I believe that I need to start a support group for people who have not read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. And now, since I saw the movie a few nights ago, I’m stuck wondering if I need to read it to fully understand the movie. Several years ago I read the opening chapters and then skimmed through some chapter endings examining Brown’s techniques. It’s clear that he was adept at using a fast pace, cliffhangers and other gambits to create suspense. But I wasn’t pulled in, found the writing hackneyed, and laid it aside for other novels that promised more satisfaction.
I was at a dinner party last night discussing the movie with a woman who read the book and claimed to have loved the movie. I was underwhelmed by the movie. First, because a movie based on a book should stand alone and the viewer shouldn’t need to read the book to understand the movie and care about the characters. The movie has many strengths especially a terrific use of setting, especially the lavishly portrayed art collection of the Louvre Museum, the streets of Paris, and the gorgeous architecture of various soaring cathedrals. It also managed to richly portray history in intriguing, if too brief flashbacks.
However, I was never caught up in the character’s lives, never cared a whit about whether they’d survive or not, and didn’t know enough about them to worry overmuch if all would end well, despite the continuing body count. I also thought that the talented Tom Hanks was flat in his role as Robert Langdon and the usually luminous Audrey Tautou never grabbed my heart in her role as Sophie Neveu the French cryptologist. I found myself noticing that she reminded me of Audrey Hepburn and I kept seeing Tom Hanks, as well, Tom Hanks, not his character.
So although the book has sold more than 60 million copies and the movie has grossed gazillions and broke records in the opening weekend, and although it is filled with dazzling costumery and effects, and is stirring up controversy with Christians worldwide, I join the critics who found the movie a disappointment. While weaving in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci, various burial places, mysteries, a chase, ciphers, the Holy Grail, secret brotherhoods and Church history, it came off as a pile of clues, not as a story with flesh and blood people at its center.
But still we all need to applaud Brown for his imagination and courage. Because it’s time that someone whispered about the missing books of the Bible, the truth about Mary Magdalene, the machinations of the Council of Nicea, and about how the pagan religions were appropriated then destroyed by a partriarchy. So bravo for Brown and other authors and scholars before him for bringing these topics into the light. I just wish the story both in print and on the screen was more engaging and the movie version did a much better job of connecting the dots of history and reflecting the human heart.
Friday, May 26, 2006
I’ve decided I’m suffering from a case of city envy. A few weeks ago while in Olympia I mused about how lovely it would be to live there among the hills, charming old neighborhoods and lapping waters of the Sound. Last week I yearned to settle in D.C. among the sophisticats with a chance to spend my free time wandering its museums and old neighborhoods. Last night before a workshop/book signing at Jackson’s Books in Salem, I fell in love with downtown Salem. I love medium-sized cities—just enough culture and shopping and interesting people to create an urbane existence, but with the quiet and low volume of traffic to make it sane.
In downtown Salem I strolled past a mix of businesses—lots of coffee shops like everywhere in the Northwest, a bridal shop next to tattoo-piercing parlor, and Thai restaurants. I ambled through an antique mall and stopped at a J.C. Penney store which was sufficiently outdated to make me feel like I had stepped back in time. On the way back to the bookstore I spotted a gaggle of little girls walking along with their mothers. The girls were dressed in formal dance costumes of varying pastels—pink, lime and yellow. Their hair was pulled tight into buns encircled by a band of matching silk rosettes and walking past them it seemed like they had just emerged from some secret fairy den.
Jackson’s Books is located on the edge of a small park that has a creek running through. Green light filters in through the low windows that overlook the park and rhododendron bushes planted next to the store. Inside, fine old jazz is playing and people wander quietly among the stacks.
After reading the first paragraph of Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time—the Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, I bought it. While his novel, Winemaker’s Daughter didn’t grab my attention, Eagan, a Pulitzer-prize winning writer makes history and place come to life like no other writer. If you haven’t read his first book, The Good Rain, I highly recommend it.
The book begins: On those days when the wind stops blowing across the face of the southern plains, the land falls into a silence that scares people in the way that a big house can haunt after the lights go out and no one else is there. It scares them because the land is too much, too empty, claustrophobic in its immensity. It scares them because they feel lost, with nothing to cling to, disoriented. Not a tree, anywhere. Not a slice of shade. Not a river dancing away, life in its blood. Not a bump of high ground to break the horizon, give some perspective, spell the monotone of flatness. It scares them because they wonder what is next…..
As you can see, he’s a gorgeous writer, or as a friend --also a Pulitzer prize winning writer-- (his Pulitzer was tacked to the walls of his outhouse outside his Door County, Wisconsin cabin) once said, “he writes like the angels.” I’ve read through the first few chapters, am amazed at the stats he’s describing, and can’t bear to put it down but must because I’ve got a manuscript to edit.
It’s so much fun to delve into some aspect of history that you don’t know much about, like stumbling into a secret room while exploring an old house. But I bought it also because I believe my writing voice is growing thin. When I was performing the final edit on Between the Lines I was worried at how many times I repeated words like whisper and dazzle and sizzle and deepen. Sometimes it makes sense to read a writer who has a voice similar to your own, but better. It seems to me that the other writer’s skills and word craft start to mingle in your imagination and subconscious, shoring up your own weaknesses.
In downtown Salem I strolled past a mix of businesses—lots of coffee shops like everywhere in the Northwest, a bridal shop next to tattoo-piercing parlor, and Thai restaurants. I ambled through an antique mall and stopped at a J.C. Penney store which was sufficiently outdated to make me feel like I had stepped back in time. On the way back to the bookstore I spotted a gaggle of little girls walking along with their mothers. The girls were dressed in formal dance costumes of varying pastels—pink, lime and yellow. Their hair was pulled tight into buns encircled by a band of matching silk rosettes and walking past them it seemed like they had just emerged from some secret fairy den.
Jackson’s Books is located on the edge of a small park that has a creek running through. Green light filters in through the low windows that overlook the park and rhododendron bushes planted next to the store. Inside, fine old jazz is playing and people wander quietly among the stacks.
After reading the first paragraph of Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time—the Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, I bought it. While his novel, Winemaker’s Daughter didn’t grab my attention, Eagan, a Pulitzer-prize winning writer makes history and place come to life like no other writer. If you haven’t read his first book, The Good Rain, I highly recommend it.
The book begins: On those days when the wind stops blowing across the face of the southern plains, the land falls into a silence that scares people in the way that a big house can haunt after the lights go out and no one else is there. It scares them because the land is too much, too empty, claustrophobic in its immensity. It scares them because they feel lost, with nothing to cling to, disoriented. Not a tree, anywhere. Not a slice of shade. Not a river dancing away, life in its blood. Not a bump of high ground to break the horizon, give some perspective, spell the monotone of flatness. It scares them because they wonder what is next…..
As you can see, he’s a gorgeous writer, or as a friend --also a Pulitzer prize winning writer-- (his Pulitzer was tacked to the walls of his outhouse outside his Door County, Wisconsin cabin) once said, “he writes like the angels.” I’ve read through the first few chapters, am amazed at the stats he’s describing, and can’t bear to put it down but must because I’ve got a manuscript to edit.
It’s so much fun to delve into some aspect of history that you don’t know much about, like stumbling into a secret room while exploring an old house. But I bought it also because I believe my writing voice is growing thin. When I was performing the final edit on Between the Lines I was worried at how many times I repeated words like whisper and dazzle and sizzle and deepen. Sometimes it makes sense to read a writer who has a voice similar to your own, but better. It seems to me that the other writer’s skills and word craft start to mingle in your imagination and subconscious, shoring up your own weaknesses.
Monday, May 22, 2006
I woke this morning to a wet, wet world in Portland, but as the day is wearing on the clouds are parting from time to time. After spending the previous week in Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania, I am keenly aware that the Pacific Northwest is sponge-like, holding in all this rain, the air thick with moisture, every surface glistening. Apparently the week I was gone the weather was lovely and a thunderstorm struck just before I arrived home on Sunday night.
I was struck by so many things while in D.C.—-my first sight of the Washington monument piercing the afternoon sky as we drove past in the airport shuttle, the charming neighborhoods of Georgetown, the grandeur of the National Gallery with it’s amazing collection, and everywhere massive, old buildings, gargoyles and fantastic architectural styles, and the reassurance of history. The Ford Theater was near my hotel as was the house where Lincoln died. Tourists and school kids swarmed the sidewalks, monuments, and museums and were easily discernible in their shorts, T-shirts and walking shoes. Was fascinated by the way the people of Washington dressed—as if The West Wing had come to life. D.C. is such a hub of wealth and power, the air buzzing with deals and gossip and clout. It’s a hard-working town, with men in suits and elegant women scurrying along engaged in rapid-fire conversations and conducting business via cell phones. Northwesterners are a casual bunch—a smattering of elegant types live here, but mostly the casual, the athletic, the Bohemian, the tattooed, and the grunged-out make up our population. The difference in dress codes was startling and when I taught workshops at the Writers Digest Conference in D.C. and even Pennwriters in Pennsylvania I was so struck by these differences.
The Writer’s Digest BEA Conference had the usual confluence of energy and optimism and desperation as happens when writers with dreams come together. The Writer’s Digest staff was great as usual—kind, professional, poised and passionate about books and writing. I taught my two workshops and slipped back to my hotel for a brief nap then joined others from the conference for dinner.
I didn’t expect BEA to be so overwhelming. As I was walking into the giant complex of the Washington Convention Center, James Patterson was hurrying out the door and then I noticed that everyone was wearing badges that said “James Patterson rules summer.” I kept wondering what he thought of the adulation. The convention center was like a massive temple to books—giant banners everywhere proclaiming the upcoming summer blockbusters, a group of women attired in aqua swimsuits, heels, and beach towels hawking a book about making peace with your thighs, people in costumes including a few Star Wars characters, wanna-be authors handing out promo pieces about their manuscripts, and more hype, noise and long lines than I’ve seen in years.
I had checked out of my hotel room and was lugging around my brief case and heavy purse, so by the time I started collecting the free books I felt so burdened I was more than happy to pay the efficient UPS team an extra $20 to ship the books home to me. Of course then I found more give-aways and ended up lugging them with me…..After signing books for the second time and chatting with an interesting array of people including a few nuts, I sprinted back to the hotel to catch a shuttle to Dulles Airport which was so crowded and crazy it matched the energy level of the convention center.
Trying not to worry that I was going to miss my plane, I fretted in the long check-in line, discovered my suitcase weighed exactly fifty pounds (it felt like eighty) and crept along in endless security lines (it seemed that despite the many signs and constant broadcast loop my fellow travelers were trying to smuggle their lighters on board) I was in the air. I reached Harrisburg, PA and the first thing I noticed was the green, green fields and woods surrounding it and once inside the airport, rocking chairs. After the bustle of D.C. it felt like I had landed in a cow pasture and I was so grateful for the quiet and nearly empty airport that I practically wept.
The people at Pennwriters Conference made me feel like I was back in the Midwest. It was laid-back and the people were real and funny and kind. And, believe it or not, on Saturday night I banged a mallet onto a device that launched a rubber chicken into the air and into a pot. And won another book. Of all the things I was expecting about teaching at another conference, a rubber chicken never entered my imaginings.
I was struck by so many things while in D.C.—-my first sight of the Washington monument piercing the afternoon sky as we drove past in the airport shuttle, the charming neighborhoods of Georgetown, the grandeur of the National Gallery with it’s amazing collection, and everywhere massive, old buildings, gargoyles and fantastic architectural styles, and the reassurance of history. The Ford Theater was near my hotel as was the house where Lincoln died. Tourists and school kids swarmed the sidewalks, monuments, and museums and were easily discernible in their shorts, T-shirts and walking shoes. Was fascinated by the way the people of Washington dressed—as if The West Wing had come to life. D.C. is such a hub of wealth and power, the air buzzing with deals and gossip and clout. It’s a hard-working town, with men in suits and elegant women scurrying along engaged in rapid-fire conversations and conducting business via cell phones. Northwesterners are a casual bunch—a smattering of elegant types live here, but mostly the casual, the athletic, the Bohemian, the tattooed, and the grunged-out make up our population. The difference in dress codes was startling and when I taught workshops at the Writers Digest Conference in D.C. and even Pennwriters in Pennsylvania I was so struck by these differences.
The Writer’s Digest BEA Conference had the usual confluence of energy and optimism and desperation as happens when writers with dreams come together. The Writer’s Digest staff was great as usual—kind, professional, poised and passionate about books and writing. I taught my two workshops and slipped back to my hotel for a brief nap then joined others from the conference for dinner.
I didn’t expect BEA to be so overwhelming. As I was walking into the giant complex of the Washington Convention Center, James Patterson was hurrying out the door and then I noticed that everyone was wearing badges that said “James Patterson rules summer.” I kept wondering what he thought of the adulation. The convention center was like a massive temple to books—giant banners everywhere proclaiming the upcoming summer blockbusters, a group of women attired in aqua swimsuits, heels, and beach towels hawking a book about making peace with your thighs, people in costumes including a few Star Wars characters, wanna-be authors handing out promo pieces about their manuscripts, and more hype, noise and long lines than I’ve seen in years.
I had checked out of my hotel room and was lugging around my brief case and heavy purse, so by the time I started collecting the free books I felt so burdened I was more than happy to pay the efficient UPS team an extra $20 to ship the books home to me. Of course then I found more give-aways and ended up lugging them with me…..After signing books for the second time and chatting with an interesting array of people including a few nuts, I sprinted back to the hotel to catch a shuttle to Dulles Airport which was so crowded and crazy it matched the energy level of the convention center.
Trying not to worry that I was going to miss my plane, I fretted in the long check-in line, discovered my suitcase weighed exactly fifty pounds (it felt like eighty) and crept along in endless security lines (it seemed that despite the many signs and constant broadcast loop my fellow travelers were trying to smuggle their lighters on board) I was in the air. I reached Harrisburg, PA and the first thing I noticed was the green, green fields and woods surrounding it and once inside the airport, rocking chairs. After the bustle of D.C. it felt like I had landed in a cow pasture and I was so grateful for the quiet and nearly empty airport that I practically wept.
The people at Pennwriters Conference made me feel like I was back in the Midwest. It was laid-back and the people were real and funny and kind. And, believe it or not, on Saturday night I banged a mallet onto a device that launched a rubber chicken into the air and into a pot. And won another book. Of all the things I was expecting about teaching at another conference, a rubber chicken never entered my imaginings.
Friday, May 12, 2006
I’ve been meeting a lot of writers lately since I’ve been traveling a bit promoting my new book. Last Friday night I was in Olympia and after my book signing went out for drinks with a few writers. And because two of the writers were journalists, we bandied around names of nonfiction writers. I brought up Truman Capote, they mentioned Hunter Thompson and Amy Goodman. I introduced them to Scott Russell Sanders, Barry Lopex and Sin and Syntax by Constance Hale. Told them about Peace Like a River by Leif Enger—a book I cannot stop talking about two years after reading it and The Memory of Running by Larry McLarty.
I’m always a little amused when writers ask about my life. What it’s like to be self employed. One guy wanted to know how much I spent every month on health care. I tell them I get up early and sit at my computer by six or so. I like to start early before I chicken out and start fretting about errands and phone calls and dirty laundry or plants that need watering. I’ve never forgotten the author who wrote about tying himself to his desk chair with his bathrobe belt, because it’s so comforting to hear that other writers feel anxiety or dread or less than fabulous emotions when they begin the day’s writing session. My life evolves around an invisible bathrobe belt, looping me into this chair, this life.
Books spill off every surface of my small townhouse and are stored away in boxes. I dream about books and words and amazing creatures appear in my nightly movies—I woke this morning after dreaming about a giant grizzly—I mean Empire State Building giant-sized rising from a northern lake. In the dream I had been crouching in a cave, looking out over the water, feeling still and strong, helped in my position by a sword (an object I’ve never brandished in real life) when the bear started rising from the water. My job then was to warn friends and batten down the hatches….
Brought up in the Midwest in a matriarchal family, I make my bed every day, always have fresh flowers in my house, take walks to watch the gardens in my neighborhood go through the seasons and love to watch the sky. Last night I was driving home from a kids’ baseball game (my team lost by one run) and the sky was simply amazing –so huge with billows of gray battleships arriving as if to explode the sky. I get pedicures in the summer and my toes are usually painted bright cherry red. I hate cigarette smoke, try not to eat sugar, and suffer from seasonal allergies. I listen to Air America and NPR during the day but am starting to become more comfortable with long swaths of silence and am thinking about playing lots of moody Sarah Vaughn-Billie Holliday-Ella Fitzgerald-my-man-left-me-again music when I start writing my new book in a few weeks. I love the thoughtful lyrics of songwriters like Cole Porter and am always on the lookout for contemporary songwriters who are more than clever. I would like to spend a month in France writing as two writers from British Columbia who I know just did.
As the oldest daughter in a family of six I started cooking at a tender age, was a professional cook and caterer in a former life and when I bring appetizers or a salad to a dinner party usually garnish the platter with fresh herbs and flowers. I think that telling the truth often requires surprising amounts of courage, that most aspects of life can be more graceful; that we all need to spend more time simply talking with people, especially around a dinner table and especially under the dim glow of candlelight; that adults should provide comforting rituals as well as surprises for children; and that aging is about growing more comfortable with our bodies and regrets.
I’m always a little amused when writers ask about my life. What it’s like to be self employed. One guy wanted to know how much I spent every month on health care. I tell them I get up early and sit at my computer by six or so. I like to start early before I chicken out and start fretting about errands and phone calls and dirty laundry or plants that need watering. I’ve never forgotten the author who wrote about tying himself to his desk chair with his bathrobe belt, because it’s so comforting to hear that other writers feel anxiety or dread or less than fabulous emotions when they begin the day’s writing session. My life evolves around an invisible bathrobe belt, looping me into this chair, this life.
Books spill off every surface of my small townhouse and are stored away in boxes. I dream about books and words and amazing creatures appear in my nightly movies—I woke this morning after dreaming about a giant grizzly—I mean Empire State Building giant-sized rising from a northern lake. In the dream I had been crouching in a cave, looking out over the water, feeling still and strong, helped in my position by a sword (an object I’ve never brandished in real life) when the bear started rising from the water. My job then was to warn friends and batten down the hatches….
Brought up in the Midwest in a matriarchal family, I make my bed every day, always have fresh flowers in my house, take walks to watch the gardens in my neighborhood go through the seasons and love to watch the sky. Last night I was driving home from a kids’ baseball game (my team lost by one run) and the sky was simply amazing –so huge with billows of gray battleships arriving as if to explode the sky. I get pedicures in the summer and my toes are usually painted bright cherry red. I hate cigarette smoke, try not to eat sugar, and suffer from seasonal allergies. I listen to Air America and NPR during the day but am starting to become more comfortable with long swaths of silence and am thinking about playing lots of moody Sarah Vaughn-Billie Holliday-Ella Fitzgerald-my-man-left-me-again music when I start writing my new book in a few weeks. I love the thoughtful lyrics of songwriters like Cole Porter and am always on the lookout for contemporary songwriters who are more than clever. I would like to spend a month in France writing as two writers from British Columbia who I know just did.
As the oldest daughter in a family of six I started cooking at a tender age, was a professional cook and caterer in a former life and when I bring appetizers or a salad to a dinner party usually garnish the platter with fresh herbs and flowers. I think that telling the truth often requires surprising amounts of courage, that most aspects of life can be more graceful; that we all need to spend more time simply talking with people, especially around a dinner table and especially under the dim glow of candlelight; that adults should provide comforting rituals as well as surprises for children; and that aging is about growing more comfortable with our bodies and regrets.
Friday, May 05, 2006
Since last I wrote, I’ve launched my book tour at Third Place Books in Forest Lake near Seattle. Nice bookstore that seems to be the hub for the community, but then I guess unless a bookstore is moldy and filthy there are few bookstores I don’t like. Traveled by train to Edmonds, WA and back and on the return trip the train was delayed by three and a half hours because someone had been killed on the tracks by the train ahead of us. I have since not heard the details about the death and keep wondering if it was a suicide and how the train engineer is doing.
Train riding is delightful and maybe now that gas prices are so expensive, this country can finally invest in train travel again. Riding along, the scenery slides past and you slip in and out of a dreamy state. You slide in and out of the mystery of tunnels and the world out the window is tender greens, new crops in the fields, a second year vineyard outside of Kent, the dazzling Tacoma Narrows bridge, and the long, blue shoreline of the Sound.
I read Nicole Krauss’s lovely book The History of Love, wrote in a journal, but mostly watched the scenery and eavesdropped on fellow passengers—a gaggle of girl scouts playing cards and eating junk food, friends returning from a Motorcross event in Seattle, families, couples, oddballs. A large man in the business car on the return trip drank and talked nonstop throughout the trip and delay. His wife and friends all seemed to expect this nonstop commentary and I kept wondering about someone with such a need to converse. By trip’s end, I learned that he had a severe fear of flying and once downed 16 drinks between New York and Ohio and then realized I had come to like him…..
On Tuesday I drove to Newport and stayed at the Sylvia Beach Hotel. It is a hotel for booklovers and could not be more charming. (although when I arrived, howling 50 mph winds made my room chilly for the beginning of my stay.) I stayed in the Sigrid Undset room and copied one of her quotes into my notebook: “Life must be lived when caresses are new and dazzling.”
Because of the winds, I didn’t walk on the beach on Tuesday, but trudged against the wind in the charming Nye Beach neighborhood, ate fish and chips for dinner, and bought an aquamarine straw hat.
On Tuesday evening gave a talk about fiction elements to the Willamette Writers group who meet monthly at the Newport Library. It’s a fabulous library, especially the children’s section with cozy corners for readers and the most beautiful jade-infused light coming in through the low windows.
The talk went well and I so appreciated the retired engineer who had driven 50 miles from Florence to hear me speak and my other listeners. We laughed amid commiserating about the difficulties of crafting fiction. Walked on the beach Wednesday morning and on the way home stopped in at Grass Roots bookstore in Corvallis and bought Sarah Dunant’s latest book.
A few questions arose during the talks—one man asked about the line between fiction and creative nonfiction. There is no line. Fiction is a pack of lies, in fact, whoppers and nonfiction is the truth as best you know it. Use narrative TECHNIQUES, but don’t fictionalize your life or reinvent memories that never happened. Another lovely man who is writing a novel based on his mother’s life, asked about his difficulties with spelling and punctuation. Corrections were bogging him down—I explained that you write the first draft as if your pants are on fire then worry about perfection later. Not exactly profound, but that’s it ….write, write, write. There will be plenty to worry about and time to fix things during the rewrites and second, third, and fourth drafts.
On to Orca Books in Olympia tonight. Another bookstore, another community of writers and book lovers. Perhaps that’s what the world is made up of after all.
Train riding is delightful and maybe now that gas prices are so expensive, this country can finally invest in train travel again. Riding along, the scenery slides past and you slip in and out of a dreamy state. You slide in and out of the mystery of tunnels and the world out the window is tender greens, new crops in the fields, a second year vineyard outside of Kent, the dazzling Tacoma Narrows bridge, and the long, blue shoreline of the Sound.
I read Nicole Krauss’s lovely book The History of Love, wrote in a journal, but mostly watched the scenery and eavesdropped on fellow passengers—a gaggle of girl scouts playing cards and eating junk food, friends returning from a Motorcross event in Seattle, families, couples, oddballs. A large man in the business car on the return trip drank and talked nonstop throughout the trip and delay. His wife and friends all seemed to expect this nonstop commentary and I kept wondering about someone with such a need to converse. By trip’s end, I learned that he had a severe fear of flying and once downed 16 drinks between New York and Ohio and then realized I had come to like him…..
On Tuesday I drove to Newport and stayed at the Sylvia Beach Hotel. It is a hotel for booklovers and could not be more charming. (although when I arrived, howling 50 mph winds made my room chilly for the beginning of my stay.) I stayed in the Sigrid Undset room and copied one of her quotes into my notebook: “Life must be lived when caresses are new and dazzling.”
Because of the winds, I didn’t walk on the beach on Tuesday, but trudged against the wind in the charming Nye Beach neighborhood, ate fish and chips for dinner, and bought an aquamarine straw hat.
On Tuesday evening gave a talk about fiction elements to the Willamette Writers group who meet monthly at the Newport Library. It’s a fabulous library, especially the children’s section with cozy corners for readers and the most beautiful jade-infused light coming in through the low windows.
The talk went well and I so appreciated the retired engineer who had driven 50 miles from Florence to hear me speak and my other listeners. We laughed amid commiserating about the difficulties of crafting fiction. Walked on the beach Wednesday morning and on the way home stopped in at Grass Roots bookstore in Corvallis and bought Sarah Dunant’s latest book.
A few questions arose during the talks—one man asked about the line between fiction and creative nonfiction. There is no line. Fiction is a pack of lies, in fact, whoppers and nonfiction is the truth as best you know it. Use narrative TECHNIQUES, but don’t fictionalize your life or reinvent memories that never happened. Another lovely man who is writing a novel based on his mother’s life, asked about his difficulties with spelling and punctuation. Corrections were bogging him down—I explained that you write the first draft as if your pants are on fire then worry about perfection later. Not exactly profound, but that’s it ….write, write, write. There will be plenty to worry about and time to fix things during the rewrites and second, third, and fourth drafts.
On to Orca Books in Olympia tonight. Another bookstore, another community of writers and book lovers. Perhaps that’s what the world is made up of after all.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Yesterday I checked Amazon twice because my book which was supposed to be for sale on the 25th, but it was still listed as unavailable. I also discovered a blurb I had sent them contained a major typo. I seem to be making more typing mistakes these days especially when I’m working at night….I’m afraid to check it again, because surely it’s a sign of obsessiveness or vanity to visit your own book on Amazon….
Years ago I read a comment by the oh-so prolific Joyce Carol Oates. She mentioned that it seemed that her computer had become an extension of her brain. I’ve never forgotten that remark and understand it completely. I’ve been using a computer for writing since the 1980s and sometimes it seems that my day doesn’t start until I click on the computer switch. With a mug of steaming Earl Grey (lightly sweetened with honey) my morning ritual is complete.
However, lately I’ve been writing in longhand more often. I’ve started buying new notebooks, assigning specific notebooks to specific projects, and jotting down ideas when I walk in the door with something simmering in my head. Last night I was driving home from a kid’s softball game and the opening sentences and concept for the preface of my new book came to me. I repeated it to myself a few times as I drove along—desperate not to lose it and tried to keep my brain from filling up with too many ideas—my ongoing struggle. When I reached home, since my computer was shut down for the day, I sat down and wrote out the idea on a yellow lined legal pad. Leafing through the notepad to a blank page, I noted how many pages were filled with ideas.
One page was the genesis of my April newsletter and another page was dedicated to a column I’m going to start writing. I’ve been writing on the train, in bed, in coffee shops and returning to a ritual that has always stamped the day with promise--in the first moments of dawn while on my couch, covered with a pale green afghan as the world twitters awake. I’m going to start writing my new book in earnest in June and feel a need to visit the Oregon coast with a pile of notebooks and novels and write the old fashioned way. The computer is so fast, so easy, so quickly corrects a misstep or clumsy locution.
But it seems like writing on the page-- when you can sketch and scrawl in the margins and circle words and scratch out mistakes-- is connected to the girl in me, the quiet part of me, the person who wonders a lot while I walk and when I’m alone.
About ten years ago I attended a book signing with Ann Perry. She was visiting an independent book store in Portland, plugging the latest book in her Victorian-era suspense series. A number of fans came dressed in Victorian costumes and Perry spent much of the evening answering questions. That evening she explained that her writing process was to write her books longhand, then have an assistant transcribe them.
In the early 90s I interviewed Natalie Goldberg who explained that writing longhand was a form of Western meditation. I also interviewed Dennis Lehane after Mystic River skyrocketed to the New York Times bestseller list and Clint Eastwood bought the movie rights. We talked about many things pertaining to writing, especially how to use setting and detail to bring a story to life. He explained that he wrote while listening to music and I asked him about his writing process. Here is a portion of that interview:
Morrell: I’ve heard that you throw away a lot of pages. What is your editing process? How do you fine tune?
Lehane: I write longhand first.
Morrell: Does that feel like your natural voice comes through with your hand on the page?
Lehane: There’s a sense that I can write anything. It’s not written in stone yet. Stone is when you type and so I can write the car was blue, gray, purple, you know, and just keep going.
Morrell: Doesn’t your wrist get sore?
Lehane: No. I get these cheap pens and they write like buddah and then usually that night I will type that draft into the computer.
Morrell: So that’s essentially edit number one.
Lehane: Yeah, in a way that’s edit number one. And then I just go along and make a lot of mistakes. The one thing I think I do have---which again, can only be created by writing a lot—I think I have an amazing instinct for when it’s going awry. I mean, I’ll still write forty pages in the wrong direction, but then suddenly I can’t write any more.
Morrell: You can hear it?
Lehane: There’s something just eating in me and usually it takes a few days to dawn on me. Then I’ve got to go back. But then I get to the end of a draft and I just read it and I mark it and read it and mark and read it and I do a lot of that and I then start playing with it.
Morrell: As far as language?
Lehane: Yes, I do a lot with language. Or something is missing as far as the character or if a scene is a little fuzzy in terms of plot. And then I send that version off to my editor or agent and in that time I’ve had three weeks to think about it. And I’ve also had time to send it out people and their responses come back.
Morrell: And hopefully they all say the same thing.
Lehane: Or if somebody says something in that month that has started to occur to me, like oh gosh, maybe that scene didn’t fly--because by this time, you want everything to fly. And then you go, ‘okay, you busted me on that. Let’s deal with that.’ You know. And that’s when it gets into squeezing the manuscript so hard it starts to bleed. And that takes a three to four month process. But I’m a maniacal believer in revision and think it if you don’t do it, you’re just a typist.
Years ago I read a comment by the oh-so prolific Joyce Carol Oates. She mentioned that it seemed that her computer had become an extension of her brain. I’ve never forgotten that remark and understand it completely. I’ve been using a computer for writing since the 1980s and sometimes it seems that my day doesn’t start until I click on the computer switch. With a mug of steaming Earl Grey (lightly sweetened with honey) my morning ritual is complete.
However, lately I’ve been writing in longhand more often. I’ve started buying new notebooks, assigning specific notebooks to specific projects, and jotting down ideas when I walk in the door with something simmering in my head. Last night I was driving home from a kid’s softball game and the opening sentences and concept for the preface of my new book came to me. I repeated it to myself a few times as I drove along—desperate not to lose it and tried to keep my brain from filling up with too many ideas—my ongoing struggle. When I reached home, since my computer was shut down for the day, I sat down and wrote out the idea on a yellow lined legal pad. Leafing through the notepad to a blank page, I noted how many pages were filled with ideas.
One page was the genesis of my April newsletter and another page was dedicated to a column I’m going to start writing. I’ve been writing on the train, in bed, in coffee shops and returning to a ritual that has always stamped the day with promise--in the first moments of dawn while on my couch, covered with a pale green afghan as the world twitters awake. I’m going to start writing my new book in earnest in June and feel a need to visit the Oregon coast with a pile of notebooks and novels and write the old fashioned way. The computer is so fast, so easy, so quickly corrects a misstep or clumsy locution.
But it seems like writing on the page-- when you can sketch and scrawl in the margins and circle words and scratch out mistakes-- is connected to the girl in me, the quiet part of me, the person who wonders a lot while I walk and when I’m alone.
About ten years ago I attended a book signing with Ann Perry. She was visiting an independent book store in Portland, plugging the latest book in her Victorian-era suspense series. A number of fans came dressed in Victorian costumes and Perry spent much of the evening answering questions. That evening she explained that her writing process was to write her books longhand, then have an assistant transcribe them.
In the early 90s I interviewed Natalie Goldberg who explained that writing longhand was a form of Western meditation. I also interviewed Dennis Lehane after Mystic River skyrocketed to the New York Times bestseller list and Clint Eastwood bought the movie rights. We talked about many things pertaining to writing, especially how to use setting and detail to bring a story to life. He explained that he wrote while listening to music and I asked him about his writing process. Here is a portion of that interview:
Morrell: I’ve heard that you throw away a lot of pages. What is your editing process? How do you fine tune?
Lehane: I write longhand first.
Morrell: Does that feel like your natural voice comes through with your hand on the page?
Lehane: There’s a sense that I can write anything. It’s not written in stone yet. Stone is when you type and so I can write the car was blue, gray, purple, you know, and just keep going.
Morrell: Doesn’t your wrist get sore?
Lehane: No. I get these cheap pens and they write like buddah and then usually that night I will type that draft into the computer.
Morrell: So that’s essentially edit number one.
Lehane: Yeah, in a way that’s edit number one. And then I just go along and make a lot of mistakes. The one thing I think I do have---which again, can only be created by writing a lot—I think I have an amazing instinct for when it’s going awry. I mean, I’ll still write forty pages in the wrong direction, but then suddenly I can’t write any more.
Morrell: You can hear it?
Lehane: There’s something just eating in me and usually it takes a few days to dawn on me. Then I’ve got to go back. But then I get to the end of a draft and I just read it and I mark it and read it and mark and read it and I do a lot of that and I then start playing with it.
Morrell: As far as language?
Lehane: Yes, I do a lot with language. Or something is missing as far as the character or if a scene is a little fuzzy in terms of plot. And then I send that version off to my editor or agent and in that time I’ve had three weeks to think about it. And I’ve also had time to send it out people and their responses come back.
Morrell: And hopefully they all say the same thing.
Lehane: Or if somebody says something in that month that has started to occur to me, like oh gosh, maybe that scene didn’t fly--because by this time, you want everything to fly. And then you go, ‘okay, you busted me on that. Let’s deal with that.’ You know. And that’s when it gets into squeezing the manuscript so hard it starts to bleed. And that takes a three to four month process. But I’m a maniacal believer in revision and think it if you don’t do it, you’re just a typist.
Monday, April 24, 2006
I was out walking yesterday afternoon in the late afternoon. We were facing west and after a mile or so, we were all feeling punished by the sun. First time of the year to feel too warm and then we turned around, our backs against the sun, the east wind sweeping in from the Columbia Gorge cooling everything. There is a path in Portland called the Springwater Corridor. It’s a former railroad line, and loops 40 miles through the city, wandering along the Willamette River in my neighborhood, but mostly follows Johnson Creek into the foothills of the Cascades. I needed to water my plants before I left home yesterday and realized that the rhythms of the season—watering the garden, long walks, lingering on the patio, spending more time outdoors, especially during the long, sweet dusk—were already here.
On Friday I received a call from an editor at Writer’s Digest Books with the news that they’ve accepted the proposal for my book on bad guys in fiction so I’ll begin working on it in June. Woke up this morning from a complicated dream where I was in trouble because of caring for other people’s kids and came into my office and turned on the computer. Somewhere in between the bedroom and office the enormity of starting a new book hit and I asked myself how in the world I was going to fill so many pages. Gulp. I’m also working on several book ideas so I also need to figure out when each of these books will get written, or at least the approximate timeframe.
Life has been complicated lately. My parents were visiting over the Easter holiday and it’s clear that my mother is suffering from dementia. Her doctor says it is Alzheimer’s and has her on medication for it and her neurologist says she’s not suffering from it. Since her mother and five aunts died of it, it seems likely. I’ve been talking with family members about the future—I want to share information, set plans in place so my father isn’t isolated and overwhelmed by her care.
My answers to the enormity of writing the new book, juggling future plans, worry about my parents, coping with other problems, is to write more. I am going to use my writing habits as a ballast in the coming years which I believe are going to be joyful and difficult and blessed and sad. On Friday night I spent time with a friend whose husband almost died about a month ago. In fact, after a seizure, he was dead for twelve minutes and then was resuscitated. Naturally he has brain damage and faces lots of rehabilitation ahead, but his near-death and so many things lately have been teaching me about the possibilities of what we do with our lives. About the preciousness of each drawn breath, each dewy sunrise and pink-hued sunset. It’s as if when we’re born, most of us, and certainly more so in the West, are offered all these fabulous choices about spending our time on this planet and what the footprint we leave behind will look like. If I was a child born in the slums of Calcutta or Mexico City to a family of twelve, my choices, of course, would be smaller or nonexistent.
Since I was eight, my choice has been mostly to write and now to teach people how to tell stories. Because when our parents are ill, are beloved husband almost dies, when we spot a bluebird sitting among pink blossoms along a trail; our tool to spread the news, to find comfort, to cope and understand is in stories. Stories express our terrible vulnerability and happily, our strengths. Just keep writing (and breathing) through it all.
On Friday I received a call from an editor at Writer’s Digest Books with the news that they’ve accepted the proposal for my book on bad guys in fiction so I’ll begin working on it in June. Woke up this morning from a complicated dream where I was in trouble because of caring for other people’s kids and came into my office and turned on the computer. Somewhere in between the bedroom and office the enormity of starting a new book hit and I asked myself how in the world I was going to fill so many pages. Gulp. I’m also working on several book ideas so I also need to figure out when each of these books will get written, or at least the approximate timeframe.
Life has been complicated lately. My parents were visiting over the Easter holiday and it’s clear that my mother is suffering from dementia. Her doctor says it is Alzheimer’s and has her on medication for it and her neurologist says she’s not suffering from it. Since her mother and five aunts died of it, it seems likely. I’ve been talking with family members about the future—I want to share information, set plans in place so my father isn’t isolated and overwhelmed by her care.
My answers to the enormity of writing the new book, juggling future plans, worry about my parents, coping with other problems, is to write more. I am going to use my writing habits as a ballast in the coming years which I believe are going to be joyful and difficult and blessed and sad. On Friday night I spent time with a friend whose husband almost died about a month ago. In fact, after a seizure, he was dead for twelve minutes and then was resuscitated. Naturally he has brain damage and faces lots of rehabilitation ahead, but his near-death and so many things lately have been teaching me about the possibilities of what we do with our lives. About the preciousness of each drawn breath, each dewy sunrise and pink-hued sunset. It’s as if when we’re born, most of us, and certainly more so in the West, are offered all these fabulous choices about spending our time on this planet and what the footprint we leave behind will look like. If I was a child born in the slums of Calcutta or Mexico City to a family of twelve, my choices, of course, would be smaller or nonexistent.
Since I was eight, my choice has been mostly to write and now to teach people how to tell stories. Because when our parents are ill, are beloved husband almost dies, when we spot a bluebird sitting among pink blossoms along a trail; our tool to spread the news, to find comfort, to cope and understand is in stories. Stories express our terrible vulnerability and happily, our strengths. Just keep writing (and breathing) through it all.
Friday, April 21, 2006
For the past few days I’ve been writing a piece about an experience I had at the Na Pali coastline of Kauai in 1990. Back then, I had been in the midst of a bitter divorce, my teenage daughter and I were not getting along, my job as communications director at a computer manufacturer was shaky, and I was generally soured on life. At the time I stilled lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and the change of locale from the shores of Lake Michigan to the emerald islands of Hawaii was like stepping onto another planet. What lingers in my memory was the softness of the place, the air soothing, of palm trees and bougainvillea and wild blooms tumbling along the roadsides and volcanoes that made me imagine the beginning of time, and sugar cane fields burning in the middle of the night.
I was vacationing with a friend and first we stayed in Maui and then moved on to Kauai, a place of astonishing beauty. We went on a catamaran trip out into the turquoise waters of the Pacific, to see the Na Pali coastline (a wilderness not accessible by car) from afar and snorkel. And while there, the captain told tales of ancient Hawaii and the race of giants (anthropologists had found bones of men 8 feet tall) and a line of kings, and whispered how the ancient ones walked at night in the still, looming forests.
I’ve been searching on google for information about facts and the myths of Na Pali and am mostly finding advertisements for excursions, condos, and helicopter rides. It feels like the information is just beyond my finger tips and I keep searching my memory for the captain’s words. What I remember most is his first mate—a tiny young woman of about twenty who wearing a skimpy yellow bikini, was so exotically beautiful and perfect, that I was almost blistered by her presence. At the time I was in my mid-thirties and worried about my looks. Now looking at those vacation photos, I see that I looked just fine—fit and thin and tan. But her beauty shook me and somehow frightened me, so it is the whispers of place and her appearance that I remember most about that day. But mostly I learned how a single experience can forever change a person.
Last weekend I taught a workshop and one of my students was a research librarian. I’m realizing that I need another means into the information on the Net and if I cannot find the portal, I’ll ask her. What I’m looking for are a few facts so that I can blend the myths and reality of a magical place with my own sense of transformation. Something happened to me that day in the Pacific. It’s was transcendent, spiritual awakening, the kind of life-altering event that is so difficult to describe. But I know that by the time I watched dolphin’s playing and the sun winking off the waters and soaked in the sight of misty mountains and waterfalls and caves and mysterious, deep, deep forests, that I was not the same. My bitterness and fear began to melt. My belief in things magical and eternal and benevolent, which had long been hibernating, reawakened. I’ve never returned to that bitter self. I’ve found the bigger and the ancient and generous side of life.
And in it all, I want to write.
I was vacationing with a friend and first we stayed in Maui and then moved on to Kauai, a place of astonishing beauty. We went on a catamaran trip out into the turquoise waters of the Pacific, to see the Na Pali coastline (a wilderness not accessible by car) from afar and snorkel. And while there, the captain told tales of ancient Hawaii and the race of giants (anthropologists had found bones of men 8 feet tall) and a line of kings, and whispered how the ancient ones walked at night in the still, looming forests.
I’ve been searching on google for information about facts and the myths of Na Pali and am mostly finding advertisements for excursions, condos, and helicopter rides. It feels like the information is just beyond my finger tips and I keep searching my memory for the captain’s words. What I remember most is his first mate—a tiny young woman of about twenty who wearing a skimpy yellow bikini, was so exotically beautiful and perfect, that I was almost blistered by her presence. At the time I was in my mid-thirties and worried about my looks. Now looking at those vacation photos, I see that I looked just fine—fit and thin and tan. But her beauty shook me and somehow frightened me, so it is the whispers of place and her appearance that I remember most about that day. But mostly I learned how a single experience can forever change a person.
Last weekend I taught a workshop and one of my students was a research librarian. I’m realizing that I need another means into the information on the Net and if I cannot find the portal, I’ll ask her. What I’m looking for are a few facts so that I can blend the myths and reality of a magical place with my own sense of transformation. Something happened to me that day in the Pacific. It’s was transcendent, spiritual awakening, the kind of life-altering event that is so difficult to describe. But I know that by the time I watched dolphin’s playing and the sun winking off the waters and soaked in the sight of misty mountains and waterfalls and caves and mysterious, deep, deep forests, that I was not the same. My bitterness and fear began to melt. My belief in things magical and eternal and benevolent, which had long been hibernating, reawakened. I’ve never returned to that bitter self. I’ve found the bigger and the ancient and generous side of life.
And in it all, I want to write.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
I know that Daylight Savings Time is unnatural, but sometimes the longer evenings seem like a gift from the gods. Yesterday afternoon I turned in my final draft to Sisters Of The Road and then went to Powells and sold a bunch of books, then bought more. This selling and buying of books seems as natural a cycle as the flow of the tides. Since I’m planning to write several more books on writing, I’m always researching, examining how writers plot and develop characters. After Powells I went out for dinner then returned home restless and too moody to sit at my computer. I could either walk off my mood or garden. I chose gardening since I had fuchsias, geraniums, and other tiny plants that needed to get into pots or in the ground.
And I had forgotten how expansive dusk can be in spring after the clock has been turned forward. The sky seemed enormous and the clouds, still instead of scuttling through as they often so this time of year, sat motionless overhead like whales on a coffee break. They were suffused with changing light and turned pearly, then pink, then purple, then gray. The changing sky as soothing as a Valium. By the time I yanked out dead plants and replaced them with tender new ones, I was feeling calmed and purposeful again.
I’ve been on a reading marathon lately—the aftermath of writing three books—and read in the past week: Eating Heaven, Jennie Shortridge’s second book, a psychological thriller Lost by Michael Robotham and The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank who also wrote The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing.
I know that Jennie had moved to Portland from Denver when she wrote Eating Heaven and she set the story in Portland and managed to capture the weather here with a newcomer’s eye, describing the endless spring rains and magical sun breaks. I love how she slipped weather and lighting into every scene and how the story felt intimate and true. I also love any story that has food featured prominently and how she comments on how women use food for comfort and to express love.
Lost is quite a different type of story—taut and layered in riddles and filled with twists and an array of antagonists. Robotham is a former journalist and his training shows because there are no wasted words, yet the story comes to life brilliantly. It begins on a cold London night with a detective pulled from the Thames with a gunshot wound. He has no memory of how he got in the river, what he was doing there or who shot him. However, in his pocket is the photo of young girl—a case he had worked on three years previously. At this hand, the girl’s murderer is in prison. Great hook, isn’t it? Then Bank’s Wonder Spot created a whole new world of an East coast Jewish family coming of age in the 80s. I became quite enamored with Sophie, the protagonist and found myself reading when I should not have been because I was wondering and worrying about her.
All three authors succeeded in writing their novels and I was puzzling out the common link. In James Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Novel he talks about using sympathetic details so that readers can then empathize with the protagonist and take on his or her goals. However, it seems to me, that in some way, all main characters and often secondary ones too, must be vulnerable. If they are invulnerable we don’t care. And the two best ways to make characters vulnerable is by revealing their back story and then placing antagonists in the story to torment them. One or two areas of vulnerability are not enough, you want to create many chinks in your character’s armor. Or perhaps no armor at all. In real life there are usually only a handful of people who we feel safe enough to expose our vulnerabilities to. In reading fiction we’re allowed this privileged relationship and the results are delicious.
And I had forgotten how expansive dusk can be in spring after the clock has been turned forward. The sky seemed enormous and the clouds, still instead of scuttling through as they often so this time of year, sat motionless overhead like whales on a coffee break. They were suffused with changing light and turned pearly, then pink, then purple, then gray. The changing sky as soothing as a Valium. By the time I yanked out dead plants and replaced them with tender new ones, I was feeling calmed and purposeful again.
I’ve been on a reading marathon lately—the aftermath of writing three books—and read in the past week: Eating Heaven, Jennie Shortridge’s second book, a psychological thriller Lost by Michael Robotham and The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank who also wrote The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing.
I know that Jennie had moved to Portland from Denver when she wrote Eating Heaven and she set the story in Portland and managed to capture the weather here with a newcomer’s eye, describing the endless spring rains and magical sun breaks. I love how she slipped weather and lighting into every scene and how the story felt intimate and true. I also love any story that has food featured prominently and how she comments on how women use food for comfort and to express love.
Lost is quite a different type of story—taut and layered in riddles and filled with twists and an array of antagonists. Robotham is a former journalist and his training shows because there are no wasted words, yet the story comes to life brilliantly. It begins on a cold London night with a detective pulled from the Thames with a gunshot wound. He has no memory of how he got in the river, what he was doing there or who shot him. However, in his pocket is the photo of young girl—a case he had worked on three years previously. At this hand, the girl’s murderer is in prison. Great hook, isn’t it? Then Bank’s Wonder Spot created a whole new world of an East coast Jewish family coming of age in the 80s. I became quite enamored with Sophie, the protagonist and found myself reading when I should not have been because I was wondering and worrying about her.
All three authors succeeded in writing their novels and I was puzzling out the common link. In James Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Novel he talks about using sympathetic details so that readers can then empathize with the protagonist and take on his or her goals. However, it seems to me, that in some way, all main characters and often secondary ones too, must be vulnerable. If they are invulnerable we don’t care. And the two best ways to make characters vulnerable is by revealing their back story and then placing antagonists in the story to torment them. One or two areas of vulnerability are not enough, you want to create many chinks in your character’s armor. Or perhaps no armor at all. In real life there are usually only a handful of people who we feel safe enough to expose our vulnerabilities to. In reading fiction we’re allowed this privileged relationship and the results are delicious.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Once a writer is born into a family, that family is doomed. Czselaw Milosz
When I’ve fallen behind with a friendship we get together for dinner or go for a walk to catch up on each other’s lives. It seems to me that if people don’t eat meals together we’ll never know enough about each other’s struggles and triumphs. Last Friday my friend S and I went to a downtown Thai restaurant for dinner and since the service was horrendous, there was plenty of time to talk. In fact, we were seated so near the kitchen that the fumes from roasting hot peppers were making us cough and the scents that drifted out to our table were tantalizing. But our waiter, who when we arrived was jogging and dashing through the place trying to keep up with his tables, disappeared after he took our order. After awhile it became funny to watch dish after dish leave the steamy kitchen destined for other tables as we speculated on our order. S who hadn’t eaten a solid meal all day, kept gulping her tea while I polished off a glass of wine. We were both practically gnawing our knuckles when the waiter finally reappeared, shocked that our appetizer salad rolls hadn’t arrived.
After we finally ate, the conversation settled into the sort of speculation and planning and confidences that women are prone to. We had driven to the restaurant in S’s red Mercedes that warms the seats for you, (the butt warmer really is a lovely invention) so that when we emerged from the car into the rainy night with our backsides warmed, the downpour wasn’t daunting. S is a real estate agent and spends a lot of time driving around Portland scoping out properties, sometimes with her perspective clients, sometimes on a scouting mission. She described what it was like to drive people around who are house hunting. That week she was working with a lesbian couple looking for a house when the conversation erupted into a fierce argument that really had nothing to do with the enclosed porch on the house they just looked at and everything about their differences. Apparently such arguments about house features—the powder room, the deck, the extra room that one person visualizes as a home office and the other as a nursery---are common. S concentrates fiercely on driving until the eruption fades.
“Ah, that’s subtext, “I explained. “It’s the river of true emotions that runs beneath the words that are being spoken.” I went on to describe how arguments are often not about the topic at hand but deeper issues in the relationship. Subtext is exploited by fiction and screenwriters to enhance tension.
On Saturday night I drove to meet a friend for dinner the sky striated with lavenders and pinks as a storm ended and clouds scuttling east. My friend E who works as a private investigator and had recently visited two Caribbean islands looking for documents and evidence for a federal case she’s working on. Along the way she and the retired cop she was partnered with stirred up a hornet’s nest and the body guard to the prime minister (recently indicted on murder charges) was trying to stop them. By the time they discovered they were in trouble it was Friday night and the only way off the island was a fishing boat. So they stayed and enlisted a local for help and eventually all was well, but I cannot mention the islands or the case she’s working on except to say that it’s generated a million pages of pre-trial discovery.
Since I’m never privy to the sort of scenes and people E has access to—death row inmates, houses filled with meth addicts, and farm homes in Mexico—our conversations are generally fascinating and her adventures exotic. About twenty years ago I was hiking around a nature preserve in northern Wisconsin. It had been formerly owned by the Sears Roebuck family, but the estate with its outbuildings and stables had been torn down and the land was a wide, wide swath of whispering forest. As we walked along we found a single wild orchid. It was a soft orange and its discovery, so far north. etched a memory that has lasted all these years. Sometimes when I talk with E it seems like she is collecting a lifetime of rare orchids.
She described government officials so inept, lazy and uncaring that they made the Bush administration look like a bunch of Eagle Scouts. Of walking into a government office where everyone was playing video games and had crowds of people standing around them offering suggestions for their next move. Of unairconditioned basement offices in the tropical heat so miserably hot that her glasses steamed up.
And then I was driving home on Saturday night after dinner, listening to the car radio. All day there had been updates about the death of Buck Owens, describing him as the creator of the Bakersfield sound because he lived there and drew inspiration from his surroundings. Bakersfield, California is a place where many Dust Bowl refugees arrived searching for fertile farm lands in the 1930s. Buck was born in Texas and grew up in Arizona, but he and his wife moved there after he traveled through the region during a truck-driving stint. When Owens began recording his string of hits he went against the pop-influeced trend of the time and recorded songs that had a rawer, honky-tonk approach, influenced by the Mexican polkas he had heard on border radio stations while growing up.
When I was a kid and my parents played Buck and his Buckeroos, I’d howl in protest. Now that I’m older, I think Buck really knew how to swing and his sound was clean and crisp and true. His rendition of Act Naturally and Santa Looked lot Like Daddy are just plain fun. Every time another icon from my childhood or teen years leaves the planet, I see the shape of the world I once knew growing smaller and less authentic. I see less real genius around me. Or am I only missing it so busy at my computer with Air America strumming political talk in the background all day? The music scene is now populated by Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Tim McGraw and Jay-Lo and these new celebrities just cannot fill the shoes of the bigger-than-life music idols who have gone: Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Marvin Gaye, John Lennon, George Harrison, Jimmy Hendricks, Jim Morrison. I want them back so I can sit in the audience one more time and hear the gravel and heat and knowing in their words. Watch them hunched over a guitar or piano. Feel the music enter and my veins and lift me up. Hear their lifetime stories in every note.
When I’ve fallen behind with a friendship we get together for dinner or go for a walk to catch up on each other’s lives. It seems to me that if people don’t eat meals together we’ll never know enough about each other’s struggles and triumphs. Last Friday my friend S and I went to a downtown Thai restaurant for dinner and since the service was horrendous, there was plenty of time to talk. In fact, we were seated so near the kitchen that the fumes from roasting hot peppers were making us cough and the scents that drifted out to our table were tantalizing. But our waiter, who when we arrived was jogging and dashing through the place trying to keep up with his tables, disappeared after he took our order. After awhile it became funny to watch dish after dish leave the steamy kitchen destined for other tables as we speculated on our order. S who hadn’t eaten a solid meal all day, kept gulping her tea while I polished off a glass of wine. We were both practically gnawing our knuckles when the waiter finally reappeared, shocked that our appetizer salad rolls hadn’t arrived.
After we finally ate, the conversation settled into the sort of speculation and planning and confidences that women are prone to. We had driven to the restaurant in S’s red Mercedes that warms the seats for you, (the butt warmer really is a lovely invention) so that when we emerged from the car into the rainy night with our backsides warmed, the downpour wasn’t daunting. S is a real estate agent and spends a lot of time driving around Portland scoping out properties, sometimes with her perspective clients, sometimes on a scouting mission. She described what it was like to drive people around who are house hunting. That week she was working with a lesbian couple looking for a house when the conversation erupted into a fierce argument that really had nothing to do with the enclosed porch on the house they just looked at and everything about their differences. Apparently such arguments about house features—the powder room, the deck, the extra room that one person visualizes as a home office and the other as a nursery---are common. S concentrates fiercely on driving until the eruption fades.
“Ah, that’s subtext, “I explained. “It’s the river of true emotions that runs beneath the words that are being spoken.” I went on to describe how arguments are often not about the topic at hand but deeper issues in the relationship. Subtext is exploited by fiction and screenwriters to enhance tension.
On Saturday night I drove to meet a friend for dinner the sky striated with lavenders and pinks as a storm ended and clouds scuttling east. My friend E who works as a private investigator and had recently visited two Caribbean islands looking for documents and evidence for a federal case she’s working on. Along the way she and the retired cop she was partnered with stirred up a hornet’s nest and the body guard to the prime minister (recently indicted on murder charges) was trying to stop them. By the time they discovered they were in trouble it was Friday night and the only way off the island was a fishing boat. So they stayed and enlisted a local for help and eventually all was well, but I cannot mention the islands or the case she’s working on except to say that it’s generated a million pages of pre-trial discovery.
Since I’m never privy to the sort of scenes and people E has access to—death row inmates, houses filled with meth addicts, and farm homes in Mexico—our conversations are generally fascinating and her adventures exotic. About twenty years ago I was hiking around a nature preserve in northern Wisconsin. It had been formerly owned by the Sears Roebuck family, but the estate with its outbuildings and stables had been torn down and the land was a wide, wide swath of whispering forest. As we walked along we found a single wild orchid. It was a soft orange and its discovery, so far north. etched a memory that has lasted all these years. Sometimes when I talk with E it seems like she is collecting a lifetime of rare orchids.
She described government officials so inept, lazy and uncaring that they made the Bush administration look like a bunch of Eagle Scouts. Of walking into a government office where everyone was playing video games and had crowds of people standing around them offering suggestions for their next move. Of unairconditioned basement offices in the tropical heat so miserably hot that her glasses steamed up.
And then I was driving home on Saturday night after dinner, listening to the car radio. All day there had been updates about the death of Buck Owens, describing him as the creator of the Bakersfield sound because he lived there and drew inspiration from his surroundings. Bakersfield, California is a place where many Dust Bowl refugees arrived searching for fertile farm lands in the 1930s. Buck was born in Texas and grew up in Arizona, but he and his wife moved there after he traveled through the region during a truck-driving stint. When Owens began recording his string of hits he went against the pop-influeced trend of the time and recorded songs that had a rawer, honky-tonk approach, influenced by the Mexican polkas he had heard on border radio stations while growing up.
When I was a kid and my parents played Buck and his Buckeroos, I’d howl in protest. Now that I’m older, I think Buck really knew how to swing and his sound was clean and crisp and true. His rendition of Act Naturally and Santa Looked lot Like Daddy are just plain fun. Every time another icon from my childhood or teen years leaves the planet, I see the shape of the world I once knew growing smaller and less authentic. I see less real genius around me. Or am I only missing it so busy at my computer with Air America strumming political talk in the background all day? The music scene is now populated by Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Tim McGraw and Jay-Lo and these new celebrities just cannot fill the shoes of the bigger-than-life music idols who have gone: Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Marvin Gaye, John Lennon, George Harrison, Jimmy Hendricks, Jim Morrison. I want them back so I can sit in the audience one more time and hear the gravel and heat and knowing in their words. Watch them hunched over a guitar or piano. Feel the music enter and my veins and lift me up. Hear their lifetime stories in every note.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
If myths were bound by time and place, then they would not be myths. Negel Spivey
More rain and blooms and the sky has dawned with pale blue lacing through the clouds. Just before waking, I was dreaming about my new book. It was one of those dreams that meld from a mini-horror story then on to dabs of normalcy to then segue into a preposterous scenario. In one segment I’m throwing a party for my upcoming book and I see the book for the first time. It’s a gaudy horror of childhood and retouched photos of people I mentioned in the preface (in real life I didn’t mention anyone), lots of movie stills from a Disney movie (perhaps Mary Poppins) about half a dozen pages of the stills and the colors mostly in turquoise. The book is, in a nutshell, tacky and strange and the art direction has overshadowed the content. Shaky from this discovery, I frantically start trying to play hostess to the crowd, popping open some champagne which has not been chilled enough and assembling plastic champagne flutes that leak.
Back to real life where yesterday I submitted a proposal for an upcoming book about writing fiction. I’m fairly sure the proposal will be accepted because the editor is already interested and I’ll be working on the book in May or June. I’m planning on spending about a week outlining and preplanning before I start writing—perhaps go to the coast with a pile of notes to mull things over before I plunge in….When writing Between the Lines I realized I had bit off too much and was forced to submit an abbreviated table of contents. With this book—I want a roadmap laid out before I begin.
Saturday afternoon I spent some time reading Nigel Spivey’s Songs on Bronze, The Greek Myths Made Real and A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong. Armstrong’s book begins by stating that humans have always been mythmakers then traces the evolution of myths from the Paleolithic period until now, when mythmaking has declined. I’ve been mulling over her conclusion ever since.
She writes: “We may be sophisticated in material ways, but we have not advanced spiritually beyond the Axial Age: because of our suppression of mythos we may even have regressed. We still long to ‘get beyond’ our immediate circumstances, and to enter a ‘full time’, a more intense, fulfilling existence. We try to enter this dimension by means or art, rock music, drugs or by entering the larger-than-life perspective of film. We still seek heroes. Elvis Presley and Princess Diana were both made into instant mythical beings, even objects of religious cults. But here is something unbalanced about this adulation. The myth of the hero was not intended to provide us with icons to admire, but was designed to tap into the vein of heroism within ourselves. Myth must lead to imitation or participation, not passive contemplation. We no longer know how to manage our mythical lives in a way that is spiritually challenging and informative.”
Armstrong goes on to recommend that we go beyond nineteenth century thought that myth is false or represents inferior thinking. In other words, we need myths to fully experience our humanity.
Although Armstrong decries storytelling as inferior to mythmaking, I believe we can write about people with heroic qualities we want to emulate, burdens we can imagine carrying, and dilemmas we can solve. Sure sometimes we can write stories that are are a vicarious thrill ride or frothy as cotton candy on a sticky July afternoon, but we can also touch the deep heart of knowing that lies in all of us. We can write to understand birth and death and pain and love. We can write to untangle all the knots of human emotions, to lend hope, and expose troublemakers and monsters in human clothes for what they are. When stories are contrived with artistry, empathy, and intricacy, reading or watching them is not a passive experience, but a deep experience of shared humanity.
More rain and blooms and the sky has dawned with pale blue lacing through the clouds. Just before waking, I was dreaming about my new book. It was one of those dreams that meld from a mini-horror story then on to dabs of normalcy to then segue into a preposterous scenario. In one segment I’m throwing a party for my upcoming book and I see the book for the first time. It’s a gaudy horror of childhood and retouched photos of people I mentioned in the preface (in real life I didn’t mention anyone), lots of movie stills from a Disney movie (perhaps Mary Poppins) about half a dozen pages of the stills and the colors mostly in turquoise. The book is, in a nutshell, tacky and strange and the art direction has overshadowed the content. Shaky from this discovery, I frantically start trying to play hostess to the crowd, popping open some champagne which has not been chilled enough and assembling plastic champagne flutes that leak.
Back to real life where yesterday I submitted a proposal for an upcoming book about writing fiction. I’m fairly sure the proposal will be accepted because the editor is already interested and I’ll be working on the book in May or June. I’m planning on spending about a week outlining and preplanning before I start writing—perhaps go to the coast with a pile of notes to mull things over before I plunge in….When writing Between the Lines I realized I had bit off too much and was forced to submit an abbreviated table of contents. With this book—I want a roadmap laid out before I begin.
Saturday afternoon I spent some time reading Nigel Spivey’s Songs on Bronze, The Greek Myths Made Real and A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong. Armstrong’s book begins by stating that humans have always been mythmakers then traces the evolution of myths from the Paleolithic period until now, when mythmaking has declined. I’ve been mulling over her conclusion ever since.
She writes: “We may be sophisticated in material ways, but we have not advanced spiritually beyond the Axial Age: because of our suppression of mythos we may even have regressed. We still long to ‘get beyond’ our immediate circumstances, and to enter a ‘full time’, a more intense, fulfilling existence. We try to enter this dimension by means or art, rock music, drugs or by entering the larger-than-life perspective of film. We still seek heroes. Elvis Presley and Princess Diana were both made into instant mythical beings, even objects of religious cults. But here is something unbalanced about this adulation. The myth of the hero was not intended to provide us with icons to admire, but was designed to tap into the vein of heroism within ourselves. Myth must lead to imitation or participation, not passive contemplation. We no longer know how to manage our mythical lives in a way that is spiritually challenging and informative.”
Armstrong goes on to recommend that we go beyond nineteenth century thought that myth is false or represents inferior thinking. In other words, we need myths to fully experience our humanity.
Although Armstrong decries storytelling as inferior to mythmaking, I believe we can write about people with heroic qualities we want to emulate, burdens we can imagine carrying, and dilemmas we can solve. Sure sometimes we can write stories that are are a vicarious thrill ride or frothy as cotton candy on a sticky July afternoon, but we can also touch the deep heart of knowing that lies in all of us. We can write to understand birth and death and pain and love. We can write to untangle all the knots of human emotions, to lend hope, and expose troublemakers and monsters in human clothes for what they are. When stories are contrived with artistry, empathy, and intricacy, reading or watching them is not a passive experience, but a deep experience of shared humanity.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
“I find stories everywhere,” she told me, her voice coming over the telephone line. I jotted down her words immediately on the back of an old envelope and we went on to talk about this phenomena –stories everywhere. Everyone a story. The story collector’s name is Kathleen and she had called to enroll in a writing workshop I’m teaching in April. As we talked, I looked out my living room window to the cherry trees blooming pink in the neighbors’ yard, the sky smudged with gray, the vibrant greens everywhere. The world offering up its own story.
And I’m still thinking about this and how I walk for exercise, but also to collect stories. About a month ago I was walking on a March afternoon when the sun was blazing but the temperature was still in the 40s. I came across two boys, about nine years old, lying shirtless across the sidewalk as if to sunbathe. I asked them if they were cold and they assured me solemnly that they were not. As I walked along I could almost feel the bite of the cold sidewalk against my back and thought about the pranks and derring-do of childhood. Thinking back to myself at their age—a girl with a thick ponytail and freckles, on my red Schwinn racing down the hill on Matthews street to freedom, my grandmother’s house, or the Wisconsin River. In the March of my childhood, there would still would be snow piled in vast drifts, but a spring thaw usually came in March and the gutters would run wild with melting snow and a patch of sidewalk would be commandeered for hopscotch or jumprope.
Nowadays I like to walk at dusk when people are flicking on their kitchen lights and pulling out pots and pans they’ll need to cook dinner. Sometimes the smells of chicken roasting or a backyard barbecue perfume the air and I can imagine their meal, the murmurs at the table as they bite into a chicken leg or spoon potato salad onto a plate. Sometimes the flickering screen of the television is glowing in the dusk. Sometimes kids are hunched at the kitchen table doing their homework. Sometimes a screen door slams. Once I walked past an old house and the garage door yawned open and inside the darkened garage it was festooned with tiny Christmas lights in every color, glimmering. And it was as if I’d stumbled on a child’s treasure box.
Kathleen is right about stories simmering everywhere for a writer to scoop up and elaborate on, but it requires that your mind quiet down so that the stories can slip in. It requires wonder. It requires asking the next question—what if, why, how does it work? Who is the person who strung the lights?
And I’m still thinking about this and how I walk for exercise, but also to collect stories. About a month ago I was walking on a March afternoon when the sun was blazing but the temperature was still in the 40s. I came across two boys, about nine years old, lying shirtless across the sidewalk as if to sunbathe. I asked them if they were cold and they assured me solemnly that they were not. As I walked along I could almost feel the bite of the cold sidewalk against my back and thought about the pranks and derring-do of childhood. Thinking back to myself at their age—a girl with a thick ponytail and freckles, on my red Schwinn racing down the hill on Matthews street to freedom, my grandmother’s house, or the Wisconsin River. In the March of my childhood, there would still would be snow piled in vast drifts, but a spring thaw usually came in March and the gutters would run wild with melting snow and a patch of sidewalk would be commandeered for hopscotch or jumprope.
Nowadays I like to walk at dusk when people are flicking on their kitchen lights and pulling out pots and pans they’ll need to cook dinner. Sometimes the smells of chicken roasting or a backyard barbecue perfume the air and I can imagine their meal, the murmurs at the table as they bite into a chicken leg or spoon potato salad onto a plate. Sometimes the flickering screen of the television is glowing in the dusk. Sometimes kids are hunched at the kitchen table doing their homework. Sometimes a screen door slams. Once I walked past an old house and the garage door yawned open and inside the darkened garage it was festooned with tiny Christmas lights in every color, glimmering. And it was as if I’d stumbled on a child’s treasure box.
Kathleen is right about stories simmering everywhere for a writer to scoop up and elaborate on, but it requires that your mind quiet down so that the stories can slip in. It requires wonder. It requires asking the next question—what if, why, how does it work? Who is the person who strung the lights?
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
(written March 9)
It’s snowing in Portland this morning. Snow is always a rare event here but especially so in March when the forsythia, cherry trees and daffodils are blooming and turning the landscape soft with lavenders, pinks and yellows.
I am traveling to Vancouver later this afternoon to teach two fiction workshops. Canada beckons as a haven of sanity in these times as the morning news reports that there were “irregularities” with Florida voting machines in yesterday’s primary. Funny word irregularity. Used to describe everything from constipation to criminal tampering with voting machines.
But on to writing. I am in the final laps of writing three books in about an 18-month period. Yesterday a meeting with Sisters Of The Road, the nonprofit organization I’m working with, writing a book based on 625 interviews with homeless people in Portland. The book will be finished by the end of March and I’ll miss my friends at Sisters. I am also waiting for my editor at Running Press to send the draft of the I Ching book for my final edits and Between the Lines, master the subtle aspects of fiction writing is going to be in stores in April. So the marathon writeathon has been worth it, but when I look back at the past year, it’s a blur of eyestrain, back pain, and brain overload. So this is the wrap-up phase and I’ll be soon into the next phase of submitting new proposals and starting new books.
But there’s something about endings, isn’t there? I joke with my students that finishing a book is like giving birth to an ugly baby. Toward the wearying end you just want the little beast out of you, will pay a king’s ransom to be rid of it. And then when it’s arrived in the world, you’re sure it’s so hideous it will spend its life locked away from the world’s harsh view. All your doubts about your skill level start blooming, after all, who are you to write a book? But then one day, when you’re not quite so exhausted, the baby grins a crooked smile at you, and you start to think maybe this kid isn’t so ugly after all.
Maybe I can write after all.
Whoever said that mothers forget the pain of birth is lying. Birth pain lives in your cellular memory always and lingers there on your child’s thirtieth birthday or whenever you recall the hours of delivery. There is nothing quite like it—so searing and seemingly unsurviveable.
And so there are times when slogging through a manuscript that you don’t think you’ll survive the struggle, the pain, the doubt. But like birth, somehow you do. I am not one of those writing teachers that preaches the airy-fairy bliss of writing. Yes, it brings joy and meaning and depth to my life. I love writing, but I know it’s mostly hard work and endless decisions and analysis. And I’m thrilled with sending my new children out into the world of readers and kindred spirits. But there is a price to be paid. I pay it gladly, but I’m always aware of the cost.
It’s snowing in Portland this morning. Snow is always a rare event here but especially so in March when the forsythia, cherry trees and daffodils are blooming and turning the landscape soft with lavenders, pinks and yellows.
I am traveling to Vancouver later this afternoon to teach two fiction workshops. Canada beckons as a haven of sanity in these times as the morning news reports that there were “irregularities” with Florida voting machines in yesterday’s primary. Funny word irregularity. Used to describe everything from constipation to criminal tampering with voting machines.
But on to writing. I am in the final laps of writing three books in about an 18-month period. Yesterday a meeting with Sisters Of The Road, the nonprofit organization I’m working with, writing a book based on 625 interviews with homeless people in Portland. The book will be finished by the end of March and I’ll miss my friends at Sisters. I am also waiting for my editor at Running Press to send the draft of the I Ching book for my final edits and Between the Lines, master the subtle aspects of fiction writing is going to be in stores in April. So the marathon writeathon has been worth it, but when I look back at the past year, it’s a blur of eyestrain, back pain, and brain overload. So this is the wrap-up phase and I’ll be soon into the next phase of submitting new proposals and starting new books.
But there’s something about endings, isn’t there? I joke with my students that finishing a book is like giving birth to an ugly baby. Toward the wearying end you just want the little beast out of you, will pay a king’s ransom to be rid of it. And then when it’s arrived in the world, you’re sure it’s so hideous it will spend its life locked away from the world’s harsh view. All your doubts about your skill level start blooming, after all, who are you to write a book? But then one day, when you’re not quite so exhausted, the baby grins a crooked smile at you, and you start to think maybe this kid isn’t so ugly after all.
Maybe I can write after all.
Whoever said that mothers forget the pain of birth is lying. Birth pain lives in your cellular memory always and lingers there on your child’s thirtieth birthday or whenever you recall the hours of delivery. There is nothing quite like it—so searing and seemingly unsurviveable.
And so there are times when slogging through a manuscript that you don’t think you’ll survive the struggle, the pain, the doubt. But like birth, somehow you do. I am not one of those writing teachers that preaches the airy-fairy bliss of writing. Yes, it brings joy and meaning and depth to my life. I love writing, but I know it’s mostly hard work and endless decisions and analysis. And I’m thrilled with sending my new children out into the world of readers and kindred spirits. But there is a price to be paid. I pay it gladly, but I’m always aware of the cost.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
The Writing Life Too
“Here’s the secret to the universe: Everything has structure. From snow flakes to fire, everything has form and function. And this applies to the craft of writing." Jay Bonansinga
The clouds are back in Portland after days, weeks of sun and impossibly lovely weather. I’ll confess to needing a respite from the sun which winks of distraction, beckons me outdoors when I need to be writing, slants down through the skylight above my desk onto my computer screen. My agent has given me guidelines for a rewrite, so distractions are not welcome, because, frankly, I can easily manufacture plenty on my own. Besides, I’m moving in a few weeks and everywhere I look, I see things that need to be packed.
Warning: a small politcal rant follows--
Today there are more hearings about the prison tortures in Iraq. Last week I tried watching Rumsfeld on CNN but his lies, dissembling, misdirection, avoidance and convoluted rhetoric pissed me off so much I had to switch to Air America, the liberal talk radio (hallelujah!)for those who don’t listen to it, to calm my nerves. Actually, that's a lie because the talk show hosts on AA are far from calming, but at least it's nice to hear people who I agree with about this political mess we're in. So I’ve become hooked because much as I love NPR, I need to bail out from time to time and CNN is distracting too especially when the ever-smirking Rumsfd--may he rot in hell--and certain Republican senators are on the screen. I wish I was one of those quiet, contemplative types, but I spend a lot of time alone in my office and I need noise to work by.And then when my brain is too stuffed, I head into the outdoors to sort my ideas.
This morning I had a long, complicated dream about an Indian reservation and rose to write about it, but then my morning poem became an agony about the prisoners tortured in Iraq. Since when is our military run by Hannibal Lector? We’re piling up deficits by the billions for future generations to pay off because we're paying a bunch of mercenaries to do our dirty work. And let's not talk about the obvious sick thrills that a bunch of out of control psychopaths or sociopaths were having far from home. But photos don't lie. And government "contractors" (alias mercenaries) are doing what, where? Since we’re a society that no longer questions our government’s crimes, my poems do.
End of rant.
But for those of you who aren’t interested in politics, I want you to know that when I’m not writing about my rage at government I’m riffing on the sweet parts of life. A few days ago I wrote a poem based on the memory of the first of May when I was a girl and we delivered May baskets in the neighborhood. This week Portland is full of roses fresh and dewy in new bloom. Like spring, the roses bursting into May is a yearly surprise. Portland is called the city of roses and aptly named. The climb telephone poles and spill out of gardens and onto sidewalks. Roses are everywhere in every velvet hue and size and their perfume follows me when I walk past.
I’ve been teaching and editing a lot lately. Last weekend a workshop on fiction middles in Eugene. When I teach fiction workshops I talk about the underpinnings and structure of fiction. In screenplays, the structure is a given, the format a guideline. In fiction it’s the foundation that beginning writers need to learn. All writing requires scaffolding. Now buidling scaffolding isn’t glamorous or easy, but it keeps a rickety story upright. Imagine music or other arts without scaffolding. Imagine Brahms without chords. No chords means no music.
If you don’t understand how fiction works, you’re likely going to suffer when you try to create it. Without some knowledge of the when and how things work in fiction your story will likely fall apart. To write something as complicated as a novel without a plan is like building a house without a diagram. Okay, I think I’ve thrown in enough similes and metaphors here.
So here’s the story on story: fiction is a record of changes that are inflicted on characters. Theses changes, are actually a series of crisis that create a world of hurt for your characters. Each crisis becomes progressively worse as the story goes along and sends your character into a tailspin and forces him or her to take action and select goals. Fiction requires that you constantly implant surprises that rev up the story and keep the reader engaged.
Scaffolding, structure—it holds up the world and your story world too.
“Here’s the secret to the universe: Everything has structure. From snow flakes to fire, everything has form and function. And this applies to the craft of writing." Jay Bonansinga
The clouds are back in Portland after days, weeks of sun and impossibly lovely weather. I’ll confess to needing a respite from the sun which winks of distraction, beckons me outdoors when I need to be writing, slants down through the skylight above my desk onto my computer screen. My agent has given me guidelines for a rewrite, so distractions are not welcome, because, frankly, I can easily manufacture plenty on my own. Besides, I’m moving in a few weeks and everywhere I look, I see things that need to be packed.
Warning: a small politcal rant follows--
Today there are more hearings about the prison tortures in Iraq. Last week I tried watching Rumsfeld on CNN but his lies, dissembling, misdirection, avoidance and convoluted rhetoric pissed me off so much I had to switch to Air America, the liberal talk radio (hallelujah!)for those who don’t listen to it, to calm my nerves. Actually, that's a lie because the talk show hosts on AA are far from calming, but at least it's nice to hear people who I agree with about this political mess we're in. So I’ve become hooked because much as I love NPR, I need to bail out from time to time and CNN is distracting too especially when the ever-smirking Rumsfd--may he rot in hell--and certain Republican senators are on the screen. I wish I was one of those quiet, contemplative types, but I spend a lot of time alone in my office and I need noise to work by.And then when my brain is too stuffed, I head into the outdoors to sort my ideas.
This morning I had a long, complicated dream about an Indian reservation and rose to write about it, but then my morning poem became an agony about the prisoners tortured in Iraq. Since when is our military run by Hannibal Lector? We’re piling up deficits by the billions for future generations to pay off because we're paying a bunch of mercenaries to do our dirty work. And let's not talk about the obvious sick thrills that a bunch of out of control psychopaths or sociopaths were having far from home. But photos don't lie. And government "contractors" (alias mercenaries) are doing what, where? Since we’re a society that no longer questions our government’s crimes, my poems do.
End of rant.
But for those of you who aren’t interested in politics, I want you to know that when I’m not writing about my rage at government I’m riffing on the sweet parts of life. A few days ago I wrote a poem based on the memory of the first of May when I was a girl and we delivered May baskets in the neighborhood. This week Portland is full of roses fresh and dewy in new bloom. Like spring, the roses bursting into May is a yearly surprise. Portland is called the city of roses and aptly named. The climb telephone poles and spill out of gardens and onto sidewalks. Roses are everywhere in every velvet hue and size and their perfume follows me when I walk past.
I’ve been teaching and editing a lot lately. Last weekend a workshop on fiction middles in Eugene. When I teach fiction workshops I talk about the underpinnings and structure of fiction. In screenplays, the structure is a given, the format a guideline. In fiction it’s the foundation that beginning writers need to learn. All writing requires scaffolding. Now buidling scaffolding isn’t glamorous or easy, but it keeps a rickety story upright. Imagine music or other arts without scaffolding. Imagine Brahms without chords. No chords means no music.
If you don’t understand how fiction works, you’re likely going to suffer when you try to create it. Without some knowledge of the when and how things work in fiction your story will likely fall apart. To write something as complicated as a novel without a plan is like building a house without a diagram. Okay, I think I’ve thrown in enough similes and metaphors here.
So here’s the story on story: fiction is a record of changes that are inflicted on characters. Theses changes, are actually a series of crisis that create a world of hurt for your characters. Each crisis becomes progressively worse as the story goes along and sends your character into a tailspin and forces him or her to take action and select goals. Fiction requires that you constantly implant surprises that rev up the story and keep the reader engaged.
Scaffolding, structure—it holds up the world and your story world too.
Saturday, April 24, 2004
I’ve got lilacs in every room—white, pale purple, deep purple, their crazy perfume spilling into the air. I stole them from neighbors’ yards, a shameless undertaking every spring. I am stealthy, I travel with clippers since the branches are woody and I half expect an irate homeowner to dash out of his house with a “Stop! Thief!” warning. But I’m never caught and the perfumed beauties last about 3 weeks since I keep replacing faded blooms as I find more lilac bushes in my walks and travels around town.
Lilacs remind me of home where they bloomed in late May. Spring was such a big deal in northern Wisconsin—a noisy, melting snow extravaganza. The gutters alive with rushing snow melt. Spring was for hop scotch and jump rope. The sight of the bare, dry sidewalks after months of snow and ice was shocking, naked as angle worms. The old fashioned flowers of my childhood enchant me most. Yesterday at Fred Meyer’s the woman ahead of me in line had a wagon full of plants, and I envied her Bleeding Hearts. When I was a girl my Aunt Gene showed us how to disassemble them to shape them into a tiny ballerina. My mother had a flower garden and I remember the fringed heads of the Matisse blue Bachelor Buttons, a row of peony bushes favored by ants. A huge patch of Lilies of the Valley grew along one side of the house and I remember the deep green stems and their tiny white bells, and their heady, thick scent. Sometimes I wear cologne that smells like Lilies of the Valley and once I walked into a room and a man younger than me said, “You smell like my grandma!” At the time I was in my late 30’s and his comment worried me. Of course, as I age and nostalgia sometimes takes over reason, I would love to smell my grandmother, or at least her house where pies were baked and children were freer than at home.
I’ve been meeting with a lot of editing clients lately. I have a manuscript about how art influences the brain and yesterday met with a client who is writing a book about yoga and cancer. Last week a woman drove up from a small town midway in the Willamette Valley where she lives on a vineyard. I’ve been teaching creative nonfiction or narrative nonfiction for years now and always tell my students that everyone has a story to tell. But lately, my clients have extraordinary tales to spin. This woman, has a twisted story of a father, a famous sculptor who created a fabled past complete with a Nazi death camp and skiing in the 1936 Olympics. She was raped and escaped with her mother from her father’s cruelty during a perilous trip to Alaska. She became a TV evangelist and has recently raised money for her school district by creating a calendar of photos of naked farmers. She radiates contentment and energy.
Two weeks ago my client was a woman who found love in an elephant tent of a circus in Italy. And I learned that when elephants are together they sway in unison to some ancient rhythm. The previous week it was a retired businessman who also worked for the Regan administration. He believes that business people and politicians have a duty to protect the earth and although he was warned he’d be fired for his views and for closing down nuclear plants, he followed his conscience.
My Wednesday morning creative nonfiction group contains women who are mostly older than me and this semester I’m astounded by their lives. One woman, who is enlightened and good has created a community in Salem that is so generous and right-minded that if we could replicate it in every neighborhood or town, it would save the world.
I wrote in my first book that I never felt more alive and humble than when I was with a room of students who were writing and reading their stories. I’ve been ill on and off a lot these past months, not sleeping much and frustrated by that fact because it interferes with my writing and I have that drowning sense that I’m behind in all my tasks. So I’ll take new medications and make changes in my life, but I’m thinking that the thing that will bring me back to me is the stories all around me, and the power of story in us all.
I jotted in my notebook that Scott Simon on NPR talked about his newly adopted baby and how she’s is already wired into his heart and he mentions rivers and the lyrics of Moon River—there such a lot of world to see. I am off to teach again today a fiction class. Oh the stories, the stories that fill our lives and imaginations.
Lilacs remind me of home where they bloomed in late May. Spring was such a big deal in northern Wisconsin—a noisy, melting snow extravaganza. The gutters alive with rushing snow melt. Spring was for hop scotch and jump rope. The sight of the bare, dry sidewalks after months of snow and ice was shocking, naked as angle worms. The old fashioned flowers of my childhood enchant me most. Yesterday at Fred Meyer’s the woman ahead of me in line had a wagon full of plants, and I envied her Bleeding Hearts. When I was a girl my Aunt Gene showed us how to disassemble them to shape them into a tiny ballerina. My mother had a flower garden and I remember the fringed heads of the Matisse blue Bachelor Buttons, a row of peony bushes favored by ants. A huge patch of Lilies of the Valley grew along one side of the house and I remember the deep green stems and their tiny white bells, and their heady, thick scent. Sometimes I wear cologne that smells like Lilies of the Valley and once I walked into a room and a man younger than me said, “You smell like my grandma!” At the time I was in my late 30’s and his comment worried me. Of course, as I age and nostalgia sometimes takes over reason, I would love to smell my grandmother, or at least her house where pies were baked and children were freer than at home.
I’ve been meeting with a lot of editing clients lately. I have a manuscript about how art influences the brain and yesterday met with a client who is writing a book about yoga and cancer. Last week a woman drove up from a small town midway in the Willamette Valley where she lives on a vineyard. I’ve been teaching creative nonfiction or narrative nonfiction for years now and always tell my students that everyone has a story to tell. But lately, my clients have extraordinary tales to spin. This woman, has a twisted story of a father, a famous sculptor who created a fabled past complete with a Nazi death camp and skiing in the 1936 Olympics. She was raped and escaped with her mother from her father’s cruelty during a perilous trip to Alaska. She became a TV evangelist and has recently raised money for her school district by creating a calendar of photos of naked farmers. She radiates contentment and energy.
Two weeks ago my client was a woman who found love in an elephant tent of a circus in Italy. And I learned that when elephants are together they sway in unison to some ancient rhythm. The previous week it was a retired businessman who also worked for the Regan administration. He believes that business people and politicians have a duty to protect the earth and although he was warned he’d be fired for his views and for closing down nuclear plants, he followed his conscience.
My Wednesday morning creative nonfiction group contains women who are mostly older than me and this semester I’m astounded by their lives. One woman, who is enlightened and good has created a community in Salem that is so generous and right-minded that if we could replicate it in every neighborhood or town, it would save the world.
I wrote in my first book that I never felt more alive and humble than when I was with a room of students who were writing and reading their stories. I’ve been ill on and off a lot these past months, not sleeping much and frustrated by that fact because it interferes with my writing and I have that drowning sense that I’m behind in all my tasks. So I’ll take new medications and make changes in my life, but I’m thinking that the thing that will bring me back to me is the stories all around me, and the power of story in us all.
I jotted in my notebook that Scott Simon on NPR talked about his newly adopted baby and how she’s is already wired into his heart and he mentions rivers and the lyrics of Moon River—there such a lot of world to see. I am off to teach again today a fiction class. Oh the stories, the stories that fill our lives and imaginations.
Thursday, April 08, 2004
Another spring morning and the cherry blossoms above my skylight are starting to fade and are dropping onto the deck below like fat snowflakes. I’m back in Portland after four days at the Coast and the latest news trumpets death and disaster in Iraq. 280 Iraqis are dead, 40 killed while gathered for afternoon prayers in a mosque. The mosque was hit by a Hellfire missile and I try to imagine the sort of outcry and war mongering that would happen if Americans would be bombed in their churches. 400 wounded, 15 Marines dead and thousands protest on the outskirts of Fallujah. The names of the ancient cities roll off the tongue like poetry, but the whole region is wrapped in rage and sorrow. Meanwhile, Condoliza Rice is testifying before the 911 Commission. I wish there was a way to apply lie detectors to the folks in this administration, some neat proof of their monstrous lies and crimes. But enough politics.
I went to the beach alone intending to write a lot, but when I arrived discovered my laptop wasn’t working. Not sure what the problem is, but it seems like its toast. So I read a lot—what a luxury-- and wrote poetry and notes and observations to myself in my notebook. And walked and walked until my legs ached, the ocean sapphire and my memory roaming like a kite in the wind. By the time I left the waters of the Pacific behind I felt slowed down and quiet. Of course, then I returned to my to-do list waiting for me back in Portland.
I want to recommend Dennis Lehane’s latest book Shutter Island which I read while the ocean waves crashed below my open window. If you’re not a mystery buff, there is still much a writer can learn by analyzing his techniques. It’s set in 1957 on an island near Boston which houses Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The protagonist is U.WS Marshal Teddy Daniels, and, to quote the book jacket, nothing at the hospital is as it seems and neither is Teddy Daniels. There is not a single wasted word throughout. He uses weather, a hurricane raging through the island, to make things happen in the plot and it’s fun to watch how the storm begins, then peaks, then the aftermath. He’s created a world that’s vivid, breathing, and deep. On page 51 as the storm is just beginning: “No one came to their table at dinner. They sat alone, damp from the careless spits of rain, the warm breeze that had begun to carry the ocean with it. Outside, the island had begun to rattle in the dark, the breeze turning into a wind.”
But mostly there is terrific narrative drive in his novel—the sense that every element in the story pushes it forward. An urgency that the reader is caught up in and thus cannot put down. One way he used narrative drive was to portray Teddy as more and more desperate and isolated as the story progresses. To beat on him, mercilessly, including a grim encounter with a gathering of rats that he is forced to walk through. I work with lots of fiction writers and many techniques in writing are difficult to master, but this sense of time ticking and push can be difficult to instill in a story. One solution is to read with a pen or highlighter marker in hand and keep noting how authors slip in their techniques. Notice how in the first pages we learn that Teddy is afraid of the vast ocean and that his father died at sea—creating sympathy and empathy from the get-go. Notice how setting can cause tension and create mood. Notice how he uses dreams and back story to reveal character and deepen the mystery. Notice how every word counts.
I went to the beach alone intending to write a lot, but when I arrived discovered my laptop wasn’t working. Not sure what the problem is, but it seems like its toast. So I read a lot—what a luxury-- and wrote poetry and notes and observations to myself in my notebook. And walked and walked until my legs ached, the ocean sapphire and my memory roaming like a kite in the wind. By the time I left the waters of the Pacific behind I felt slowed down and quiet. Of course, then I returned to my to-do list waiting for me back in Portland.
I want to recommend Dennis Lehane’s latest book Shutter Island which I read while the ocean waves crashed below my open window. If you’re not a mystery buff, there is still much a writer can learn by analyzing his techniques. It’s set in 1957 on an island near Boston which houses Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The protagonist is U.WS Marshal Teddy Daniels, and, to quote the book jacket, nothing at the hospital is as it seems and neither is Teddy Daniels. There is not a single wasted word throughout. He uses weather, a hurricane raging through the island, to make things happen in the plot and it’s fun to watch how the storm begins, then peaks, then the aftermath. He’s created a world that’s vivid, breathing, and deep. On page 51 as the storm is just beginning: “No one came to their table at dinner. They sat alone, damp from the careless spits of rain, the warm breeze that had begun to carry the ocean with it. Outside, the island had begun to rattle in the dark, the breeze turning into a wind.”
But mostly there is terrific narrative drive in his novel—the sense that every element in the story pushes it forward. An urgency that the reader is caught up in and thus cannot put down. One way he used narrative drive was to portray Teddy as more and more desperate and isolated as the story progresses. To beat on him, mercilessly, including a grim encounter with a gathering of rats that he is forced to walk through. I work with lots of fiction writers and many techniques in writing are difficult to master, but this sense of time ticking and push can be difficult to instill in a story. One solution is to read with a pen or highlighter marker in hand and keep noting how authors slip in their techniques. Notice how in the first pages we learn that Teddy is afraid of the vast ocean and that his father died at sea—creating sympathy and empathy from the get-go. Notice how setting can cause tension and create mood. Notice how he uses dreams and back story to reveal character and deepen the mystery. Notice how every word counts.
Monday, March 29, 2004
So here were the problems that I imagined when I started this web log. First, that it would be difficult to squeeze in enough time to commit to it. And second, that since my life is rather dull at the moment, that I’d bore readers with my entries. Guilty on both counts. Because the truth of many writers’ lives is that we’re not fascinating creatures, but people who lock ourselves alone for long periods of time, emerging a little dazed, blinking at the world.
And a few days ago I read through this log and realized that I was repeating myself and because I was sleep deprived decided to take a break. And I'm writing today knowing that I sound drunk on spring and that I'm repeating myself, because this I know--a writer's world must sift into her writing by means of the senses.
So here is my life. I live in Portland, Oregon a green, green place with a climate not unlike the Mediterranean if it rained more there. A desert balances on the rim of this region. I walk to free my mind and limbs and work out at a downtown gym and host little dinner parties with other writers in attendance. I am a former chef and am happy to report that I am not on the Atkins diet but I do eat organic foods. And I attend lectures and films and plays and watch HBO—whatever it takes to replenish my creativity. I listen to NPR most of the day and follow politics, feverish for the truth of our times to be more revealed. And I teach writers and I fix the words of people who are trying to become better writers. It adds up to a life that is sometimes brimming, sometimes quiet, sometimes filled with shared struggles and laughter.
But I spend a lot of time at this desk. It as an old desk that about ten years ago I painted a forest green but the paint has been peeling off. Above my head to the right is skylight and for the past few days the window has been filled with the cherry blossoms of the too old-too tall tree that looms over the building and my lower deck. I’ve just returned from another walk—going out at about 8 strolling through Irvington, my old neighborhood. The dog walkers were out—I counted 8 carrying that plastic ball-throwing device that I wish I’d invented. There were three people performing Tai chai in the park, and there was a sleepy-looking homeless man trundling a shopping cart as he searched for cans and bottles among the yellow recycling bins lining the curbs, workman arriving in pick up trucks at a remodeling job, a garbage collector and a man who arrived at the ATM machine driving an old gold colored Mercedes and wearing a gray sweat suit and slippers. There was the woman who was walking matching Scottie dogs—black and white like salt and pepper—tugging them away from the flower beds.
And everywhere flowers—tulips out in full force—yellow and red ones lining the sidewalk and magnolias of varying shades of pink and purple and two last, giant Japanese cherry trees—thank you for late bloomers everywhere. But as I walked along in the newly-minted morning, spring screaming a jazz riff along with birds twittering, I was so keenly aware. So alive and grateful for every breath and every gardener’s tired back. This is a city of gardeners. A city with soft edges. I plucked small petals and leaves as I walked along, rubbing them between my fingers, leaves soft as velvet. The morning breeze against my neck and face exquisite. And if you move through the world noticing, noticing, noticing, if you manage to capture a bit of the bliss of a season, if only for a few moments of sensory awareness, your writing will be become a breathing world. And readers will visit there.
My third grade teacher was Mrs. Schultz. She was six foot tall, large boned, with a startling and hair tipped mole on her chin. Lutheran with a fervor that did not allow Catholics in heaven or utterances of "gee" or "golly" in our conversations. She was fiercesome and stoic in her need to push multiplication tables and Bible passages into our forming skulls. Her dresses were tailored with white collars and fell well below the knee, her shoes sturdy and thick soled. No softness, no lap. But she created seasonal bulletin boards that this time of year would be romping with lambs made of cotton balls. She taught by repetition, and I fear, so do I.
And a few days ago I read through this log and realized that I was repeating myself and because I was sleep deprived decided to take a break. And I'm writing today knowing that I sound drunk on spring and that I'm repeating myself, because this I know--a writer's world must sift into her writing by means of the senses.
So here is my life. I live in Portland, Oregon a green, green place with a climate not unlike the Mediterranean if it rained more there. A desert balances on the rim of this region. I walk to free my mind and limbs and work out at a downtown gym and host little dinner parties with other writers in attendance. I am a former chef and am happy to report that I am not on the Atkins diet but I do eat organic foods. And I attend lectures and films and plays and watch HBO—whatever it takes to replenish my creativity. I listen to NPR most of the day and follow politics, feverish for the truth of our times to be more revealed. And I teach writers and I fix the words of people who are trying to become better writers. It adds up to a life that is sometimes brimming, sometimes quiet, sometimes filled with shared struggles and laughter.
But I spend a lot of time at this desk. It as an old desk that about ten years ago I painted a forest green but the paint has been peeling off. Above my head to the right is skylight and for the past few days the window has been filled with the cherry blossoms of the too old-too tall tree that looms over the building and my lower deck. I’ve just returned from another walk—going out at about 8 strolling through Irvington, my old neighborhood. The dog walkers were out—I counted 8 carrying that plastic ball-throwing device that I wish I’d invented. There were three people performing Tai chai in the park, and there was a sleepy-looking homeless man trundling a shopping cart as he searched for cans and bottles among the yellow recycling bins lining the curbs, workman arriving in pick up trucks at a remodeling job, a garbage collector and a man who arrived at the ATM machine driving an old gold colored Mercedes and wearing a gray sweat suit and slippers. There was the woman who was walking matching Scottie dogs—black and white like salt and pepper—tugging them away from the flower beds.
And everywhere flowers—tulips out in full force—yellow and red ones lining the sidewalk and magnolias of varying shades of pink and purple and two last, giant Japanese cherry trees—thank you for late bloomers everywhere. But as I walked along in the newly-minted morning, spring screaming a jazz riff along with birds twittering, I was so keenly aware. So alive and grateful for every breath and every gardener’s tired back. This is a city of gardeners. A city with soft edges. I plucked small petals and leaves as I walked along, rubbing them between my fingers, leaves soft as velvet. The morning breeze against my neck and face exquisite. And if you move through the world noticing, noticing, noticing, if you manage to capture a bit of the bliss of a season, if only for a few moments of sensory awareness, your writing will be become a breathing world. And readers will visit there.
My third grade teacher was Mrs. Schultz. She was six foot tall, large boned, with a startling and hair tipped mole on her chin. Lutheran with a fervor that did not allow Catholics in heaven or utterances of "gee" or "golly" in our conversations. She was fiercesome and stoic in her need to push multiplication tables and Bible passages into our forming skulls. Her dresses were tailored with white collars and fell well below the knee, her shoes sturdy and thick soled. No softness, no lap. But she created seasonal bulletin boards that this time of year would be romping with lambs made of cotton balls. She taught by repetition, and I fear, so do I.
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
The official arrival of spring happened a few days ago. I was in the Tacoma, Washington teaching a fiction workshop to a room of women. Later that afternoon we stopped at a bulb farm in Puyallup. Here, as in my home state of Wisconsin, the names of Native American tribes recall its first citizens: Puyallup. Cowlitz, Seattle,
The bulb farm was landscaped in spring flowers, containers spilling over with blooms, an old bicycle loaded down with baskets of tulips and hyacinths and daffodils. Everywhere you looked, the colors of spring, beyond a daffodil field, the air soft and the lush promise of spring touching every corner of the farm while bees drowsed among the blossoms of a cherry tree.
I woke too early on Sunday morning thinking about the workshop the previous day, mentally revising how I might have done things different. As the sky changed from slate to blue, I concluded that I’d talked too much. A workshop participant once called me a “torrent of information” and I use that blurb in my marketing material. But sometimes I’m uncomfortable with my style; sometimes my workshops are not as interactive as I plan. During this particular workshop, I spent most of the morning lecturing, although this is not the usual format for a workshop. It happened because about a fourth of those attending didn’t have a fiction manuscript in progress and one of the writing exercises required a story in the works in order to complete it.
So I talked a lot and we looked at examples of story openings and discussed some of the odd realities of fiction writing: Fiction characters suffer monstrously. In fact, in most stories they’re fairly miserable throughout and the opening pages must introduce sympathetic details about your protagonist. These pitiful or pitiable details create sympathy in those first moments when we meet him or her and as the story progresses, that sympathy will shift to empathy and thus the reader becomes entangled in the unfolding events. We talked about Stones From the River and Trudy Montag’s heart-breaking habit of hanging from doorways in order to stretch and tying silk scarves around her too-large head to keep it from growing. We discussed an elderly woman who witnessed a murder in the first pages of an Agatha Christie mystery; the flies buzzing along Inman’s’ open wound in Cold Mountain; and the sad facts of the protagonist in The Shipping News.
Fiction openings are densely packed and difficult to write because they’re the doorway that leads from reality to the world of the story. An opening must introduce setting, character, voice, point of view and reveals a story question and goals, and a character reeling from a change that has been inflicted. Fiction characters are constantly thrown off balance, often teetering toward ruin through most of the story. I was thinking about this and concluded that the underlying structure of fiction is opposite of a bridge or some sturdy foundation. The world of a story is an earthquake zone, a fun house of distortions. It’s based on a series of changes, surprises and reversal—a log of changes.
In the past few days I read a novel by Jacquelyn Mitchard called A Theory of Relativity. The themes of the story are wrapped around adoption and what makes a family. I know that the author has both birth and adopted children, but the themes are heavy handed and overshadow all parts of the story. There were parts that I skimmed and skipped over, pages and pages that seemed overwritten. I was especially annoyed with how the setting, a small town in northern Wisconsin, was indistinct. I was doubly annoyed that the small town I grew up in was part of the story, but it was as if the author had never been there. She scheduled meals in fancy restaurants that don’t exist and although of course, you can create fictional restaurants, in this particular town it didn’t make sense. She also never adequately explained the distances between places although the characters were constantly traveling up and down the state and in one scene a character lolls on the shore of Lake Michigan, although it’s hundreds of miles away. But skimming along, I read the whole thing in record time because I wanted to know the ending and because she inserted surprise after surprise, misery after misery, until the whole human stew was finally sorted out. Life is messy; fiction is messier.
The bulb farm was landscaped in spring flowers, containers spilling over with blooms, an old bicycle loaded down with baskets of tulips and hyacinths and daffodils. Everywhere you looked, the colors of spring, beyond a daffodil field, the air soft and the lush promise of spring touching every corner of the farm while bees drowsed among the blossoms of a cherry tree.
I woke too early on Sunday morning thinking about the workshop the previous day, mentally revising how I might have done things different. As the sky changed from slate to blue, I concluded that I’d talked too much. A workshop participant once called me a “torrent of information” and I use that blurb in my marketing material. But sometimes I’m uncomfortable with my style; sometimes my workshops are not as interactive as I plan. During this particular workshop, I spent most of the morning lecturing, although this is not the usual format for a workshop. It happened because about a fourth of those attending didn’t have a fiction manuscript in progress and one of the writing exercises required a story in the works in order to complete it.
So I talked a lot and we looked at examples of story openings and discussed some of the odd realities of fiction writing: Fiction characters suffer monstrously. In fact, in most stories they’re fairly miserable throughout and the opening pages must introduce sympathetic details about your protagonist. These pitiful or pitiable details create sympathy in those first moments when we meet him or her and as the story progresses, that sympathy will shift to empathy and thus the reader becomes entangled in the unfolding events. We talked about Stones From the River and Trudy Montag’s heart-breaking habit of hanging from doorways in order to stretch and tying silk scarves around her too-large head to keep it from growing. We discussed an elderly woman who witnessed a murder in the first pages of an Agatha Christie mystery; the flies buzzing along Inman’s’ open wound in Cold Mountain; and the sad facts of the protagonist in The Shipping News.
Fiction openings are densely packed and difficult to write because they’re the doorway that leads from reality to the world of the story. An opening must introduce setting, character, voice, point of view and reveals a story question and goals, and a character reeling from a change that has been inflicted. Fiction characters are constantly thrown off balance, often teetering toward ruin through most of the story. I was thinking about this and concluded that the underlying structure of fiction is opposite of a bridge or some sturdy foundation. The world of a story is an earthquake zone, a fun house of distortions. It’s based on a series of changes, surprises and reversal—a log of changes.
In the past few days I read a novel by Jacquelyn Mitchard called A Theory of Relativity. The themes of the story are wrapped around adoption and what makes a family. I know that the author has both birth and adopted children, but the themes are heavy handed and overshadow all parts of the story. There were parts that I skimmed and skipped over, pages and pages that seemed overwritten. I was especially annoyed with how the setting, a small town in northern Wisconsin, was indistinct. I was doubly annoyed that the small town I grew up in was part of the story, but it was as if the author had never been there. She scheduled meals in fancy restaurants that don’t exist and although of course, you can create fictional restaurants, in this particular town it didn’t make sense. She also never adequately explained the distances between places although the characters were constantly traveling up and down the state and in one scene a character lolls on the shore of Lake Michigan, although it’s hundreds of miles away. But skimming along, I read the whole thing in record time because I wanted to know the ending and because she inserted surprise after surprise, misery after misery, until the whole human stew was finally sorted out. Life is messy; fiction is messier.
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
The Writing Life Too
“If you listen carefully enough to anything, it will talk to you.” George Washington Carver
Spring has taken over this town, in fact it’s rioting in the streets. Yesterday I walked with a friend up Mt. Tabor. It’s an extinct volcano and the view at the top is marvelous, the sounds of the city a far-off rumble, the old fir trees at the top magnificent sentinels. No matter the temperature, the air is always crisp like a forest glen under the trees. After 9/11 I walked with a friend there, slowly climbing upward, talking about how the world had changed in a only a few days. People were gathered in clumps, speaking in whispers, watching dusk settle over the city as lights began winking on below. It was in those moments looking down at the city, walking round and around, that I became knit back together. Yesterday, we looked down at one of the pools lined with trees abloom in soft pink, sky reflecting in water. We spoke of a new marriage and how a woman can hold her own in a relationship.
In one of the parks where I often walk around a cinder track, trees have blossomed overnight and the air is thick with the perfume of blooms. These past few months I’ve usually been there alone except for few dog walkers, but these days families are picnicking, a couple sprawls under a tree made of tiny white flowers, kids lean out from the merry-go-round, birds giddy and busy everywhere. Soon soccer and baseball teams will inhabit the diamonds in the middle of the track, their uniforms bright splashes of color against the green, green of the fields.
It’s a good thing that it’s spring and not November. We need the softening days for hope. The past week was filled with grim news. On April 11 terrorists struck trains in Spain, killing 200, injuring 1200. Rescue workers struggled to save the injured, the babies. Hearses carted off body parts and what is left is the grisly task of identifying remains. And, of course, determining who the mass murderers are this time. These days it’s especially dangerous to be America’s friend and an election proves that the Spanish people want to be heard. I watched television news and scenes from throughout Europe vigils in the rain, people railing against the craziness of it all. An investigation fallowing a trail of clues, making arrests.
The Bush campaign aired a bizarre commercial twisting facts and simply stating outright lies about Kerry’s Senate record. Kerry has answered with an ad discrediting the distortions. But let’s not go into politics because there are too many lies to count—it’s an exciting and enraging time—so much at stake before we go down. Speaking of down, the Dow is down almost 500 points in five days. 15 million people are unemployed in this country. If I wasn’t writing and teaching people to wring their hearts onto a page, I’d be made of tears.
But back to writing. Recently I read somewhere that writers are scavengers and that word stuck in my mind. Of course it’s easy to scavenge this time of year—you walk outdoors and get drunk on the first flowers of the season. A feast for the senses lies just outside the window. I walk the downtown streets in the morning, heading for the gym and the oversized planters along Morrison Street are bursting with jonquils, tulips, daffodils and hyacinths. The view from the graceful, old, second floor windows at the gym is changing daily, snow-capped Mt. Hood in the distance gleams white.
Scavenging knows no season. For writers, scavenging is a necessary habit because good subjects aren’t just lying around waiting to be scooped up or alighting like a golden dove on the page. Thus you need to keep a stockpile of images, sensory details, memories, bits gathered from eavesdropping. Scavenging teaches us awareness and this noticing will make your writing more alive. A stockpile of images and bits can be helpful for all sorts of reasons. My gathering can trigger a poem, be the source code for an article or story. Scavenging can become a kind of writing practice or you can slip small the details you gather into fiction. Trust me, if you start gathering, you will use the material.
I know this too well from my early morning poetry writing sessions. Sometimes my mind is dull when I first wake, so I’ll start writing about anything I can cling to—a dream from only moments earlier, the color of dawn, a bit of news on the radio. So to face off against that blankness I’ve become a collector. I slip most of the things that I scavenge into my writer’s notebook. Yesterday I was reading through one and found a note about a couple in Texas who bought a house and discovered a 30-pound bees’ nest in the wall. I’ve copied Gavin Ewalt’s Sonnet: Daffodils where he riffs on how Wordsworth really loved daffodils, claiming they were flashers, exhibitionists. I’ve written about the mornings when I leave the gym and spot a gaggle of toddlers, holding onto an orange leash. It’s a little nerve racking to watch them cross the street together despite their teachers urging, “Use your quick feet.” “Take big steps.”
On the next page there is the memory of The Weekly Reader and the smells of my grandmother’s cellar—part grave/part damp earth/part spider and my older brother ordering sea monkeys from the back of a magazine. On a page I’ve labeled “Overheard” lines like “cowboys with saddles that became pillows under the stars.” and “hair the color of sunset.” A notation that Bush mentioned ‘war’ 33 times during his interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press.
I keep adding to my writer’s notebook: In a village in Italy a giant dinosaur looking creature has been spotted. On a recent walk through a northwest neighborhood I approached a school on a Friday afternoon. Two boys, about ten, were serving as crossing guards. One was crowing about the weekend ahead. The other solemn with duty, manning an orange flag. He escorted me as if we were on a busy street in Manhattan although there was not a car in sight. And afternoons from my elementary school days flashed back as easily if I were a time traveler. I was never a crossing guard, but these days, in my life as a writing teacher I feel like one. And perhaps like the boy I can be too earnest, too worried about dangers.
“If you listen carefully enough to anything, it will talk to you.” George Washington Carver
Spring has taken over this town, in fact it’s rioting in the streets. Yesterday I walked with a friend up Mt. Tabor. It’s an extinct volcano and the view at the top is marvelous, the sounds of the city a far-off rumble, the old fir trees at the top magnificent sentinels. No matter the temperature, the air is always crisp like a forest glen under the trees. After 9/11 I walked with a friend there, slowly climbing upward, talking about how the world had changed in a only a few days. People were gathered in clumps, speaking in whispers, watching dusk settle over the city as lights began winking on below. It was in those moments looking down at the city, walking round and around, that I became knit back together. Yesterday, we looked down at one of the pools lined with trees abloom in soft pink, sky reflecting in water. We spoke of a new marriage and how a woman can hold her own in a relationship.
In one of the parks where I often walk around a cinder track, trees have blossomed overnight and the air is thick with the perfume of blooms. These past few months I’ve usually been there alone except for few dog walkers, but these days families are picnicking, a couple sprawls under a tree made of tiny white flowers, kids lean out from the merry-go-round, birds giddy and busy everywhere. Soon soccer and baseball teams will inhabit the diamonds in the middle of the track, their uniforms bright splashes of color against the green, green of the fields.
It’s a good thing that it’s spring and not November. We need the softening days for hope. The past week was filled with grim news. On April 11 terrorists struck trains in Spain, killing 200, injuring 1200. Rescue workers struggled to save the injured, the babies. Hearses carted off body parts and what is left is the grisly task of identifying remains. And, of course, determining who the mass murderers are this time. These days it’s especially dangerous to be America’s friend and an election proves that the Spanish people want to be heard. I watched television news and scenes from throughout Europe vigils in the rain, people railing against the craziness of it all. An investigation fallowing a trail of clues, making arrests.
The Bush campaign aired a bizarre commercial twisting facts and simply stating outright lies about Kerry’s Senate record. Kerry has answered with an ad discrediting the distortions. But let’s not go into politics because there are too many lies to count—it’s an exciting and enraging time—so much at stake before we go down. Speaking of down, the Dow is down almost 500 points in five days. 15 million people are unemployed in this country. If I wasn’t writing and teaching people to wring their hearts onto a page, I’d be made of tears.
But back to writing. Recently I read somewhere that writers are scavengers and that word stuck in my mind. Of course it’s easy to scavenge this time of year—you walk outdoors and get drunk on the first flowers of the season. A feast for the senses lies just outside the window. I walk the downtown streets in the morning, heading for the gym and the oversized planters along Morrison Street are bursting with jonquils, tulips, daffodils and hyacinths. The view from the graceful, old, second floor windows at the gym is changing daily, snow-capped Mt. Hood in the distance gleams white.
Scavenging knows no season. For writers, scavenging is a necessary habit because good subjects aren’t just lying around waiting to be scooped up or alighting like a golden dove on the page. Thus you need to keep a stockpile of images, sensory details, memories, bits gathered from eavesdropping. Scavenging teaches us awareness and this noticing will make your writing more alive. A stockpile of images and bits can be helpful for all sorts of reasons. My gathering can trigger a poem, be the source code for an article or story. Scavenging can become a kind of writing practice or you can slip small the details you gather into fiction. Trust me, if you start gathering, you will use the material.
I know this too well from my early morning poetry writing sessions. Sometimes my mind is dull when I first wake, so I’ll start writing about anything I can cling to—a dream from only moments earlier, the color of dawn, a bit of news on the radio. So to face off against that blankness I’ve become a collector. I slip most of the things that I scavenge into my writer’s notebook. Yesterday I was reading through one and found a note about a couple in Texas who bought a house and discovered a 30-pound bees’ nest in the wall. I’ve copied Gavin Ewalt’s Sonnet: Daffodils where he riffs on how Wordsworth really loved daffodils, claiming they were flashers, exhibitionists. I’ve written about the mornings when I leave the gym and spot a gaggle of toddlers, holding onto an orange leash. It’s a little nerve racking to watch them cross the street together despite their teachers urging, “Use your quick feet.” “Take big steps.”
On the next page there is the memory of The Weekly Reader and the smells of my grandmother’s cellar—part grave/part damp earth/part spider and my older brother ordering sea monkeys from the back of a magazine. On a page I’ve labeled “Overheard” lines like “cowboys with saddles that became pillows under the stars.” and “hair the color of sunset.” A notation that Bush mentioned ‘war’ 33 times during his interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press.
I keep adding to my writer’s notebook: In a village in Italy a giant dinosaur looking creature has been spotted. On a recent walk through a northwest neighborhood I approached a school on a Friday afternoon. Two boys, about ten, were serving as crossing guards. One was crowing about the weekend ahead. The other solemn with duty, manning an orange flag. He escorted me as if we were on a busy street in Manhattan although there was not a car in sight. And afternoons from my elementary school days flashed back as easily if I were a time traveler. I was never a crossing guard, but these days, in my life as a writing teacher I feel like one. And perhaps like the boy I can be too earnest, too worried about dangers.
Monday, March 15, 2004
Driving home yesterday as dusk thickened into night, I listened to Ursula Hegi interviewed on San Francisco’s Arts and Lecture program.
Hegi lived in Germany until she was 19 and has been living in this country since. Most of her stories and her amazing book, Stones from the River were told from a female protagonist’s viewpoint. In this wonderbook, Hegi tells the story of Trudi Montag, a dwarf, and her pains and struggles in Germany as the war descends on the land. I believe there are many reasons for reading Hegi. I first encountered her in an excerpt of Stones published in Story magazine and was flattened by the power of her storytelling. But what this story also reveals is a deep understanding of how ordinary Germans allowed the Nazis their reign of terror. Her newest book, Sacred Time features a male protagonist who the reader first meets when he is seven, living in the Bronx.
Hegi compared the intense characterization of her stories to the same techniques used by Method actors. She described how first she chases the characters, making lists about them, trying to understand them. But then, there is a point when the characters chase her and as she goes about her day, drives her car, etc. the characters are with her. She described how as she writes a scene, she is feeling exactly what the character feels at that moment in the scene. And that she rewrites 50-100 times in order to write deeply about her characters.
As I listened to her talk in her lovely accented voice, I was remembering some of the early scenes about Trudi and the thunderclap moment that occurs when she finally understands that she’s a dwarf, that she’ll always be different from the other people in their village. I recalled the details about her mother’s funeral and how day after day, Trudi hangs from the door frame, trying to stretch herself taller.
The best writers weave details that cause a reader to sympathize with their characters in the first few pages of the story. In first paragraph of Cold Mountain we are immediately sympathetic: “At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring. Inman’s eyes and the long wound at his neck drew them, and the sound of their wings and the touch of their feet were soon more potent than a yardful of rooster in rousing a man to wake. So he came to yet one more day in the hospital ward….”
Over the years when I teach classes about fiction openings I’ve described the first few pages of What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!, a mystery written by Agatha Christie in 1957. She opens the story this way: “Mrs. McGillicuddy panted along the platform in the wake of the porter carrying her suitcase. Mrs. McGullicuddy was short and stout, the porter was tall and free-striding. In addition, Mrs. McGillicuddy was burdened with a large quantity of parcels; the result of a day’s Christmas shopping. The race was, therefore, an uneven one, and the porter turned the corner at the end of the platform while Mrs. McGillicuddy was still coming up the straight.” The reader follows her through a series of difficulties and humiliations until she settles into the plush train cushions, falls asleep and wakens to witness a murder, although she cannot see the victim’s face. And when she reports it, is not believed. And so the story is launched in three deftly woven pages.
Readers need to sympathize with characters in fiction and memoir from the first moments they meet him or her and this sympathy must transform to empathy and finally, taking on the character’s struggles as their own. In this way fiction becomes involving and satisfying. But sympathy is not sentiment and it is not achieved though melodrama, or in the case of a memoir, whining or venting.
I am left with the memory Hegi’s voice in the dark as I drive toward home, and her notion that she writes to discover her characters’ truths.
Hegi lived in Germany until she was 19 and has been living in this country since. Most of her stories and her amazing book, Stones from the River were told from a female protagonist’s viewpoint. In this wonderbook, Hegi tells the story of Trudi Montag, a dwarf, and her pains and struggles in Germany as the war descends on the land. I believe there are many reasons for reading Hegi. I first encountered her in an excerpt of Stones published in Story magazine and was flattened by the power of her storytelling. But what this story also reveals is a deep understanding of how ordinary Germans allowed the Nazis their reign of terror. Her newest book, Sacred Time features a male protagonist who the reader first meets when he is seven, living in the Bronx.
Hegi compared the intense characterization of her stories to the same techniques used by Method actors. She described how first she chases the characters, making lists about them, trying to understand them. But then, there is a point when the characters chase her and as she goes about her day, drives her car, etc. the characters are with her. She described how as she writes a scene, she is feeling exactly what the character feels at that moment in the scene. And that she rewrites 50-100 times in order to write deeply about her characters.
As I listened to her talk in her lovely accented voice, I was remembering some of the early scenes about Trudi and the thunderclap moment that occurs when she finally understands that she’s a dwarf, that she’ll always be different from the other people in their village. I recalled the details about her mother’s funeral and how day after day, Trudi hangs from the door frame, trying to stretch herself taller.
The best writers weave details that cause a reader to sympathize with their characters in the first few pages of the story. In first paragraph of Cold Mountain we are immediately sympathetic: “At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring. Inman’s eyes and the long wound at his neck drew them, and the sound of their wings and the touch of their feet were soon more potent than a yardful of rooster in rousing a man to wake. So he came to yet one more day in the hospital ward….”
Over the years when I teach classes about fiction openings I’ve described the first few pages of What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!, a mystery written by Agatha Christie in 1957. She opens the story this way: “Mrs. McGillicuddy panted along the platform in the wake of the porter carrying her suitcase. Mrs. McGullicuddy was short and stout, the porter was tall and free-striding. In addition, Mrs. McGillicuddy was burdened with a large quantity of parcels; the result of a day’s Christmas shopping. The race was, therefore, an uneven one, and the porter turned the corner at the end of the platform while Mrs. McGillicuddy was still coming up the straight.” The reader follows her through a series of difficulties and humiliations until she settles into the plush train cushions, falls asleep and wakens to witness a murder, although she cannot see the victim’s face. And when she reports it, is not believed. And so the story is launched in three deftly woven pages.
Readers need to sympathize with characters in fiction and memoir from the first moments they meet him or her and this sympathy must transform to empathy and finally, taking on the character’s struggles as their own. In this way fiction becomes involving and satisfying. But sympathy is not sentiment and it is not achieved though melodrama, or in the case of a memoir, whining or venting.
I am left with the memory Hegi’s voice in the dark as I drive toward home, and her notion that she writes to discover her characters’ truths.
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