“When you’re doing you’re meant to do, you benefit the world in a unique and irreplaceable way. This brings money, friendship, true love, inner peace, and everything else worth having; it sounds facile, but it’s really true. Richard Nelson Bolles, he author of the perennial bests-seller What Color is Your Parachute? puts it this way: ‘Your mission is where your deep joy and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Martha Beck

The sky a pale blue and the small maple across the street has now slipped into its full autumn finery of scarlet. On Friday I arrived at the Oregon coast and as soon as I stepped out of the car into driving winds, I was aware that I was in the midst of a big storm system and that a whole new season had taken hold of the place.

On Thursday tropical storm Ling Ling swept into the region with high winds, knocking out power and toppling trees all the way up to Canada. When I walked out onto the beach on Friday evening I scarcely recognized the place. A small stream had completely changed course, the beach had shrunk to about half its normal size, and the deep sand banks leading up to the road were flattened out. But probably most surprising were the huge piles of bull kelp that were scattered everywhere. Bull kelp look like a long whip with a bulb at the end. On Friday night a family walked past me, four kids each trailing one leaving tracks in the sand. One pile of kelp was about ten feet long and four feet tall.

It was like a mad sculptor had stopped by dropping piles of abstract designs, Dada-like, against the wet sand and meanwhile, the outer the waves thundered at about 10 feet high.

Friday night I was awakened in the night three times by rain pelting the windows sounding like hail or pebbles. Most of my students drove in from Portland on Saturday morning and all had stories to tell about driving through the storm. One woman said she’d been through Hurricane Andrew and the storm was only a few notches lower in ferocity. Then all day the weather changed hour by hour with several periods of sunshine. By Sunday morning things had calmed down, the waves and most of the kelp piles swept back to sea.

I taught a workshop called A Vivid Vision. It’s about if you know/have a strong vision for your life you can move toward it with more ease and purpose. So a lot of the workshop was about excavating and exploring, dreaming dreams and imagining the future. There was a delightful young man in the workshop with his mother—I believe he was 17 and a senior in high school. I had the students write a list of things they love and first on his list was “women” and I couldn’t help but laugh harder than I have in weeks. The idea for this exercise is that you start incorporating more of what you love into your daily life. As Amy Tan once said, “Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming—well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.”

I have been listening to Garrison Keillor’s storytelling for most of my adult life. Each morning his Writer’s Almanac delivers a poem in my email box. Each weekend that I’m home I tune in to some part of his weekend show, Prairie Home Companion. Sometimes the jokes are weak or the musicians don’t do much for me. But I keep coming back for Garrison’s dulcet voice weaving stories about a mythical place. I keep coming back for his gentle humor and because he gives me hope.

Lately I have also enjoyed his essays that appear in salon.com. Today’s piece is about a Sunday morning in a Baltimore church, his father, and how his father never knew him, H.L. Mencken and grace. And in the middle comes this passage:

“Now I'm an old, tired Democrat, sick of this infernal war that may go on for the rest of my life and in which more of our brethren will die miserably, both American and Iraqi. I'm sick of politics today, the cleverness and soullessness of it. I am still angry at Al Gore for wearing those stupid sweaters in 2000 and pretending he didn't know Bill Clinton, and I am angry at everyone who voted for Ralph Nader. I hope the next time they turn the key in the ignition their air bags blow up.”

Last night I was playing mahjongg with friends and our conversation led to this supposition: your spiritual beliefs and political opinions are meaningless without the ability to think critically. You might want to read the whole piece and the responses to it at www.salon.com/opinion/keillor/10/17/baltimore

The fog is still blanketing everything, making the neighborhood look like a horror movie set. I’ve been up since 5 revising a chapter on antagonists. Some days I wish I could tell wanna-be writers that on weekends I stay in bed with a book, but that just wouldn’t be true. I almost never sleep in, and I rarely take days off from writing. Now, I’m not always sure this is a virtue. But the more I work on a piece, no matter what it is, the closer I stay to it, then the easier it is to write. If I write a lot my brain is always working on it and new ideas will arrive when I’m in the shower or out walking or running errands. The trick is to get them down right away. So I like to keep my brain primed, my thoughts centered on a book or article.

Another trick for me comes when I’m juggling on multiple projects. Right now I have at least six book ideas floating around in various stages. I had dinner with a writer the other night. She had been writing fiction for six years and hasn’t been published yet. Meanwhile, her husband has a serious illness that is severely impacting their lives and happiness and dreams of the future. She wants to write about it but is afraid to stop writing fiction.

I told her that it seems to me that most writers should juggle projects. Now, I know some authors who are working on 1000-page sagas and it doesn’t always make sense for them to put down the novel and draft short stories. But for most of us writing short pieces has a similar effect as going for a brisk walk. You return home feeling enlivened and peppy with your joints loose and your emotions calm.

But there’s another point here—no matter what your major projects you also need to write about what pisses you off or keeps you awake at night. We need to speak back to our demons, our ghosts, our waking nightmares. This is the stuff that already contains so much juice it’s a shame not to dig in. Oh, and a big congrats to Al Gore. Sure you don't want to run?

The sky is still dark with dawn a few minutes away. The days are rapidly growing shorter and I’m not yet accustomed to it. I’ve been thinking about how writers live their lives. Yesterday I interviewed Diana Gabaldon for an upcoming article in The Writer. She is now writing two series, but the books in her main series, the Outlander stories are usually about 300,000 words. So I was curious about how her brain worked; how she tracked all her characters and shaped her complicated plots. I learned she does most of writing between midnight and four a.m. and that she doesn’t outline or write in a straight forward or linear way. She writes bits and pieces and scenes and then starts putting it all together sort of like a puzzle. Because she’s up late in the night she wakes at about nine and starts her day by answering emails and the like to get her synapses fired. She then works on her book for about an hour in the morning and then eats lunch and spends the afternoon away from her desk. This hour in the morning is a fertile breeding ground for what she writes in the night, since her layers of consciousness are working on it during the day.

Last weekend when I was in Edmonds, I heard Timothy Egan speak about his writing and living the writing life. In case you’re not familiar with him, he’s a gorgeous writer and along with Truman Capote has influenced my writing enormously. He mentioned that when he travels he carries A River Runs Through It and that Norman Maclean’s elegant words never fail to inspire him. Egan won the National Book Award for his latest book The Worst Hard Times---I’ve been recommending it to people ever since I read it. It’s beautifully written and is about the people who stayed behind in the Dust Bowl states during the Great Depression and it is so taut and suspenseful and intimate that you can hardly believe that you’re reading history.

When Egan talked I learned that he brings a blue collar work ethic to his writing and the idea for the book came when he was traveling through these states writing about the deaths of towns in the area. While other parts of the country are full of newcomers, these states are emptying out and ghost towns litter the prairie lands. And he started hearing from people who still remembered the terrible dust storms of the 30s, especially Black Sunday, and eventually the book came together, augmented by interviews with survivors, research and artifacts.

During the talk Egan talked about the differences between writing fiction and nonfiction but said that all writing comes down to storytelling. That storytelling is encoded in our DNA. He reminded us that when you’re writing nonfiction you need to step back and make sure it’s still a story and not random information and then when you write fiction you need to inhabit the dream and visit the fiction world every day.

Pale sky this morning with no rain. I’m back from a weekend in the Seattle area. I taught two workshops at the Write on the Sound conference in Edmonds, Washington, then taught a mini-workshop at the Barnes and Noble in downtown Seattle. I arrived in Edmonds by train on Friday night and after checking into my hotel, ate dinner and walked around town. I won’t get into the details of the dinner because it was disappointing, but the town is such a jeweled treasure, set alongside the sparkling waters of Puget Sound. It’s a charming, upscale town and I was mostly glad the shops were closed as I wandered around the downtown area, peering into windows brimming with enticing wares. But it’s also a town firmly connected to the arts and I noticed a sign in a coffee house advertising for a “Zen barista.” I walked down to the water as the sun sunk into the horizon and a group of scuba divers were preparing to enter the water. When I asked one diver why they were diving at night, he replied with a heavy, German accent, “because the fish are sleeping,” so I never did learn why they dive at night, although I know that lots of divers train there.

On Saturday morning I taught a workshop on anti-heroes to a packed room and was gratified to note the interest in the topic. I explained my thesis that in a rapidly-changing world that characters cannot necessarily be assigned as good or bad guys, that many inhabit realms in between and can be colored gray. The rest of the day I sat in on a few workshops including one taught by the unflappable Jennie Shortridge who was teaching the how and why of writing sex scenes. As my stomach was bothering me (the meal of the previous evening a suspect in my discomfort) I didn’t get to hear it all, but it was fun and Jenny has great insights into fictional characters. That evening dinner was Thai food and wonderful.

I taught a workshop on writing nonfiction proposals on Sunday morning and at one point I explained that a book proposal was like a mini-business plan and is typically about 50 pages. One woman, with a distinctly unhappy look etched on her face complained that if a writer is going to write 50 pages of a proposal, that you might as well write the book. Well, the reason is simple, nonfiction editors don’t read manuscripts, they read proposals and base buying decisions on a proposal.

A friend whisked me off to Seattle after the conference for another lovely Thai lunch, then on to the book signing and mini workshop. Now, I taught this workshop last weekend in Eugene also and it’s about how to live the writing life. Or, at least what I’ve discovered about living the writing life. Sometimes I write about these topics in this blog or in my column or newsletter. It’s mostly common sense advice about reading a lot, writing a lot, having a plan and maybe having some fun along the way with a bunch of examples from my life and my students' and clients’ lives.

After the workshop was underway, a woman joined us in the front row. After she sat down I asked her if people told her she looked like Angela Bassett (she was a dead ringer). She replied that they did when she was younger. So I countered that she was looking great now and we continued. Afterward, I signed books and chatted with some of the people and then went with my friend to the checkout because he was buying books. And ran into the Angela-Bassett look-alike again. Sorry, I foolishly didn’t learn her name. And she told me that she was so glad she’d come that day to hear me, that it had been especially hard to be motivated to leave home because she’s been diagnosed with bone cancer. When I asked about her prognosis, she said the doctors had bad news for her, but she was ignoring their gloom because “she had too much writing to do.”

And I’m so humbled by meeting her. Wishing we can meet up again and her health somehow improves, that she beats the cancer. And I’m so grateful for this writing life and for all the writers I meet.

Snow is falling in the mountains and while usually October is a long swath of Indian summer, this year, the rains seem to have arrived to stay. Since it was raining last night, I took a quick walk and went past a yarn store in the neighborhood. I don’t knit but every time I pass it I feel drawn to go inside and look around. Besides the rows and rows of brightly colored, muted, and no doubt organic (after all this is Oregon) yarns, there is a café with tables and chairs. Last night a group of women were gathered together at a table chatting and knitting away. And I’ve rarely seen such a cozy sight of such community and congeniality. I was reminded of sewing and quilting bees of former times.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how to maintain community while still accomplishing the lonely task of writing. In my bio on my Between the Lines book it says that “Jessica Morrell is surrounded by writers.” And so I am and several of my close friends are writers. But while many writers gather together in a critique group, I instead lead them with a firm objective to help writers get published. Yesterday my latest fiction group met and the members are talented and diverse and fun. But I’m going to send out an email to fine-tune the procedure so everyone is heard equally. I’m not entirely fond of acting as the Alpha female, but I can and I will.

A few years ago I was attending a monthly meeting of writers. I was sitting in one of the front rows of the charming old church they meet in. And early in the evening, I happened to turn around and gaze at those gathered. And I swear it looked like an asylum had emptied out. There were so many wild-eyed and odd people that seemed to telegraph some sort of mental illness that I was shaken and stayed away from the meetings for awhile. Usually when you attend writing conferences you notice several people a few sandwiches short of a picnic, and I’ve often wondered about this. I’ve heard that dentists have the highest rate of suicide of any profession. I believe it has something to do with how their patients view them (as in with fear and trepidation) as they stick sharp objects in their months and inflict pain. So what do the people at dentist’s conferences look like? You gotta wonder.

So while I have a community of writers, I’m selective of who can enter my inner circle and some of my tribe is a bit more far flung. I have writing friends in the Midwest, Canada, Texas, on the East coast, and my writing newsletter is sent to all parts of the world. Sometimes it seems to me that if you cannot meet regularly with your tribe that you need to carry them inside you anyway. You need to reach out with regular emails and phone calls and letters.

I was in Eugene over the weekend teaching and signing books at a Barnes and Noble. I spent time with a man who was formerly in one of my critique groups. In fact he used to drive from Eugene to Portland weekly. He’s a retired teacher and is one of the most well read, astute, insightful and just plain delightful people I’ve known. Our conversations were a smorgasbord of politics and art and history and personal stories and reminisces. We each had a notebook with us and were writing down book titles the other recommended, the table littered with books. And days later I’m still warmed by this conversation.

Since we live in a time when our political leaders want us to feel afraid and helpless and dependent and isolated, these kind of conversations are especially important. You see, it’s so much easier to rule people who are cowed and uninformed and alone. So I’m reaching out, I’m looking for more people in my tribe.

Sky is pale grey and the morning news reports that Jimmy Carter is spending his 83^rd birthday in Sudan and more rain is on the way. Yesterday I arrived home from the weekend in Eugene in a driving rain. I stopped at the nearby farmer’s market and bought produce and a jar of honey from farmers, who looked huddled and miserable in the cold. But one stand still had raspberries and blackberries for sale, although the teens selling them were wearing gloves, scarves, and winter jackets.

I taught a workshop in narrative nonfiction and later gave a mini workshop at the Barnes and Noble and signed books. There are some parts of my life I don’t have quite figured out but this I know: that I’m privileged to meet amazing people and hear amazing stories as someone who teaches writers. The main theme in my nonfiction workshop was that when you write from life you need to use fictional techniques, thus using scenes, dialogue, conflict, tension. In my workshop I assigned two in-class assignments and the results were amazing. One woman, who wants to write about motherhood, told the tale of bringing her toddler into the emergency room because he was weak and dehydrated from the flu—the tension was amazing. Another writer wrote about betrayal and a crazy roommate. Yet another write wrote about the solace of dusk, the blue hour. Then another writer described her recent visit to a friend of 30 years who has breast cancer.

However, the story that really stayed with me came from a woman who needed to be coaxed by her friend to read out loud. At the lunch break this woman and I had walked around the campus, searching for something hot to drink without success. She’d told me that she wants to write a memoir about her experiences with caring for her son. When he was 19 he went through a windshield at 90 miles an hour. After he was in a coma for three months the hospital staff urged her to move on with her life and gave her a list of nursing homes to care for her comatose son. After visiting some of these homes with his 19 year-old girlfriend, they concluded they needed to bring him home, still in a coma, to care for him. The hospital didn’t agree with this decision.

Which is where the essay began that she read to the quiet room, weeping. It began that she remembered the sweetest words she ever heard from her son. This came after five months of caring for him at home. After waving hamburgers and other scents beneath his nose. After unclenching his crabbed hands and straightening his Achilles tendon. After changing diapers and all sorts of efforts that brought about no response. Then he developed a problem—his brain was exposed.

The family rushed him to the hospital for emergency surgery. The surgeon wanted the family out of the room. The family demanded to stay. The surgeon wasn’t bothering to use anesthesia, the family demanded that he did. So after applying Lydocaine, he began immediately stitching up her son. And his first words in eight months were “What the fuck?” The sweetest words to a mother’s ears.

He didn’t immediately emerge from the coma, it took stops and starts. But he is alive and while brain damaged, she reports that he’s so changed, so sweet and wise and kind. That living with him is like living with the Dali Lama.

You must see that this is why I teach writers.

There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.

What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance. Steven Pessfield from The War of Art

The sky is still dark obscuring the dawn and I’ve started my day by reading a few articles on salon.com, not my usual morning routine. Usually I begin every morning by waking up and walking across the hall to my office and turning on my computer. Then I walk downstairs and fill the tea kettle with water, turn on the stove, return upstairs and sit down, check my emails in case I need to answer my agent or editor, then settle into work.

Yesterday I met with a nice woman who won an hour of my time in a raffle at the Willamette Writers Conference. She had attended one of my workshops this past winter and at the time had talked about a book she was interested in writing. The topic is intriguing and unusual, she’s done much of the research, and she loves the topic. She’s also been writing a weekly column for her small town paper, has had an essay published and is a decent writer. Trouble is, she’s having a hard time buckling down to write the book. I suggested that she begin by writing a book proposal that included a sample chapter as her first step on this project.

But mostly we ended up talking about developing a morning writing routine and brainstorming ways so that the writing gets done. The problem is, as I explained yesterday, there is no magic elixir that makes a writer turn pro. People who write for a living are like everyone else but we have found a way to buckle ourselves into a writing chair day after day.

I think a lot of it comes down to the power of routine. A few years ago I wrote a column in my newsletter about the power and solace of routine. You see, I think that a lot of grown ups hate the notion of routines, especially when it comes to writing or the arts. Routine sort of equals a straight jacket or selling out or whatever is the opposite of being an artiste.

It seems to me that a writing routine provides two things: when you write at the same time day after day, it sends powerful signals to your deep layers of consciousness. Then somehow these subterranean parts of self start powering the imagination with ideas, images, and connections. At least that’s my theory. All I know is that when I write at the same time day after day that the writing flows out. Now I don’t always have a great writing day and writing doesn’t just pop out of me. It’s never effortless. Sometimes I really struggle with it, particularly the progression of logic in some of the things I write. But my routine still makes it all easier, more natural.

The second aspect of establishing a writing routine is that it provides solace and this too makes the writing easier. When my daughter was a girl she had Raggedy Ann and Andy sheets and a pink quilt on her bed and a row of stuffed animals arranged on the quilt that included three koala bears in various sizes like a small family. Every night she’d slip into her nightgown and brush her teeth and then she’d climb into bed, holding her koala bear named Elizabeth and I’d read her books. Some of her favorites I can still quote to this day, we read them so often. And by the time we’d finish three or four books she was comforted by her bedtime routine and able to slip off into the darkness of sleep and dreams.

Similarly, I think that all routines provide comfort for people of all ages. With my mug of Earl Gray and the radio humming in the background and the dawn breaking, I am at once feeling alive and inspired, and yet calmed by the ballasts of my morning writing routine.

Sky is dusted with layers of grays and blues. Lovely and brooding. I’ve been sick most of this week so am writing and working between naps and a bit of self pity. I wanted to call your attention to a couple of stories that I heard on National Public Radio (www.npr.org).

The first is called Why Women Read More Than Men. It describes how Ian McEwan and his son passed out 30 books free at a London park at lunchtime. The story says, “ Nearly all of the takers were women, who were "eager and grateful" for the freebies while the men "frowned in suspicion, or distaste." The inevitable conclusion, wrote McEwan in The Guardian newspaper: "When women stop reading, the novel will be dead."”

Research has shown that women read more than men although theories of why this is true varies and research is ongoing. However, the story continues that a poll conducted recently found that the typical American read only four books last year, and one in four adults read no books at all. The story goes on with more stats: “A National Endowment for the Arts report found that only 57 percent of Americans had read a book in 2002 a four percentage-point drop in a decade. Book sales have been flat in recent years and are expected to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Among avid readers surveyed by the AP, the typical woman read nine books in a year, compared with only five for men. Women read more than men in all categories except for history and biography. “. I wish they would have called me since I read about 100 books a year and most of my friends read far more than four books

The story also remarks that women read 80 percent of fiction, most book groups are comprised of women, and most literary blogs are written by women. Another exception is the Harry Potter books where 41 of the readers are girls. I wish a pollster would call me since I read about 100 books a year and most of my friends read far more than four book. In fact, wouldn’t it be interesting if writers were polled about their reading habits?

Then yesterday NPR correspondent Lynn Neary interviewed Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and other novels including her newest novel, Run. The story began with Patchett saying she can write anywhere, any time, but that her most necessary ingredient is her first reader, author Elizabeth McCracken. The two writers met in 1990 and since then are invaluable components in their writing practice. At one point the story switched to McCracken and she related how when she began reading the manuscript to Bel Canto in a crowded Cambridge bar and she wanted to grab the bartender or tell someone that the manuscript she was reading was going to be a bestseller.

Patchett went on to say that when she writes, Elizabeth’s knowledge and sensibilities are always in her mind. In the beginning of their relationship their critiques were mostly encouraging, but they’ve gotten tougher over the years. I think all writers need a trusted first reader, someone who can be relied on who is knowledgeable and opinionated.

Cumulus clouds scattered across the sky. I’ve been up since 6 working on a proposal for a new book. I’m hoping to send the proposal to my agent in a few days. As usual, juggling a lot of projects and thinking a lot about writing and how to successfully live the writing life.

I was home on Sunday night working and had the small television in my office on. It was broadcasting the Emmy awards and I was please to see The Sopranos win for Best Drama. When I moved here 3 years ago I cancelled my cable subscription and watch little television. I’ve decided that somehow I’m going to write a breakout book and television doesn’t factor much into my schedule except for a few hours a week, usually none in the summer.

Somehow after the Emmys were over on Sunday, I was still awake and flipped the channel to PBS and watched P.O.V. It is a show that features documentary films and the one featured was Made in L.A. by filmmakers Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar. It’s about garment workers living in L.A., many of them illegal immigrants working under horrible conditions—12 hour workdays, no overtime pay, no breaks for the bathroom or lunch. And there lives could not have been more removed from glittery crowd at the awards show.

This particular group of workers, mostly women, began organizing at the Garment Worker Center in L.A. and started protesting/boycotting Forever 21. This store, which you might pass by in your local mall, sells cheap clothes to teens and twenty-somethings and sells them cheap because the workers are exploited. The film traces the workers three-year struggle to bring Forever 21 into a room for negotiating.

Made in L.A. is powerful because of its intimacy, chiefly focusing on three women, Lupe, Maura, and Maria, showing their journey through these years. I was amazed that after their grueling work weeks and other responsibilities that the women would spend their precious free time protesting. Even after setbacks such as an unfavorable court ruling, they kept fighting.

I talk a lot about themes when I teach memoir and fiction classes and the themes of the documentary are courage and unity. And as I watched, I kept thinking if these frightened and weary women can keep persisting against the odds, surely we all can.

There is more information about the film at www.prs.org/pov. It includes follow up comments by the workers and others. Comments include: “ Lupe Hernandez says she feels very shy about seeing herself in the film. But she adds: "Then I feel proud to be there, I feel happy I participated. My grandchildren, if I have children one day, will know me. I can now say that I didn't just pass through life quietly. I left a mark!" and laughs.

Freddie, now in college and the son of Maria said, “the movie is good, because in the end everything turned out as it should have for them, as women, as workers and as immigrants. But as a son of immigrants, I feel kind of sad because everyone looks down on immigrants and treats them as though they have fewer rights than everyone else. Because our parents were immigrants they couldn't complain about anything because they were always fearful of being deported. But I think we can fight. Like the movie says: 'united we can make it.' "

Pale gray sky with the marine layer in evidence. I want to talk about writing a bit. This year I’ve worked on a lot of manuscripts for clients. Several of them showed promise and will go on to be published, some of them needed a strenuous rewrite, some of them were so muddled I wasn’t sure the writers possess the skills to bring them up to snuff. I am about to start rewriting my bad guys book and hoping to take a break from editing, so wanted to mention a few things I’ve seen in manuscripts lately.

One of the main things I notice in badly written manuscripts is that when an author has a thin story he or she tends to cover it up with excess. When I use the word thin to describe fiction it means that often the dramatic question at the heart of the story is not particularly engaging; often it involves little or no suspense; sometimes it has no subplots; sometimes it simply never comes to life.

Excess can take many shapes---excess figurative language or modifiers, overwrought emotions, every leaf or sidewalk or sigh described, dialogue that rambles and never ignites into conflict. But lately what really worries me is when writers cannot handle language and resort to excess to tart up a story. If your language is imprecise you’ll lose the reader’s trust. If your language veers all over the place it detracts from the story’s unity.

When you write you need to present all your ideas with sentences that are stripped down to their cleanest components. If you want to sprinkle in a few gems here and there that’s fine. But when a tastefully dressed woman attends a party she walks in wearing earrings and a few select pieces of jewelry. Now, if she’s wearing a tiara and sixteen bracelets, covered head to toe with tattoos, and has piercings hanging off every part of her face, she broadcasts a much different message. And elegant isn’t one of them. I believe that good writing is elegant and often understated, even if you’re writing about a risqué or bold topic.

Now, I realize that there are many moods, tones, approaches for crafting a story. But excess will always distract from whatever you’re trying to say, will choke the reader as if he’s in a crowded elevator with a person doused in cheap cologne. Most stories I work on require more suspense, nuance, sophistication and somehow, a lot less surplus language

When I work on manuscripts for my clients, I pen long memos about the problems in their manuscripts. I’m often advising them that they have not left enough to the reader’s imagination, and I often advise that they read books on craft they might refer to for help. For people who use excess language and modifiers I sometimes suggest Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages. In this book, Lukeman, who is an agent explains the mistakes that cause a manuscript to be rejected. The number one mistake that he cites is excess modifiers, and I agree with him. Nothing shouts that a writer is an amateur more than this sort of excess.

Lukeman writes: “…the quickest and easiest way to reject a manuscript is to look for this overuse, or misuse, of adjectives and adverbs. Most people who come to writing for the first time think they bring their nouns and verbs to life by piling on adjectives and adverbs, that by describing a day as being “hot, dry, bright, and dusty” they make it more vivid. Almost always the opposite is true.”

Remember that your reader is a participant in the story and especially if you’re writing a book set in a contemporary setting, your job is to remind the reader of what he already knows. Again quoting Lukeman, “Finally, the overall effect of a text encumbered with adjectives, adverbs, and the inevitable commas in between makes for very slow, awkward reading—which these writers would find out for themselves if they only took the time to read their own work aloud.”

Dawn is breaking with an amber glow and record heat is predicted. Last night I met friends at a local wine bar and came home and kind of wandered around here, feeling restless. Then I sat down to write by hand, an activity that’s always calming.

I wanted to say something about this the sixth anniversary of the September 11^th attacks on Washington D.C. and the World Trade Center. And as I wrote, I found warring instincts within me. Part of me wants to rant about how the attacks were preventable. Part of me wants to weep. Part of me wants to pierce this day of remembrance with logic.

We live in a time of political smokescreens and slick propaganda—as evidenced by General Petraeus appearing today again before Congress with the latest batch of smoke and bogus statistics. He keeps talking about whether “the surge” is working and when we can start withdrawing troops from what has become the hellhole of Middle East. But what is missing from his rhetoric and lies and obfuscations is why we’re there in the first place. And it always comes back to our irrational and intemperate response to the 9/11 attacks.

On salon.com today Gary Kamiya has written The real lessons of 9/11. He writes: “Sept. 11 is a totemic date for the Bush administration. It justifies everything, explains everything, ends all argument. It is the crime that must be eternally punished, the wound that can never heal, the moral high ground that can never be taken. Bush's reaction to 9/11 was to declare a "war on terror," of which the Iraq adventure was said to be the "front line." The American establishment signed off on this war because of 9/11. To oppose Bush's "war on terror" was to risk another terror attack and dishonor our dead. The establishment has now turned against the Iraq front, but it has not questioned the "war on terror" itself, or the assumptions on which it is based.”

Today the flags in Oregon are flying at half mast. I think this should be a day of mourning not only for the orphans and widows of the attacks, but also for our soldiers who have died needlessly, the Iraqi citizens slaughtered by the thousands, for their country which lies in shreds, for our weak Congress, our broken government, our damaged reputation abroad, our fractured infrastructure drained by billions wasted.

Let’s mourn for all that’s been ruined, for all the lives lost and in those families let’s imagine the empty nights of a widow’s bed, the stolen futures of the soldiers blown to ribbons by a roadside bomb. All lost in the name of 9/11 from attacks that could and should have been prevented. And then fear was fanned to an inferno, greed overtook reason, and it seems like the keening for all that’s been destroyed can be heard from the farthest heavens.

And it all started with a bunch of extremists with box cutters?

Here is more of Kamiya’s analysis: “Like a vibration that causes a bridge to collapse, the 9/11 attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation's defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character. Many more Americans have now died in a needless war in Iraq than were killed in the terror attacks, and tens of thousands more grievously wounded. Billions of dollars have been wasted. America's moral authority, more precious than gold, has been tarnished by torture and lies and the erosion of our liberties. The world despises us to an unprecedented degree. An entire country has been wrecked. The Middle East is ready to explode. And the threat of terrorism, which the war was intended to remove, is much greater than it was.” The article can be found at www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/09/11/911

You might also want to check out my friend Tiana’s blog at http://tianatozer.wordpress.com/. She recently moved to Kuwait to work for Mercy Corps to establish a literacy project for Iraqi women and to help establish systems to ease the lives of disabled Iraqis. She’s been briefed by Mercy Corps about the real situation in the Middle East and reports these truths on her blog.

Blue skies and heat is coming for the next few days and NPR is playing excerpts from Pavarotti’s funeral, a Mozart aria swirling about the room. Yesterday I went to the Portland Art Museum to see their Rembrandt show, a collection of about 90 Dutch paintings and objects on loan from Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum.
The collection included portraits, landscapes, classical poses and still lifes, along with examples of Delft glassware and tiles, silver, and other objects. With paintings of this era I’m always amazed at what the artists do with light and shadow. I stand in front of a painting and I just cannot figure out how the artist made light shine on the objects portrayed. For example a woman’s still life of flowers—how did she manage that slant of sunlight?
And as I strolled through the crowded galleries with a friend we could only marvel at the level of detail, the precision, and how the Dutch valued beauty and artistry in their everyday life. There was also humor in some of the paintings as when a man is approaching a woman with a dead fowl, apparently a proposal for sex and there was a scene of a quack selling his potions and another scene where a pregnant woman was being treated for morning sickness.
There were several paintings that depicted biblical scenes. One particularly struck me because it told such a story—it was the moment when Jesus is arrested and Peter denies knowing him. A young girl is Peter’s accuser and she’s holding a lamp up to his face. And every nuance of every person is so precise and Peter’s agony is so intimately portrayed. In fact, many of the paintings told a story
In the 1600s there was a Golden Age of art in the Netherlands and I learned that Rembrandt was responsible for teaching most of the important artists of this era. He painted at least 600 paintings, plus drawings and etchings. And noticing the level of detail in the works of these painters I wondered how their output compared to writers. For example, who today can match Rembrandt’s 600 paintings and his scope and influence—perhaps Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates with their prodigious output. But somehow I can’t imagine King’s or Oate’s influence to be felt 400 years from now, their work revered as those of a master. Which writers will stand the test of time? I kept thinking of how great art is so lasting, so important to the culture.
When I left the exhibit I felt like I was returning from another century just as when I sometimes close a novel and return to the real world.

The sky is a pale sooty color and I’ve just seen a school bus chug past with its cargo of children. From my upstairs window it seemed to me that the kids wore a look of captivity. Senator Larry Craig is now fighting his charges of soliciting sex in a public restroom with his lawyer chiming in that he was entrapped. Apparently there were multiple complaints about the sexual activity in the Minnesota airport restrooms that led to the sting operation that snared Craig. It seems to me that people should be able to use public restrooms without being solicited for sex, especially by U.S. senators. Then of course there is the whole issue of how he pulled out a business card and tried to use his position to make his guilt go away.
But then of course this isn’t the first time he’s been caught soliciting or involved in gay sex. I didn’t watch the Sunday morning programs but wasn’t the editor of the Idaho Statesmen on one of the shows explaining why he sat on stories about Craig’s sexual activities? Now I don’t care what kind of sex consenting adults engage in. But call me as prudish as Mary Poppins, but I don’t believe that people should be having sex in public restrooms, or parks or anywhere else in public that infringes on the privacy of others.
The larger issue is the hypocrisy of these Republicans who are always pandering to the far right faction of their party, particularly the fundamentalist Christians who vote in droves. They’ll do and say anything to bring these people to the polls and the more anti-gay they appear, the better…..
Yesterday my September issue of The Sun finally arrived and since I’d been at a party or function for five nights in a roll it was delicious to sprawl on the couch with my issue. I want to call your attention to three pieces worth reading. Letters of Light From a Dark Place was written by Saint James Harris Wood and depicts his decent into heroin addiction, but is most specifically about how he was arrested. He’s an amazing writer and I hope his long incarceration both provides the redemption he’s looking for and offers him the chance for more writing like this amazing piece.
Joseph Bathani’s short story Fading Away is stunning, but maybe because I read it first, Theresa Williams’ short story Trash has stayed with me because of the authenticity of the voice. It begins: “My mother’s name was Jesse Mae Parker. Her married name was Futrell, but Bill Futrell wasn’t my father. My father was a beach bum my mother never married, and I never knew him. Bill married my mother when she was only fifteen and pregnant with me. He was pale and slight, a quiet, worried-looking man who loved to hold hands with her. He worked for the Highway Patrol, and when I was nine he was struck and killed along Highway 17 while writing out a speeding ticket. For years my mother cried every time she passed the spot in the northbound lane, just before the New River Bridge.
Bill Futrell’s parents never forgave him for marrying my mother. My mother’s parents never forgave her for getting pregnant in high school. Nobody in either family would talk to us. So my mother and I were on our own, and this was fine with me. It made us closer.”
After this hook, how could I not keep reading? As I sometimes do, when I read The Sun or a book, I jotted down phrases that were especially powerful, ideas for my own work, and words for my word list: edict, scuttle, spastic, labyrinth, vendetta, caprice, notorious, scrim, irascible, quavering, throng, limbo, languor, pittance, thrum, wager. Happy writing.

Blue, blue skies this morning with temperatures expected to reach 90. I’m writing to the sounds of my sprinkler whirring on the lawn, watering the giant dahlias and a rose bush that is so tall and shapeless and odd this summer it looks like it is pumped full of steroids.
I was thinking about Grace Paley who died on August 22 at 84 of breast cancer. She is best known for her activism, short stories and poetry. She was never a compulsive writer and didn’t leave a huge body of work. It would seem that her concerns for mankind trumped her urge to write, but then again, she had ten books of poetry and short stories published, no small achievement. I’m especially fond of her short story collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute published in 1974.
Her activism was mainly anti-war and anti-militarism, and she was even part of group that traveled to Hanoi to negotiate peace during the Vietnam War. In one of her last interviews given for a newspaper in May she mentioned her dreams for her grandchildren: “It would be a world without militarism and racism and greed – and where women don't have to fight for their place in the world."
Amen to that sister.

Usually I’m a fast reader and can race through the thickest novels lickety split. However, lately I’ve started Finn by Jon Clinch and I’ve only read 50 pages in about a week, savoring each word. It’s not a book to hurry through. It’s a book that is spare and yet dense, meticulous and dark. Every word is precise and the effect of the book is like thunder clouds blotting out the sun at a picnic, then tossing down murderous and endless bolts of lightening. No, that description is not nearly ominous enough. The story starts out with a body floating down the Mississippi and boys arguing whether the corpse is male or female. It’s not until page 40 that we’re privy to the details of how Finn, Huck’s ne’r do-well drunk of a father, mutilated the corpse of his common-law wife and drained it of blood. These details come while he's trying to contact his son.
You see, on page 28 Finn, who barely gets by and manages to keep a daily supply of whiskey, discovers that Huck has found gold. I believe this is the inciting incident in the story since it pushes Huck and his father together and raises the question of whether Finn will wrest the gold from his son. On learning this fact, he immediately travels to the town where Huck lives and after a night spent in jail for drunkenness. He then breaks into the boy’s bedroom at the widow’s home, waiting for him in the dark. Here is part of their conversation after Huck has given him a dollar and claimed he didn’t have access to the gold
:
“I’m thirsty, boy.” As if he needs to construct an argument. Still, he the boy’s father and there may be some useful sentiment to be mined there. Moreover the urge for whiskey has worked its weakness upon him and at this moment he is feeling for the stuff a kind of paternal tenderness that anyone could perceive, event his child. “Now where’s the rest?”
“I give it to the judge,” says the boy, and Finn’s blood turns cold.
“You didn’t.”
“I did.”
“No. He wouldn’t have it.”
”I swear.”
He unsheathes his belt, drawing it forth snakelike from under his coat and winding his stove-in hat tumbling to the floor as he does. “He wouldn’t have it nor anything else. Not from you.” Rising to his feet in the darner of the dark room, his shadow cast large behind hum by the light of the boy’s receding candle.
From out of his other pocket the boy produces a thick sheet of vellum, densely lettered and sealed and signed, and in his high rising voice reads it off to his father like a lesson.
I’ve read hundreds of thrillers and suspense novels and mainstream novels fraught with danger, but never have encountered a book and character so embroidered with menace.

Clear skies, hot weather is on the way this week. Well, ding dong the witch is dead as we finally hear that Alberto [dead man walking] Gonzales is resigning. What a lovely Monday morning present. What I doubt we’ll hear is exactly why he’s leaving—he doesn’t want to be disbarred since he’s lied to Congress especially about his crucial role in the mass firings of U.S. Attorneys. We’ll never hear that these particular attorneys weren’t going along with the administration’s plans to steal elections. Or, speaking of mainstream media not doing their jobs, how much talk will there be about how Gonzo helped George hide his drunk driving charge and his other crimes? The White House sounds like it just might be getting to be a lonely place, but then Bush has always been isolated and out of touch with Americans.

Clouds have drifted away and a pale blue sky is promising warm weather. I teach all kinds of writers and when I teach people who write personal essays I always advise them to read columnists in order to see how the pros lay out their ideas, make the abstract concrete and to pay special attention to their beginnings and endings. I don’t read newspapers like I once did and mostly read columnists on line like Joe Conasan who write for salon.com. But I do read a lot of magazines and almost always read the editor’s letter.

One editor that I especially admire is Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair. Over the years I’ve noticed that Vanity Fair, more famous for its glitzy coverage of the beautiful people also has some of the most in-depth articles on the present state of politics. They also feature quirky profiles of newsmakers including despots like Cheney. I’ve been reading Carter for the past few years and find his writing clear eyed, thoughtful and insightful. He also simply knows how to turn a phrase, has a terrific vocabulary, and is able to make complex ideas understandable.

Here is the opening to his September column called Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse which I especially liked for its effective use for repetition: “Arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence. Not a pretty cocktail of personality traits in the best of situations. No siree. Not a pretty cocktail in an office-mate and not a pretty cocktail in a head of state. In fact, in a leader, it’s a lethal cocktail. Our president and his administration were arrogant during the lead-up to the Iraq war in that they listened only to those who would tell them what they wanted to hear. They were ignorant in the lack of scholarship and due diligence they brought to the matter of how the invasion would at almost every level in the execution of the war and its aftermath. What the political commentator Bill Maher described last year as “fuck –up fatigue” in regard to this administration has moved to the next stage. Around our kitchen table—and I suspect yours—the current stage is outrage fatigue, a simmering frustration and anger over what this administration has done in our good name.”

Carter goes on to delineate how the president has dangerously isolated us in the world; how it always politics over what is best for the country; how the administration is staffed with hacks; how many government agencies are understaffed and underfunded, etc. etc.

He concludes with this paragraph: “Returning to the lethal cocktail of arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence, which knows no national boundaries: in a documentary shown on Britain’s Channel 4 recently , a former senior adviser to Tony Blair recounted the meeting Blair, our president’s ally, had with Jacques Chirac just before the invasion of Iraq. According to the adviser, the French president, who fought in Algeria in the 1950s, worried that neither Bush nor Blair fully understood the ugly nature of war, and issued the following warnings: (1) If the U.S and U.K. invaded Iraq they would not be welcomed by the Iraqi people. (2) The invasion could spark a civil war. (3) A country run by a Shiite majority should not be confused with a democracy. (4) As he left Chirac, Blair turned to an aide, rolled his eyes, and said, “Poor old Jacques, he doesn’t get it, does he?” Arrogance and ignorance. The incompetence was there, too, but it really surged later.”

Enough said.

The sky is overcast although it will clear up by afternoon. Returned from the Oregon coast yesterday and now am unpacked with laundry put away, mail sorted, and am ready to settle back into my routine. While I was at the coast I woke every morning and pulled out a notebook and wrote down my morning dreams, then started sketching ideas for books I’m working on. After writing by hand, I’d pulled out my laptop and start writing. I’m working on several new books and also hatched an idea for another book.

It’s my favorite place for writing—in a kitchen at a big table covered with blue-checkered oilcloth with the Pacific stretching on and on in all its moods. All last week flocks of pelicans were acrobating across the sky, diving into the ocean, moving on to a new location. Never saw them on the shore or at rest, always busy, always fishing.

It was a week of simple pleasures—a lot of walking on the beach, collecting shells and sand dollars, building sand castles, sitting around a bon fire as the stars came out, cooking, eating outdoors at a picnic table, watching the sun wink behind the horizon and all the shades of lavender and pink that followed, and reading. I read T.C. Boyle’s Drop City about a commune in the 70s moving to Alaska, and Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies about her conversion to Christianity and various magazines. And I feel slowed down and quiet within, and already miss the ocean with its constant changing hues and the surf crashing onto shore.

While I was at the coast I found myself swimming in new ideas and inspirations and was often jotting these ideas into my notebook all through the day. My theory that the mind needs time to roam so that ideas can arrive was proven true. I was reminded of the writer Brenda Ueland, author of If You Want to Write. While the book was first published in the 1930s it has stood the test of time because her advice to writers is simple and sound. Ueland was a great proponent of long, solitary walks and allowing the mind to empty, or as she said, “So you see, imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient, happing idling, dawdling and puttering.”

She also said that, “I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another. “

And one last quote from Ueland: “I learned... that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.”

Sky is dusky and I’m getting ready to leave town for a week at the Oregon coast. It’s a good day for what is left of our rapidly-shredding democracy since Carl [Bush’s brain] Rove is leaving Washington. Speculation is that the multiple subpoenas have finally hounded him out of town, along with the knowledge that so-called “executive “privilege” cannot protect his pasty white ass forever. If you’re eating breakfast I apologize for evoking Rove’s anatomy—I realize that it’s less than appetizing. But who is he going to work for next? He’s been a criminal for so many years and gotten away with so much, it seems unlikely that he’ll end his crime spree. Maybe now he’ll spend the rest of his life protecting the Bush “legacy.” All I know is that in all of literature no author has created a villain of his stature. Wait, stature is not the right word—what is opposite of stature? After all these people are lower than whale poop at the bottom of the deepest ocean…..

Oh well, enough of politics since I must slip into a vacation mind set. I just wanted to call your attention to a terrific post at Salon.com. This must-read site has an advice columnist named Cary Tennis. He pens some of the most thoughtful and interesting advice I’ve ever run across and he’s a terrific writer. Today he’s advising an artist on rejection and talking about the notion that in order to survive rejection, we all must be less critical and self critical. Here is the link: www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2007/08/13/rejection

I’m off to build sand castles and listen to the ocean’s lullaby. Happy writing to all. Jessica

Layers of gray are sketched across the sky. The morning news is talking about the floods in northern India that have affected millions of people, many desperate for food and that the nude body of a young woman was found by two joggers. I’m drinking my usual cup of Earl Gray and have been thinking about the Willamette Writer’s conference which ended yesterday afternoon. From what I could detect, the conference seemed to run smoothly and was a big success.

I met Lee Lofland at the conference and had dinner with him on Friday night. Lee is a retired detective who has just had his first book published, Howdunit? Police Procedure & Investigation: A Guide for Writers. At dinner he described how he consults with authors from Jeffrey Deaver to Dean Koontz, receiving 100 emails a day. He tells them about rape kits and how autopsies are performed and he also consults with representatives from television and movies. He is constantly pointing out that shows like CSI get it wrong and has an article in the latest issue of The Writer that explains that crime labs are usually underequipped and understaffed and thus evidence doesn’t get processed. This means bad guys aren’t caught and the whole system bogs down. Lee is the real deal and he’s lots of fun. His web site is at www.leelofland.com.

I taught a half-day workshop on Saturday and at one point I asked how many people in the room were writing memoirs. I believe everyone raised their hands and there were about 50 writers present. Then I asked how many people had read at least 10 memoirs. About ten writers raised their hands. Next I asked how many people had read 20 or more memoirs—no one raised their hands. Which seems to be a problem I see in writers again and again.

As part of my involvement for the conference, I also read and critiqued the synopses and openings of 8 novels, then met with the writers. All last week I was feeling queasy about this responsibility because only one of the writers was ready to be published and the others had large problems with their approach. The odd thing was that most had good ideas for stories, but their skill level needs improving and most aspects of the story needed refining. Two of the writers were working on young adult novels and my biggest impression of their work was that they didn’t read young adult novels. When I asked these women if they read them, they both answered no. I was flabbergasted explaining that you cannot understand the themes, pacing, voice, etc being read by kids if you don’t read the same books they read. Young adult novels are generally fast paced and the main conflict is often introduced in the first paragraphs. When I explained to one woman she needed to read about 40-50 young adult novels, she visibly blanched.

I explained to my memoir class and the individual writers that all last year when I was working on my Bad Guys book I read at least 100 novels as fuel for my ideas. At least six of those novels were over 1000 pages. If there were a job description for writers it would describe the necessity of writing all the time and reading all the time. As Stephen King said, reading is the center of a writer’s life.