it’s likely to be cold and snowy, I’m not going to think about the weather except to pack some sweaters. NPR is humming along with the news and has just reported that 3,000 gallons of milk has spilled on a local highway. Sometimes my life feels so quiet as I sit here writing away with all this hubbub going on in the bigger world.

I’ve been thinking about melodrama in stories because it’s something I often warn my editing clients about, but I’ve realized that I don’t often define it adequately when I work on their manuscripts. Depending on the needs of the storyline, the best fiction is character-driven. Now, some action stories or thrillers are action-driven, so we don’t care as much about what happens to individual characters but rather how they can stop the terrorist threat or bring down a serial killer.

In character-driven fiction, story people we have come to know lose or triumph in situations that are believable and satisfying. Melodrama is the opposite of this and I recognize it when I see it on the page, but it’s sometimes a bit difficult to explain. Melodrama is often about the triumph of good over evil and idealizing goodness. What is helpful to remember is that the word has the Greek word melody or song combined with drama which means action or deed. So imagine that music is shrieking in the background when a melodramatic scene plays out sort of like the shower scene in Psycho. Or imagine all the shenanigans and tears and hype in reality television—it’s swimming in melodrama.

There are several formulas for melodrama. In the first type, you must take an underdeveloped character—a villain, a hero, or victim and place them in situations for which the reader hasn’t been adequately prepared for. When a reader isn’t prepared for action on the page it is sometimes called jumping conflict. That is, we go from watching a group of people enjoying a picnic to watching them running, shrieking, and tripping over each other in their haste to escape from a monstrous threat. It’s jumping conflict and melodrama when the readers don’t have an inkling about the threat, when there has been no foreshadowing or buildup.

Or melodrama can feature foreshadowing or a buildup, but is still an extreme action created solely for emotional impact rather then for satisfying drama. It usually involves some evil unleashed and a victim hurt or killed by the evil. Then a hero must right the evil. Now, that would seem like a timeless formula for drama. It’s typical of television series and soap operas and you can find it in Westerns, and mysteries, and modern day shoot-em-ups. Melodrama is designed to reinforce society’s values. To avoid melodrama, the trick lies in the proportion of things, the reactions of characters, the morality in play. Fiction requires balance and it’s so easy to have an unbalanced tale with too much violence or sappiness or weeping.

Melodrama might stem from embroiling your characters in a situation, then you pull the plug or stage the reversal with the suddenness of a punch to the groin. It can be unexpected, but it is always used to heighten emotions—the villain rapes the heroine, the hero finds out he has a terminal illness, the baby dies, the heroine is maimed, a tornado savages the town. You will recognize melodrama because the emotions in the angst-prone characters are at full-tilt while you, the reader or viewer, are not feeling much. Melodrama often uses stock or stereotyped characters, and usually, but not always features a happy ending. Often the themes are heavy handed and preachy. It also often is accompanied by purple prose, excess sentiment, clichés, heavy sighs, and characters emoting about their souls and purpose for being.

Remember when the judge said he knows porn when he sees it, but it’s difficult to define? I know melodrama when I see it on the page and I believe that it often stems from my lack of intimacy with characters. Or it can come when the hero is actually a superhero without flaws or believable feelings. The sort of hero featured in Greek dramas of old. Now I know that there is a place for superheroes in the world, but I like my heroes tarnished and flawed and real. Melodrama is opposite of slice-of-life fiction. It’s the broad strokes of writing with lots of torment, but little redemption; shrillness without nuance; arguments and tortures, with few quiet moments. Usually the character’s motives are not understood or characters are simply evil. It’s Tania Harding. For readers to believe in fiction they require that story also holds small moments and the dailiness of life found in setting details and chopping onions and wearing socks. Fiction illuminates the human existence, melodrama does not.

The sky is dusky and rain is coming down steady as tribal drum beat. I’ve been at my desk for a few hours working on my Bad Guys book—still working on sociopaths and criminals and particularly trying to figure out what I want to say about real criminals such as the female pirates that roamed the seas from the 17^th through 19^th centuries and one of Diana Gabaldon’s villains, Stephen Bonnet.

Bonnet is likely a sociopath, although at times he’s sympathetically drawn in her series. He’s a smuggler, a rapist, and someone who once sliced a man’s eyes with a sharp sheath, and then twisted the knife so his foe was completely mutilated. He appears in (I believe) three of the books and since Gabaldon’s novel are so long, twisting, and intricate, tracking down this particular bad guy is going to take some sleuthing and time on my part. But he belongs in the chapter because he’s black hearted as they come and it’s helpful to examine how an author of a series brings a character back for repeat performances and added chaos.

Yesterday I taught a writing workshop at Evergreen College in Olympia and it was one of those days when I felt energized and alert and completely happy the whole day. It was pissing rain most of the day, the sky so low and sullen that it looked like dusk all day. The college is set in a grove of tall evergreens (hence the name) and sometimes gazing out the window it looked like we were nestled uneasily among a haunted forest.

The students completed two writing exercises during the class—and you know it’s always hard to write in this impromptu fashion, but there were some amazing pieces that we all heard. Some were essays or stories that needed to be fleshed out and nurtured and launched out into the world for a bigger audience. One woman read a piece about how her mother who was mentally ill, told her of her father’s death. She was 11 when he died and her mother wasn’t stabilized on medication for another thirty years.

And I was reminded of a class I taught years ago at a community college here in Portland. During this 8-week session I would assign the students to write about a particular event in their childhood. It was a class on improving your writing style and each assignment was meant to focus on a particular technique such as using short words (no words over six letters were allowed). Then the students returned to class the following week and read their stories out loud and we’d discuss their techniques.

However, one week will always linger in my memory because almost all the students had tales of such heartbreak and loss that it felt like a therapy session with a large dose of the Jerry Springer thrown in. One woman wrote about a Thanksgiving day when she was so despondent over her family situation that she left the house and stayed outdoors in an attempt to commit suicide. She lived in Denver and when she returned home hours later no one had missed her and there was no turkey baking.

Another student wrote about a playground accident where he received a large gash on his leg. He goes home to find his mother for comfort. However, he’s stopped at the front steps and must sit down because it comes to him that his mother had died recently and in his pain he’d forgotten that crucial loss.

Another man wrote about losing his parents when he was five and being placed on a train alone and shipped to relatives who lived in Eastern Oregon. They were fundamentalist nuts and had hated his parents because they were in league with the devil and the train trip was only the first moments on a journey of pain.

And I can still remember the atmosphere of that class that evening. We were meeting in a high school classroom and those rooms always smelled like chalk and dust and faintly of feet. The pain in that room was palpable and the atmosphere was heavy and sad but also sweet and respectful and holy. Loss, pain, dysfunction, longing, grief—they’re all such rich, rich territory for writers. A landscape that must and should be visited for all the lessons of the raw heart revealed. To be human is to deal with a series of losses. Some of us are unlucky and face them when we’re children and not so well equipped. And these losses with their ringing magnitude, keep clanging over the decades, demanding to be heard.

The morning sky is blanketed in fog, the trees ghostly as if rising up from a dream. Yesterday I wrote the first draft of a chapter on sociopaths and criminals in fiction for my Bad Guys book. In this chapter I’m talking about Thomas Ripley, the sociopath of Patricia Highsmith’s books and have also just finished reading Talk Talk by T.C. Boyle and will be including his villain in the chapter. A writer I know who lives in Eugene has been recommending Boyle to me for a while, and I now understand why.

The story opens with a woman, Dana Halter, hurrying to a dentist appointment because she’s late, when she runs a stopsign. A cop is parked nearby and this small incident turns her life upside down, because once the cop runs her license through the department’s computer, she is arrested on a variety of charges. Problem is, she’s innocent and the victim of identity fraud. If you’re never worried about identity fraud, after reading his book I predict you’ll dash out and buy a document shredder. The identity theft in Talk Talk is a sociopath and Boyle manages to render his personality and thoughts and motives with perfect pitch. Not to mention the writing is taut and beautiful and he creates complex characters with troubles that are not easily answered.

I’ve been researching sociopaths for this chapter and highly recommend psychologist Martha Stout’s book, The Sociopath Next Door. In it she explains that about four percent of the population are sociopaths and if you have one in your life, you’d better run. She writes: Imagine—if you can—not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.

Sociopaths add lots of juice and tension to a fictional story because they are bound to exploit and manipulate others and are adept at rationalizing all their creepy behaviors. There have been a number of studies and books written about the antisocial personality, most notably Hervey Chleckley’s The Mask of Sanity, and here are some of the characteristics: superficial charm, intelligence, lack of personal responsibility, self-centered, manipulativeness, lying, insincerity, poor judgment and failure to learn from mistakes, unable to establish lasting or close relationships, and lack of insight into personal motivations. You can see how the glib and sometimes charming Hannibal Lecter fits into this personality type.

Of course sociopaths will have these characteristics in varying degrees and are often hot tempered and also thrill seekers, but one thing you can count on: they have ice in their veins. About twenty percent of the prison population are sociopaths but what is more difficult is to identify sociopaths in the general population. But they’re everywhere, or as Stout asserts, next door.

I am looking for strangeness and beauty and mysteriousness and excitement. I sometimes find those ingredients in works widely recognized as important milestones of great literature, and I else times find it in works others would dismiss as rubbish. Jessica Salmonson

Last night I was driving home from teaching a workshop and watching the clouds. It was near dusk and the sky had a yellow cast and clouds dark as whales crowded the sky as if gathering for a rumble. I was thinking about the workshop, but I was mostly thinking about the movie I’d seen the night before. It was Notes on a Scandal, starring Judy Dench, Cate Blanchett and Bill Nighy. It was directed by Richard Eyre and is so gripping, or shall we say riveting, that you don’t dare leave your seat or blink. It begins with a tried-and-true concept: stranger comes to town and shakes up the world and the characters’ lives. In this case, it’s the luminous Sheba Hart, played by Cate Blanchett joining the staff of St. George's school as the new art teacher. Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) a cynical teacher who is near retirement, senses that Hart is a possible friend, a kindred spirit. But Barbara is not the only one who is interested in the lovely Hart. The art teacher begins a highly improper affair with a talented student and Barbara, although horrified by it, promises to keep her secret if she’ll end it. But can Barbara keep a secret? And what is the price for her silence?

Amazing performances by all the actors shape what is a tawdry tale into a deep exploration of the human heart. What is particularly amazing is Dench’s performance as a lonely sociopath. In fact, she embodies loneliness and tilts us into all the rage this state can bring. The film also has a voice-over by Dench as she writes in her journal, a wasp nest of delusions. The novel was written by Zoe Heller and I am going to step out and buy it because I’m curious about how the author embodies Barbara Covett on the page. Dench’s performance contains so much intimacy and nuance and subtext, so that a fleeting expression speaks volumes of emotion or a withering glance quells the most volatile students.

There are varying statistics about how much of human communication is nonverbal. Facial expression, posture, eye contact, mannerisms, gestures, all convey so many cues, so many wordless messages. Then there is also voice tone and clothing and hairstyles and handshakes, touch, both intimate and casual, and how much personal space a person needs that also communicate meaning. But taking this reality into our writing is no easy matter, especially since nonverbal communications vary from culture to culture and also because a smile can communicate joy or malice.

So here’s a suggestion—when you’re out in the world, particularly at a party or gathering, when you’re at a mall, or watching a movie or play, pay special attention to what is unspoken yet still communicated. Be on the alert for subtext –the river of emotion that flows beneath human encounters—whenever you’re with another person, whenever you’re presented with the opportunity to watch humans unaware. .

The sky has dawned a sullen pale gray and rain is falling steadily. Last night I was listening to the NPR evening broadcast when they ran a story about Jennifer Harris. Harris was 28 and a Marine Captain when her helicopter was shot down north of Baghdad on February 7. Her 6 crewmen were also killed and an Al Qaeda-linked grouped claimed responsibility and released a video of the crash.

Her helicopter was the sixth that was shot down in the past few weeks. We have entered a new era in our occupation of Iraq. Helicopters were once the only safe means of travel in the country, but now with people on the ground equipped with shoulder-launched missiles, helicopters are now vulnerable to attack. In case you have forgotten, these weapons were the reason the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan.

Harris’ childhood friend, high school principal, and others spoke about her in the story. By all accounts she was amazing with a future as bright as a mountain of new copper pennies. She was scheduled to return home from her second tour of duty next week. Although Harris died doing what she loved, piloting a helicopter, maybe it’s time we listened to our dead.

I’m spending my mornings working on my Bad Guys book and am reading young adult novels as research for a chapter on writing for children. Yesterday I finished reading Inkheart by Cornelia Funke and it’s such a well written story and intriguing concept that it’s worth talking about. Funke is German and currently lives in Los Angeles and the English titles are published by Scholastic. Inkheart is the first in a series and she has also written The Thief Lord, Dragon Rider, When Santa Fell to Earth and other titles including books for younger readers. I recommend that writers look into her life because she’s a big-hearted woman who channels her compassion for humanity into innovative good works along with her marvelous stories.

The protagonist in Inkheart is 12-year-old Meggie who lives with her father Mo, a book binder and book restorer. But Mo has a most unusual talent—when he reads, the characters in the books leave the pages and enter our world, but also, sometimes people from the real world leave and enter the story world. These appearances and disappearances wreck havoc and as the story begins Mo never reads out loud anymore. Funke writes: “I think that some people have a special talent for reading aloud and if the reading is done well, it can put the listener under a spell.”

The story is about the reverence for books and about how authors create characters and stories and it’s also about evil. Funke has three major villains in her story along with several minor villains and although the worst of the lot, Shadow, never makes an appearance, our fear of him still pervades most of the final chapters. It seems to me that this trick of layering and ranking evil is a great one to replicate. Here is our first acquaintance with Capricorn, a villain who has left the story world and is living in a village in Italy:

. “How can I explain what he’s like? If you were to see a cat eating a young bird I expect you’d cry, wouldn’t you? Or try to help the bird. Capricorn would feel the bird to the cat on purpose, just to watch it being torn apart, and the little creature’s screeching and struggling would be as sweet as honey to him.”

Meggie took another step backward, but Dustfinger kept advancing toward her.

“I don’t suppose you’d get any fun from terrifying people until their knees were so weak they could hardly stand?” he asked. “Nothing gives Capricorn more pleasure. And I don’t suppose you think you can just help yourself to anything you want, never mind what or where. Capricorn does. Unfortunately, your father has something Capricorn has set his heart on.”

Meggie glanced at Mo, but he just stood there looking at her.

“Capricorn can’t bind books like your father,” Dustfinger went on. “In fact, he’s not much good at anything except terrifying people. But he’s a master of that art. It’s his whole life. I doubt if he himself has any idea what it’s like to be so paralyzed by fear that you feel small and insignificant. But he knows just how to arouse that fear and spread it, in people’s homes and their beds, in their heads and their hearts. His men spread fear abroad like the Black Death, they push it under doors and through mailboxes, they paint it on walls and stable doors until it infects everything around it of its own accord, silent and stinking like a plague.” Dustfinger was very close to Meggie now. “Capricorn has many men,” he said softly.” Most have been with him since they were children, and if Capricorn were to order one of them to cut off your nose or one of your ears he’d do it without batting an eyelash. They like to dress in black like crows—only their leader wears a white shirt under his black jacket—and should you ever meet any of them make yourself small, very small, and they notice you. Understand?”

Meggie nodded. Her heart was pounding so hard she could scarcely breathe.

Funke also does a great job of creating a world of unease and darkness. The setting creates a mood of danger and malevolence and even the moon can cause fright.

Although Funke’s books are embedded with themes she writes: “I don`t like to send messages. I do not think that most of us read a book to find a message there. Maybe questions to ask, yes, maybe something to think about, but a message doesn`t allow the reader to think, and this is disrespectful. I hope that The Thief Lord expresses my love for children, my deep respect for them, and my anger about the way adults so often treat the smaller, younger ones. And I always wanted to fulfill Scipio`s wish to become an adult: That was our deal from the beginning.”

And her advice for writers: “Read – and be curious. And if somebody says to you: "Things are this way. You can`t change it" - don`t believe a word.”

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.