Drizzly morning here in Portland, but the Sunday in October after the clocks are wound back is always one of my favorite days because of the extra hour gained. I’ve been taking care of my back the last few days with treatments and rest and such, so have had time to finish reading Alexandra Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat, Travels with an African Soldier. I bought in Victoria last Monday in Munro’s Bookstore. Munro’s is worth visiting simply for the neo-classical architecture. The landmark building has large columns, soaring windows, murals that depict scenes from literature, a coffered ceiling and is located in the Old Town section of Victoria. Jim Munro (formerly married to the amazing author Alice Munro) first opened a store in 1963 and moved his store into the current location in 1985 after he refurbished it. And they have an amazing section of bargain books and a great staff who seem to know everything about books and the store.
Alexandra Fuller’s first book was a memoir, Don’t Let’s Go the Dogs Tonight. It described the various troubles of an English family trying to farm in Africa, particularly in Rhodesia and neighboring Mozambique after civil war broke out. The book was a national bestseller and Fuller managed to depict sorrows and violence amid the wild beauty of a land she still loves. The first book depicts war from a child’s perspective and is understated, the second from an adult’s view. Scribbling the Cat begins with Fuller visiting her parents living in Zambia and meeting a white Rhodesian who fought with the all-white Rhodesian Light Infantry Commando Unit. Fuller and the soldier, who we know as K, travel together, returning to his past as a soldier, both looking for answers about the legacy of war.
In an interview she explains that she began by depositing the reader in the Sole Valley where even the residents look like refuges. “There is, in all my writing, a real desire to take readers where very few of them would go on their own. One way to do that is to not allow them the luxury of a tour guide, if you like. This cold bath of reality is to shake people into the realization that this is not going to be a romantic handholding; this is really what it feels like to be there. This is the shock of reality.
The other thing I try to do is dispel the romantic myths of Africa, the Out of Africa motif, which really exists only in safari camps anymore. Very few people live that existence.”
This book is anything but romantic and instead shows the terrible scars of war on land and people. It is a place of land mines and ruined villages and shifting alliances and hard scrabble survival. And perhaps because I’m nursing a bad back and felt the need to travel far from my bed, the book managed to drop me on my head smack in the midst of the heat and smells of Africa. Especially though the symphony of smells that is Africa where she describes everything from a pet lion to a fish camp to lake via smells. If writers can learn anything from Fuller it would be the precision and power of these many smells. Our olfactory sense is connected to a primal section of the brain and memory. Even in our plastic-wrapped world, smells carry emotion and meaning and most writers don’t use nearly enough smells in their work.
Here is a small sample from the book as the author and K meet one of K’s former fellow soldiers: “Mapenga looked exactly how you’d expect a man to look who spends his life alone on an island in the middle of a lake in Mozambique with a lion. He had a week or ten days’ worth of beard on his face, a torn shirt, scratches up and down his arms and legs, and a damp, raw tan, blending to deep red in his neck. He had vivid blue eyes, deeply creases on the edges with laughter (but the eyes themselves had a worried, restless, haunted look), and a sunburned nose. His smile was sudden and beautiful and careless and came easily. His energy was quick and electric, as if you might be shocked by physical contact with him. He was about five foot ten, powerfully built, and wiry with shoulders that looked coiled and ready for a fight.”
The other technique that writers can learn from Fuller is the power of voice, especially a voice that holds the music identified with a continent. The book is scattered with terms and sayings from various African languages and the chatter of birds and sounds of insects and the lilt of the African tongue. For example, scribbling means killing and stonked means killed; fossils means old people, lekker, nice; dopping, drinking alcohol. We live in a country and time where there is so little consideration given to the human cost of war. Scribbling the Cat is an excellent reminder of all that is lost when humans turn guns on each other.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
The morning is shrouded in fog, making the view from my office window look like a dream of ghosts. I must apologize for being a bad blogger lately. I returned from Vancouver Tuesday night and am still catching up on things and over the weekend injured my back so badly I can barely walk. So I’m hobbling around like an invalid and as I speak, am sitting here against a package of frozen peas—I’ve lost my ice pack and so the peas must suffice.
Meanwhile, the Surrey conference was marvelous—uplifting, exhausting and fun. Got to spend time with friends from Vancouver and a friend who lives in Seattle and spent a lot of time hobnobbing with the literati and authors who have sold millions of books. I particularly enjoyed chatting with Susan Wiggs, a romance author, Diana Gabaldon who writes the Outlander series, and Jack Whyte a Canadian author who also writes historical novels. During our meals (the only downtime) I heard several authors who hale from Britain describe Prince Charles as a wretch and opine on topics such as writing routines, publishers and the Canadian Dollar Store.
Whyte is the author of a nine-book series set in post-Roman Britain in the fifth century. His A Dream of Eagles novels deal with King Arthur and Camelot in a nonmystical, nonfantasy approach. His latest book Knights of the Black and White is set in the 12th century and is centered on the Knights of the Templar. Talking with Whyte, he mentioned that he’d been interested in the legends of Arthur since he was a boy in Scotland and also that the recent success of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code has helped the sales of his latest book.
Besides talking with Whyte at the conference I ran into him in downtown Victoria after he’d purchased an extravagantly expensive and quite handsome pen that he had bought to celebrate his latest book deal. In case you haven’t visited Victoria, it is as charming as billed. If you ignore the modern-day businesses and chain stores that dot the outskirts, the downtown area with its hundreds of historic buildings, many painted in a lavish palette, doesn’t quite feel like North America. We wandered to the Empress Hotel for a drink after stopping to listen to a street musician who Whyte recommended. The Empress Hotel, built in the early 1900s is like stepping back in time with that hushed atmosphere that grand old buildings possess.
Conversation was lively as Whyte talked about modern Scotland (“a bunch of hypocritical Calvinists,”) the amazements of the Edinburgh Festival, how he became a writer, and how Gabaldon introduced him to her agent. Whyte started writing when he was thirty five and described the ups and downs of a career that came after he was a professional singer, actor, copywriter, and English teacher. He also has a memoir coming out that marks his fortieth year of arriving in Canada.
Diana Gabaldon is the bestselling author of the Outlander series, which follows the adventures of Jamie Fraser, a Scottish Highlander from the 18th century, and his time-traveling wife, Claire. The latest book in the series, A Breath of Snow and Ashes, just came out in paperback. She has a gravely, Katherine Hepburn voice, long, jet black hair, and a stunning and dramatic wardrobe that is often in midnight blue and swirls and rustles around her as she walks like gowns from times past. I asked Gabaldon how she got the idea to use standing stones (similar to Stonehenge) as a device in her series. She explained that she always knew that Claire was going to be a modern-day woman (the series begins after World War II) and then while researching Scotland, kept finding references to the standing stones. However, no one seemed to know who had placed them in various places, or their purpose. She started musing about them, knowing she could find a purpose, which in her series, is for time travel.
Whenever Gabaldon is around there always seems to be speculation about the appeal of men in kilts and while at the hotel when a group that was leaving for a wedding included a handsome young man in a green plaid kilt, the excitement he caused in the women around him was palpable. At the Surrey conference you seem to spend a lot of time traveling up and down in elevators and the conversation is often lively—in this instance, women were practically giddy over the kilt wearer.
Susan Wiggs was the keynote speaker on Friday morning and slumped onto the stage in hotel bathrobe and pink fuzzy slippers, then pulled off her robe to reveal a smart outfit, yanked her long hair out of its holder, and slipped into a pair of turquoise heels. Her talk was dotted with humor about the writing life nd she described how writers view other authors as their rock stars and gave homage to Mary Balogh who was also teaching at the conference. Balogh also writes romances and has penned 36 Regencies and 30 historical romances.
On Sunday morning Wiggs described her writing routine. She writes longhand and then uses speech recognition software to input it. Wiggs cranks out two novels a year (“My publisher loves me”) and when she first began writing met Catherine Coulter. I met Coulter a few years back and still recall her as funny and real and smart. She writes historical romances, contemporary romance, romantic suspense, and FBI thrillers and as you might guess, is a prolific writing machine. Coulter advised Susan to write until noon, then spend afternoons lunching and shopping with friends. And so Wiggs, who lives on an island near Seattle, stops writing at noon as advised. Then we all discussed how answering e-mails and the business of writing eats up a great deal of our time.
During the final keynote address, mystery author Ann Perry advised the crowd of writers who were by now nearly saturated in words and advice, to go forth and write a book that matters. And so I’ll try.
Meanwhile, the Surrey conference was marvelous—uplifting, exhausting and fun. Got to spend time with friends from Vancouver and a friend who lives in Seattle and spent a lot of time hobnobbing with the literati and authors who have sold millions of books. I particularly enjoyed chatting with Susan Wiggs, a romance author, Diana Gabaldon who writes the Outlander series, and Jack Whyte a Canadian author who also writes historical novels. During our meals (the only downtime) I heard several authors who hale from Britain describe Prince Charles as a wretch and opine on topics such as writing routines, publishers and the Canadian Dollar Store.
Whyte is the author of a nine-book series set in post-Roman Britain in the fifth century. His A Dream of Eagles novels deal with King Arthur and Camelot in a nonmystical, nonfantasy approach. His latest book Knights of the Black and White is set in the 12th century and is centered on the Knights of the Templar. Talking with Whyte, he mentioned that he’d been interested in the legends of Arthur since he was a boy in Scotland and also that the recent success of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code has helped the sales of his latest book.
Besides talking with Whyte at the conference I ran into him in downtown Victoria after he’d purchased an extravagantly expensive and quite handsome pen that he had bought to celebrate his latest book deal. In case you haven’t visited Victoria, it is as charming as billed. If you ignore the modern-day businesses and chain stores that dot the outskirts, the downtown area with its hundreds of historic buildings, many painted in a lavish palette, doesn’t quite feel like North America. We wandered to the Empress Hotel for a drink after stopping to listen to a street musician who Whyte recommended. The Empress Hotel, built in the early 1900s is like stepping back in time with that hushed atmosphere that grand old buildings possess.
Conversation was lively as Whyte talked about modern Scotland (“a bunch of hypocritical Calvinists,”) the amazements of the Edinburgh Festival, how he became a writer, and how Gabaldon introduced him to her agent. Whyte started writing when he was thirty five and described the ups and downs of a career that came after he was a professional singer, actor, copywriter, and English teacher. He also has a memoir coming out that marks his fortieth year of arriving in Canada.
Diana Gabaldon is the bestselling author of the Outlander series, which follows the adventures of Jamie Fraser, a Scottish Highlander from the 18th century, and his time-traveling wife, Claire. The latest book in the series, A Breath of Snow and Ashes, just came out in paperback. She has a gravely, Katherine Hepburn voice, long, jet black hair, and a stunning and dramatic wardrobe that is often in midnight blue and swirls and rustles around her as she walks like gowns from times past. I asked Gabaldon how she got the idea to use standing stones (similar to Stonehenge) as a device in her series. She explained that she always knew that Claire was going to be a modern-day woman (the series begins after World War II) and then while researching Scotland, kept finding references to the standing stones. However, no one seemed to know who had placed them in various places, or their purpose. She started musing about them, knowing she could find a purpose, which in her series, is for time travel.
Whenever Gabaldon is around there always seems to be speculation about the appeal of men in kilts and while at the hotel when a group that was leaving for a wedding included a handsome young man in a green plaid kilt, the excitement he caused in the women around him was palpable. At the Surrey conference you seem to spend a lot of time traveling up and down in elevators and the conversation is often lively—in this instance, women were practically giddy over the kilt wearer.
Susan Wiggs was the keynote speaker on Friday morning and slumped onto the stage in hotel bathrobe and pink fuzzy slippers, then pulled off her robe to reveal a smart outfit, yanked her long hair out of its holder, and slipped into a pair of turquoise heels. Her talk was dotted with humor about the writing life nd she described how writers view other authors as their rock stars and gave homage to Mary Balogh who was also teaching at the conference. Balogh also writes romances and has penned 36 Regencies and 30 historical romances.
On Sunday morning Wiggs described her writing routine. She writes longhand and then uses speech recognition software to input it. Wiggs cranks out two novels a year (“My publisher loves me”) and when she first began writing met Catherine Coulter. I met Coulter a few years back and still recall her as funny and real and smart. She writes historical romances, contemporary romance, romantic suspense, and FBI thrillers and as you might guess, is a prolific writing machine. Coulter advised Susan to write until noon, then spend afternoons lunching and shopping with friends. And so Wiggs, who lives on an island near Seattle, stops writing at noon as advised. Then we all discussed how answering e-mails and the business of writing eats up a great deal of our time.
During the final keynote address, mystery author Ann Perry advised the crowd of writers who were by now nearly saturated in words and advice, to go forth and write a book that matters. And so I’ll try.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Well last night I hung out with the NaNo writers at Powells on Hawthorne and the Chance of Rain coffee shop. Chris Baty was in town promoting NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and his new writing kit. In case you don’t know, National Novel Writing Month is going to challenge at least 75,000 writers around the world to buckle down and write 50,000 words in the month of November. For more info go to www.nanowrimo.org.
Most of the folks I met last night were as intense and keyed-up as a triple espresso (although I don’t drink coffee this is my best guess about their high-octane energy level) and Chris was greeted like the evangelist of hope. He was irreverent, witty and practical and described how writing fast and focused unleashes everyone’s inner MacGivor……He also recommended slipping dirty dinner plates under the sofa for the month, and this comment like others, was met with gales of laughter.
Chris generously introduced me to the crowd at the book store and I talked with a few people afterward about my anthology, my editing and writing in general. Then we waited for Chris to sign books since the line was long and congenial and snaked into the next room. Momentarily, I longed to join them in the novel-writing plunge and wished I wasn’t involved in other book projects. But then I snapped back to reality and realized how excited I am about the books I’m writing.
The anthology is gaining momentum and sort of taking on a life of its own. Last night I met two of Chris’ friends who are professional cartoonists and they suggested adding women cartoonists to the book. I am already trying to contact a syndicated cartoonist for the anthology, so I’m going to run this idea past my agent.
Meanwhile, I’m heading to the Surrey International Writing Conference on Thursday to teach three workshops. If you’re looking for a high-energy yet laid back conference chocked full of inspiration and terrific speakers, Surrey should be on your radar screen. If only I could bottle the buzz and sizle of a conference—not sure how I’d market it, but it’s sort of part champagne, part optimism, part love of words. Surely the planet needs this elixir?
Most of the folks I met last night were as intense and keyed-up as a triple espresso (although I don’t drink coffee this is my best guess about their high-octane energy level) and Chris was greeted like the evangelist of hope. He was irreverent, witty and practical and described how writing fast and focused unleashes everyone’s inner MacGivor……He also recommended slipping dirty dinner plates under the sofa for the month, and this comment like others, was met with gales of laughter.
Chris generously introduced me to the crowd at the book store and I talked with a few people afterward about my anthology, my editing and writing in general. Then we waited for Chris to sign books since the line was long and congenial and snaked into the next room. Momentarily, I longed to join them in the novel-writing plunge and wished I wasn’t involved in other book projects. But then I snapped back to reality and realized how excited I am about the books I’m writing.
The anthology is gaining momentum and sort of taking on a life of its own. Last night I met two of Chris’ friends who are professional cartoonists and they suggested adding women cartoonists to the book. I am already trying to contact a syndicated cartoonist for the anthology, so I’m going to run this idea past my agent.
Meanwhile, I’m heading to the Surrey International Writing Conference on Thursday to teach three workshops. If you’re looking for a high-energy yet laid back conference chocked full of inspiration and terrific speakers, Surrey should be on your radar screen. If only I could bottle the buzz and sizle of a conference—not sure how I’d market it, but it’s sort of part champagne, part optimism, part love of words. Surely the planet needs this elixir?
Friday, October 13, 2006
It’s Friday the 13th and I’m wondering where the superstition about the day began. In the background Thom Hartman of Air America is claiming that the 13th is a fortunate day. I’ve never thought of myself as superstitious, have never tossed salt over my shoulder, and have indeed stepped on my share of cracks, and ducked under ladders.
But still, some of the legacies of childhood are indelible. For example, Portland is a town swarming with cats and my neighborhood is a sort of cat central. Now, I don’t have anything against cats except I’m allergic to them, but sometimes I wonder if they don’t outnumber our citizenry. When I’m staying home for the evening I like to walk at dusk and that’s when the cats seem to have taken over. They’re sauntering down sidewalks like they own the place, lounging on porches, lolling in flower beds, and peering at me from stoops as if I’m an interloper in their kingdom, which I suppose I am. And I swear this neighborhood is literally crawling with black cats. And try as I might to avoid them, they are invariably crisscrossing my path as I chug along in the gathering dusk. And as the tiny wraiths slink past, some part of me is seven years old and is trying to dance out of its trajectory. So, of course, I’m not superstitious, I’m just careful.
Last night I attended a radio show being taped at the Aladdin Theater. It airs here on Portland’s public radio station and is called Live Wire. Last night they actually taped two shows so it was sort of a long night. Live Wire is a combination of comedy, radio skits, music and interviews and is generally amusing. Like Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion show there is a person creating sound effects and if the banter wasn’t so topical, you might close your eyes and imagine you’ve slipped back in time.
Sometimes on the Live Wire show a local writer reads an essay and last night Stacy Bolt read a piece about an A-frame cottage her family once owned in Lincoln City in the Road’s End neighborhood. Lincoln City is on the Oregon coast and she has memories of summers and holidays spent there before the casino and outlet malls were built. When there was still available real estate on the ocean front. The neighborhood that she once visited still has plenty of charm, but now most of the homes cost at least a million and many families will never have access to the endless blue of the Pacific or be lulled to sleep by the surf.
When Bolt finished reading her piece I was struck by the power of a good essay. How it can convey a glimpse of a person’s life, or paint a giant swath of truth. In my copy of The Norton Book of Personal Essays, editor Joseph Epstein calls the personal essay a happy accident of literature. He writes: “I call it an accident because it seems to have come into the world without anything like a line of descent. Michel de Montaigne (1530-1590) was its first great practitioner, the first man to make plain that he did not intend to be either exhaustive or definitive in his writing and to use the first-person singular in a fairly regular way. Montaigne once referred to himself as an ‘accidental philosopher.’”
Like Epstein, I don’t believe that many writers start out in life to become essayists. Perhaps that because essay writing is taught in school and so thus is tainted with a dusty or dutiful pall. Perhaps because essay writers are always scrambling for an audience or publications for their essays. Like poetry, I believe that essays are like small gems. And like the best gems they gleam with clarity and the writer’s heart.
But still, some of the legacies of childhood are indelible. For example, Portland is a town swarming with cats and my neighborhood is a sort of cat central. Now, I don’t have anything against cats except I’m allergic to them, but sometimes I wonder if they don’t outnumber our citizenry. When I’m staying home for the evening I like to walk at dusk and that’s when the cats seem to have taken over. They’re sauntering down sidewalks like they own the place, lounging on porches, lolling in flower beds, and peering at me from stoops as if I’m an interloper in their kingdom, which I suppose I am. And I swear this neighborhood is literally crawling with black cats. And try as I might to avoid them, they are invariably crisscrossing my path as I chug along in the gathering dusk. And as the tiny wraiths slink past, some part of me is seven years old and is trying to dance out of its trajectory. So, of course, I’m not superstitious, I’m just careful.
Last night I attended a radio show being taped at the Aladdin Theater. It airs here on Portland’s public radio station and is called Live Wire. Last night they actually taped two shows so it was sort of a long night. Live Wire is a combination of comedy, radio skits, music and interviews and is generally amusing. Like Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion show there is a person creating sound effects and if the banter wasn’t so topical, you might close your eyes and imagine you’ve slipped back in time.
Sometimes on the Live Wire show a local writer reads an essay and last night Stacy Bolt read a piece about an A-frame cottage her family once owned in Lincoln City in the Road’s End neighborhood. Lincoln City is on the Oregon coast and she has memories of summers and holidays spent there before the casino and outlet malls were built. When there was still available real estate on the ocean front. The neighborhood that she once visited still has plenty of charm, but now most of the homes cost at least a million and many families will never have access to the endless blue of the Pacific or be lulled to sleep by the surf.
When Bolt finished reading her piece I was struck by the power of a good essay. How it can convey a glimpse of a person’s life, or paint a giant swath of truth. In my copy of The Norton Book of Personal Essays, editor Joseph Epstein calls the personal essay a happy accident of literature. He writes: “I call it an accident because it seems to have come into the world without anything like a line of descent. Michel de Montaigne (1530-1590) was its first great practitioner, the first man to make plain that he did not intend to be either exhaustive or definitive in his writing and to use the first-person singular in a fairly regular way. Montaigne once referred to himself as an ‘accidental philosopher.’”
Like Epstein, I don’t believe that many writers start out in life to become essayists. Perhaps that because essay writing is taught in school and so thus is tainted with a dusty or dutiful pall. Perhaps because essay writers are always scrambling for an audience or publications for their essays. Like poetry, I believe that essays are like small gems. And like the best gems they gleam with clarity and the writer’s heart.
Monday, October 09, 2006
Today is the quintessential perfect autumn day sunny and warm and quiet and smelling faintly of dried leaves and change. I taught a fiction workshop in Newport over the weekend and was impressed at the level of activism and sense of community in the town. My students were busy and involved and full of life and art. But as I often do when I teach these one-day workshops I dumped a lot of information into their brains. We covered so many subjects—the how and why of subplots, how backstory creates motivation and how theme and premise create boundaries and along with structure, establishes a scaffolding to hang a story on.
The last question of the day came from a writer who used to attend one of my critique sessions about five years ago. I used to conduct a lot of critique sessions for fiction and nonfiction writers and at times I miss the students and the whole shebang—the tension, the laughter, the rollicking good times when a great scene was read out loud, the hope and disappointments. But mostly I like my quieter life I have now and I’d rather go out with friends in the evening or work or plop on my couch with a book. And I know it sounds cold, but sometimes it’s easier to mentor writers from a distance than to show up week after week and deal with bruised egos and hurt feelings.
So this student who lives on the Oregon coast used to drive into Portland every week, but understandably grew weary of the commute and lately has been working on his novel with the help of a writer’s group. I have never forgotten his story set in a coastal town in the early days of the salmon fishing and canning industry. It features an interesting protagonist, a clash of cultures between the Chinese and locals, a murder investigation, and at least one body part –I believe it was a hand, showing up in canning plant. As I recall, the hand had been parboiled.
His question, the last of the day, was how to take all the information that he’d learned that day and apply it to the manuscript he was working on. So here’s what I think. While you work, you need to keep learning. You need to use a checklist of elements such as the ones I give away in my classes (I’ll ask my webmaster to post it at my web site) or work with a book such as Michael Seidman’s The Complete Guide to Editing Your Fiction.
As you write, keep reading the many books published on craft by Writer’s Digest and other publishing houses, read The Writer and Writer’s Digest magazine and Poets & Writers. Download information from the web and pay attention to information from organizations like Romance Writers of America since they offer volumes of helpful information at various sites.
Analyze the novels you’re reading, noticing when the author slipped in a flashback and how he or she doles out the backstory. Note the proportion of action to description, how technical information is handled, if there is subtext in the dialogue. Notice how many secondary characters show up and notice the physicality of the cast. Read with a pen, paying attention to diction and how the language affects the mood of the story and how much time it takes the writer to move and out of scenes. Are there scene cuts? What about smells? Secrets? How many characters are wrestling with inner conflict? How many subplots? How many chapters and scenes end in cliffhangers? How has he or she used weather and setting details to enhance the story?
Now, as you’re analyzing novels and reading about craft it’s not going to jell all at once. Sometimes as you’re writing you’ll have a breakthrough, sometimes you’ll swear you’re losing your mind. But if you keep analyzing technique and reading about craft, then especially when you step away from your manuscript by walking, driving, gardening, showering, or whatever, sometimes you’ll find a connection, an answer, a eureka moment. It seems to me that often when fiction writers sit down and work on a novel that they do so in a sort of isolation chamber. Keep looking for answers, they’re out there somewhere. Step away from the work and let your mind roam free.And remember that writing requires as much analysis as it does creativity.
The last question of the day came from a writer who used to attend one of my critique sessions about five years ago. I used to conduct a lot of critique sessions for fiction and nonfiction writers and at times I miss the students and the whole shebang—the tension, the laughter, the rollicking good times when a great scene was read out loud, the hope and disappointments. But mostly I like my quieter life I have now and I’d rather go out with friends in the evening or work or plop on my couch with a book. And I know it sounds cold, but sometimes it’s easier to mentor writers from a distance than to show up week after week and deal with bruised egos and hurt feelings.
So this student who lives on the Oregon coast used to drive into Portland every week, but understandably grew weary of the commute and lately has been working on his novel with the help of a writer’s group. I have never forgotten his story set in a coastal town in the early days of the salmon fishing and canning industry. It features an interesting protagonist, a clash of cultures between the Chinese and locals, a murder investigation, and at least one body part –I believe it was a hand, showing up in canning plant. As I recall, the hand had been parboiled.
His question, the last of the day, was how to take all the information that he’d learned that day and apply it to the manuscript he was working on. So here’s what I think. While you work, you need to keep learning. You need to use a checklist of elements such as the ones I give away in my classes (I’ll ask my webmaster to post it at my web site) or work with a book such as Michael Seidman’s The Complete Guide to Editing Your Fiction.
As you write, keep reading the many books published on craft by Writer’s Digest and other publishing houses, read The Writer and Writer’s Digest magazine and Poets & Writers. Download information from the web and pay attention to information from organizations like Romance Writers of America since they offer volumes of helpful information at various sites.
Analyze the novels you’re reading, noticing when the author slipped in a flashback and how he or she doles out the backstory. Note the proportion of action to description, how technical information is handled, if there is subtext in the dialogue. Notice how many secondary characters show up and notice the physicality of the cast. Read with a pen, paying attention to diction and how the language affects the mood of the story and how much time it takes the writer to move and out of scenes. Are there scene cuts? What about smells? Secrets? How many characters are wrestling with inner conflict? How many subplots? How many chapters and scenes end in cliffhangers? How has he or she used weather and setting details to enhance the story?
Now, as you’re analyzing novels and reading about craft it’s not going to jell all at once. Sometimes as you’re writing you’ll have a breakthrough, sometimes you’ll swear you’re losing your mind. But if you keep analyzing technique and reading about craft, then especially when you step away from your manuscript by walking, driving, gardening, showering, or whatever, sometimes you’ll find a connection, an answer, a eureka moment. It seems to me that often when fiction writers sit down and work on a novel that they do so in a sort of isolation chamber. Keep looking for answers, they’re out there somewhere. Step away from the work and let your mind roam free.And remember that writing requires as much analysis as it does creativity.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
So I’m having one of those days where I woke up too early and then drank two cups of Earl Gray tea and now feel jittery and unfocused. It seems to me that caffeine works best when you’ve had enough sleep. Problem is, you tend to need it when you’re tired. But as usual, I’ve worked on my book already and am now going to work on a proposal for an upcoming book.
But I wanted to mention a talk I heard last night at the Willamette Writers meeting. Willamette Writers is one of the biggest writing organizations in the country with more than 1400 members and 800 writers attending our 2006 conference. Since I’ve been traveling to conferences in other states I know how impressive these numbers are and that we’re a vital and varied group of professional writers and wannabes.
Larry Brooks was the speaker at our monthly meeting and he was talking about the six main elements needed in fiction to assure that it’s marketable. He talked about needing a dynamite concept, intriguing characters, and the like and claimed that you needed at least two of these elements to guarantee a sale. And then he said something interesting that I’ve always thought, but have never expressed out loud in a lecture.
The rules that apply to published writers don’t apply to unpublished writers. Sometimes beginning writers don’t quite understand this, but this knowledge, while not exactly comforting, at least gives you a glimpse of how the publishing world works. As Brooks mentioned when a writer is trying to become published, it is called breaking in. When a writer is a already published, but is a mid-list writer and he’s trying to take his career to the next level, that’s called breaking out.
And the rules are simply different for breaking in. The biggest difference is that the manuscripts from breaking in writers must be impeccably crafted, imaginatively plotted and simmering with energy. No matter if James Patterson, John Grisham and Larry McMurtry have penned some real stinkers, or at least less-than stellar tales. Because they have already broken in and broken out so they’re allowed some duds and these less-than great works will be published even with the most glaring flaws intact.. You, as an unpublished dweeb cannot get away with this.
Brooks used himself as an example. He writes in the psychological-suspense-thriller mode and his first book published was Darkness Bound and it gained him a two-book contract. His second book was Pressure Points and he described how his editor made him completely rewrite it three times. Now, if Brooks had been an unpublished writer he’d never have gotten his foot into a publisher’s door with his second book.
So just something to think about as you go about crafting fiction (and nonfiction) that is impeccable, amazing, and polished to a fine sheen.
But I wanted to mention a talk I heard last night at the Willamette Writers meeting. Willamette Writers is one of the biggest writing organizations in the country with more than 1400 members and 800 writers attending our 2006 conference. Since I’ve been traveling to conferences in other states I know how impressive these numbers are and that we’re a vital and varied group of professional writers and wannabes.
Larry Brooks was the speaker at our monthly meeting and he was talking about the six main elements needed in fiction to assure that it’s marketable. He talked about needing a dynamite concept, intriguing characters, and the like and claimed that you needed at least two of these elements to guarantee a sale. And then he said something interesting that I’ve always thought, but have never expressed out loud in a lecture.
The rules that apply to published writers don’t apply to unpublished writers. Sometimes beginning writers don’t quite understand this, but this knowledge, while not exactly comforting, at least gives you a glimpse of how the publishing world works. As Brooks mentioned when a writer is trying to become published, it is called breaking in. When a writer is a already published, but is a mid-list writer and he’s trying to take his career to the next level, that’s called breaking out.
And the rules are simply different for breaking in. The biggest difference is that the manuscripts from breaking in writers must be impeccably crafted, imaginatively plotted and simmering with energy. No matter if James Patterson, John Grisham and Larry McMurtry have penned some real stinkers, or at least less-than stellar tales. Because they have already broken in and broken out so they’re allowed some duds and these less-than great works will be published even with the most glaring flaws intact.. You, as an unpublished dweeb cannot get away with this.
Brooks used himself as an example. He writes in the psychological-suspense-thriller mode and his first book published was Darkness Bound and it gained him a two-book contract. His second book was Pressure Points and he described how his editor made him completely rewrite it three times. Now, if Brooks had been an unpublished writer he’d never have gotten his foot into a publisher’s door with his second book.
So just something to think about as you go about crafting fiction (and nonfiction) that is impeccable, amazing, and polished to a fine sheen.
Monday, October 02, 2006
People who know me well know that writing is my port in the storm, my beloved shelter amid the raging sea of everyday life. I write almost every day and I write a lot and when I don’t write, such as when I’ve traveling or I’m teaching at a conference, I need to be planning my next project in a notebook or at the very least, be talking to writers about, you guessed it, writing. So this past weekend I invited 12 people over for a lobster dinner and I didn’t get much writing done and I'm back at my desk with relief and gratitude. Because I write on weekends, I often write on holidays before I head off to the celebration or the guests arrive at my place, I write on my birthday, I write when I cannot sleep and when I really need sleep. But this weekend I was too busy cleaning, cooking, arranging flowers and worrying about what to do with the wriggling beasts….I’ve never cooked lobsters before and it seemed the perfect reason to stage an end-of-the-summer gathering.
But as the countdown to the party approached and I visited the farmer’s market for vegetables and cleaned the bathrooms and scrubbed the spots from the living room carpet, I wondered what I was getting into. The more I thought about the liveness of our entrée, the more squeamish I became. Which is why I’m forever grateful to my dearest friend who actually dropped the critters into the pot (we cooked outdoors) and watched over them as they turned bright red. I cooked the corn on the cob, sliced pumpkin-ginger bread and arranged nasturtiums on the plate, plattered the grilled chicken and green onions, set out salads and plates and popped more champagne and tried to figure out where people were going to sit since the table was filled with food and accoutrements. And once they were cooked I chopped them in half for some guests and poured them all ramekins of melted butter flavored with lemon, basil, chives and Italian parsley. It really pays to grow fresh herbs. And then I ate half a lobster and started clearing up the mess, and when the last guest wobbled out the door, I cleaned more and woke the next day my place smelling like a wharf and I kept cleaning. And when I discovered that some of the borrowed seafood forks were missing, dug into the garbage bag of lobster husks and greasy corn and trash and practically threw up for the first time since I was pregnant, which was when throwing up was my hobby. And then went to the farmer’s market because I’m going to whip up a huge pot of vegetable soup later today to settle my stomach and then I joined about twenty women for a brunch at a friend’s house, where, you guessed it, I talked about writing.
So the past few days were just plain busy and I’m glad the party is over and I’m back into my routine. And I need to remind people that NaNoWriMo is coming up in November and they should bite the bullet and settle in and crank out 50,000 words. And yes, you can crank out 50,000 words in 30 days because thousands of writers and would-be writers have been doing just that since 1999. It’s lots of fun, like a toboggan ride down a good steep hill is a lot of fun, and all the support you need is available at NaNoWriMo.org and if you live in a decent-size city there is a likely a group of writers meeting throughout November cheering each other on.
I talked with Chris Baty who is the founder of the whole shebang on Thursday. Talking to Chris is like a shot of adrenaline—he’s funny and bright and creative and kind and I can see how he first coerced 20 friends to join him in this crazy but then not-so-crazy venture back in 1999. I was reminded of Winston Churchill's quote that meeting Roosevelt was like uncorking your first bottle of champagne. Baty wrote about it all in No Plot? No Problem! (A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days). If you’re read the book, Chris sounds exactly like that.
The reason that I was talking to Chris is that NaNoWriMo is a nonprofit organization and some of the money and donations that they collect at the web site is spent building children’s libraries in Vietnam. Libraries have already been built and stocked with books and the stories between the covers of the books are changing young lives. I don’t know about you, but the city library in my hometown and reading in general, was the port in the storm of my childhood. In order to increase the donations to $5000, NaNoWriMo is going to offer donors my editing services along with mentoring from an agent and Chris Baty. I believe in libraries for children and people sitting down and writing as if their pants are on fire, no matter if the draft isn’t fabulous. There is always time to fix it once it’s written. Just sit there and start typing. And if you’ve got money to donate, help us bring books to these children.
But as the countdown to the party approached and I visited the farmer’s market for vegetables and cleaned the bathrooms and scrubbed the spots from the living room carpet, I wondered what I was getting into. The more I thought about the liveness of our entrée, the more squeamish I became. Which is why I’m forever grateful to my dearest friend who actually dropped the critters into the pot (we cooked outdoors) and watched over them as they turned bright red. I cooked the corn on the cob, sliced pumpkin-ginger bread and arranged nasturtiums on the plate, plattered the grilled chicken and green onions, set out salads and plates and popped more champagne and tried to figure out where people were going to sit since the table was filled with food and accoutrements. And once they were cooked I chopped them in half for some guests and poured them all ramekins of melted butter flavored with lemon, basil, chives and Italian parsley. It really pays to grow fresh herbs. And then I ate half a lobster and started clearing up the mess, and when the last guest wobbled out the door, I cleaned more and woke the next day my place smelling like a wharf and I kept cleaning. And when I discovered that some of the borrowed seafood forks were missing, dug into the garbage bag of lobster husks and greasy corn and trash and practically threw up for the first time since I was pregnant, which was when throwing up was my hobby. And then went to the farmer’s market because I’m going to whip up a huge pot of vegetable soup later today to settle my stomach and then I joined about twenty women for a brunch at a friend’s house, where, you guessed it, I talked about writing.
So the past few days were just plain busy and I’m glad the party is over and I’m back into my routine. And I need to remind people that NaNoWriMo is coming up in November and they should bite the bullet and settle in and crank out 50,000 words. And yes, you can crank out 50,000 words in 30 days because thousands of writers and would-be writers have been doing just that since 1999. It’s lots of fun, like a toboggan ride down a good steep hill is a lot of fun, and all the support you need is available at NaNoWriMo.org and if you live in a decent-size city there is a likely a group of writers meeting throughout November cheering each other on.
I talked with Chris Baty who is the founder of the whole shebang on Thursday. Talking to Chris is like a shot of adrenaline—he’s funny and bright and creative and kind and I can see how he first coerced 20 friends to join him in this crazy but then not-so-crazy venture back in 1999. I was reminded of Winston Churchill's quote that meeting Roosevelt was like uncorking your first bottle of champagne. Baty wrote about it all in No Plot? No Problem! (A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days). If you’re read the book, Chris sounds exactly like that.
The reason that I was talking to Chris is that NaNoWriMo is a nonprofit organization and some of the money and donations that they collect at the web site is spent building children’s libraries in Vietnam. Libraries have already been built and stocked with books and the stories between the covers of the books are changing young lives. I don’t know about you, but the city library in my hometown and reading in general, was the port in the storm of my childhood. In order to increase the donations to $5000, NaNoWriMo is going to offer donors my editing services along with mentoring from an agent and Chris Baty. I believe in libraries for children and people sitting down and writing as if their pants are on fire, no matter if the draft isn’t fabulous. There is always time to fix it once it’s written. Just sit there and start typing. And if you’ve got money to donate, help us bring books to these children.
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
“How can you . . . write well about a place? My advice can be reduced to two principles—one of style, the other of substance. First, choose your words with unusual care. If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion; . . . As for substance, be intensely selective. If you are describing a beach, don’t write that ‘the shore was scattered with rocks’ or that ‘occasionally a seagull flew over.’ Shores have a tendency to be scattered with rocks and to be flown over by seagulls. Eliminate every such fact that is a known attribute: don’t tell us that the sea had waves and the sand was white. Find details that are significant. They may be important to your narrative; they may be unusual, or colorful, or comic, or entertaining. But make sure they do useful work.” William Zinsser
Summer weather has returned to our region and the morning has dawned blue and soft and clear. But still the signs of autumn are everywhere—in my fading garden, in the trees shifting to yellows and scarlets, in the pumpkins and peppers and gourds piled high at the farmer’s market.
I’ve been working on a bunch of editing projects this week and I want to suggest a few things about language. Something I mention often when I speak at writer’s conferences is that a writer needs to put himself or herself into the mindset of an editor. And the first thing you need to know about editors is that they’re word people. Most are English majors, most are also accomplished writers. At the very least they can spot whether you’re an accomplished writer or a hack and they will judge your level of skill after reading only a few sentences or your manuscript or query letter. They will base this judgment, not so much on your ideas—because there are lots of so-so ideas or story concepts that sell, and lots of terrific concepts and plots that fail—but rather on which words you use in your sentences to bring the reader into a fictional world, or to introduce an idea.
Editors notice is there is a bevy of modifiers clogging up sentences and if there is simply too many words used to get the job done in a sentence. Remember that every word in every sentence needs a job to accomplish. If it has no job, get rid of it. They will also notice if you use wimpy verbs, passive verbs, or passive linking verbs when vibrant and muscular verbs are called for to push the sentences along.
And because editors love language, they also notice if you’ve imbued your prose with a bit of fairy dust or figurative language. We use figurative language because it creates excitement, surprise, and layers of meaning and associations in the reader’s imagination. If your writing never makes these leaps, never makes comparisons, never dares to riff on a subject, the writing will be pallid.
So yes, yes, yes, learn all about plot and character development and subtext and structure. But start with your most basic tools and create magic, no matter the subject, word by word.
Summer weather has returned to our region and the morning has dawned blue and soft and clear. But still the signs of autumn are everywhere—in my fading garden, in the trees shifting to yellows and scarlets, in the pumpkins and peppers and gourds piled high at the farmer’s market.
I’ve been working on a bunch of editing projects this week and I want to suggest a few things about language. Something I mention often when I speak at writer’s conferences is that a writer needs to put himself or herself into the mindset of an editor. And the first thing you need to know about editors is that they’re word people. Most are English majors, most are also accomplished writers. At the very least they can spot whether you’re an accomplished writer or a hack and they will judge your level of skill after reading only a few sentences or your manuscript or query letter. They will base this judgment, not so much on your ideas—because there are lots of so-so ideas or story concepts that sell, and lots of terrific concepts and plots that fail—but rather on which words you use in your sentences to bring the reader into a fictional world, or to introduce an idea.
Editors notice is there is a bevy of modifiers clogging up sentences and if there is simply too many words used to get the job done in a sentence. Remember that every word in every sentence needs a job to accomplish. If it has no job, get rid of it. They will also notice if you use wimpy verbs, passive verbs, or passive linking verbs when vibrant and muscular verbs are called for to push the sentences along.
And because editors love language, they also notice if you’ve imbued your prose with a bit of fairy dust or figurative language. We use figurative language because it creates excitement, surprise, and layers of meaning and associations in the reader’s imagination. If your writing never makes these leaps, never makes comparisons, never dares to riff on a subject, the writing will be pallid.
So yes, yes, yes, learn all about plot and character development and subtext and structure. But start with your most basic tools and create magic, no matter the subject, word by word.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
I write for the same reason I breathe-- because if I didn't, I would die. ~ Isaac Asimov
The sky has been confused lately with rain coming and going, the sun playing peek-a-boo, and sunsets that are part rosy glow, part gloom. I know I’ve been complaining about global warming and excess heat, but this much rain, so early in the season is odd. I was out running errands yesterday before my mahjongg game and the traffic was crazy, sort of a giant bumper car game with cars skidding around and tailgating and drivers seeming to have forgotten how to navigate slick pavement. For those who live in a desert I wish you could smell this place after the first rains of the season—it smells like sweet ferns and earth and there is a dampness that infiltrates your lungs and permeates your bones. Although the sun is returning later today, at least the forest fires in the region are sputtering out and our parched lawns and gardens are revived.
I woke up too early this morning so have been sitting here bleary-eyed working on my bad guys book. I’m writing the chapter on villains and evil and keep tossing around ideas about both. Sometimes the line between good and evil is fragile, sometimes it’s finite because people agree that rape, murder, and pedophilia are evil. So I keep wracking my memory for the best known villains in literature (I’m trying to avoid film references in this book, although I’m not sure that strategy will work) and then thinking back to the villains I’ve read about recently. George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Ice series has terrific villains and lots of characters who shift alliances and morality as the need arises. He’s one of the few authors who allows his characters a real range to change over time.
But I wanted to mention that I’ve edited more short stories for a client this week and want to bring up a few points. If you’re writing short stories I believe that first you should be striving for is a single effect in the way that a song or poem strives for a single effect. Short stories are traditionally written to be read in a single sitting which makes the impact of the story more profound. There must be something important at stake for your main character and because you’re transporting a reader to another time and place, the short story must also contain a bit of magic.
Because of their length, short stories are fiction on a budget. You’ll also have fewer scenes (typically 3-7), fewer settings and characters and less dialogue. Dialogue needs to be crisp and strictly related to the story events. But then, despite your tight budget, a short story must portray significant events and the action must arc to some kind of peak. Now this doesn’t mean you need a shoot-out or divorce to end the story, but something important must happen to an interesting person at a crucial time in his or her life. One of the problems I see as an editor is that writers often create anecdotes, or a series of anecdotes instead of a situation that demands a resolution.
While there is no template for short stories, generally they are about conflict, a decision, or a discovery. The conflict plot should be staged so that an antagonist is the obstacle and the climax is a confrontation. If the short story climax has the protagonist making a decision, this decision should have far-reaching consequences. If the story ends with the character making a discovery through some kind of realization, this realization should have potential to be life changing
Finally, while short stories generally don’t have subplots, they need some kind of back story or influences from a time before the story began. This might be a recollection, a flashback or summary. If the reader is shown only the present moment with no knowledge of a character’s past or previous influences, the story can be thin and unconvincing.
The sky has been confused lately with rain coming and going, the sun playing peek-a-boo, and sunsets that are part rosy glow, part gloom. I know I’ve been complaining about global warming and excess heat, but this much rain, so early in the season is odd. I was out running errands yesterday before my mahjongg game and the traffic was crazy, sort of a giant bumper car game with cars skidding around and tailgating and drivers seeming to have forgotten how to navigate slick pavement. For those who live in a desert I wish you could smell this place after the first rains of the season—it smells like sweet ferns and earth and there is a dampness that infiltrates your lungs and permeates your bones. Although the sun is returning later today, at least the forest fires in the region are sputtering out and our parched lawns and gardens are revived.
I woke up too early this morning so have been sitting here bleary-eyed working on my bad guys book. I’m writing the chapter on villains and evil and keep tossing around ideas about both. Sometimes the line between good and evil is fragile, sometimes it’s finite because people agree that rape, murder, and pedophilia are evil. So I keep wracking my memory for the best known villains in literature (I’m trying to avoid film references in this book, although I’m not sure that strategy will work) and then thinking back to the villains I’ve read about recently. George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Ice series has terrific villains and lots of characters who shift alliances and morality as the need arises. He’s one of the few authors who allows his characters a real range to change over time.
But I wanted to mention that I’ve edited more short stories for a client this week and want to bring up a few points. If you’re writing short stories I believe that first you should be striving for is a single effect in the way that a song or poem strives for a single effect. Short stories are traditionally written to be read in a single sitting which makes the impact of the story more profound. There must be something important at stake for your main character and because you’re transporting a reader to another time and place, the short story must also contain a bit of magic.
Because of their length, short stories are fiction on a budget. You’ll also have fewer scenes (typically 3-7), fewer settings and characters and less dialogue. Dialogue needs to be crisp and strictly related to the story events. But then, despite your tight budget, a short story must portray significant events and the action must arc to some kind of peak. Now this doesn’t mean you need a shoot-out or divorce to end the story, but something important must happen to an interesting person at a crucial time in his or her life. One of the problems I see as an editor is that writers often create anecdotes, or a series of anecdotes instead of a situation that demands a resolution.
While there is no template for short stories, generally they are about conflict, a decision, or a discovery. The conflict plot should be staged so that an antagonist is the obstacle and the climax is a confrontation. If the short story climax has the protagonist making a decision, this decision should have far-reaching consequences. If the story ends with the character making a discovery through some kind of realization, this realization should have potential to be life changing
Finally, while short stories generally don’t have subplots, they need some kind of back story or influences from a time before the story began. This might be a recollection, a flashback or summary. If the reader is shown only the present moment with no knowledge of a character’s past or previous influences, the story can be thin and unconvincing.
Monday, September 18, 2006
Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. Rainer Marie Rilke
I woke to sullen skies and rain this morning. Standing at the open patio door I breathed in the wet air while my tea steeped. It was a busy weekend, hanging out with friends and writers. I bought an armchair and a friend and her husband delivered it Saturday morning and I spent a lot of time over the weekend cleaning and rearranging furniture in my living room, office and bedroom. As I was doing so I was thinking back to how I used to play house as a girl. I wonder if children still do this as much as our generation and those before us did. Perhaps not, since children, especially girls have more options before them.
All those years of playing house, making beds, dressing dolls, sweeping, whipping together meals of acorns and creek water and flowers were a wonderful way to spend time. It seems to me that it’s how children build their imaginations and learn to live within a story. I started going to the library when I was about four and one of the first books I read was The Box Children. It’s the story of four siblings who run away and for a while live in an abandoned box car in a woods. Just like me, the second oldest sibling was a girl named Jessie and also like me, she was charged with domestic chores and caring for her younger brother and sister. I cannot tell you how charmed I was by this story and how we played endless variations of it. When my youngest brother Colin was born we moved into a larger house amid a huge yard wreathed in evergreens and cedars. In some places the trees formed tunnels and in these spaces, we pretended to be brave orphans, fending for ourselves.
But as I mentioned, I also spent time with writers over the weekend. One woman who is retired has mostly stopped writing at this point. She seems disillusioned by the publishing world, and wonders why she should work on stories and poems when the publishing world is so difficult to break into. It’s hard to refute this logic, but I suggested that once you break in, that it’s always easier thereafter. Another writer who I had dinner with on Friday night is father to a toddler and stepfather to two older boys. He works full time and writes mostly in the evenings. His wife who stays home with the children has written five manuscripts and is reworking one of them. After we talked I imagined the clamor of their household and how hard it was for them to claim the time for their writing.
On Sunday I met another woman for tea. She wrote a novel ten years ago and at one time she had an agent and publishers interested in it, but the deal fell through. Since then she has relocated to Portland, gotten married, and went through a year and a half of health problems. She has started a new novel and was talking about the practical steps in staking out the time and space to write. She’s now a stepmother to two teenage girls and is going to buy a laptop. They’re also going to remodel their attic to create a master suite where she’ll have more privacy.
Over the years I’ve always mentioned to students that every writer needs a time and place that is all theirs for writing. Even if the place is a corner of a bedroom or a reconfigured closet. But of course, like all advice, this isn’t always possible. If before you can write, you’re forced to wrest the family computer from a teenager, or clear off the breakfast dishes from the kitchen table so you can sit there, it’s just one more barrier that stops the writing.
In college I minored in Women’s Studies and we talked about Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. It is a series of essays, based on Woolf's lectures addressing "the question of women and fiction." She ponders the question of a woman producing art such as Shakespeare’s plays. Woolf examines women's historical experiences and the unique struggles of the woman artist. She invented a sister for Shakespeare, Judith, and explains that she would have been denied her brother’s opportunities. Woolf wrote, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is going to write." I can remember our earnest, angry discussions in these classes, professors breaking new ground, introducing little known authors like Tillie Olson. We were killing off the vestiges of the Victorian era, but it seems to me that the struggle for space and time to write for both men and women, continues.
I woke to sullen skies and rain this morning. Standing at the open patio door I breathed in the wet air while my tea steeped. It was a busy weekend, hanging out with friends and writers. I bought an armchair and a friend and her husband delivered it Saturday morning and I spent a lot of time over the weekend cleaning and rearranging furniture in my living room, office and bedroom. As I was doing so I was thinking back to how I used to play house as a girl. I wonder if children still do this as much as our generation and those before us did. Perhaps not, since children, especially girls have more options before them.
All those years of playing house, making beds, dressing dolls, sweeping, whipping together meals of acorns and creek water and flowers were a wonderful way to spend time. It seems to me that it’s how children build their imaginations and learn to live within a story. I started going to the library when I was about four and one of the first books I read was The Box Children. It’s the story of four siblings who run away and for a while live in an abandoned box car in a woods. Just like me, the second oldest sibling was a girl named Jessie and also like me, she was charged with domestic chores and caring for her younger brother and sister. I cannot tell you how charmed I was by this story and how we played endless variations of it. When my youngest brother Colin was born we moved into a larger house amid a huge yard wreathed in evergreens and cedars. In some places the trees formed tunnels and in these spaces, we pretended to be brave orphans, fending for ourselves.
But as I mentioned, I also spent time with writers over the weekend. One woman who is retired has mostly stopped writing at this point. She seems disillusioned by the publishing world, and wonders why she should work on stories and poems when the publishing world is so difficult to break into. It’s hard to refute this logic, but I suggested that once you break in, that it’s always easier thereafter. Another writer who I had dinner with on Friday night is father to a toddler and stepfather to two older boys. He works full time and writes mostly in the evenings. His wife who stays home with the children has written five manuscripts and is reworking one of them. After we talked I imagined the clamor of their household and how hard it was for them to claim the time for their writing.
On Sunday I met another woman for tea. She wrote a novel ten years ago and at one time she had an agent and publishers interested in it, but the deal fell through. Since then she has relocated to Portland, gotten married, and went through a year and a half of health problems. She has started a new novel and was talking about the practical steps in staking out the time and space to write. She’s now a stepmother to two teenage girls and is going to buy a laptop. They’re also going to remodel their attic to create a master suite where she’ll have more privacy.
Over the years I’ve always mentioned to students that every writer needs a time and place that is all theirs for writing. Even if the place is a corner of a bedroom or a reconfigured closet. But of course, like all advice, this isn’t always possible. If before you can write, you’re forced to wrest the family computer from a teenager, or clear off the breakfast dishes from the kitchen table so you can sit there, it’s just one more barrier that stops the writing.
In college I minored in Women’s Studies and we talked about Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. It is a series of essays, based on Woolf's lectures addressing "the question of women and fiction." She ponders the question of a woman producing art such as Shakespeare’s plays. Woolf examines women's historical experiences and the unique struggles of the woman artist. She invented a sister for Shakespeare, Judith, and explains that she would have been denied her brother’s opportunities. Woolf wrote, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is going to write." I can remember our earnest, angry discussions in these classes, professors breaking new ground, introducing little known authors like Tillie Olson. We were killing off the vestiges of the Victorian era, but it seems to me that the struggle for space and time to write for both men and women, continues.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Last night a weather system from Canada bustled in here, completely changing the way the world feels. I was out walking at dusk and the wind was whisking the trees into an overhead rumba and the sun was setting in pales shades of pink, overshadowed by clouds roiling and gray. The clouds have remained this morning and rain is forecast although it’s early for us. With global warming it’s difficult to know what our weather is supposed to be like any more, but generally we have a bit of rain in September and summer lasts until about the end of October. In fact, often Halloween trick-or-treating happens in the midst of a downpour.
In Portland we still trick-or-treat at night, as seems right for the proper ambience and spookiness. I used to live in neighborhood of old houses and mansions and almost everyone decorated for Halloween turning front lawns into graveyards, porches and front hallways into haunted houses, and adding sound effects of shrieks and ghostly moans. Often grown-ups answered the door in costume, decked out for fright. Last night as I was hustling through my neighborhood it felt like Halloween and one neighbor had lit a fire in his fireplace scenting the air with woodsmoke.
This week for the first time in months I didn’t have an editing project on hand and so had more time for reading. I finished reading Kafka on the Shore, reread Say When by Elizabeth Berg because I’m using it for my antagonist chapter and am now reading Anna Quindlen’s new book, Rise and Shine.
I’m writing like a madwoman every morning and am currently working on three separate chapters on the book about bad guys in fiction. Using The Old Man and the Sea for reference, I’ve just concocted a list of elements that happen between an antagonist and protagonist in a story. Here are a few: The antagonist must be worthy and well-matched to the protagonist; he must reveal the protagonist’s Achilles’ heel; there must be some proximity and intimacy involved—a rivalry between classmates is interesting, a rivalry between sisters is riveting. The antagonist is always a threat, and always pushes the protagonist off-balance. In fact, you don’t want your protagonist balanced, chipper and mighty. You want to create him or her struggling throughout the story and the outcome must appear in doubt and cause apprehension in the reader.
My list of qualities goes on and on and I’ve spent a lot of time this week trying to delineate the different qualities of bad guys in fiction. I keep asking myself what exactly is a villain, and I’ve come to realize that they fall broadly into two types, sympathetic and unsympathetic. It’s easy to delineate between an anti-hero and a villain, but now I’m starting to worry how I’m going to stake out the territory for dark heroes. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t included that chapter and am realizing that I’m going to need to read romances, gothic stories and fantasies in order to find examples. Often answers come to me when I’m out walking or driving, so the trick is to capture these thoughts as soon as I can grab a pen or hurry to my computer. But the writing is going well and the season is changing and so am I.
In Portland we still trick-or-treat at night, as seems right for the proper ambience and spookiness. I used to live in neighborhood of old houses and mansions and almost everyone decorated for Halloween turning front lawns into graveyards, porches and front hallways into haunted houses, and adding sound effects of shrieks and ghostly moans. Often grown-ups answered the door in costume, decked out for fright. Last night as I was hustling through my neighborhood it felt like Halloween and one neighbor had lit a fire in his fireplace scenting the air with woodsmoke.
This week for the first time in months I didn’t have an editing project on hand and so had more time for reading. I finished reading Kafka on the Shore, reread Say When by Elizabeth Berg because I’m using it for my antagonist chapter and am now reading Anna Quindlen’s new book, Rise and Shine.
I’m writing like a madwoman every morning and am currently working on three separate chapters on the book about bad guys in fiction. Using The Old Man and the Sea for reference, I’ve just concocted a list of elements that happen between an antagonist and protagonist in a story. Here are a few: The antagonist must be worthy and well-matched to the protagonist; he must reveal the protagonist’s Achilles’ heel; there must be some proximity and intimacy involved—a rivalry between classmates is interesting, a rivalry between sisters is riveting. The antagonist is always a threat, and always pushes the protagonist off-balance. In fact, you don’t want your protagonist balanced, chipper and mighty. You want to create him or her struggling throughout the story and the outcome must appear in doubt and cause apprehension in the reader.
My list of qualities goes on and on and I’ve spent a lot of time this week trying to delineate the different qualities of bad guys in fiction. I keep asking myself what exactly is a villain, and I’ve come to realize that they fall broadly into two types, sympathetic and unsympathetic. It’s easy to delineate between an anti-hero and a villain, but now I’m starting to worry how I’m going to stake out the territory for dark heroes. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t included that chapter and am realizing that I’m going to need to read romances, gothic stories and fantasies in order to find examples. Often answers come to me when I’m out walking or driving, so the trick is to capture these thoughts as soon as I can grab a pen or hurry to my computer. But the writing is going well and the season is changing and so am I.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
This morning there are jet trailings in a pale blue sky and it’s clear that autumn is on the way with cooler days and a changing landscape. Last Saturday the heat was almost unbearable, yesterday, the day was perfect after a nighttime rainfall that scrubbed the city. In the afternoon I met with a client who has written a short story collection. It was great to work on her stories because the writing was crisp, powerful, and insightful. She’s a medical doctor who has worked for 17 years in a clinic that serves homeless people. And I wish all my clients spent as much time working on and rethinking their stories.
She wants to finish the final rewrite by December and explained that she’s sick of working on the stories. I told her my theory of how often when a writer has been working on a manuscript for a long time that you often come to loathe it. I call it giving birth to ugly babies. When I was working on Between the Lines, I mentioned this to my editor who was a bit shocked, and wrote me an e-mail about how ugly ducklings turn into swans. No matter, I rewrite everything except this blog at least five times and advise everyone else to push their work through a series of drafts.
After I met with the doctor I joined friends to see the film Quinceanera. What a delight! Afterwards, we went out for dinner and talked about it, worrying over the characters as if they were still living in the Echo Park neighborhood of L.A. where it was filmed. It’s about a girl named Magdalena who is approaching her 15th birthday and the important Latino custom of Quinceanera which celebrates the passage from girlhood to womanhood with an elaborate and expensive ritual and ceremony. But then Magdalena has a falling out with her family and goes to live with her great-uncle and gay cousin. It’s about acceptance and forgiveness and family and a Latino neighborhood in transition. It’s written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmorland, and it understandably won awards at Sundance. If want to see a fresh view of life and unaffected performances, especially by the leads Emily Rios and Jesse Garcia, this film will knock you on your butt.
If you’re looking for a fresh voice and approach to novel writing, you might want to pick up the novel Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. I’ve only read the first 100 pages but am already understanding why he’s read by people far beyond Japan and why magical realism has so many devoted fans. It’s the story of a 15- year-old boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home to avoid a prophesy. He’s destined to meet another character, Tamura, a man who was forever changed when he became unconscious during a classroom outing during World War II. Tamura can talk to cats and one such exchange with an erudite Siamese is some of the wittiest dialogue I’ve read in years.
You might also want to listen to the Ann Garrels report on Guffran, a 9-year-old girl living in Baghdad that aired on NPR Saturday morning, September 9th. Her father was killed five months ago in a carjacking. When he was alive, she enjoyed writing letters to him and leaving them around their house for him to find. When he died, her letters were with him and she’s afraid the people who killed her father might come for her. But although she lives in terror, she's still writing him letters and always goes with her mother when she leaves home in case something happens to her mother, she can at least scream for help. The story is at www.npr.org where you can listen to Garrel’s broadcast.
Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I’ll never forget the perfection of that sky, the promise of autumn, a morning and week so filled with beauty and so marred with tragedy. The dread about a world forever changed that clutched my heart. Please do not forget that this administration had been repeatedly warned about these attacks and chose to ignore the warnings; that these attacks and all their terrible losses and all the justifications for the acts that followed, including the invasion of Iraq, were likely preventable.
She wants to finish the final rewrite by December and explained that she’s sick of working on the stories. I told her my theory of how often when a writer has been working on a manuscript for a long time that you often come to loathe it. I call it giving birth to ugly babies. When I was working on Between the Lines, I mentioned this to my editor who was a bit shocked, and wrote me an e-mail about how ugly ducklings turn into swans. No matter, I rewrite everything except this blog at least five times and advise everyone else to push their work through a series of drafts.
After I met with the doctor I joined friends to see the film Quinceanera. What a delight! Afterwards, we went out for dinner and talked about it, worrying over the characters as if they were still living in the Echo Park neighborhood of L.A. where it was filmed. It’s about a girl named Magdalena who is approaching her 15th birthday and the important Latino custom of Quinceanera which celebrates the passage from girlhood to womanhood with an elaborate and expensive ritual and ceremony. But then Magdalena has a falling out with her family and goes to live with her great-uncle and gay cousin. It’s about acceptance and forgiveness and family and a Latino neighborhood in transition. It’s written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmorland, and it understandably won awards at Sundance. If want to see a fresh view of life and unaffected performances, especially by the leads Emily Rios and Jesse Garcia, this film will knock you on your butt.
If you’re looking for a fresh voice and approach to novel writing, you might want to pick up the novel Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. I’ve only read the first 100 pages but am already understanding why he’s read by people far beyond Japan and why magical realism has so many devoted fans. It’s the story of a 15- year-old boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home to avoid a prophesy. He’s destined to meet another character, Tamura, a man who was forever changed when he became unconscious during a classroom outing during World War II. Tamura can talk to cats and one such exchange with an erudite Siamese is some of the wittiest dialogue I’ve read in years.
You might also want to listen to the Ann Garrels report on Guffran, a 9-year-old girl living in Baghdad that aired on NPR Saturday morning, September 9th. Her father was killed five months ago in a carjacking. When he was alive, she enjoyed writing letters to him and leaving them around their house for him to find. When he died, her letters were with him and she’s afraid the people who killed her father might come for her. But although she lives in terror, she's still writing him letters and always goes with her mother when she leaves home in case something happens to her mother, she can at least scream for help. The story is at www.npr.org where you can listen to Garrel’s broadcast.
Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I’ll never forget the perfection of that sky, the promise of autumn, a morning and week so filled with beauty and so marred with tragedy. The dread about a world forever changed that clutched my heart. Please do not forget that this administration had been repeatedly warned about these attacks and chose to ignore the warnings; that these attacks and all their terrible losses and all the justifications for the acts that followed, including the invasion of Iraq, were likely preventable.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
A book if necessary should be a hammer [or] a hand grenade which you detonate under a stagnant way of looking at the world. Wole Soyinka
Well yesterday at the same moment the Senate was about to bring a ‘no confidence’ vote against Donald Rumsfeld to the floor, Bush gave a weird speech where he admitted to that he’s been lying to us all along and secret prisons around the world do exist and that 14 of these prisoners will be transferred to Guantonamo. And of course mainstream media is not commenting on the fact that he’s been lying all these years. We operate secret prisons in other countries so there is no oversight on our interrogation methods and these people don’t have access to lawyers. Then, after letting the prisoners languish in Cuba for five years with some of them committing suicide in their despair, he wants Congress to ram through his legislation that refutes the latest Supreme Court ruling on how there prisoners are being held without trials and the Geneva Convention. The bill gives permission to torture and won’t allow him or the military to be tried for torturing. Of course, if members don’t vote for it, they will be accused of being soft on terrorism, similar to the high jinks of the Patriot Act. So the Bush crime family is busy with their usual bait and switch /smokescreen and trying to downplay the facts of how after 5 years Ben Laden is still on the loose and the occupation of Iraq is an expensive and deadly fiasco. Meanwhile the campaign to blame Bill Clinton for 9/11 is in full swing with the upcoming ABC docu-drama. Stay tuned for a massive smear campaign. Perhaps we should all boycott Disney, owners of ABC.
But enough about politics—there are many people who write more eloquently about this state of affairs. If I allow the Bush crime family to occupy too much of my mental energy, I tend to feel like I’m living in the Twilight Zone or some unending nightmare.
Actually I was thinking about this past weekend. It began with my seeing Little Miss Sunshine, a movie I highly recommend. I don’t often go to see comedies because I just find so few of them funny with a few exceptions such as A Fish Called Wanda and Sideways. Little Miss Sunshine is hilarious and provides quite a role for Allen Arkin. I don’t want to give it away except that it’s a road trip movie with dysfunctional family in a VW bus with a broken clutch on their way to a kiddie beauty pageant. On Saturday I attended two concerts. One of them was at Sake One out in Forest Grove. It was blazing hot, the music was good and we toured the sake making facility. With its massive vats and presses, I would have never guessed it was so involved.
Second concert was at the Mississippi Studios—a fun place that I recommend for intimate venues. Then Sunday night I watched the first two segments of Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts on HBO. He’s captured a lot of voices not normally heard about this tragedy (surely I don’t need to mention that this is another Bush fiasco?) along with amazing footage and controversial theories. In the final clip of part two, the camera spans a neighborhood which the winds and rain have lashed into shreds. Houses are reduced to splinters, cars are overturned, destruction is total. And I was reminded of the ending of the movie The Pianist when Adrien Brody as Wladyslaw Szpilman emerges from hiding into the nightmare landscape of the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. I believe that Roman Polanski created this backdrop on a computer, but the similarities between the two scenes is eerie.
Well yesterday at the same moment the Senate was about to bring a ‘no confidence’ vote against Donald Rumsfeld to the floor, Bush gave a weird speech where he admitted to that he’s been lying to us all along and secret prisons around the world do exist and that 14 of these prisoners will be transferred to Guantonamo. And of course mainstream media is not commenting on the fact that he’s been lying all these years. We operate secret prisons in other countries so there is no oversight on our interrogation methods and these people don’t have access to lawyers. Then, after letting the prisoners languish in Cuba for five years with some of them committing suicide in their despair, he wants Congress to ram through his legislation that refutes the latest Supreme Court ruling on how there prisoners are being held without trials and the Geneva Convention. The bill gives permission to torture and won’t allow him or the military to be tried for torturing. Of course, if members don’t vote for it, they will be accused of being soft on terrorism, similar to the high jinks of the Patriot Act. So the Bush crime family is busy with their usual bait and switch /smokescreen and trying to downplay the facts of how after 5 years Ben Laden is still on the loose and the occupation of Iraq is an expensive and deadly fiasco. Meanwhile the campaign to blame Bill Clinton for 9/11 is in full swing with the upcoming ABC docu-drama. Stay tuned for a massive smear campaign. Perhaps we should all boycott Disney, owners of ABC.
But enough about politics—there are many people who write more eloquently about this state of affairs. If I allow the Bush crime family to occupy too much of my mental energy, I tend to feel like I’m living in the Twilight Zone or some unending nightmare.
Actually I was thinking about this past weekend. It began with my seeing Little Miss Sunshine, a movie I highly recommend. I don’t often go to see comedies because I just find so few of them funny with a few exceptions such as A Fish Called Wanda and Sideways. Little Miss Sunshine is hilarious and provides quite a role for Allen Arkin. I don’t want to give it away except that it’s a road trip movie with dysfunctional family in a VW bus with a broken clutch on their way to a kiddie beauty pageant. On Saturday I attended two concerts. One of them was at Sake One out in Forest Grove. It was blazing hot, the music was good and we toured the sake making facility. With its massive vats and presses, I would have never guessed it was so involved.
Second concert was at the Mississippi Studios—a fun place that I recommend for intimate venues. Then Sunday night I watched the first two segments of Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts on HBO. He’s captured a lot of voices not normally heard about this tragedy (surely I don’t need to mention that this is another Bush fiasco?) along with amazing footage and controversial theories. In the final clip of part two, the camera spans a neighborhood which the winds and rain have lashed into shreds. Houses are reduced to splinters, cars are overturned, destruction is total. And I was reminded of the ending of the movie The Pianist when Adrien Brody as Wladyslaw Szpilman emerges from hiding into the nightmare landscape of the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. I believe that Roman Polanski created this backdrop on a computer, but the similarities between the two scenes is eerie.
Monday, September 04, 2006
I was listening to NPR on Saturday morning with Scott Simon interviewing Edward Medelshon, a professor at Columbia about his book The Things That Matter that explores how seven novels by women writers tell us about the stages of life. The novels include three by Virginia Woolf, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights. The conversation talked about if meaning can be found in reading novels. Then Mendelshon made some interesting comments about the separation between the novelist and the novel. He said that Virginia Woolf the novelist was fearless and then they went on to discuss how she weighted her pockets with rocks and drowned herself.
But his comment that most intrigued me because it jives with how I think, was this one: “The author of a novel is different than the person who sat down to write the book…..The way in which a writer, when you sit down to make a work of art seems to be cooperating with hundreds, thousands of other writers to have the support of the shape of the novel, the have the help of the English language itself …with its rhymes and its puns and its echoes and allusions. And when you sit down to write this book you’re not alone. You have all of your reading, all of the language, all you have forgotten but that got into your head working with you, helping shape the way you think about the world. And that’s going to be something more profound I suspect, much of the time, but not always, than the way you sit down to breakfast.”
Isn’t that a marvelous statement—that we have all this help and embedded memory and language and patterns at our disposal when we write? One of the main reasons that novelists, or short story writers or poets need to read the sort of works that they’re writing is because we need to allow the language and shape and themes of other authors to filter into our many layers of consciousness. All this information simmering away beneath the surface of things. All these secret shapes and themes and patterns are like magical helpers. The eye and brain record so much that we’re not aware when we read.
When I was a girl I had so many secret longings and ambitions I could scarcely hold them all. One was to become a figure skater. Since I lived in a small town in northern Wisconsin, I skated nearly every day in the winter. Often after school I’d come home and practice skating on a bumpy patch of ice on our driveway, then would visit the rink after dinner. I can still see the girl in the driveway as the sun sets and the steel sky settles into dusk. When I think back to some of those overriding emotions what I remember is a lot of frustration and sense of failure that I could not performs spins and moves of ballerina grace.
Then sometime in my adult years I was thinking of my many frustrated girlhood ambitions and realized, that of course, I never progresses as a skater because I never had a teacher to show me the steps. And you know how some times when a realization hits you with a powerful zap and you suddenly understand something important? That understanding was enormously helpful. But writers can find teachers everywhere since it’s never been a better time to be a writer. There are programs that teach craft, hundreds of books written on craft, and then the words of those who have gone before. Who laid down their tracks that can be followed as if they’ve just trekked across fresh snow.
But his comment that most intrigued me because it jives with how I think, was this one: “The author of a novel is different than the person who sat down to write the book…..The way in which a writer, when you sit down to make a work of art seems to be cooperating with hundreds, thousands of other writers to have the support of the shape of the novel, the have the help of the English language itself …with its rhymes and its puns and its echoes and allusions. And when you sit down to write this book you’re not alone. You have all of your reading, all of the language, all you have forgotten but that got into your head working with you, helping shape the way you think about the world. And that’s going to be something more profound I suspect, much of the time, but not always, than the way you sit down to breakfast.”
Isn’t that a marvelous statement—that we have all this help and embedded memory and language and patterns at our disposal when we write? One of the main reasons that novelists, or short story writers or poets need to read the sort of works that they’re writing is because we need to allow the language and shape and themes of other authors to filter into our many layers of consciousness. All this information simmering away beneath the surface of things. All these secret shapes and themes and patterns are like magical helpers. The eye and brain record so much that we’re not aware when we read.
When I was a girl I had so many secret longings and ambitions I could scarcely hold them all. One was to become a figure skater. Since I lived in a small town in northern Wisconsin, I skated nearly every day in the winter. Often after school I’d come home and practice skating on a bumpy patch of ice on our driveway, then would visit the rink after dinner. I can still see the girl in the driveway as the sun sets and the steel sky settles into dusk. When I think back to some of those overriding emotions what I remember is a lot of frustration and sense of failure that I could not performs spins and moves of ballerina grace.
Then sometime in my adult years I was thinking of my many frustrated girlhood ambitions and realized, that of course, I never progresses as a skater because I never had a teacher to show me the steps. And you know how some times when a realization hits you with a powerful zap and you suddenly understand something important? That understanding was enormously helpful. But writers can find teachers everywhere since it’s never been a better time to be a writer. There are programs that teach craft, hundreds of books written on craft, and then the words of those who have gone before. Who laid down their tracks that can be followed as if they’ve just trekked across fresh snow.
Friday, September 01, 2006
Good fiction often unsettles us, defamiliarizing what we think we know so that we see the world with newly opened eyes. Tony Eprile
My first book, Writing Out the Storm was remaindered by my publisher about a year after it was published because they lost their distributor. Unfortunately, at the time, they didn’t tell me the reason for their decisions, so I was enraged and heart broken. Looking for advice, I called a person who had been in the publishing industry for a while, wailing at the fates, trying to understand what had happened, because when the publisher called with this decision, they also told me how much they loved my book. So my publishing contact told me something I’ve never forgotten, that writing chooses us, we don’t choose it. These days I feel chosen and in sync with my writing and on fire with it. My mornings whiz by and I often need to force myself to quit writing because there are other tasks to accomplish, appointments to keep.
Yesterday I started writing my column for The Willamette Writer about using a writer’s notebook. I also call it an inspiration notebook because it’s the place I gather and glean all that I hear and notice as I go through my days. I use it for plotting out columns and chapters, for recording dreams and overheard conversations, saving quotes, listing vocabulary words I want to use, and savoring wonderfully crafted sentences and phrases I find in whatever I’m reading. Sometimes I paste poems or images or bits that strike my fancy into the pages. I cannot quite express how much I love my various notebooks and how they enrich my writing practice. How this habit brings richness and meaning to my days.
My notebooks are not diaries or journals, do not contain complaints or therapeutic venting. They are repositories, treasure troves. Since I wanted to quote excerpts from my notebooks, I paged through the four most recent ones I’ve been jotting in. And it was like watching home movies of myself as a writer—brimming with life and insights and ideas and wonder at what I found as I stumbled around on this spinning planet. Although I make it a practice to read through them from time to time—often when I go away for a writing retreat at the coast, I was blown away at all I found there. How much I had used them for the books I’ve been writing. How they provide me a place of solidity as I go about my days.
P.S. Another heat wave is starting today. If you don't believe in planetary warming, please stop by and water my flowers, I think the habit might convince you.
My first book, Writing Out the Storm was remaindered by my publisher about a year after it was published because they lost their distributor. Unfortunately, at the time, they didn’t tell me the reason for their decisions, so I was enraged and heart broken. Looking for advice, I called a person who had been in the publishing industry for a while, wailing at the fates, trying to understand what had happened, because when the publisher called with this decision, they also told me how much they loved my book. So my publishing contact told me something I’ve never forgotten, that writing chooses us, we don’t choose it. These days I feel chosen and in sync with my writing and on fire with it. My mornings whiz by and I often need to force myself to quit writing because there are other tasks to accomplish, appointments to keep.
Yesterday I started writing my column for The Willamette Writer about using a writer’s notebook. I also call it an inspiration notebook because it’s the place I gather and glean all that I hear and notice as I go through my days. I use it for plotting out columns and chapters, for recording dreams and overheard conversations, saving quotes, listing vocabulary words I want to use, and savoring wonderfully crafted sentences and phrases I find in whatever I’m reading. Sometimes I paste poems or images or bits that strike my fancy into the pages. I cannot quite express how much I love my various notebooks and how they enrich my writing practice. How this habit brings richness and meaning to my days.
My notebooks are not diaries or journals, do not contain complaints or therapeutic venting. They are repositories, treasure troves. Since I wanted to quote excerpts from my notebooks, I paged through the four most recent ones I’ve been jotting in. And it was like watching home movies of myself as a writer—brimming with life and insights and ideas and wonder at what I found as I stumbled around on this spinning planet. Although I make it a practice to read through them from time to time—often when I go away for a writing retreat at the coast, I was blown away at all I found there. How much I had used them for the books I’ve been writing. How they provide me a place of solidity as I go about my days.
P.S. Another heat wave is starting today. If you don't believe in planetary warming, please stop by and water my flowers, I think the habit might convince you.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
There’s a cold front moving through. Last night as I emerged from the theater, fall was in the air and a low-hanging crescent moon hung in the western sky seemed placed there by a genie. I finally went to see the film Wordplay. It’s about Will Shortz the editor of The New York Times daily crossword puzzle, the puzzle’s many fans, and a yearly contest held in Connecticut. It’s directed by Patrick Creadon who did an impeccable job—it’s tightly edited and he makes the whole story involving, tense, while educating and amusing. I was surprised how many times I laughed out loud, how fascinated I was by the puzzler’s minds and lives, and how much I cared about the winner of the annual dust-up. It helped that the film also included celebrity puzzle fans such as Bill Clinton, John Stewart, Ken Burns, and the Indigo Girls.
I listen to Will Shortz every Sunday morning on NPR and he’s always so kind, bright and personable and it was great to put a face to my weekly addiction. And the more I watched the film, the more amazed I was at the brain power of these people. Their vocabularies and general knowledge are amazing and you can practically see their neural passageways speeding faster than the Autobahn. My own vocabulary seems paltry in comparison. Zolaesque? And their homes and work spaces were fascinating and I doubt another film will ever feature so many dictionaries. What a hoot!
Yesterday I scrapped vast swaths of a chapter I was working on and started over—my approach and logic were all wrong. I think the most difficult part of writing an instructional book is to make it entertaining while the logic of the ideas, especially how the ideas build and hang together must be just right. It seems to me that when many people begin writing they imagine it a right brain fiesta, when it’s actually requires a lot of analysis and thoughtful planning.
I listen to Will Shortz every Sunday morning on NPR and he’s always so kind, bright and personable and it was great to put a face to my weekly addiction. And the more I watched the film, the more amazed I was at the brain power of these people. Their vocabularies and general knowledge are amazing and you can practically see their neural passageways speeding faster than the Autobahn. My own vocabulary seems paltry in comparison. Zolaesque? And their homes and work spaces were fascinating and I doubt another film will ever feature so many dictionaries. What a hoot!
Yesterday I scrapped vast swaths of a chapter I was working on and started over—my approach and logic were all wrong. I think the most difficult part of writing an instructional book is to make it entertaining while the logic of the ideas, especially how the ideas build and hang together must be just right. It seems to me that when many people begin writing they imagine it a right brain fiesta, when it’s actually requires a lot of analysis and thoughtful planning.
Saturday, August 26, 2006
The morning has dawned cool and hazy, heat is on its way. I won’t bore you with another curse to planetary warming, but I believe that this is Portland’s fifth heat wave of the summer. Enough! I returned home yesterday afternoon from a week at the coast and began immediately mourning the life I was living there. As I unpacked and handled laundry last night I was trying to identify exactly what I was mourning and I realized that besides the endless swath of water, the quality of air, that it was simply how much time I spent out of doors. I walked along the shores in the morning, spent afternoons at the beach reading and building sand castles, and ate dinners on a picnic table with the surf pounding below. I watched every sunset and slept with the window open to the sound of the surf’s lullaby.
I rose each morning and brewed cups of tea and sat at an old table overlooking the ocean and wrote longhand in two notebooks that I’d brought along. Sometimes I jotted down my early morning dreams, but most often I played with ideas for upcoming books. In fact, I made lots of progress on sketching out a plan for a specific book, researched topics for another book, read a client’s short stories and read Dennis Lehane’s short story collection Coronado and Amy Hempl’s Tumble Home. Kept reading Eric Larson’s The Devil in the White City and the long-ago Chicago Exposition seemed even more garish and extravagant when read in a vintage beach cottage outfitted in antiques and a massive fireplace with stones gathered from nearby. These morning sessions with the Pacific spread before me in continuous changing blues, the sky so enormous and volatile that it seemed to touch my every thought, were deliciously creative and somehow calming
For months I’ve been playing with ideas in my notebooks, trying to preplan my work more. Natalie Goldberg calls writing by hand a moving meditation and claims that it connects us to a younger self. The writing that happens longhand is much different than what comes out of a computer. Each word is etched at a higher price and at the same time closer to some essential truth of who I am.
These morning sessions started the day with a slowness that I don’t feel in the city. I realized too that so much time spent outdoors reminded me of summers from my childhood which began and ended with time spent outside. With a marvel of plants and stars, with smells of grass and green and flowers. With every sense ignited.
I was nervous about spending a week away from the book I’m working on, but by about the fourth night I was there I realized that a week away was exactly what I needed. We were roasting marshmallows in the fireplace, the rosy sunset had faded to black and K.D. Lang was on the stereo, when I recognized just how relaxed and easy I felt. How my upper back was not knotted from constant typing. How hours spent playing in the sand trying to figure out how to build steps and stories and turrets had quieted my mind. Usually a day that has spent mostly editing and writing doesn’t result in feelings of ease, in fact just the opposite and I often go out walking at night to burn off feelings of unease and stress.
As I thought about the past week, I tried to mentally transplant myself to full-time life at the Oregon coast. I just cannot imagine it because my friends and my daughter’s family are here, because I love theater and concerts, and Powells and the lovely old neighborhood’s in Portland. The parks, the gardens, the farmer’s markets and fabulous restaurant scene. So it seems that I need to figure out how to spend more time at the coast, how to meld writing with ease.
I rose each morning and brewed cups of tea and sat at an old table overlooking the ocean and wrote longhand in two notebooks that I’d brought along. Sometimes I jotted down my early morning dreams, but most often I played with ideas for upcoming books. In fact, I made lots of progress on sketching out a plan for a specific book, researched topics for another book, read a client’s short stories and read Dennis Lehane’s short story collection Coronado and Amy Hempl’s Tumble Home. Kept reading Eric Larson’s The Devil in the White City and the long-ago Chicago Exposition seemed even more garish and extravagant when read in a vintage beach cottage outfitted in antiques and a massive fireplace with stones gathered from nearby. These morning sessions with the Pacific spread before me in continuous changing blues, the sky so enormous and volatile that it seemed to touch my every thought, were deliciously creative and somehow calming
For months I’ve been playing with ideas in my notebooks, trying to preplan my work more. Natalie Goldberg calls writing by hand a moving meditation and claims that it connects us to a younger self. The writing that happens longhand is much different than what comes out of a computer. Each word is etched at a higher price and at the same time closer to some essential truth of who I am.
These morning sessions started the day with a slowness that I don’t feel in the city. I realized too that so much time spent outdoors reminded me of summers from my childhood which began and ended with time spent outside. With a marvel of plants and stars, with smells of grass and green and flowers. With every sense ignited.
I was nervous about spending a week away from the book I’m working on, but by about the fourth night I was there I realized that a week away was exactly what I needed. We were roasting marshmallows in the fireplace, the rosy sunset had faded to black and K.D. Lang was on the stereo, when I recognized just how relaxed and easy I felt. How my upper back was not knotted from constant typing. How hours spent playing in the sand trying to figure out how to build steps and stories and turrets had quieted my mind. Usually a day that has spent mostly editing and writing doesn’t result in feelings of ease, in fact just the opposite and I often go out walking at night to burn off feelings of unease and stress.
As I thought about the past week, I tried to mentally transplant myself to full-time life at the Oregon coast. I just cannot imagine it because my friends and my daughter’s family are here, because I love theater and concerts, and Powells and the lovely old neighborhood’s in Portland. The parks, the gardens, the farmer’s markets and fabulous restaurant scene. So it seems that I need to figure out how to spend more time at the coast, how to meld writing with ease.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Last night I attended another outdoor concert—the Patrick Lamb Band. Patrick plays the saxophone, writes original music and has a great stage personality, always trying to coerce the crowd to dance and clap and join in. To be part of the music. The sky had remained overcast all day, but then the sunset was amazing—rosy and lavender and mysterious. It looked like a faraway forest fire, like the world was ending or just beginning.
Yesterday I was also interviewed on Oregon Public Broadcasting for a radio show. I had thought it was taped, but it turned out to be a live broadcast and at one point the engineer, who is blind, came into the room, and was groping at instruments, and playing with my microphone so that it was difficult to talk, but overall it went okay. The interviewer, a journalist, asked harder questions than I anticipated. She wanted to know the percentage of writers who I worked with who are published—I honestly don’t know. Her first question was if writing required talent. I answered no, that it’s a craft and as any craft, can be taught. She asked along with curiosity what other traits were required of a writer—and I answered awareness, being a person on whom nothing is wasted. Noticing the colors in the sky, the quality of light as it changes hourly, the vibrant passage of the seasons, interesting people you spot on the streets.
Her question seemed to be aiming at the difficulties of writing, the inner fortress one must build to get words on the page. She wanted to know the most important trait in writers—and I answered persistence. When I explained that I wrote every day and was at my desk by 6 a.m. she gave a low whistle of amazement. The interviewer also talked about the muse, about how some writers claimed that it sort of took over and did the writing for them. I just laughed and said I wished it would visit me, but in its place I build habits to get the work done. That I start my writing day by light editing so that I am engaged with a specific process and then as I begin changing words, grammar and punctuation, before I know it, ideas and inspiration also arrive. That I write early before the day offers its distractions.
When she asked where I get my ideas I explained that many arrive by reading. I mentioned some of the writers I’ve been reading lately—Dennis Lehane’s short story collection Coronado, Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, Scott Russell Sanders’ essays. And that as I read, I jot down phrases and words that catch my eye and ignite my imagination. The more I read the more I write. And that working with my editing clients teaches me what writers need to know about craft because I’m trying to fill in the gaps of their understanding.
We spent quite a bit of time discussing Voices in the Street—the book I wrote based on interviews with homeless people. And I found that I had already forgotten many of the statistics that I used to know—but my interviewer was surprised when I mentioned that about 35% of homeless people are veterans and that there are already Iraq War/Occupation veterans among them. That the main thing I discovered based on the interviews was that a large percentage of homeless people did not have stable childhoods, even if that meant a parent was in the military and they moved around a lot. Many mentioned that they’d never had a place that meant home to them.
And I was making my tea this morning I was thinking about how I had always searched for a magic solution to being a writer. That like Dorothy, I thought it involved ruby slippers and some sort of divine intervention. Her great longing for home, and knowing her place in her family among the endless flatlands and big sky of Kansas was her answer. And this knowledge was within her all the time. And like Dorothy, I’ve found my place too, it was within me all the time, but it took sitting here morning after morning, no matter the bruised sky, no matter my mood. I found my place by writing.
Yesterday I was also interviewed on Oregon Public Broadcasting for a radio show. I had thought it was taped, but it turned out to be a live broadcast and at one point the engineer, who is blind, came into the room, and was groping at instruments, and playing with my microphone so that it was difficult to talk, but overall it went okay. The interviewer, a journalist, asked harder questions than I anticipated. She wanted to know the percentage of writers who I worked with who are published—I honestly don’t know. Her first question was if writing required talent. I answered no, that it’s a craft and as any craft, can be taught. She asked along with curiosity what other traits were required of a writer—and I answered awareness, being a person on whom nothing is wasted. Noticing the colors in the sky, the quality of light as it changes hourly, the vibrant passage of the seasons, interesting people you spot on the streets.
Her question seemed to be aiming at the difficulties of writing, the inner fortress one must build to get words on the page. She wanted to know the most important trait in writers—and I answered persistence. When I explained that I wrote every day and was at my desk by 6 a.m. she gave a low whistle of amazement. The interviewer also talked about the muse, about how some writers claimed that it sort of took over and did the writing for them. I just laughed and said I wished it would visit me, but in its place I build habits to get the work done. That I start my writing day by light editing so that I am engaged with a specific process and then as I begin changing words, grammar and punctuation, before I know it, ideas and inspiration also arrive. That I write early before the day offers its distractions.
When she asked where I get my ideas I explained that many arrive by reading. I mentioned some of the writers I’ve been reading lately—Dennis Lehane’s short story collection Coronado, Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, Scott Russell Sanders’ essays. And that as I read, I jot down phrases and words that catch my eye and ignite my imagination. The more I read the more I write. And that working with my editing clients teaches me what writers need to know about craft because I’m trying to fill in the gaps of their understanding.
We spent quite a bit of time discussing Voices in the Street—the book I wrote based on interviews with homeless people. And I found that I had already forgotten many of the statistics that I used to know—but my interviewer was surprised when I mentioned that about 35% of homeless people are veterans and that there are already Iraq War/Occupation veterans among them. That the main thing I discovered based on the interviews was that a large percentage of homeless people did not have stable childhoods, even if that meant a parent was in the military and they moved around a lot. Many mentioned that they’d never had a place that meant home to them.
And I was making my tea this morning I was thinking about how I had always searched for a magic solution to being a writer. That like Dorothy, I thought it involved ruby slippers and some sort of divine intervention. Her great longing for home, and knowing her place in her family among the endless flatlands and big sky of Kansas was her answer. And this knowledge was within her all the time. And like Dorothy, I’ve found my place too, it was within me all the time, but it took sitting here morning after morning, no matter the bruised sky, no matter my mood. I found my place by writing.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
I have concluded that the whole misfortune of men comes from a single thing, and that is their inability to remain at rest in a room. Pascal
On Sunday night I attended a concert at Washington Park. When we arrived the park was crowded so we perched on top of a hill. Below us, the amphitheater held an orchestra and visiting musicians, Three Legged Torso and behind us soft grasses carpeted the ground and mixed with row after row of roses, and beyond the hillsides were dotted with trees. Washington Park is at the heart of Portland and besides the rose garden of 500 varieties, it houses a Japanese garden that is amazing in all seasons, a zoo, a children’s museum and lies next to Forest Park which is a giant swath, of old growth and second growth trees. Forest Park has 5,000 acres, is ribboned with miles of trails and is the largest urban forest reserve in the country. I write about this because Portland is a place where you can always find a respite and Washington Park, is a place at so genteel and peaceful it seems set apart from the world, perhaps existing in another century, and I can still feel a calm left over from Sunday evening.
I’ve been reading The Devil in the White City and Larson is describing how Frederick Law Olmstead was brought into the organization to design the grounds of the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Larson’s such a skilled writer— able to transform piles of research into a narrative and imbue it all with tautness and tension. Olmstead had worked on Central Park, the grounds of Harvard and Yale. I have just discovered that John Olmstead, his brother, came to Portland to refine the design of Washington Park.
Last night I gardened and in one of my restless moods, came upstairs to my office to work on my September newsletter. I had an hour to kill between watering and deadheading flowers and walking at near-dusk. My office chair faces north and a window about six feet wide by feet long, so it always shows a great expanse of sky. Last night the clouds were wisps and feathers brushing against the blue like feathers on a quiet sea, as if the world contains no troubles, no drama. A dance of clouds. A sweep of sky. I had spent much of the day writing, then napped a bit and wandered out to run errands, starting to pick up bits and pieces of things I’ll need for a week at the coast. The day had been hot and the evening was cooling off pleasantly billowing the almond colored drapes.
I was searching my files for a column I was working on when I came across a file I have collected on Scott Russell Sanders, and instead of writing, I spent the hour reading some of his work. He is one of my favorite writers, a superb essayist, and after I read his essay about trying to stay still amid a busy life, I went out walking. He’s the kind of writer whose words and images linger in your imagination, like wine lingers in the blood. I walked and seemed to have an even keener awareness of my surroundings, an acute sensitivity because of his words simmering in my blood.
As I walked last night I puzzled over whether the essay is taken seriously today among writing's many forms. I believe more people should write essays and more places should publish them. They are small gems in the world of words. Here is Sanders, being interviewed on the topic in The Fourth Genre where you can read the entire interview:
Robert L. Root: Annie Dillard has written of the essay: "The essay can do everything a poem can do, and everything that a short story can do." Do you agree with that?
Scott Russell Sanders: The essayist certainly can use most of the strategies open to the writer of poetry or fiction—narrative, dialogue, exposition, and so on—but not all of them. Nothing in the essay corresponds to the force of the line in poetry, for example. Nothing in the essay, as I conceive of it, corresponds to the unreliable narrator in fiction. I don't think any one genre is a substitute for the others. We need poems and stories and novels and plays, as well as essays. Each genre offers us paths through the dark woods of this life, and we need all the paths we can find.
RLR: Do you turn to one form or the other because of what it can do or what you need to get done?
SRS: I don't write poetry, although I read it with great pleasure. I made my start as a writer of fiction, and I had finished half a dozen novels or collections of stories before trying my hand at the essay. Once I got the feel of the essay, it began to draw me away from fiction. As I say in my introduction to The Paradise of Bombs, I turned to nonfiction at a time when minimalism and irony and postmodernist games-playing ruled the world of fiction. I was tired of reading stories whose characters and narrators were inarticulate, obtuse, or numb, and I had no desire to write such condescending and stripped-down stuff. Against the vacancy, shallowness, and silliness of so much that was fashionable in stories, the essay appealed to me for its directness and urgency and grace. It seemed to me a form in which one could pursue any question, no matter how difficult, and to which one could bring the full range of intelligence. I keep imagining that I'll return to the writing of stories and novels, but for the present I'm still absorbed, still challenged, by the essay.
RLR: A number of writers have emphasized the relationship between the devices and strategies of creative nonfiction and those of fiction, but some others have emphasized the relationship between creative nonfiction and poetry. They think of the essay as principally a lyrical form rather than a narrative form. What associations do you make between these established literary genres and the fourth genre of nonfiction?
SRS: The essay is a capacious genre, with room enough for lyrical as well as narrative forms. Because of my own training in fiction, I often use narrative strategies in organizing my essays?scenes, character sketches, dramatic gestures, plot, and so on. But I also frequently organize essays by a logic more common in poetry?using a sequence of governing metaphors, for example, or fashioning a collage of images, or playing up the role of the speaker's voice, or relying on patterns of sound to bind together seemingly disparate materials.
RLR: You remarked in "The Singular First Person" about being "bemused and vexed to find one of my own essays treated in a scholarly article as a work of fiction . . . . To be sure, in writing the piece I had used dialogue, scenes, settings, character descriptions, the whole fictional bag of tricks; sure, I picked and chose among a thousand beckoning details; sure, I downplayed some facts and highlighted others; but I was writing about the actual, not the invented. I shaped the matter, but I did not make it up." What limits of creativity and accuracy do you apply to the essay?
SRS: The line between fiction and nonfiction may be fuzzy when seen from the outside, by the reader, but from the inside, from the writer's perspective, it seems to me quite clear. When I write what we're calling creative nonfiction, I feel bound by an implicit contract with the reader: I don't invent episodes, don't introduce characters who were not actually present, don't deliberately change circumstances. Of course I may change circumstances without knowing I've done so, because memory and perception are tricksters. We all realize that no two people, confronted by the same event, will see exactly the same thing; we realize that memory shapes and edits our past. So when I sit down to write about actual events and places and people, I don't imagine that I can give a flawless transcript, but I do feel an obligation to be faithful to what I've witnessed and what I recall. In writing nonfiction, I feel an obligation to a reality outside the text; in writing fiction, I feel no such obligation.
(later in the interview)
RLR: Particularly when there are so many influences in what anyone reads and so many voices you may ultimately have, how do you tune your ear for your voice?
SRS: For better or worse, I spend more hours a day writing my own prose than reading anybody else's. I think you grow into your voice on the page, just as you grow into your body. A singer performs with his or her body; the body is an instrument, and each body, if developed to its full power and subtlety, produces a unique sound. When I'm composing, and sorting through those dozens of sentences in my head for every one that I put down on paper, I still hear plenty of false notes, but I discard them. I'm listening for what sounds right, what sound true, what carries conviction. That's not to say I never hit a false note, never lapse into imitation, but I think I do so less often nowadays because I test everything against my stubborn sense of who I actually am.
On Sunday night I attended a concert at Washington Park. When we arrived the park was crowded so we perched on top of a hill. Below us, the amphitheater held an orchestra and visiting musicians, Three Legged Torso and behind us soft grasses carpeted the ground and mixed with row after row of roses, and beyond the hillsides were dotted with trees. Washington Park is at the heart of Portland and besides the rose garden of 500 varieties, it houses a Japanese garden that is amazing in all seasons, a zoo, a children’s museum and lies next to Forest Park which is a giant swath, of old growth and second growth trees. Forest Park has 5,000 acres, is ribboned with miles of trails and is the largest urban forest reserve in the country. I write about this because Portland is a place where you can always find a respite and Washington Park, is a place at so genteel and peaceful it seems set apart from the world, perhaps existing in another century, and I can still feel a calm left over from Sunday evening.
I’ve been reading The Devil in the White City and Larson is describing how Frederick Law Olmstead was brought into the organization to design the grounds of the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Larson’s such a skilled writer— able to transform piles of research into a narrative and imbue it all with tautness and tension. Olmstead had worked on Central Park, the grounds of Harvard and Yale. I have just discovered that John Olmstead, his brother, came to Portland to refine the design of Washington Park.
Last night I gardened and in one of my restless moods, came upstairs to my office to work on my September newsletter. I had an hour to kill between watering and deadheading flowers and walking at near-dusk. My office chair faces north and a window about six feet wide by feet long, so it always shows a great expanse of sky. Last night the clouds were wisps and feathers brushing against the blue like feathers on a quiet sea, as if the world contains no troubles, no drama. A dance of clouds. A sweep of sky. I had spent much of the day writing, then napped a bit and wandered out to run errands, starting to pick up bits and pieces of things I’ll need for a week at the coast. The day had been hot and the evening was cooling off pleasantly billowing the almond colored drapes.
I was searching my files for a column I was working on when I came across a file I have collected on Scott Russell Sanders, and instead of writing, I spent the hour reading some of his work. He is one of my favorite writers, a superb essayist, and after I read his essay about trying to stay still amid a busy life, I went out walking. He’s the kind of writer whose words and images linger in your imagination, like wine lingers in the blood. I walked and seemed to have an even keener awareness of my surroundings, an acute sensitivity because of his words simmering in my blood.
As I walked last night I puzzled over whether the essay is taken seriously today among writing's many forms. I believe more people should write essays and more places should publish them. They are small gems in the world of words. Here is Sanders, being interviewed on the topic in The Fourth Genre where you can read the entire interview:
Robert L. Root: Annie Dillard has written of the essay: "The essay can do everything a poem can do, and everything that a short story can do." Do you agree with that?
Scott Russell Sanders: The essayist certainly can use most of the strategies open to the writer of poetry or fiction—narrative, dialogue, exposition, and so on—but not all of them. Nothing in the essay corresponds to the force of the line in poetry, for example. Nothing in the essay, as I conceive of it, corresponds to the unreliable narrator in fiction. I don't think any one genre is a substitute for the others. We need poems and stories and novels and plays, as well as essays. Each genre offers us paths through the dark woods of this life, and we need all the paths we can find.
RLR: Do you turn to one form or the other because of what it can do or what you need to get done?
SRS: I don't write poetry, although I read it with great pleasure. I made my start as a writer of fiction, and I had finished half a dozen novels or collections of stories before trying my hand at the essay. Once I got the feel of the essay, it began to draw me away from fiction. As I say in my introduction to The Paradise of Bombs, I turned to nonfiction at a time when minimalism and irony and postmodernist games-playing ruled the world of fiction. I was tired of reading stories whose characters and narrators were inarticulate, obtuse, or numb, and I had no desire to write such condescending and stripped-down stuff. Against the vacancy, shallowness, and silliness of so much that was fashionable in stories, the essay appealed to me for its directness and urgency and grace. It seemed to me a form in which one could pursue any question, no matter how difficult, and to which one could bring the full range of intelligence. I keep imagining that I'll return to the writing of stories and novels, but for the present I'm still absorbed, still challenged, by the essay.
RLR: A number of writers have emphasized the relationship between the devices and strategies of creative nonfiction and those of fiction, but some others have emphasized the relationship between creative nonfiction and poetry. They think of the essay as principally a lyrical form rather than a narrative form. What associations do you make between these established literary genres and the fourth genre of nonfiction?
SRS: The essay is a capacious genre, with room enough for lyrical as well as narrative forms. Because of my own training in fiction, I often use narrative strategies in organizing my essays?scenes, character sketches, dramatic gestures, plot, and so on. But I also frequently organize essays by a logic more common in poetry?using a sequence of governing metaphors, for example, or fashioning a collage of images, or playing up the role of the speaker's voice, or relying on patterns of sound to bind together seemingly disparate materials.
RLR: You remarked in "The Singular First Person" about being "bemused and vexed to find one of my own essays treated in a scholarly article as a work of fiction . . . . To be sure, in writing the piece I had used dialogue, scenes, settings, character descriptions, the whole fictional bag of tricks; sure, I picked and chose among a thousand beckoning details; sure, I downplayed some facts and highlighted others; but I was writing about the actual, not the invented. I shaped the matter, but I did not make it up." What limits of creativity and accuracy do you apply to the essay?
SRS: The line between fiction and nonfiction may be fuzzy when seen from the outside, by the reader, but from the inside, from the writer's perspective, it seems to me quite clear. When I write what we're calling creative nonfiction, I feel bound by an implicit contract with the reader: I don't invent episodes, don't introduce characters who were not actually present, don't deliberately change circumstances. Of course I may change circumstances without knowing I've done so, because memory and perception are tricksters. We all realize that no two people, confronted by the same event, will see exactly the same thing; we realize that memory shapes and edits our past. So when I sit down to write about actual events and places and people, I don't imagine that I can give a flawless transcript, but I do feel an obligation to be faithful to what I've witnessed and what I recall. In writing nonfiction, I feel an obligation to a reality outside the text; in writing fiction, I feel no such obligation.
(later in the interview)
RLR: Particularly when there are so many influences in what anyone reads and so many voices you may ultimately have, how do you tune your ear for your voice?
SRS: For better or worse, I spend more hours a day writing my own prose than reading anybody else's. I think you grow into your voice on the page, just as you grow into your body. A singer performs with his or her body; the body is an instrument, and each body, if developed to its full power and subtlety, produces a unique sound. When I'm composing, and sorting through those dozens of sentences in my head for every one that I put down on paper, I still hear plenty of false notes, but I discard them. I'm listening for what sounds right, what sound true, what carries conviction. That's not to say I never hit a false note, never lapse into imitation, but I think I do so less often nowadays because I test everything against my stubborn sense of who I actually am.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Saturday morning has dawned cloudy and cool again but hot weather is on its way tomorrow. Yes, I’m obsessed with weather. I just finished writing a long chapter in my bad guys book, 14,000 words and logged in at least 6,000 words this week. Writing is much easier when sweat isn’t running down my thighs and when the early morning sun does not beckon me from my desk, urging me to take off on errands or garden, or simply sit on the patio with the sun warm as a blanket on my skin. It’s been a quiet week, long hours spent at my computer, a concert in a local park—Linda Hornbuckle, a shopping trip with my daughter, chatting on the phone with friends, walking through the neighborhood at dusk, noting who has and hasn’t been watering.
Meanwhile, today at Heathrow a third of the flights were cancelled and the latest rounds of terrorist’s threats and new travel sanctions and more fear-mongering by the Bush administration are threatening my sanity. The right wing talk Nazis are already spreading lies that somehow link the Bushies to landing the bad guys. The truth is, Bush who after last August’s Katrina fiasco is curtailing his vacation yet busy cutting brush in Crawford—don’t get me started about his capabilities. Lieberman is going to run as an independent in November and if I think about it too much or listen too often to Mike Malloy, I feel like I’m drowning in a sad and dangerous farce. And is it just me, but isn’t traveling without bottled water, toothpaste, and lipstick going a bit too far? Nest, we’ll all be strapped into our seats naked…..oh well, onto the writing life.
Yesterday I finished reading Anita Shreve’s latest novel, A Wedding in December. At first I wasn’t as enchanted with the story as I have been with some of her previous novels, but then as usual, she grabbed me. Light on Snow, an earlier novel, is simply amazing, so sensuous and moving that the story has never left me. Her new novel doesn’t start out quite as captivatingly and because it has several viewpoint characters, is at first, not as emotionally gripping. However, I’ve noticed that Shreve is comfortable writing in any century but her research never overpowers the story, and I always learn something about another era. In A Wedding in December, one of her characters is writing a short story about a fascinating bit of history. It describes a terrible explosion in the Halifax harbor that killed and blinded thousands of citizens and almost demolished the city.
But Shreve always writes about the tenderest and most vulnerable regions of the human heart and the theme of this story is regret. Thus several characters are all wracked with regret for choices they’ve made—especially choosing or turning back from love. So love lost and found is another central theme. In fact, the marriage that takes place is between two high school sweethearts who get back together in their forties after meeting at a reunion. But, because Shreve never makes life easy for her characters and often writes bittersweet tales, the bride has an aggressive form of cancer and her chances for survival are not good. And because Shreve is a master yarn spinner, she’s got a secret at the heart of the story, it’s revealed at the last moment, and it’s linked to the theme.
Although I’m mostly reading fiction these days, I’m going to attend a book club in a few weeks so just bought Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City. Larson is the author of Isaac’s Storm and I’ve been wanting to read this book ever since I heard him interviewed on NPR. It’s nonfiction and it’s about the World’s Columbian Exposition that took place in Chicago in 1893. It’s also about a serial killer who went on a killing spree during this time. I’ve been combing my memory from my last trip to Chicago, trying to understand which buildings from the exposition still exist in Chicago.
It’s a city of such fabulous architecture; just a joy to wander through and gaze at all the architectural styles and to look upward at the gargoyles. Always feeling Lake Michigan in all its moods. Larson is a meticulous researcher, but knows how to use narrative drive and tension. He’s also carefully using the language of the era to lend it all more resonance and believability. In the opening I was particularly struck by a startling statistic: in the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly 800 violent deaths. Now I wonder how that compares to the first six months in Baghdad this year? I think they’ve got Chicago of old beat.
Meanwhile, today at Heathrow a third of the flights were cancelled and the latest rounds of terrorist’s threats and new travel sanctions and more fear-mongering by the Bush administration are threatening my sanity. The right wing talk Nazis are already spreading lies that somehow link the Bushies to landing the bad guys. The truth is, Bush who after last August’s Katrina fiasco is curtailing his vacation yet busy cutting brush in Crawford—don’t get me started about his capabilities. Lieberman is going to run as an independent in November and if I think about it too much or listen too often to Mike Malloy, I feel like I’m drowning in a sad and dangerous farce. And is it just me, but isn’t traveling without bottled water, toothpaste, and lipstick going a bit too far? Nest, we’ll all be strapped into our seats naked…..oh well, onto the writing life.
Yesterday I finished reading Anita Shreve’s latest novel, A Wedding in December. At first I wasn’t as enchanted with the story as I have been with some of her previous novels, but then as usual, she grabbed me. Light on Snow, an earlier novel, is simply amazing, so sensuous and moving that the story has never left me. Her new novel doesn’t start out quite as captivatingly and because it has several viewpoint characters, is at first, not as emotionally gripping. However, I’ve noticed that Shreve is comfortable writing in any century but her research never overpowers the story, and I always learn something about another era. In A Wedding in December, one of her characters is writing a short story about a fascinating bit of history. It describes a terrible explosion in the Halifax harbor that killed and blinded thousands of citizens and almost demolished the city.
But Shreve always writes about the tenderest and most vulnerable regions of the human heart and the theme of this story is regret. Thus several characters are all wracked with regret for choices they’ve made—especially choosing or turning back from love. So love lost and found is another central theme. In fact, the marriage that takes place is between two high school sweethearts who get back together in their forties after meeting at a reunion. But, because Shreve never makes life easy for her characters and often writes bittersweet tales, the bride has an aggressive form of cancer and her chances for survival are not good. And because Shreve is a master yarn spinner, she’s got a secret at the heart of the story, it’s revealed at the last moment, and it’s linked to the theme.
Although I’m mostly reading fiction these days, I’m going to attend a book club in a few weeks so just bought Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City. Larson is the author of Isaac’s Storm and I’ve been wanting to read this book ever since I heard him interviewed on NPR. It’s nonfiction and it’s about the World’s Columbian Exposition that took place in Chicago in 1893. It’s also about a serial killer who went on a killing spree during this time. I’ve been combing my memory from my last trip to Chicago, trying to understand which buildings from the exposition still exist in Chicago.
It’s a city of such fabulous architecture; just a joy to wander through and gaze at all the architectural styles and to look upward at the gargoyles. Always feeling Lake Michigan in all its moods. Larson is a meticulous researcher, but knows how to use narrative drive and tension. He’s also carefully using the language of the era to lend it all more resonance and believability. In the opening I was particularly struck by a startling statistic: in the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly 800 violent deaths. Now I wonder how that compares to the first six months in Baghdad this year? I think they’ve got Chicago of old beat.
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