"By the very nature of creative insights, it is difficult to study it scientifically. Science is about repeatability. Creativity is not about repeatability. When you come across an idea, something irreversible occurs in your brain. Your brain is in a different state than before. You cannot request the brain to go back to the 'before'' state and measure the creative process over again." ~ Ken Mogi

"Things don't fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept."-Lucille Clifton

Writing Prompt

Using the first line of a published poem, keep writing. However, it’s not necessary to  continue writing a poem. You can pen a story, essay or scene.  Try these first lines written by Richard Hugo. Or try the first lines of your favorite poems.

This is the final resting place of engines

One tug pounds to haul an afternoon

We had to get him off, the dirty elf-

In gold life here a small guard

A field of wind gave license for defeat

This summer, most friends out of town

You remember the name was Jensen. She seemed old

Dear Bobbi: God it’s cold. Unpredicted, of course, by forecast

He is twice blessed, the old one buried here

Town or poem. I don’t care how it looks. Old woman

Believe in this couple this day who come

Now I’m dead, load what’s left on the wagon

You might come here Sunday on a whim

Lucille Clifton
Last night I was out with friends for a while and came home to channel surf between Bill Moyers Journal featuring Ted Olson and David Bois talking about the legal issues behind same-sex marriage and the Olympics. The speed skaters fascinate me--and I'm surprised more of them don't topple over as they skim around corners.  At the end of Moyer's show he talked about the death of poet Lucille Clifton.

Moyers: "The long arc of morality that bends toward justice leads not only through the courthouse and the statehouse but out on the streets and in the pages of poetry and prose. Luckily for the rest of us, there are writers who in words both beautiful and bold can express rage at injustice. But they don't stop there, they help us experience sorrow and joy through an intimate knowledge of our tempestuous human nature. We lost one of those gifted people the other day- one of our most popular poets, my friend, Lucille Clifton."

She learned to love poetry from her mother who wrote poetry yet never finished grade school and wrote poems for twenty years before any were published. She was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer and won the National Book Award for Blessing the Boat: New and Selected Poems, and then in 2007, became the first African American woman to receive the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize - one of American poetry's most prestigious poetry honors.

Clifton said: " I was not trained as a poet. I've never taken poetry lessons. I've never had workshops. Nobody taught me anything, really much. But I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem."

Update on Summer With Words

Still raining here....sounds as familiar as my breathing. I've just finalized the schedule and instructor line up for Summer in Words. In case you're new to this blog it's a conference for writers at Manzanita, Oregon which is a charming village on the Oregon coast. About a 2 hour drive from Portland. Dates are June 25-27 and space is limited. The instructors are: Larry Brooks, Polly Campbell,  Bill Johnson, Marian Pierce, Jennie Shortridge, and me......So we've got seasoned teachers, best-selling authors, editors, nonfiction writers--what can I say?--a stellar line up. And I've figured out the schedule, now we just need to fine tune some of the workshop titles and descriptions. So please stay tuned and if this interests you, plan on registering early.
Meanwhile, keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Poets & Writers & Platforms

Drizzling this morning so you can fill in the color scheme. Poets & Writers magazine is now 40 years old and in every issue they feature a classified section. In this section they list contests, anthology opportunities, calls for submissions, and information about writing conferences. It's one of the most respected listings in the writing world. And I was reminded by Christina Durarte who teaches at Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day High School that it's a great resource for writers.

These days there is a lot of buzz about platform for writers. A platform means that you have a built-audience for your book and it's a huge part of the publishing world these days. In fact, it's a simple truth that publishers and agents are looking for writers who have a platform. If you're sighing with frustration over this, I can understand your annoyance. After all, writing is hard enough and now publishers want you to do the heavy lifting of promotion too? The answer is yes. But a writing platform could make or break your book deal and a platform drives book sales.

You can build your platform my joining organizations, using social networking, blogging, creating a website, and generally affiliating with people and groups. But another method is to enter contests, get short stories, poems, articles, and essays published, write for on-line magazines and websites, join on-line communities, teach classes, speak before groups and organizations. So I want to suggest that you sort of double-team your writing career by becoming a better writer and building your platform at the same time. And a place to begin building a platform is pursuing those opportunities at Poets & Writers Classified.

So instead of fighting it or grousing about it, accept the fact that a platform is an essential ingredient in the publishing biz these days. A helpful resource for building your platform is Christina Katz's book Get Noticed Before the Book Deal.Use Your Personal Strengths to Grow an Author Platform. 

Photos!
Blue seems to be chasing out the clouds this morning. One thing I love about writing books and this blog is connecting with readers around the country and world. Sitting alone in a room with a computer, although I have a window in front of me can feel as isolating as solitary confinement some days.

The other thing I love about writing books is the chance to give them away, especially to young writers. With that in mind, here are photos of Christina Durate's class who have just received 2 of my books recently. She wrote: The name of the school is Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day High School. It's a second chance school for kids who are ages 17 to 21 to get their diploma. This semester I have a student teacher in that class, she taught her first class yesterday. She also loves to write and she had them write a poem about the sights and senses they come from, and they did great. As for me, I teach them a lot of vocabulary including Greek and Latin roots which they love (believe it or not) because they begin to understand how to decipher words and see language in a greater and wider context. Also, I believe vocabulary is like the multiplication tables, without it you can't do higher level work. I notice that when students learn new words they feel like they own them and they enjoy using them and showing them off, it's a little acquisition or as I tell them "little keys."
.....
 Doesn't she sound like a great teacher and just what these kids need? And you know what? I'm thinking as a blog, why don't we consider sponsoring/mentoring  these kids? Any ideas?

 

 

Laura Miller Weighs In

Another soft day down here in the valley, with off and on rain and clouds moving around like bullies in the heavens. It was snowing up in the Cascades to the relief of skiers, snow boarders, and resort owners, but down here trees are turning the most delicate shades of pink and I'm reminded of chiffon ball gowns of old.

Laura Miller is the book critic at salon. com and has weighed in on The Guardian piece about 10 rules for writing. Her piece A Reader's Advice to Writers is short, but smart. In fact, it's the sort of advice I give writers all the time, so maybe I like it because she agrees with me. Her first point is one I mention all the time to my students.  1. Make your main character want something. Writers tend to be introverted observers who equate reflection with insight and depth, yet a fictional character who does nothing but witness and contemplate is at best annoying and at worst, dull. There's a reason why Nick Carraway is the narrator of "The Great Gatsby" while Gatsby himself is the protagonist. Desire is the engine that drives both life and narrative.

What does your character want? And who or what is going to stand in his/her way?

Awake in the night 

Somehow since I started working on my new book I've developed this habit of working in the middle of the night. Now, I don't do it every night or I'd walk around during the daylight hours with a constant sleep hangover. But something has switched inside of me, and so here I am again. A few years ago I interviewed Diana Gabaldon for The Writer magazine and she explained her nocturnal writing pattern. She developed it out of necessity when she first started writing because she was working more than full time AND had three kids. But her kids are grown now and she continues her nocturnal schedule. 

One thing Diana told me that I've always remembered is that she writes a bit each morning, then goes about her day of errands, research, gardening, walking, hanging out with her husband. But those morning bits are composting all day, ready for her nighttime sessions. 

 Last night I met a visual artist for cocktails and asked him about his work. He told me that his daily life and painting are completely separate. I explained that as a writer, everything I do is part of writing, and everything I see seems to funnel into it. And that as a writer, I feel like I'm living twice. I live in the now, but often as I'm gazing at the sky, or moving through the kingdom of spring, part of me is writing the moment too. 

 On Monday night I was out walking along the Springwater Trail, timing my walk so that if clouds were moving in from the west as the sun was setting, I'd be facing them on my way home. And as I was walking west, sort of drinking in the sky, it felt like I was walking into a dream, or into another space that was not quite earth It seems to me that all writers need to keep looking around, living with an acute awareness of all the beauty and chaos around us, asking ourselves, what does this remind me of?     

Stage and Studio Interview 

Meanwhile, here's the interview from yesterday.
 http://www.facebook.com/l/dc1b3;kboo.fm/node/19643
Many thanks to Dmae Roberts, Stage and Studio, KBOO

Ten Rules Continued.....
I hope you have a chance to read the rules for writing fiction at The Guardian that I posted in the earlier link. I'm going to post my own ten rules later today or tomorrow and welcome you to submit yours to me at jessicapage at spiritone dot com.

Meanwhile, the KBOO interview was fun although I slipped and said 'lame ass' on the air. They're trying to keep their content clean because cranks who want them off the air complain to the FCC. Anyway, writing in the rain here in Portland.

10 Rules for Writing Fiction
Sky is pale grey and rain seems inevitable--but we've had a good ride with this dewy spring weather. I'm posting the link to The Guardians article that appeared on February 20th, Ten Rules of Writing Fiction. In this article, authors weigh in responding to Elmore Leonard's rules.

For years I've been dividing writers between those that overwrite and those that underwrite. But I know that there are also sharp divisions between those that love these sort of rules (let's call them guidelines) and those who hate these sort of rules. But no matter your bent, it seems to me that you can break the rules once you know them, but operating out of ignorance is just silly.

Here's an excerpt:
Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin
1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2 Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."

3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary....

Well, so far, I disagree with rule #2, because some of my favorite books begin with a prologue and I wrote a chapter on how to manage them in Between the Lines.  The advice I most love comes from P.D James: "1 Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more ­effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
2 Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious."

hhhmmm

KBOO Interview

Powder blue skies this morning. Years ago one of my students called these early springs with spates of sunshine 'sucker spring' because rains and clouds are sure to follow, but I'll settle for being suckered in. I just wanted you to know that I'm going to be interviewed by Peabody award winner Dmae Roberts on KBOO radio (Portland 90.7 FM) for their Stage and Studio program. It begins at 11 p.m. Pacific time, on Tuesday, February 23. I'll be talking about the writing life, craft,  and writing through adversity and you can also send in questions. You can also find the interview on line afterward.

Meanwhile, keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart.

Lives of Writers
Don't you love to read about the lives of writers? I know I do. As much as I know that they spend hours alone in a room wrestling with words, I'm convinced they all lead vastly more interesting lives than I do. Generally I'm right about this as was confirmed by a piece from yesterday's Sunday Times  about Don DeLillo: A Writer Like No Other

Here is an excerpt: "DeLillo now lives in the suburb of Bronxville, where he writes on an Olympia typewriter, shuns email, watches old movies with his wife and gives as few interviews as is polite. He is not, as newspapers have often suggested, a recluse (he is far too sociable, for one thing), but he prefers not to think of himself in the third person. Indeed, DeLillo used to carry a business card that read “I don’t want to talk about it” — again funny, again instructive. “Did Saul Bellow walk around thinking, ‘I’m Saul Bellow’?” he asks, the Bronx still in his vowels. “I don’t think so. No, he went around getting in trouble with his wife, having arguments with his colleagues and so on. You can’t separate yourself. You just are who you are beyond whatever your line of work is.”

And here he is talking about the novel: "It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience,” he says. “For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so many kinds of interaction between humans, and so many ways of creating patterns in the novel that can’t be created in a short story, a play, a poem or a movie. The novel, simply, offers more opportunities for a reader to understand the world better, including the world of artistic creation. That sounds pretty grand, but I think it’s true.”

"You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft—then you can add all the genius you like." Phyllis A. Whitney

Bloodroot
Gorgeous blue skies this morning. I was listening to NPR while checking my emails and listened to an interview with Amy Greene  about her new book Bloodroot. She grew up in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains and seems to have a special focus on place. At the end of the interview she was asked what she learned and she said, "take what's good from the life you lived and leave the rest behind."

 

This photo of my latest book, Thanks, But This Isn't For Us  was sent to me by writer Ken Matthews......

And this one: 

Makes all that hard work writing it worthwhile! 

Nancy Farmer
Nancy Farmer writes illuminating, powerful, and gripping YA fiction. She wins prizes, she has many devoted readers,  she takes risks with her stories and characters and themes. In fact, she's freaking amazing. I zipped over to her website this morning because I wanted to introduce her to one of my students. And I got sucked into reading her bio. You need to read this. She was destined to be a writer.

Pale blue skies again today and yesterday was our warmest day of the year. I went out walking yesterday afternoon in the sun then came home so restless from the influx of rays into my brain that I practically needed to tie myself into a chair. Then on the way to meet with my critique group, I was just sort of gaping at everything and arrived at my destination dazed and practically drunk on sun. Then learned that my claims of yesterday were wrong  since plum trees, not cherry trees are now blooming. So I'm not sure what will happen today when I step outdoors....but I'm willing to risk it.

Why I Write

"To satisfy a basic, fundamental need. I think all people have this need. It's why children like to draw pictures of houses, animals, and Mom; it's an affirmation of their presence in the corporeal world.
You come into life, and life gives you everything your senses can bear: broad currents of animal feeling running alongside the particularity of thought. Sunlight, stars, colors, smells, sounds. Tender things, sweet, temperate things, harsh, freezing, hot, salty things. All the different expressions on people's faces and in their voices.
For years, everything just pours into you, and all you can do is gurgle or scream until finally one day you can sit up and hold your crayon and draw your picture and thus shout back, Yes! I hear! I see! I feel! This is what it's like! It's dynamic creation and pure, delighted receptivity happening on the same field, a great call and response." ~ Mary Gaitskill

Sweet-looking blue skies this morning. You know, here on the West coast we cannot deny that spring has already arrived. I was watching the Olympics a few days ago and the network was splicing a camera shot of snow fluttering down at Whistler with another camera angle of cherry trees blooming in Vancouver. And I was thinking how odd it was that the cherry trees had started so early. But we've had a mild winter and the crocuses are popping up everywhere, the dafodils are opening, the willows down by the creek are turning green, and then yesterday I saw that some of the cherry trees were blooming here too. They used to bloom in April. In the past few years they've been blooming in March. So you tell me what this means about climate trends.

Meanwhile, I'm happy to report that I'm working with two different critique groups of fiction writers and it's been fun. Not draining, or exasperating, or get-this-delusional-or-crazy-person-out-of-my-sight-agony, but fun. They're talented, hard working, and realistic. They lob out great insights about each others' stories and are supportive and kind, yet tough when needed. So I'm in a I love writers mood which is lovely...maybe spring is affecting me and I can end my rein as the Queen of Bad News. In fact, I'm pretty sure I need a new title.....

And I've been thinking about teachers in general lately--how you can uplift and guide and nurture as a teacher. In a bizarre twist, Senator Buttar of Utah has suggested that the state eliminate the 12th grade to deal with their financial crisis. Now, we all know that education systems most everywhere in the country are struggling to teach kids without enough resources. But this is probably the worst solution I've ever heard in years. As if 17 year old kids are ready to go out into the world. Yeesh. As if the subjects taught in high school weren't of great value.

Almost everyone I know who has made something of his or her life had at least one teacher who shone a light, who cared, who understood, who modeled curiosity, compassion, and well, just plain adulthood. So I'm going to keep teaching in many ways in my life--it's what I always wanted to do since I was about eight and I realized how much teachers could bring to a child's life. And I'm going to join the voices that speak out for learning and teachers and helping kids in this country. I've been thinking lately about volunteering at a local school and have been trying to figure out what kind of program I want to be involved in, or how I'd go about it. What if everyone who has a few extra hours in their week (I don't, but think I'm going to do this anyway) would call the closest school and volunteer? What if millions of people did this everywhere?

"Don't disregard your life. It is too precious. This moment, right now, is the only life you will ever have. You can't store it up for the ideal time. When you walk, walk with your whole body and mind joining the floor. Place your eyes in the soles of your feet, walking as if the floor were a dear friend. This is intimacy with all things, where the whole world is self, where there is no "outside" or other."
- Pat Phelan