Hope versus Despair

Sky is steely colored and all looks still out there. I was meeting with an editing client yesterday where we spent several hours talking about her manuscripts and writing career. And we also talked about her weariness and sometimes sense of despair that she  might never be published. It's such a horrible place to be in--writing for weeks, months, and years without a publishing contract or much outward validation that all those hours add up to something worthwhile. I told her the truth--that she has genuine talent and needs to keep plugging away, no matter what.

As a balm for any of those feeling the why-am-I-still-writing despair I'm offering this link to Gertrude Stein's rejection letter and also advice from one of my former students Melissa Coleman. Her memoir  This Life is in Your Hands is about to be published by Harper Collins and it will be excerpted in O magazine in April, a huge coup by any stretch of the imagination.
In an email yesterday she wrote: "Tell your students to keep writing and it will happen! "

Picture YOUR book here

And so it will.   But you gotta believe, you've got to keep trying.

We writers too often hear about all the scary and disheartening news in the publishing industry. So for a change, here's a piece in McSweeneys, SOME GOOD NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF BOOKS that will lend wind beneath your wings. Yes, I just wrote that cliche on purpose.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have hope

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream. ~ Gaston Bachelard 

There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence-an overwhelming determination to succeed. Sophy Burnham

From an Editor's Desk: Super Bowl Sunday
Sky is clearing here in Portland and my beloved Green Bay Packers are playing in the Super Bowl so I'm keyed up, waiting for the game. Ready for smack talk and beastly, oversized men smashing into other large men while racing around with a ball. Costumes and songs and traditions and silliness and bets riding.

Meanwhile, a big thanks to Julia Hunter and all the women of Emerald City RWA group. I had a fabulous time in Seattle, was inspired by so many productive and intelligent writers, sharing laughs and information. And if you don't ever travel by train, you don't know what you're missing.
A few things we discussed yesterday:
Your protagonist's motivations increase as the story moves forward.
Each time you craft a scene you ask yourself what is the worse possible thing that can happen next.
Always try to base your story on your protagonist's worst fear.
The dominant personality traits of the protagonist (and antagonist) are showcased by the story events.
Know your protagonist's emotional bandwidth--how he or she reacts to stress, pain, threat, joy.
Know how far your protagonist and antagonist will go to achieve their goals.
How the best fiction forces your protagonist into new emotional and physical territory.
In many stories inner conflict needs to drive the protagonist as much as outer conflict.
More to come.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Loving the Internets

Still no rain in sight here in Portlandia. I just want to pause and mention how much I love using the internet this morning. I was googling the synonym for screw for a client's manuscript and came across this photo of a ship's screw:
What's not to love about that image? And, of course, came across many juicy synonyms.

I also wanted to point out this link to George Orwell's fabulous essay Politics and the English Language. Here's an excerpt:  

MEANINGLESS WORDS

"In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning(2). Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader.

When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality."

The language for an instant must have been as ordered as the succession of stars / that twilight draws every evening out of the forests & over violet ridges.... I have thought toil could succeed in their realignment / or a line crafted after a succession of stars must radiate the letters / and the consonants who instruct would gather in an ordered constellation. / I have sought throughout the succession of letters / but there is not one so radiant as the line of stars / that twilight draws out of the forest. ~-Bill Deemer

From an Editor's Desk

Imagine that you're seated in a dark theater. Act one begins with a single actor on the stage. He or she is in costume and using posture, gestures, and actions --possibly puttering around the stage. We start to form opinions about his or her state of mind and personality. Possibly the actor is talking to himself or herself. And don't forget the stage set and props, all which are designed to suggest a place and era. In most plays, this opening salvo of an actor alone doesn't last long because sooner or later the phone rings or the doorbell rings or somehow another character enters the stage.
And that's when things get interesting.
In life we humans are often alone, toiling away, or whiling away the hours, or watching television, or cooking dinner. If we were watching ourselves on a screen it would not be dramatic or captivating. I spend a great deal of time at this desk, typing, moving around papers and such. My daily routine is often boring. I would not want to watch me, although I like to imagine that I possess a rich inner life.
In fiction, as much as possible, bring another person onto the stage. A person alone in a room is generally static--not much tension, not much drama, not many reasons to watch. Resist featuring your characters alone in a room. Especially if they're constantly rehashing events that just happened. Mix it up. Lace your dialogue with power plays and mine your scenes with conflict and antagonism. Let things boil and simmer between characters. A terrific example of how two characters on the stage are in nearly constant conflict is in the film The King's Speech. It's beautifully written and acted and there's much to learn when two actors are pitted against each other, as viewers (and readers) lean in for more.
Meanwhile, keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Summer in Words Keynote Speaker

(drumroll please)
I'm thrilled to announce that the keynote speaker for the Summer in Words 2011 will be Cheryl Strayed.

The luminous and talented 
Cheryl Strayed's award-winning stories and essays have appeared in more than a dozen magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, The Sun, Washington Post Magazine, Allure, and DoubleTake.
Her personal essays, Heroin/e and The Love of My Life, were both selected for inclusion in the prestigious Best American Essays collections (in 2000 and 2003 respectively) and she is a winner of the Pushcart Prize for her essay, Munro Country. Her novel, Torch, published by Hougton Mifflin in 2006, was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award and selected by The Oregonian as one of the top ten books by Pacific Northwest authors.Cheryl's upcoming memoir Wild will be published by Knopf.

"The early hours of morning; you still aren't writing (rather, you aren't even trying), you just read lazily. Everything is idle, quiet, full, as if it were a gift from the muse of sluggishness,

just as earlier, in childhood, on vacation, when a colored map was slowly scrutinized before a trip, a map promising so much, deep ponds in the forest like glittering butterfly eyes, mountain meadows drowning in sharp grass;

or the moment before sleep, when no dreams have appeared, but they whisper their approach from all parts of the world, their march, their pilgrimage, their vigil at the sickbed (grown sick of wakefulness), and the quickening among medieval figures

compressed in endless stasis over the cathedral; the early hours of morning, silence — you still aren't writing,

you still understand so much. Joy is close." ~ Adam Zagajewski Without End

Happy birthday Norman Mailer

Who wrote: It's very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way — just sign the contract and do the book because, provided the topic has some meaning for me, I know I can do it. But a novel is different. A novel is more like falling in love. You don't say, 'I'm going to fall in love next Tuesday, I'm going to begin my novel.' The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love." He carried a small, spiral-bound notebook with him at all times, in case inspiration struck. Source: The Writer's Almanac

"It’s this simple. The writer is the person who stays in the room. The writer wants to read what she is in the process of creating with such passion and devotion that she will not leave the room. The writer understands that to stand up from the desk is to fail, and to leave the room is so radical and thorough a failure as to not be reversible. Who is not in the room writing? Everybody. Is it difficult to stay in the room, especially when you are not sure of what you are doing, where you’re going? Yes. It’s impossible. Who can do it? The writer.” ~ Ron Carlson

"We know very little even of the persons we know most intimately; we do not know them enough to transfer them to the pages of a book and make human beings of them. People are too elusive, too shadowy, to be copied; and they are also too incoherent and contradictory. The writer does not copy his originals; he takes what he wants from them, a few traits that have caught his attention, a turn of mind that has fired his imagination, and therefrom constructs his character."
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (1938)

"I usually have a perception around dawn when I wake up. I have what I call the theater of morning inside my head, all these voices talking to me. When they come up with a good metaphor, then I jump out of bed and trap them before they're gone." ~Ray Bradbury

Summer in Words 2011

Dates: June 24-26

Theme: Truth, Risk & Lies

Location: Cannon Beach, Oregon 

Registration opens April 1

"Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity. By day, space is one with the earth and with man - it is his sun that is shining, his clouds that are floating past; at night, space is his no more. When the great earth, abandoning day, rolls up the deeps of the heavens and the universe, a new door opens for the human spirit, and there are few so clownish that some awareness of the mystery of being does not touch them as they gaze. For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars - pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time. Fugitive though the instant be, the spirit of man is, during it, ennobled by a genuine moment of emotional dignity, and poetry makes its own both the human spirit and experience." ~ Henry Beston

Best Magazine Articles

Skies are the color of frosted blue and the sun is due for an appearance soon. It's been spring-like and soft all week. I've got narcissus bulbs popping out of the ground and I'm ready to start planting again. I was talking with an editing client yesterday who lives on  Long Island and was spending the day rewriting her novel because two feet of snow in her driveway had her stranded.  I reminded her that spring was a mere 52 days away and I suspect that she was stifling a growl.

I've been reading an essay or two every day because I'm working on several and want to improve my skills. So I was happy when I ran into this site that lists the Best Magazine Articles. I cannot recommend Gay Talese's Frank Sinatra has a Cold enough. I read it years ago and rereading it was a distinct pleasure. Meanwhile, if you're writing in a specific genre or format are you reading like crazy too? Analyzing what the writer or author does right or wrong?

A few notes my Between the Lines workshop in Portland has been rescheduled for February 26.
I will be teaching workshops in Snohomish County, Washington on March 19--details to come.
Plans are underway for Summer in Words on the Oregon coast and I'm lining up the keynote speaker and instructors. Dates are June 24-26. Details will start popping up on the Summer in Words blog soon.
I've also got a bunch of talented authors scheduled for interviews on this blog so watch for them in the coming weeks.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

For details follow this link. You've got until April 30th to send in your submission.

Meanwhile, keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Revelations

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. Eudora Welty

I have secrets. How about you? My secrets, closely guarded, are often tied to regrets and tinged with a fair dose of shame. They have to do with times I didn’t live up to my personal standards, was humiliated or embarrassed, or made a promise I couldn’t keep. I also carry other people’s secrets, and try to guard them as if I’m carrying a baby across an ice field, although when I was younger, the baby hit the ice more than once.

Let’s think for a few moments about secrets and revelations in what we write.  People read with a desire to discover something important, perhaps something that has been craftily concealed until just the right moment, because curiosity and intrigue make the world go round. Humans are naturally curious, and they long to uncover secrets and delve into the hidden areas of life.

Although you might believe that revelation belongs only to genres such as mystery and suspense novels, it is at the heart of every memoir and novel. Unraveling revelations is part of the narrative drive that pushes the story forward. Unmasking people and revealing some essential or hidden truth can provide the story’s high marks and surprises.

But as we know from real life, there are secrets, and then there are secrets. In fiction and memoir there are smaller concealments, but usually the secret, truth, or fact not yet exposed must be worth knowing, must impact the protagonist’s or memoirist’s life, and must affect some key element in the story such as character arc or outcome. Important revelations are foreshadowed or hinted at, and are carefully crafted, layer upon layer to give lend them meaning.

When foreshadowing is inlaid into a story, suspense is enhanced and the reader needs to keep reading to find out how things turn out and to quell the uneasiness that the foreshadowing induces. Once hints or forewarnings have been whispered to the reader,   they tingle with appreciation when the truth or surprise is sprung.   Thus, before the payoffs, including revelations, in fiction and memoir, lay the groundwork so that they are believable and credible.

A gradually unfolded revelation is at the heart of many compelling stories you have likely read. In Daphne Du Murier’s Rebecca it was a series of searing truths about the antagonist. In Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery it is about a grisly yearly ritual. In Colin Harrison’s psychological thriller The Havana Room it is about a secret rite in a secret room and a character’s past  cloaked in riddles and subterfuge. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest McMurphy learns that most of his fellow patients choose to live in the asylum of their own free will. In the film Romancing the Stone the glittering, huge and oh-so dangerous emerald is at heart of the story, but isn’t revealed until we’re well into the adventure.  In To  Kill a Mockingbird the reader must read the entire book to discover Bo Radley's true nature.

Trust me on this one—the more you hide, the faster your reader will turn pages. I like to imagine both characters and storylines as Russian stacking dolls. You keep opening up the doll to reveal one after another, and then another, until you reach the tiniest doll nested in the center. And there is a little thrill to opening up the final doll just as there is in uncovering a series of revelations while reading a good book.

Readers love to work undercover and their need to know is part curiosity, anxiety and apprehension. This potent mix is a form of arousal and it causes them to want to solve puzzles and enigmas, delve deep into a character’s most sheltered heartbreaks and fears, and learn the ugliest facts about humankind.

If you can craft a story that has mystery or secret to unravel, along with people or characters who would rather you didn’t know everything about them, you’ll have won half the battle in creating suspense and tension. The structure of most book-length fiction and nonfiction is about events that are going to be uncovered as we go along and subterfuge is simply part of writing. Readers also like being teased with possibilities, and they will enjoy a bit of misdirection and experiencing reversals along with the character or memoirist.

Revelations can occur in many shapes in a story. And, while, a revelation can provide profound and important information and insights, each doesn’t necessarily need to change the character or the course of the plot. Now some revelations will be life-changing, such as if a character learns the identity of his birth parent or discovers that he was adopted when he always believed his adopted parents were his birth parents. A character discovering that a child was born as the result of a rape would be another dramatic and difficult realization. A revelation can be almost anything-- the identity of a murderer, a lie, a denial, a longing for vengeance.

Here’s what I think: all secrets matter. If you can, use them to drive your stories. If you can, think about all the secrets you’ve known, their pain, the fallout, the shame and the consequences. Write about secrets in dialogue, stage them in bedroom scenes, in hospital rooms and foxholes. Think about the pressures that lead up to revealing a secret and craft a scene or two around these pressures. Then lead your reader slowly, slowly to the truth. 

"A writer needs 3 things: experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others." ~ William Faulkner

Pale blue skies here this morning and the weekend will feature spring-like weather. I'm teaching my Writing Recharge workshop this afternoon and I'm going to sprinkle it with u-rah-rah quotes including this one by Alan Watts: 

"Advice? I don't have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you're writing, you're a writer. Write like you're a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there's no chance for a pardon. Write like you're clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you've got just one last thing to say, like you're a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God's sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don't. Who knows, maybe you're one of the lucky ones who doesn't have to." 

And I'm going to tell my students that writing chooses us.  Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Start with the Tangible

I want to suggest a foundation from where we can all begin writing.  All fiction and nonfiction must start with the artifacts of everyday life. For you see, if the reader cannot somehow enter the world you’re describing in the same way that he enters a restaurant or party or foreign country in the real world, then he or she cannot understand the ideas, emotions or truths that you’re revealing.

Thus all writing starts with the tangible because descriptive detail is the writer breathing life into the story. The weak December light seeping in from the north window, the peculiar, musty smell of your grandmother’s attic, the dailiness of wearing an insulin pump. So for now, let’s ignore the many adages about writing and technique and simply concede that art is in the details.

          The real world is made up of things—Cumulus clouds, paperback books and ladderback chairs, champagne flutes and good Bordeaux, Sharpie® pens, red boots, a purple sofa, a belching city bus, the metal-colored winter sky. Because the power of our stories lies in tangible details. Details pull in readers, create a sense of place, reveal people, action and tension, making experiences and thoughts poignant, sensory, and alive.

        The trick is to choose tangible details that are so vital that the writing will suffer without them. Details should affect the outcome of the piece and make us understand theme and meaning. But herein lies the rub. Which details do we choose? Sometimes it seems like there are a blizzard of choices to be made. So choose carefully and choose details that add mood, atmosphere, and tension whenever possible.   

            Let’s begin by noticing, by practicing active awareness, by honing in on the ordinary, the real, the minutiae and sifting it onto the page. But let’s also gather details with a freshness of vision. Try to see the world as new when you describe it, and of course, notice the unusual, the quickly dismissed truth, the unguarded expression, the small gesture that speaks volumes about the person.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart