Dawn is breaking on another cloudless day. The news is on in the background and I’m sitting here dabbling away at my first projects of the day. Have you heard that a kidney specialist released a study that says we don’t need to drink 8 glasses of water a day? University of Pennsylvania kidney specialist Dr. Stanley Goldfarb said “We set out to take a look at the eight-by-eight myth, and we were really unable to find any scientific rationale for it." I’m so happy to remove that one from my guilt list…

Now, I am the sort of person who hates it when people e-mail me those “pass it on" messages. You know, the kind that claim that if you don’t pass along this e-mail within the next five minutes to ten friends you’ll be cursed and your toenails will fall out. Grinch that I am, I usually hit 'delete'. But this morning I found a message in my in-box that I like and want to include the link here. You can send a message of peace and hope that is meant especially for the women and children survivors of war. You can find the link at:

http://www.dircksny.com/message_of_peace/

It is sponsored by Women for Women International and at their site is information on how you can support women survivors. The site is at http://www.womenforwomen.org/ and includes a report on the lives of women in Iraq.

There are now about 5 million people or one in five Iraqis who have displaced by the violence in their country. About 2 million have fled Iraq. Not exactly Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn" theory but instead the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world. There are no estimates of the number of women and children who have turned to prostitution in order to survive, but numbers are high. Information about Iraqi refugees is at http://www.refugeesinternational.org At http://www.theIRC.org you can find a number of magazine and newspaper stories detailing the crisis.

Dawn is just breaking in a cloudless sky on a day that promises to be sun-filled and blossom-scented. After a week of raw temperatures, spring has returned and yesterday was so lovely that as I walked along the city streets I felt a restlessness invade me as if I was a kid during the final days of the school year. This morning I’m up early writing and listening to the radio, thinking about a workshop I’m teaching at the Oregon coast this weekend. I’m so ready for a weekend at the coast, ready to fall asleep to the sound of the surf.

The sky is the color of pewter and the forecast calls for more rain. While the blooms continue, yesterday I was running an errand in a small town at about 500 feet and it was snowing. In January when I was visiting Mexico I was struck by how easy it was to be in country not ruled by fear. Now, I’m no Pollyanna, and I don’t think that Mexico is without problems, corruption, or poverty, especially in the border region. I think our government policy toward Mexico shouldn’t involve building walls, but rather figure out how both countries can build more jobs.

But back to fear. Saturday I mailed the final draft of my manuscript for my upcoming book to my editor at Writer’s Digest. It will be published in July and is called Bullies, Bastards & Bitches, How to Write the Bad Guys in Fiction. I wrote an introduction that describes the physiological wiring involved in fear and why we capitalize on readers’ fears as writers. It’s something I also talked about in Between the Lines, particularly in chapters on suspense and tension: "Fiction isn’t written to make readers happy. Its purpose is to jangle their nerves, make their hearts race, give them goose bumps, and disturb their sleep. A happy reader is a complacent reader, and a complacent reader is one who nods off instead of turning the pages until dawn. The urge to keep reading comes from many factors, but mostly from suspense. And suspense is a technique that requires sleight of hand and is tied to our reader’s primal instincts and fears. Your job is to unsettle your reader even if you’re uncomfortable being sneaky or sly or if such traits come naturally."

Here is an early version of the opening that describes why we capitalize on a reader’s fears and physiology: "The world is a dangerous place. Or at least that’s what we’re taught as children when we were warned about stepping into oncoming traffic, playing with matches, accepting candy from a stranger, and running with a pointed stick or scissors. But children know that bigger dangers loom because monsters, witches, ghosts, and villains all have more fright power than sticks or on-coming traffic. These creatures invaded our nightmares, were depicted in movies and Marvel Comics, heard in fairy tales and myths, and told around campfires with the flames crackling and licking and a chorus of night sounds adding an extra shiver to the ghostly tale.

In childhood we also first meet real-life bad guys and learn that cruelty is an inescapable reality. These harsh lessons come in the form of the neighborhood or classroom bully, a sadistic cousin, a teacher who seemed to have it in for you, and creepy strangers at the mall. So at an early age we learn distrust and unease because life holds dangers and we realize that it takes resilience and courage to navigate through our days.

This particular legacy of childhood lingers into adulthood and fiction writers can capitalize on this fact, remembering fear’s potent hold on us as children and how difficult it was to feel vulnerable. In fact, it’s a fiction writer’s job to remember childhood’s hard lessons about vulnerability and dangers and stir up those memories and fears in readers. You see, readers are consciously or unconsciously drawn to vulnerable characters in precarious circumstances that are the heart of fiction. We enjoy reading about menace threatening a character in fiction since it’s safely removed from us, yet we can still enjoy the thrill ride because we’re well acquainted with fear and feelings of vulnerability. So in essence, readers tell authors bring on the baddest of the bad guys, the scariest monster, the freakiest sociopath, the most depraved killer—and we’ll flip through the pages, attention focused on the carnage."

While I was working on my chapter on horror fiction and monsters, I came across a terrific interview with Peter Straub at www.darkecho.com that you might want to read because his remarks about fear and how to create horror are fascinating. Straub remarks: “I had a connoisseur's...appreciation of fear. Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary. I knew his whole family, his older brothers Terror and Panic, his little sister, Nightmare, their charming parents, Chaos and Destruction, and all their cousins, Rage, Depression, Denial, Guilt, Shame, and the rest of the brood. I had first made my acquaintance with these enlightening folks in my seventh year, about twenty seconds before being struck by a car and at the moment I noticed the proximity of the vehicle to myself and understood that an unhappy collision was in the cards."

In fact, I researched extensively while writing this book, especially when it came to writing about horror and sociopaths. I particularly enjoyed Martha Stout’s book The Sociopath Next Door as a resource along with the research of Robert Hare. Stout, who until recently taught at the Harvard Medical School has written a practical examination of what terror and fear politics have done to our minds and to the very biology of our brains. In this timely book, The Paranoia Switch: How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior and How We Can Reclaim Our Courage. Stout explains "how terror rewires our brains and reshapes our behavior--and how we can reclaim our courage." It’s exciting to find professionals who can draw the line around fear—who realize that it works in fiction and drama, but should not be the means that politicians use to control a populace.

Here is an excerpt Stouts book posted on the Huffington Post: “When the president of the United States behaves in ways that redouble the population's fears, his behavior is a psychological issue. When the White House uses advertising specialists to instill in our minds terrifying visual images of mushroom clouds above American cities, American psychologists should be concerned, to say the least. When our chief executive dwells yet again on "death and destruction" in a speech he makes as we observe the sixth anniversary of our national trauma--and tells us that if we hinder his war policy, our enemies will "come here to kill us"--it's time for professionals who know about the effects of psychological trauma to speak up. As such a professional, I invite any person of reasonably sound mental health to engage in this brief and illuminating fantasy:

Imagine for a moment that somehow the American presidency falls to you, instead of to George Bush, and that, for reasons known only to you and your conscience, you accept the position. Not long after you move into the Oval Office, the United States is hit by a disastrous terrorist attack. Counterterrorism measures that should have been attended to long ago must now be designed at emergency speed--protective systems for the skies, the ports, the nation's nuclear facilities, its food supplies--but you can see that, just now, your stricken countrymen are scarcely able to think at all. Their physical and psychological landscapes have been disfigured by inscrutable "others" from a distant part of the world, and they are deeply traumatized and subclinically paranoid. The resonance of their fear is almost palpable. In this uniquely vulnerable state of mind, three hundred million people turn to you en masse, and, prepared to trust your answer implicitly--to cling to it, even--they ask you the following question: What should we do now?

I believe that, as you looked out on millions of your countrymen lost in fear and grief, you would experience an overwhelming desire to help them. You would earnestly want to bring them some comfort and peace, so they could protect themselves, heal, and rebuild. And--exiting this little fantasy exercise and returning to the reality of the last six years--perhaps, like me, you've been repeatedly saddened to witness that not everyone in such a rare and influential position experiences a desire to assist his own nation in recovery and real self-protection.

That some of our leaders didn't display this sort of heartfelt reaction has been understandably difficult for Americans to acknowledge out loud.”

Sky is a pale blue gray and today is supposed to be rain free. I returned home last night in time to make dinner, chat on the phone and watch Bill Moyer’s Journal on public television. Last night it was about a documentary film made by Phil Donohue and Ellen Spiro, Body of War about the true cost of war. The story tracks Tomas Young and his family in the aftermath of the paralyzing injuries he received while serving in Iraq. Donahue met Young when he was visiting at Walter Reed hospital. Donahue says, “My inspiration for this film was the naked child running from the napalm. Remember that Vietnam picture? I mean, terrified, this little girl is totally naked... See the pain. Don't sanitize the war. If you're gonna send young men and women to fight for this nation, tell the truth. That's one of the biggest reasons for the First Amendment, and we haven't been. And so I thought 'I will tell the story,' the real story of the harm in harm's way.”

I don’t know about you, but I miss Phil Donahue in our public life and discourse.

Not only does the documentary expose the difficulties of Young’s life now that he’s in a wheelchair and mostly paralyzed, it also is juxtaposed with clips of the Senate and House hearings that were held three weeks before the November 2002 election. You can see how so many Senators and Congressmen and women voted for the rush to war, how they were reading from their notes dictated by the Administration, except for those few votes of dissent. You can see once again Robert Byrd’s heroic pleas to the Senate and the American people to stop the madness. And you can wonder how these supposed leaders can sleep at night. The film will be released April 2 and the web site that lists where it will be shown is http://www.bodyofwar.com. The story is at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal

Meanwhile, Young has turned his energy into producing a CD. He writes: Being an antiwar activist in this day and age is frustrating. You fight and fight and nothing gets done and, when you add the daily struggles I endure just to get out of bed and try to have a normal day, life can be a tiring experience both physically and mentally. Music has helped me find the motivation to not only get up and fight another day but to do it with determination no matter how the frustration may stack up against me. Whether it be a song that is written from the perspective of a soldier confused at being in a position he doesn’t want to be in but has no say in the matter (“Hero’s Song” by Brendan James or “Day After Tomorrow” by Tom Waits), or a song written to inspire a vitriolic anger at the state of the union and inspire the listener to action (“B.Y.O.B. by System of a Down or “The 4th Branch” by Immortal Technique), music like the songs I chose for the BODY OF WAR CD compilation inspired a particular emotion in me that made me want to act towards the goals of ending the war and bringing light to the need for better veterans’ health care. These things are bigger than all of us and need to be paid attention to, so I can only hope that music of any kind helps and inspires you as much as it has helped me.

I’ve woken to a bullet-colored sky with a promise of rain. It’s probably not big news to most people that tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of our invasion of Iraq. I could spend many words on the waste and the horrors and the deaths. But please don’t forget about all the Iraqis who have died and about how they still live in a country plagued by violence, shortages and intermittent electricity. Please don’t forget that so many of them are refuges, scattered all around the world. I think it also might be a good time that we focus on the media coverage of these events and perhaps we can ask how our media can do a better job covering the truth. For example check out the story at www.editorandpublisher.com about how five years ago major newspapers opposed the invasion. "The road to imminent war has been a bumpy one, clumsily traveled by the Bush administration," The Buffalo (N.Y.) News wrote. "The global coalition against terror forged after the atrocities of 9/11 is virtually shattered. The explanation as to why Iraq presents an imminent threat requiring immediate action has not been clear and compelling."

Many papers expressed hopes that a better world could prevail. "So the United States apparently will go to war with few allies and in the face of great international opposition," the L.A. Times said. "This is an uncharted path ... to an uncertain destination. We desperately hope to be wrong in our trepidation about the consequences here and abroad."

One thing for sure is that the Bush administration has been good for the publishing industry and I doubt that will never be such a flowering of dissent and truth-telling in the light of such ineptitude and corruption. The latest offering about our ill-fated plunder is So Wrong for so Long by Greg Mitchell. It features a foreword by Joe Galloway and a preface by Bruce Springsteen. Bill Moyers comments: "Every aspiring journalist, every veteran, every pundit—and every citizen who cares about the difference between illusion and reality, propaganda and the truth, and looks to the press to help keep them separate—should read this book. Twice."

You might also want to read The Three Trillion Dollar War, by Harvard's Linda Bilmes and Joe Stiglitz a Nobel laureate in economics. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Clinton and chief economist and senior vice president at the World Bank. They estimate the economic cost of the war to the United States at $3 trillion, and the costs to the rest of the world to be an additional $3 trillion - far higher than the estimates the Bush administration gave before the war.

And speaking of the media, perhaps it’s time that we demand that the media stops the hate mongering (ala Bill O’Reilly) about 1/3 of the world’s population, Muslims. Yesterday in anti-hate speech mode, there was Barack Obama’s talk about race relations in our country. Imagine that a politician thinks that we can absorb thoughtful discourse instead of sound bites and name calling. Here is an excerpt:

“We have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle—as we did in the OJ trial—or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina—or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words.

"We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

"We can do that.

"But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

"That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

"This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don't have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

"This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

"This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should've been authorized and never should've been waged, and we want to talk about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

"I would not be running for President if I didn't believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation—the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

"There is one story in particularly that I'd like to leave you with today—a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King's birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

"There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

"And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

"She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

"She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

"Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother's problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn't. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

"Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."

""I'm here because of Ashley." By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

"But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins."

You can watch or read the whole speech here: http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3511

The morning sky is the color of soot and the wind is lashing the trees. Our spring temperatures disappeared yesterday and it felt more like winter was back. I console myself that the blooms will last longer if the temperatures are cool.

I have the author’s proof of Bullies, Bastards and Bitches, How to Write the Bad Guys in Fiction sitting here in my office. When I look at that thick stack of pages I understand that it was no wonder I was weary when I finished. So it’s one last bath for my baby. Meanwhile, I’ve been working on editing projects for clients, getting ready to teach a workshop tomorrow in Portland, and I’ve started working on my new book that’s going to be published by Tarcher Penguin in 2009.

This book is based on working with writers for many years, especially my work as a developmental editor and noticing the same mistakes in their manuscripts over and over. It’s also based on my feelings of deep sorrow for these writers that they have often spent many months or years working on a novel or memoir without first knowing about the craft of writing, the three-act structure, or that scenes are built from conflict. So I’m hoping to address the problems I see most often, because frankly, these writers break my heart.

Of course, sometimes they really piss me off. I taught at a conference recently and about a month later a writer sent me several query letters and asked me to think like a publishing exec and let him know if his stories intrigued me. Problem was, the queries were dreadful—riddled with errors, lacking in specifics, but instead full of boasts about how everyone was going to love the story. They screamed “amateur” –I wish it wasn’t true, but alas it was. When I sent him email and explained (and I wasn’t unkind although he deserved to be ripped to shreds) the problems in his queries, he sent me back a nasty, nasty email claiming that I had called him names, insulted him, etc. Which I hadn’t. Although he deserved to be insulted and I’m afraid needed a big wake up call about his skill level.So I'm writing the book for people who want to break into publishing, but might not be able to see the problems with their approach.

If you want to play the game you gotta know the rules and abide by them. You gotta write stuff that is so hauntingly beautiful or clever or potent that I cannot not read it. You’ve got to write something that is going to start buzz about you. The rules for writers who have never been published are different than for those who have. You have lots more to prove, so up your game baby, up your game.

After spending four days in Prince George, B.C. it’s with great pleasure that I’m watching spring unfold here. I flew in late yesterday afternoon and when I stepped off the plane into 64 degree sunshine, felt almost reborn. When I had climbed into the plane in Prince George a bitter wind was blowing snow sideways out of a bullet-colored sky. As we drove to a dinner party Saturday night I felt like I’d slipped back into my childhood because snow plows had piled up snow 10 or 15 feet high and houses were all diminished at the back of the mounds of white. I had threatened the people at the dinner party that I’d write about our dinner conversation in my blog, but I won’t. Except I’ll report that being the only American at the table is always interesting when they demand to know how the hell George Bush won two elections. And I don’t know if they believe me when I tell them he hasn’t won a damn thing in his life, but I do know that Canadians are mad as hell at our government.

I rarely have the stomach for reading apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic fiction because frankly ever since George Bush stole his first election in 2000 and the horrors he’s unleashed on the world, I’ve been expecting the worst from humankind. Or at least the humans running our government. So although several people have recommended Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I had resisted reading it. After all, McCarthy’s dark visions aren’t for wimps. But while visiting my friend who teaches English to high school kids in Prince George, he drove me to a bookstore in town and bought me the book. We’d hiked up a hillside through snow, sometimes sinking as we trudged along and then looked down at the valley where two rivers met and the city spread below, all winter barren, the sky nearly turquoise.

Driving along we’d talked about what wakes us scared in the middle of the night and one of my big fears is that this country will never right itself, that the sweet promise of democracy has been played out, and we’re spinning into madness fueled by greed. My friend wakes with worries too, but not about his country or his future like I do. There are about six copies of The Road at his school that kids are constantly borrowing and as we drove to the airport, the windshield wipers brushing off the snow, he told me that a senior in his class “a sweet girl” had read the book over a weekend, weeping throughout.

And I finished reading The Road by the time I landed in Portland yesterday. As usual, every one of McCarthy’s words is carefully chosen as if chiseled into stone. It’s dedicated to his son who was about five when he wrote it. And it’s so haunting and profound that this book will always live within me. Part poetry, part horror story, you can scarcely bear to turn each page, but you cannot also not stop reading.

You see, some unnamed horror has changed the world to ash when "A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" happened ten years before the story begins. Almost no one is left on earth, but those that remain are "Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night.”

The story follows a father and his son slogging southward trying to avoid danger, hoping for warmth and life near the ocean in the midst of a nuclear winter. The father is weakened and coughing blood and you’ll never read anything so bleak or tender. The sun and moon and stars are gone and I cannot bear to imagine a world without our skyward companions. "The nights now only slightly less black," he writes. "By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp."

The boy’s most frequent comment is about how scared he is. Little wonder: "The land was gullied and eroded and barren. The bones of dead creatures sprawled in the washes. Middens of anonymous trash. Farmhouses in the fields scoured of their paint and the clapboards spooned and sprung from the wallstuds. All of it shadowless and without feature. The road descended through a jungle of dead kudzu. A marsh where the dead reeds lay over the water. Beyond the edge of the fields the sullen haze hung over the earth and sky alike. By late afternoon it had begun to snow and they went on with the tarp over them and the wet snow hissing on the plastic."

As we were descending over Portland, Mt. St. Helen’s white, scooped-out top filled the airplane window and I was so grateful for the sight of the mountain, for the sense that nature can survive, for a world not covered in ash. After I got home I walked to a neighborhood restaurant for carry-out Mexican food. I passed a bed of jonquils and buds appearing everywhere and spotted a tree that had opened into soft pink blooms and I’ve never seen anything more lovely. So I’ve been thinking a lot about old Cormac and his bloody visions of humankind and how this book is a love letter to his son. In one of his rare interviews when he talks about spending a life writing and the sacrifices it requires he said, "You're just here once, life is brief, and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it."

Hundreds of people have written accolades about this prize-winning book already. So I’ll leave you with McCarthy’s comment on what the book means, “Just simply care about things and people and be more appreciative. Life is pretty damn good, even when it looks bad, and we should appreciate it more. We should be grateful. I don't know who to be grateful to, but you should be thankful for what you have.”

Well, a friend just sent me this link. Another memoir has turned out to be a hoax. We live in an age of lies and distortion and craziness. Sometimes I'm so dizzy and sad by all the lies we're being fed daily that I can scarcely stand to listen or read on. Perhaps it's time that writers step up with truth and dignity. Perhaps it's time that publishers investigate a memoir writer's allegations about his or her past. Read it and wonder how so many people were taken in.....

BOOKS | March 4, 2008
Gang Memoir, Turning Page, Is Pure Fiction
By MOTOKO RICH
Margaret Seltzer admitted that the personal story she tells in “Love and Consequences” was entirely fabricated.

The morning sky is the color of smoke and life has been too hectic lately to visit the blogosphere. Yesterday was especially lovely here—sun so bright it would break your heart and buds popping out with wild profusion. As I mentioned, I missed so many movies lately I’m trying to catch them while they’re still showing on the big screen. So I saw Michael Clayton with a friend on Friday night and loved the frame story structure and the tension so thick you felt wound tight as you watched the story unfold.

After the movie we stopped at a wine bar and were talking about this phase of our lives. She mentioned that she believed that most of life was simply fate, that on any day we get to choose the clothes we wear, but pretty much else is preordained. I’ve been mulling this over since—and can’t agree. But then again we hear stories about how fate taps someone on the shoulder and summons them for ruin or greatness. In fact, Oprah has a new reality show the Big Give that is about intervening in fate. I like that this show reminds us that giving needs to happen every day, but why is every part of life turning into a reality show? Isn’t reality better?

But I want to get back to the essentials of writing compelling fiction. Here are some more tips:

Truths about our shared humanity lie at the core of fiction. We read fiction to be distracted from the dailiness of our lives, to be entertained, to walk among a different time and place; but mostly to further our understanding of what it means to be human.

So fiction is one of our best teachers, our easily-loved companion, and it resonates so deeply with the reader since we’ve all heard stories since we were small. And since we were small, stories brought meaning to our lives.

Stories begin at a moment of change or just before the moment of change and the change threatens the protagonist’s well being and sets the story in motion.

All the major players have an agenda.

All the major moments and the ending are foreshadowed.

Characters are developed through action and dialogue.

The situation of the story world is inescapable.

Excursions into the past via recollections and flashbacks exist only to illuminate the front story.

The story is anchored via the theme and premise.

It is written for all the senses and weather, lighting, shadows, seasonal details create a world that breathes.

Know how far your protagonist and antagonist will go to achieve their goals. Also know their emotional range.

Uses emotional moments for impact to reveal truths, realizations, epiphanies, and the like without resorting to melodrama. This is best achieved by slowly escalating tensions and conflict.

The writer pays attention to language to maximize the drama, create moods, and enhance tension while invoking a subtle, lingering resonance.

Scenes are based on a goal or mission meeting an obstacle, but are also embedded with tension. This is often done by finding small ways to make the protagonist uncomfortable or at odds with his environment.

The middle of a novel comprises more than half its length. At about the midpoint of most novels, a dramatic reversal occurs. The hunter becomes the hunted; a second murder occurs proving the detective has been wrong in his suspicions; a former lover arrives in town to complicate a budding romance. This reversal keeps the middle from bogging down and becoming predictable and also breathes new life and often a new direction into the story.

Dawn is making an appearance swathed in gray. Yesterday I was indoors most of the day so when I stepped out for a walk, I was surprised at how soft and springlike the air felt on my skin. Although the geese around here are unreliable as harbingers of spring, since there is a large pond nearby, I counted three flocks winging north. Then I noticed that daffodils that have joined the crocuses blooming in sunny patches and camellias with their fuchsia-colored and waxy leaves are appearing also. Finally I passed a mother and her small son drawing with colored chalk on the sidewalk, stars and dogs and a smiling sun.

But while spring is coming to this country, our government is still borrowing millions a day to run this war, taxes are still being cut for the rich, while there is a resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Pakistan with its nukes is becoming increasingly unstable, the government in Iraq is still not solidified, and the number of American troops cannot be maintained because the troops are exhausted and there are none to replace them. It seems that there is no sector in this country that the Bush policies and corruption haven’t damaged or ruined. But spring is coming, spring is coming.

Meanwhile, I believe I have forgotten to report that I finished my latest book for Writer’s Digest, Bullies, Bitches & Bastards: How toWrite the Back Guys in Fiction. It will be out in July and I handed in the last revision a few weeks ago. I and have taken a few weeks off from working on a book and have editing projects to work on, but I’m also cleaning, gardening and trying to catch up with friends. Next week I’m going to start on a new book that will be out in spring or summer of 2009.

But let’s get back to the elements of effective fiction:

Characters are built from dominant traits. Create main characters with dominant and unforgettable traits as a foundation of personality. These 3-6 traits will be showcased in the story events, will help him or her achieve or fail at goals, and will make the story person consistent. For example, Sherlock Holmes’ dominant traits are that he is analytical, deductive, intelligent, and deeply aware. These traits are showcased in every story he appears in along with secondary and contrasting traits such as his Bohemian tendencies. When your character first appears in the first scene, he arrives with his dominant traits intact.

Emotional need Protagonists and main characters are people with baggage and emotional needs stemming from their pasts. These needs, coupled with motivation cause characters to act as they do. For example, in Silence of the Lambs Clarisse Starling is propelled by childhood traumas to both succeed as an FBI profiler and investigator and heal the wounds caused by the death of her father.

Significance The storyline focuses on the most significant events in the protagonist’s life.

Motivation entwined with backstory Motivation, the why? of fiction, fuels your character’s desires and drives him to accomplish goals. It provides a solid foundation for the often complicated reasons for your character’s behaviors choices, actions, and blunders. Motivating factors provide trajectories for character development, as a character’s past inevitably intersects with his present. Your character’s motivations must be in sync with his core personality traits and realistically linked to goals so that readers can take on these goals as their own.

Desire is the lifeblood of fictional characters. Not only do your characters want something, they want something badly. Santiago, in The Old Man and the Sea desperately wants to restore his reputation and also wants his friendship and partnership with the boy to resume. And in the lonely hours when he is far out at sea, desperately struggling to hang on to the fish and fighting off sharks, we see his fierce desire acted out and the price he pays for it.

Threat Fiction is based on adversity and this is revealed in a series of threatening changes inflicted on the protagonist. In many stories these threats force him or her to change or act in ways he or she needs to change or act. Often too, what the protagonist fears most is what is showcased in a novel or short story. It can be fear of losing his family, job, or health with this dreaded outcome providing interest, action and conflict.

Inner Conflict A fictional character doesn’t arrive at easy decisions or choices. Instead he is burdened by difficult or impossible choices, particularly moral choices, that often make him doubt himself and question his actions. Inner conflict works in tandem with outer conflict—an physical obstacle, villain or antagonist--to make the story more involving, dramatic, and events more meaningful.

Complications A story builds and deepens by adding complications, twists, reversals and surprises that add tension and forward motion. Plots don’t follow a straight path, instead there are zigzags, dead ends, and sidetracks. Complications create obstacles and conflict, cause decisions to be made, paths to be chosen.

Midpoint Reversal The middle act of a novel comprises more than half its length. At about the midpoint of most novels a dramatic reversal occurs. The hunter becomes the hunted; a second murder occurs proving the detective has been wrong in his suspicions; a former lover arrives in town to complicate a budding romance. This reversal keeps the middle from bogging down and becoming predictable and also breathes new life and often a new direction into the story.

Satisfying Ending every story needs an ending that satisfies the reader while concluding the plot. The final scenes, when the tensions are red hot and the character has reached a point of no return, must deliver drama, emotion, yet a logical conclusion. This is not to suggest that every plot ends with a shoot-out or physical confrontation, because some endings are quieter, more thoughtful. Some endings are ambivalent, some a dramatic or a violent clash of wills. But there is always a sense that all the forces that have been operating in your story world have finally come to a head and the protagonist’s world is forever changed.

The morning sky is mostly blue with a few wisps of cumulus clouds drawn in like feathers. I was thinking about the Academy Awards show I watched on Sunday night. I had returned from teaching in Seattle, and thankfully the train ride home was without any hitches. No cherry pickers driving out onto the tracks to be knocked off by the engine, no broken cars that needed to be exchanged. So I unpacked, went for a quick walk, and settled onto my couch to gawk at the stars.

As I was watching the awards, noting which dresses were fabulous and which were dreadful such as that black sack worn by Tilda Swinton who appears to be such a lovely person and Diablo Cody the screenwriter of Juno who was wearing a ghastly leopard skin number that showcased a particularly unattractive and oversized tattoo. I noticed that I’d fallen behind in my movie viewing. Still hadn’t seen The Savages or Michael Clayton.

I like how my emotions zigzag throughout the show as when I’m happy when Javier Bardem who attended with his mother, won and gave a tribute to her, remembering his chilling role as the sociopath in No Country for Old Men and thrilled when the über-charming Ratatouille won for best animated film. Although as someone who once worked in the food industry there is still something about rats in a kitchen that gives me the creeps.

Usually somewhere along the way during the show I’ll become teary-eyed as when they show the montage of the people that have died since the previous Academy such as Ingmar Bergman, Suzanne Pleshette and Heath Ledger. But this year the tears sprung up when Nicole Kidman (what in the world has she done to her face—have you noticed that it’s carved out like a wax museum figure?) presented the Honorary Oscar of the night to Robert Boyle, who received a standing ovation. I’m a huge fan and if you’re not familiar with him, Boyle is a production designer and art director with four Academy Award nominations to his name. The 98-year-old Boyle gave a halting speech in which he thanked many people including Hitchcock for their collaborations in films like North by Northwest, Marnie and The Birds. He also worked on The Thomas Crown Affair, Fiddler on the Roof and In Cold Blood among others.

A montage of his films including the famous scene in North by Northwest where the crop duster plane swoops down on Cary Grant and the especially famous scene where the actors are climbing on Mount Rushmore. In an interview Boyle explained that for the crop duster scene Hitchcock had told him to create a place where Grant could run but could not hide.

In this blog I’ve talked before about the role of production design in film and cited the PBS Hollywood Presents series that explored the importance of this aspect of movie making. If the director is responsible for what the actors are doing, the designer is responsible for what the scene looks like and how the setting suggests mood and creates emotions in the viewer. Production design creates the overall look, atmosphere and emotion that moves story material from the printed page to the screen.

So here’s what I think. When you watch a movie, you’re not only absorbing the story and noticing the actors’ skills and lines, but you’re noting too the art direction. Why has the production designer or art director used shadows in a scene? Why is it raining? How does the story world appear so seamless? For more on Boyle, you might want to check out the documentary The Man on Lincoln’s Nose.

The morning sky is a dusky gray and NPR is running a story about the slaves and African Americans that cooked for presidents in the early days of the republic. Hercules was George Washington’s chef who had eight assistants working under him. It is from their “Hidden Kitchen” series and to read more about these cooks you can go to www.npr.org. And Castro has resigned….interesting turn of events since our next president will be the first in decades who won’t be dealing with him.

A few days ago I was talking about the essentials of fiction and wanted to return to that discussion. I had mentioned that good fiction is balanced, intimate, and unified. The opening of a novel or short story portrays a dynamic, simmering world that is upset by the inciting incident so that the balance of the story world is turned topsy-turvy and the story starts. The inciting incident tosses the protagonist into a situation he likely would not have entered willingly, and then the story progresses with an urgent need to reinstate that equilibrium. This second aspect of balance depicts the fictional world and its characters always straining toward stability, after the first incident throws the protagonist’s world off-kilter.

Since fictional characters are more consistent than real life people, you need to understand the why of your story. Motivation, the why factor of fiction, has more than one purpose and meaning. Motivation refers to the specific and often complicated reasons that your characters act as they do. It is typically connected to your character’s desire for something or to achieve goals. But it’s also typically your character’s past intersecting with events in the now, or the front story.

Thus, motivation is entwined with backstory. Motivation is at the heart of every scene, fueling your character’s desires and driving him to accomplish goals. It provides a solid foundation for the often complicated reasons for your character’s behaviors choices, actions, and blunders. Motivating factors provide trajectories for character development or character arc. Your character’s motivations must be in sync with his core personality traits and realistically linked to goals so that readers can take on these goals as their own.

Thus desire is the lifeblood of fictional characters. Not only do your characters want something, they want something badly. Santiago, in The Old Man and the Sea desperately wants to restore his reputation and also wants his friendship and partnership with the boy to resume. And in the lonely hours when he is far out at sea, desperately struggling to hang on to the fish and fighting off sharks, we see his fierce desire acted out and the price he pays for it.

You can bestow on your character flaming red hair, an endearing, crooked grin and a penchant for chocolate and noir movies, but if she doesn’t want something badly, she’s merely a prop in your story, not a driving force. But if she wants to win the Miss Florida contest, take over her boss’ job, or become the first female shortstop for the Atlanta Braves, then you’ve got a character who will make things happen and a story that will be propelled by desire.

Effective fiction is causally related. Fiction is the opposite of life in many ways. Events in fiction are never random or unconnected. They are always linked by causality with one event causing more events later in the story, which in turn causes complications, which cause more events, which cause bad decisions, etc. Fictional characters act out of their own sense of logic, based on believable motivations that stem from their pasts. But also, while life can be unpredictable and chaotic, fiction, even when interspersed with surprises and reversals, is not chaotic, but is instead realistic based on the storyline and the conventions of the story.

Compelling fiction is based on a single, powerful question around which your story is based. This question will be dramatized chiefly via action in a series of events or scenes. If you are writing a romance, the question always involves whether the couple will resolve their differences and declare their love. In a mystery the dramatic question might be will Detective Smith find the serial killer in time to prevent another senseless death? In The Old Man and Sea the dramatic question is will Santiago catch the big fish and thus restore his pride and reputation?

Threat and adversity. Fiction is based on a series of threatening changes inflicted on the protagonist. In many stories these threats force him or her to change or act in ways he or she needs to change or act. Often too, what the protagonist fears most is what is showcased in a novel or short story. It can be fear of losing his family, job, or health with this dreaded outcome providing interest, action and conflict. More to come….

I didn’t sleep well last night so instead of tossing around in bed, listening to the radio, here I am again, writing as dawn arrives, the sky the palest of blues. I wanted to say something in this blog about Friday night when I went Powells to join the throng listening to Natalie Goldberg read from her new book Old Friend From Far Away: The Practice Of Writing Memoir and answer questions from the crowd. Her new book is based on the idea that in order to write a memoir we must first know how to remember. It’s filled with writing exercises that prod the memory, short chapters, and Zen wisdom. If you’re not familiar with Goldberg, she wrote Writing Down the Bones, one of the first books that talked about writing practice and Zen and the book sold over a million copies. Goldberg and Peter Elbow first encouraged people to use writing practice, simply sitting and writing quickly without judging the outcome, as the way into writing. The thing with Goldberg is that she makes writing seem possible and deepening and exhilarating.

And while I’ve followed her career, listening to her on Friday night I discovered that I’d missed some key happenings and knowledge. First, I hadn’t realized that she was a poet for 15 years before she wrote Bones, and for those 15 years she couldn’t get her poems published. I’d read her first memoir Long Quiet Highway years ago but hadn’t read The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to the Truth where she came to terms with her relationships with her father and her Zen teacher Dainin Katagiri Roshi. Friday night she talked about how the truths she wrote about Roshi has caused her to lose the Zen community that has been her home for many years.

So she talked about being okay with pain and loss, to feel your way through it, to be gentle with yourself, and admitted that she spent months recovering from this sharp grief. Afterward I stood in a long line to have a book signed for a friend because she’s afraid to write and I’m giving it to her later today as a birthday gift. And I greeted Goldberg because we’d met ten years ago at a smaller bookstore signing here in Portland and because she was a guest author when I taught on-line at iVillage.com when I interviewed her twice. During that on-line visit she offered three of Roshi’s teachings that have been posted on my desk since: Continue under all circumstances. Make positive efforts to the good. Don’t be tossed away.

Also during that on-line visit one of my writing students asked her what to do about fear and she answered. “I just let it be. I keep my hand moving.”

So I was thinking about her life and her beliefs about fear, failure, and grief when I was teaching a workshop yesterday. It was one of those days when getting my ideas to my students seemed especially difficult and it kept feeling like we couldn’t connect. Then we spent the final hours making collages together with music playing in the background. The idea of the collage was to represent a vision for the life we want to live along with core values. And in the final minutes of the class we lined them up along a wall and walked around looking at them like paintings in a gallery. And they were so beautiful and alive and rich that something inside me shifted and the difficult day seemed not so hard.

I arrived home, planning on spending a quiet night because I’m still getting over a cold and started cooking dinner. I checked my phone messages and discovered that one of my friends had died. I called the woman delivering this news and we talked for a long time about our mutual friend, Cathy and the past. About six years ago after going through several crises and losing her father, she had become increasingly paranoid, delusional, and was suffering from serious health problems. The last time I saw her she looked like she was dying. I tried to talk to her about getting medical help, but she wasn’t one to take advice.

So I called the medical professionals in her life and her old friends and reported to them about her seriously elevated heart rate and some other facts, trying to stage an intervention, trying to save her life. I sent her an email explaining what I’d done and she cut off our friendship and I hadn’t seen her since. Now, six years later she is dead from these health problems including heart disease.

After absorbing this news, I ate dinner and was reading on my couch when Toni, another of her old friends called and we talked for about an hour about all that had gone down, about times past and our memories of Cathy, and I learned that in the past few years she’d suffered horribly. And that as I feared, her health problems and early death were unnecessary. I spent more time on the phone with my daughter and then with music in the background curled on my couch and followed the pain like I was hobbling down an old, familiar road, one that carried me to my childhood. I just let it wash over me, surrendering. I recalled how that morning before my workshop I had been thinking about Cathy and Toni and now Cathy was dead. I thought about another friend Barbara who had died too young about a year ago, about my aunts, both dead in their fifties.

My eyes kept wandering to the collage I’d just made and all the images and words, messages to my subconscious. I believe that what writing and life can teach us is that pain doesn’t need to be avoided. That you can nestle there with it and really feel and let it enter you. Because when you avoid it, or block it, or push it away, it just returns. And festers. During the question and answer session on Friday night a man asked Goldberg what she loved about Zen. And in an odd voice with hands pressed together, she intoned “Awaken. Awaken. Do not waste your precious life.”

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes if hard to plan the day. E. B. White

Dawn has arrived and before it broke, the giant fir trees in the neighborhood looked ghostly in the gloom, but now they’re standing out in sharp relief. Meanwhile on the side street I can hear trucks arriving with shrill beeps and thumps as they park. They’re replacing sewer pipes in the next block and I fear that they’re going to work on this block also.

I know that many parts of the country are buried under snow and heard yesterday Wisconsin has had a record snowfall and I can imagine a world of white back there. Well, actually, in the cities the snow gets dirty and littered with piles of dog poop and they run out of room to stash the mountains of snow, but it’s still a world of white. While here in Portland yesterday when I was out walking I spotted buds and crocuses poking up and signs of spring all over the place as my eyes teared from allergies. And our weather forecast is calling for temperatures in the 50s in the coming days.

And so much is happening in the world as the writers in Hollywood are going back to work, Barack Obama has won eight primary elections or caucuses in a row and is still packing in thousands of people wherever he goes giving his stump speech about hope, while Hillary is rearranging her staff. Meanwhile, Republicans are laying down the gauntlet so that the debate in the summer and fall can be about 9-1-1 and fear and terrorism, not the fact that this country is sinking under debt and despair. Why are these guys so much better at strategy than the progressives? And isn’t it time for Harry Reid to resign after yesterday the vote in the Senate to give immunity to phone companies for warrantless wiretapping/snooping against Americans? Now the bill goes to the House—so we should also call our Congressman and tell them not to vote for it.

On Saturday I was in Olympia teaching a class on fiction and Monday I drove down to Albany to give a talk on the essentials of fiction. When I begin this talk I start by saying that compelling fiction haunts us and touches the deep layers in us. The best stories resonate and are created from elements that cause them to linger in the reader’s imagination, senses, emotions, and memory with a lasting clarity. When a story stays with a reader it does so because the writer employed dozens of techniques. These techniques are often invisible and are sometimes embedded in into the underpinnings or structure. All are needed to bring a story to life. They include: vivid character development, tension that crackles on the page, suspense that keeps us turning pages, conflict that creates worry in the reader and a fictional world that is so intimate, layered, and substantial that it breathes.

But this haunting isn’t easy and the process begins when the reader encounters the first word on the first page. This opening separates the reader from his everyday life and wrests him into the reality and simmering problems of the story. These first pages might open quietly or thunder, there might be a single character or dazzling, funny cast; it might depict an enchanted kingdom or a police precinct in the Bronx. Reading fiction is a physical, emotional, and intellectual experience, a way to live vicariously and to explore psychological issues

I talk about how the opening in fiction is a doorway through which the reader enters separating him from the real world. And in this world, the best stories are balanced, unified, and intimate.

Unity creates coherence and flow in a story -- everything in the story working together for a profound overall effect. Unity also refers to the notion that your story cannot read like it was created by a committee, but instead crafted by a single author with a compelling vision and design. Just as in a symphony or any musical composition, each note is designed to create a profound, overall effect.

Another aspect of unity is that all the aspects from the style choices to scene details to characterization push the reader to understand the themes of the story. Themes and controlling concepts connect the story and deepen the reader’s experience.

An intimate world isn’t created by merely piling on details. It means your story world has the resonance of childhood memories, the vividness of a dream, and the power of a movie. It’s filled in with shadows and corners and dogs and ice cubes and the sounds and smells of a dryer humming on washday and a car blaring past, rap music shaking the windows. These details lend it authority, potency, and a palpable physical existence.

An intimate story takes us to a specific place and coaxes us to remain there. An intimate story is lifelike and feels as real and complicated as the world the reader inhabits. When he finishes the final pages, and leaves the story world, he should feel the satisfaction of the ending, but also a huge sense of loss. Like a friend has moved to another town just when the friendship had reached a level of closeness and trust.

In a balanced story every element exists in proper proportion. The cast size is just right for the kind of story you’re telling and subplots don’t dominate the main story line. Each scene is orchestrated for potency, and backstory illustrates the front, yet the front story is the driving force. Secondary characters are quirky and add to the whole but never overshadow the main players. Description and details are also used in proper proportion because the amount of details you use telegraphs meaning. Also pacing marches past the less important moments and slows down for the most emotional scenes.
More to come….

“I would say that there exists a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.” Mary Oliver, Winter Hours

Dawn is breaking and the day is supposed to bring showers with snow in the mountains and apparently in towns in the higher elevations there is danger of collapsing roofs. I’m reminded of a particularly snowy winter in northern Wisconsin where my parents live and my mother reporting that my father was up on roof on snow removal duty and that particular winter “your father’s spending more time on the roof than on the ground.”

Well, I was planning on going out tonight to hear local writers, but I woke up with a cold so think I’m about done celebrating my birthday, since it’s been going on since Friday night. On Friday night I started the celebration with a friend at a small concert at Music Millennium, a local independent music store. I hadn’t been in there in a while and there was a good crowd gathered to hear Steve Poltz, but also I was so gratified to see the bustle of people coming in and out of the store to buy CDs. In these days of music downloads and IPods and YouTube, it feels like stepping back in time to be in an independent music store replete with Rolling Stone posters and old album covers of Jimi Hendrix. And I’m grateful just as when I walk into a crowded bookstore. Because let’s pay the writer- performers for their creativity. Also, the story has little signs all over that lists the top 100 albums of all time. While I was watching Poltz perform I was standing near the B section and the Blind Faith CD was so categorized. Since I didn’t buy the CD that night I’m going to return to the store, just to wander among all the music and remember.

Anyway, although Poltz has a world wide and cult following I didn’t know much about him but was soon captivated by his writing and zaniness and heart. Well, to tell the truth, I was at first a bit worried that I wasn’t going to like him because he tends to rhyme and has recorded kids’ albums. I soon learned he was born in Halifax Nova Scotia and when he was a kid his family moved to Palm Springs which brought on a case of culture shock, go figure. He trick-or-treated at Liberace’s house, met Elvis who hugged his singer longer than necessary and was an altar boy. He moved to San Diego to attend college and formed the Rugburns an indi-rock band which began the cult following.

Apparently he is also the first person that beckoned Jewel Kilcher onto the stage at the Innerchange Coffee House in San Diego where Jewel was waitressing and Steve was playing his tunes. Together on a beach in Mexico in they wrote You Were Meant for Me which became the longest-running song on the Billboard Top 100. Poltz has performed and written other songs with her and toured as her opening act and playing in her band, and has appeared in her videos. He’s traveled all over the world performing including as a street musician and is the sort of singer-writer with a CD called Answering Machine that contains 56 songs all 45 seconds long that are outgoing messages from his home machine.

As I was listening to his lyrics I kept thinking about the poetry of songwriting and then he introduced one of his songs, The Light in Your Eyes which is about being homesick and returning home to watch the birth of his niece and breaking down crying during it. I hope this isn’t copyright infringement, but here is the chorus that wrung out my heart:

Now I’ve seen a lot of things
Huge shiny diamond rings
And I’ve seen two grown men cry
But I never saw the light
Like I did in your eyes
The light in your eyes

You can find out more about Steve at www.poltz.com.

Then last night after a dinner at Higgins I heard the poet Mary Oliver as part of Portland’s Arts & Lecture series. And it was a packed house, as in people sitting all the way up to the rafters of the bejeweled and historic Arelene Schnitzer Hall. She is now in her 70s and I was sitting above her, listening and taking in the lovely architecture of the Schnitzer with it’s filigreed walls and gorgeous lamps, with winking turquoise glass. And although Oliver looked a bit frail, her voice was strong and her wit keen, especially during the question and answer session after the reading.

Oliver is best known as a nature poet following in the footsteps of Thoreau and Whitman since her daily walks and birds, dogs, flowers and all aspects of nature appear in her poems. She brings a Zen awareness to daily life and writing and said, “looking at the world is the important part of my life,” and “every day I step out into the world to be dazzled,” and “my work is loving the world.” Her poetry seems filled with talismans and she poses questions about what this all adds up to as when she asks, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Her poems reflect the serious questions of faith, as in "When Death Comes:"

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.

Oliver’s twelfth book of poems Red Bird will be published in April. And I was thinking about how great it is to be a writer or songwriter in old age. How you can carry your gifts forth into all your years, how like Oliver, we can always be paying attention.

A brooding sky this morning. When I arrived home late last night from Mexico the cold and damp lanced into me and I had to laugh at myself. For the whole time I was visiting down there everyone rhapsodized about the sublime weather and blue skies and I kept protesting how I loved four seasons and adored winter but now that I’m back I’m missing the blue, the warm, the lake, the hillsides and bougainvillea tumbling down beautiful old walls. I fell in love with the walls-(Now the so-called cobblestone streets were another things altogether since they are barely passable they are so uneven and treacherous). I had been teaching at the Lake Chapala Writer’s Conference in Ajijic, Mexico along with the talented freelance journalist Vince Beiser. Besides the fact that I had a hard time acclimating to the altitude, the whole experience was amazing, I met delightful people, was given a breathless tour around the lake that included passing an agave field, a colorful graveyard as festive as a children’s birthday party and people busy decorating graves on a Friday afternoon, and burros loaded with piles of firewood. I’d still be down there except I’ve got a book deadline. If you want to visit a part of Mexico that is magical and sweet and far from the glitz of Puerto Vallarta, this is the place to go…..I’m planning on returning.

While on the plane I read Ursula Le Guin’s intriguing essay in the February issue of Harpers, “Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading." A while ago the NEA issued their latest dire report about the decline of reading claiming that 43% of Americans hadn’t read a book in the previous year. Now, on first glance the report is troubling indeed. In this report one of these non-reading Americans was quoted as saying, "I just get sleepy when I read."

But if you look deeper into the report you’ll discover that creative nonfiction isn’t classified as literature, that on-line reading doesn’t count, nor do graphic novels. This has puzzled me enormously, because spring, summer, winter and fall when I step into a bookstore or library here in Portland, they’re throbbing with life and with, well, this apparently endangered species, readers. I meet readers everywhere I go. In her essay Le Guin simply insists that books are here to stay: "It's just that not all that many people ever did read them."

Le Guin's sharpest barbs are aimed at publishing executives who "think they can sell books as commodities" and are disappointed if their holdings don't increase "yearly, daily, hourly." She then goes on to compare selling books to selling corn.

Until the corporate takeover of independent publishing houses, she points out, publishers didn't expect expansion: "They were quite happy if their supply and demand ran parallel, if their books sold steadily, flatly."

It’s also a beautiful rhapsody to reading and Le Guin writes: “Besides, readers aren’t viewer; they recognize their pleasure as different from that of being entertained. Once you’ve pressed the ON button, TV goes on, and on, and on, and all you have to do is sit and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed aloneness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge; it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it…”

In the closing sentences she writes: “Since kids coming up through the schools are seldom taught to read for pleaser and anyhow are distracted by electrons, the relative number of book readers is unlikely to see any kind of increase and many well shrink further. What's in this dismal scene for you, Mr. Corporate Executive? Why don't you just get out of it, dump the ungrateful little pikers, and get on with the real business of business, ruling the world?"

A number of Le Guin's science fiction works, including her award-winning novels The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, are set in a future. Over nearly 50 years she's published novels, children's books, more than 100 short stories, essays, poetry, two volumes of translation and screenplays of her works. She's received the National Book Award, five Hugos, five Nebulas, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize and several "lifetime achievement" awards among dozens of other honors. She’s crosses genres and in her sci fi she examines contemporary problems by placing them in her imagined worlds--for example, an anarchic society in The Dispossessed, (1974) and life in an androgynous world, in The Left Hand of Darkness, (1969). LeGuin is also the author of a fantasy series for children, the Earthsea trilogy, and has received many awards, including the Boston Globe-Hornbook Award for juvenile fiction (1968) and the National Book Award (1973) for the children's book The Farthest Shore.

Le Guin once said, "The writer cannot do it alone. The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."

Well the sky is sooty but no rain today. I’ve still been sick lately with various ailments, so am trying to get some work done, but not overdo. I’m working on the final chapter of my Bad Guys books so I’m trying to find books that fall into various children’s book categories. While browsing around the powells.com site I read a recent interview with Sue Grafton author of the Kinsey Milhone series about her body of work and her latest book, T is for Tresspass.

Last week while trying to get over the flu I read it and Greg Iles’ Third Degree. Isle’s latest book is a thriller and while it’s a page turner, I found myself wanting a bit more realism. As for Grafton, I found myself skipping or skimming over parts of the story—the whole just didn’t have enough tension for me. However, she’s a skilled and interesting writer and also I think any writer would be smart to pay attention to her writing process and how she works with her right brain. In the interview she mentions that she has posted the journals that she writes during her book writing process at the website http://www.suegrafton.com

The interview is at http://www.powells.com/interviews/suegrafton.html Here is an excerpt:

Dave: In the last twenty-five years, what is the longest you've gone without thinking of Kinsey?

Grafton: Seven minutes, maybe. I think about her a lot.

The way I look at the world is filtered through her. Every time I read the paper, I'm thinking about Kinsey, though I don't often draw from real cases because I don't want to get my butt sued. Everybody's suing everybody these days. Besides which, a lot of true crime, the stuff you read in the paper, is so absurd. There's no art, there's no intellect, there's no cleverness to it. People get drunk and they whack each other. Where is the joy in that? The beauty of detective fiction is that you come to believe somebody is thinking about crime, thinking and doing something devious. It isn't just alcohol-fueled, impulsive nonsense. If somebody gets killed in a mystery novel, there's a reason. It isn't for their tennis shoes.

Grafton: The mystery novels I love — Michael Connelly, Elmore Leonard — I love those guys who've been around forever, and they're just workhorses. Old school. I love watching writers of any gender do a beautiful job at anything. That's exciting. When you see someone who has a voice, a tone, a point of view, and they do their job well, that's fun.

You also might want to check out today’s Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media. It’s called "A Color of the Sky" by Tony Hoagland, from What Narcissism Means To Me. © Graywolf Press, 2003.
Here is the first stanza:
A Color of the Sky
Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn't make the road an allegory.