Real writers need frustration. They need embarrassment. They need cold, uncomfortable rooms, miles from a mobile signal. There should be an infestation of at least one parasite, a backlog of warnings from the Student Loans Company and just enough coffee for what Don DeLillo calls "an occasional revelation". From The Guardian book blog, February 2010

In Memorium

With deep thanks for the men and women who have served our country.

From today's The Writer's Almanac:
"Today is Memorial Day. It became a holiday after the Civil War, to honor the Union and Confederate soldiers who had died in battle, and after World War I it was extended to honor all United States soldiers who died in any war. It happens to fall this year on May 30, which was the original date for the holiday; Union general John Logan chose the 30th specifically because it was not the anniversary of any battle. But in 1968, Congress's Uniform Holidays Act severed the link between Memorial Day and the original date, changing it instead to "the last Monday in May" to allow for a three-day weekend. Some are opposed to the switch, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars and Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye; they believe people have lost sight of the original meaning of the holiday, a day for reconciliation and honor. It has lately become a holiday for families to remember anyone they have lost (veteran or otherwise), to lay flowers at gravesites, and, in later years, barbecue, shop, and watch the Indianapolis 500. For those unable to travel to the graves of their loved ones, there are websites like FindAGrave.com, where one can create a cyber-monument and leave a "virtual" note or bouquet.

Some choose to visit the grave of a favorite author. Ernest Hemingway (books by this author) served in the Red Cross during World War I and his grave, in the Municipal Cemetery, is one of the main tourist attractions of Ketchum, Idaho, where he was living at the time of his suicide in 1961. Fans leave bottles of liquor, and pennies, as though Papa could grant their wishes." To read the rest of this piece about authors' graves go here .

From an Editor's Desk: writing from memories

Memory, no matter how it’s incorporated in our writing, doesn’t equal nostalgia or sentimentality. When you track your memory, you’re hunting the stuff of real life, the grit and sorrow, along with laughter and bliss. Whenever you’re prompting or reviewing memories, approach the past with an open and questioning mind. Dust off the memory, but then examine all sides of it, using the lamplight of adult knowledge. Remove the filters, and notice the emotions that arise from memory.

Search for the intricate connection of memory. If a memory slips in unbidden during the day, track its source. What where you doing or thinking when the memory came to light? In writing from memory, be selective. If you’re crafting nonfiction, remember that essays and memoirs don’t wander, they are defined by theme and meaning. It’s impossible to write about every event from birth to death. Choose significant moments, narrow your time frame.

      Memory is a slippery thing. A distant scene will appear unbidden; a tragedy will refuse to leave our consciousness. We are sometimes haunted by our past and sometimes able to step into a distant time to relish life again. When mining the past, ask yourself what it means. So often we understand ourselves, our families, our tragedies long after events unfolds So often we spend our lives puzzling, teasing over the meaning of things. Marilyn Ferguson suggests, "In most lives insight has been accidental. We wait for it as primitive man awaited lightening for a fire. But making mental connections is our most crucial learning tool, the essence of human intelligence; to forge links; to go beyond the given; to see patterns, relationship, context."

Market Resource

Here is a resource for those of you looking to publish that I've just run across: Duotropes Digest   It's a free listing of poetry and fiction publications. If you have success with this resource, please let me know.

"Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”  ~Winston Churchill

What about you?
I've been blogging here on and off since 2004. Seems like a long time, but I discontinued blogging when I was literally writing three books at the same time and slowed down a lot while recovering from an accident. As we all know there is a lot of noise and information on the internet, so I'm wondering, what kind of content are you looking for here? I plan to continue interviewing authors and passing along tidbits about the writing life. My columns and longer pieces will be featured at my web site from now on. But I'd like to fill a need here before my next books are published. Your input would be appreciated. Meanwhile, keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Quick Take:

Fiction should always portray higher truths and the human heart exposed.

Skies silver and drippy over Portland. I'm distracted today. My daughter is going to be induced and will be having her daughter by tomorrow. So if I'm not around, I'm busy with my family.  Also, there is still plenty of time to register for Summer in Words June 24-26 in Cannon Beach, Oregon although spaces are filling up. Meanwhile, people out there keep writing. And if you have a first draft that is not working break through your resistence--and trust me, you have it in some form, and come at it with new eyes and lots of stamina.

The Writing Life turns 100!

The newsletter that is. Here's  the proof .
Although I couldn't format it worth a damn, this still is issue 100. Which means  I'm still writing folks. How about you? 

Programming Note:
I'm going to be the guest on Barbara DeMarco Barrett Writers on Writing show this Wednesday at 9 AM (May 25) Pacfic Time. Writers on Writing is a weekly radio program produced and hosted by author Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, with co-host Marrie Stone. Each Wednesday at 9am Pacific, writers, poets and literary agents join her and/or Marrie. The show is broadcast from the studios of KUCI-FM; on your radio in Orange County, CA, at 88.9 and simulcast worldwide at http://www.kuci.org/.
I'll be yakking for an hour, so please listen in or you can download the podcast here

From an Editor's Desk

Often when I lecture I talk about how all the new media is changing the way in which readers perceive communications. Plugged into televisions, smart phones, YouTube,  and text messages, we don't  see the world in the same way any more. And we while we read in the same linear, left to right fashion that we once did when opening a book, our brain is acclimated to all sorts of stimulus. Because our brain is receiving messages and stories in images and sounds all the time, electronic media is returning us to an auditory and visual culture. As in the days before books and reading. 

So think about it when you're writing. Humans have been listening to stories for 190,000 years. Over this span of time, we’ve developed deeply unconscious ways of responding to Story. However, these days, the audio and visual stimuli that exists all around us makes the reader/listener/viewer feel emotions with a lot of immediacy from sound. Your words on the page need that same degree of resonance, potency, and drama as stories they watch and hear. Just saying.

Programming Note:

Cannon Beach shoreline

I've just added updates and reminders about Summer in Words over at the website. If you've been vacillating about joining us, remember that May 24th is the final date to receive the discount on the hotel room at the Hallmark Inn & Resort.

Think about Not Waiting Your Turn

Blue, blue skies as another perfect spring day is unfolding here. If you've been following this blog you might know that I grew up in small town in northern Wisconsin where a bunch of my aunts, uncles, and cousins still live and where my maternal grandparents are buried. That I was a girl who spent much of her childhood outdoors, swimming, bicycling, ice skating under wide skies and exploring forests after adventure. And when I was 14 my family  moved to another small town in southern Wisconsin about 20 miles from Milwaukee and five miles from the wide, cold waters of Lake Michigan. In Wisconsin they talk a lot about "lake effect" weather because Lake Michigan is the eastern border, Lake Superior the northern border and there are thousands of lakes dotted throughout the state. It's a place of waters, simple as that.

When I moved to the second small town I attended a high school that offered dozens of electives and I started studying journalism and fell in love with it. I'd always loved to write and was writing fantasies and poems and such that kids write, but in journalism I found a sort of home, because I loved news and I realize now that I loved to explain things, or at least try to explain things. That sorting out ideas on the page made me feel something I didn't feel in any other part of my life. Which back when I was a teenager wasn't all that happy because I was a teen and there were lots of reasons not to be happy.

I went to college several different times because I couldn't figure out what to do with my life, I worked in restaurants and owned my own catering business, I raised a daughter who is about to birth another daughter any day now, I fumbled around and then came back to journalism. And so I double majored in journalism and English Lit and found a place for myself bit by bit writing for alternative newspapers, community newspapers, regional magazines. I wrote features because I was curious about how people lived their lives and about food because I loved to cook and was excited about all the new trends. And then that part of my life morphed when I moved to Portland, Oregon and started teaching writers what little I knew. In the beginning I didn't know much, but I kept learning and kept teaching and these days lots of my students have gone on to publish and flourish, and although I cannot take the credit, I do know that I was a person who kept asserting that words and stories are important. That sometimes words are all we have to make sense of this troubled, roiling world.

And along the way I followed the careers of famous journalists and read their words again and again because I wanted to emulate how they captured life and truth and light on the page. One of my icons was Charles Kuralt. So it was with great pleasure that I read this commencent speech by Robert Krulich (host of Radiolab)to the Berkley School of Journalism graduating class where he mentions how Kuralt got his start in the business. Like many writers, I'm worried about the demise of newspapers and journalism. So in his advice he talks about Charlies Kuralt's passions and commitment to standards and he talks about how journalists, particularly science journalists will break in to today in this changing media landscape. It's a long piece, but I recommend that you read it and you just might be moved by it. And remember that great storytellers will always remain with us because they caught a moment, an event, a story on the page.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Quick Take:
When plotting, keep in mind that often the worse problems happen when least expected. Sort of like life. As you write or plan scenes you might want to ask, what is the worst thing that can happen next? Or, what surprising element can you add--something the reader will never see coming round the bend?

"Remember yourself, from the days when you were younger and rougher and wilder, more scrawl than straight line. Remember all of yourself, the flaws and faults as well as the many strengths. Carl Jung once said, "If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance toward oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbors, for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures." ~ Anna Quindlen
commencement speech at Mount Holyoke College

"All you need now is to stand at the window and let your rhythmical sense open and shut, open and shut, boldly and freely, until one thing melts in another, until the taxis are dancing with the daffodils, until a whole has been made from all these separate fragments." ~  Virginia Woolf, Letter To A Young Poet

Ann Hood and Loss
Ann Hood is an amazing writer. Her stories are full of aching depth, characters so real seeming you can imagine them in your kitchen, and language that wraps into your heart. She lost her daughter Grace when she was five to a virulent form of strep and has been writing about it in various places, including in her memoir The Red Thread. Although there are no happy endings when a child dies, Ann and her husband adopted Annabelle from China and this too is reported in The Red Thread.

Salon.com has a weekly feature called Mortifying Moments in which writers confess something they normally wouldn't disclose. Ann Hood has written about her daughter's death in an essay called What I never told anyone about her death
For those of you who are struggling to master the essay form, this is how. For those of you afraid to write about hard topics, this is your doorway into bravery. It begins:
Dead bodies do get a grayish blue/purple hue because blood pools in the capillaries and the body starts to decompose. It's not smurf blue, but it's not a pleasant shade.

The ultrasound technician moves her transducer over my almost six-month-pregnant belly, sliding easily across the thick gel she's spread there. The gel works as a conductor for the sound waves the transducer is producing in my uterus. Think of bats, a friend told me before the procedure. It's the same kind of sonar. But as those sound waves bounce off bone and tissue and a black-and-white image of my baby appears on the screen, I cannot think of bats. Watching the fuzzy gray heart beat, I can only think of one thing: I want to hold this baby. Now. Forever.

"Do you want to know the sex?" the technician asks, pausing over something that my husband and I cannot identify.

We've already agreed that we do want to know, even though I am already confident this baby is a girl. I don't know why I have such certainty about my pregnancies, but I knew that my first baby was a boy and that this one is a girl.

I am not surprised when the technician announces, "You've got a daughter!"

I am not surprised, but I am elated. It is the perfect family: a boy, then a girl. A big brother for a little sister. They are three years apart, my Sam and Grace, both names chosen during my first pregnancy. After a bumpy start to this marriage, to my move from Manhattan to Providence, R.I., things are settling. It is as if my life has taken a big, happy sigh.

Writing Opportunity

The evening sky is striped in soft shades of grey and pink and blue. Here's a contest that I can recommend since my writer pal Marian Pierce won it a few years ago: Wordstock is pleased to announce the call for submissions for the 5th Wordstock Short Fiction Competition.

This national contest is a blind competition. The winner of the competition receives a first prize of $1,000 and publication in the October 2011 issue of Portland Monthly magazine. All 10 finalists' stories will be published in the Wordstock Ten, an anthology that will be available at the festival, at Portland-area bookstores, and online through the Wordstock website. Every writer who enters the competition will receive a copy of the anthology.

The final judge for this year's competition is novelist Aimee Bender.

Bender is the author of four books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) which recently won the SCIBA award for best fiction, and an Alex Award. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper's, Tin House, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, and many more places, as well as heard on PRI's This American Life and Selected Shorts. Her fiction has been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at USC.

The fee to enter the contest is $20. Any proceeds from the competition go to support Wordstock's education programs. The deadline for entering the 2011 competition is July 15.

Complete submission guidelines are available at http://wordstockfestival.com/get-involved/short-fiction-competition

And according to Writer's Almanac: On this day in 1893, a patent was issued for a typewriter “type bar” that would make the results visible while typing. It was the first of its kind.
Typewriters became commercially available in the 1870s and featured an under-stroke type bar that obscured the writing from the typist. A magazine story called “The American Typewriter: A Story of Progress” that appeared in The Banker’s Magazine in 1911 recounted that most people were satisfied with the under-stroke machine. “Few looked for any radical change in the then accepted design, which had a large demand and was considered to be well nigh ultimate perfection.”

Underwood Typewriter Company was the first to adopt the new innovation, bringing a front-stroke “visible” typewriter to market in 1897. The machine was a tremendous success and soon there was a large demand for visible typewriters. The Underwood typewriter manufacturing plant in Hartford, Connecticut, could not keep up with demand and had to increase its capacity every year. By 1911, it was double the size of any typewriter factory in the world and employed more than 3,200 people.

Of the typewriter in America, The Banker’s Magazine notes: “The modern typewriter is the product of American inventive genius, coupled with the foresight, ability and aggressiveness of the American manufacturer, and supported by the confidence of the American capitalist. It stands as an industrial monument to the American commercial spirit which has in a few decades made the institutions of this country the marvel of the world.”

Introducing Randall Platt

Randall Platt is an award-winning writer of fiction for adults and young adults and for those who don’t own up to being either. She'll be teaching  at Summer in Words 2011, The Art of Reserach and the Research of Art and her Sunday keynote is What to Do After the Hangover Wears Off.

Q: How long have you been writing and when did you make your first sale? 

A: The first things I ever wrote were teleplays for popular TV westerns. All had a plumb, ripe, juicy, hammy role for a little girl. I was all of 11 and wanted to be an actress so badly that I wrote 'next week's episode' and offered myself as the guest star. I actually mailed them and got nice 'thank you for writing' letters back from the studios. So I guess you could say I have been writing nearly my whole life. But I did not make my first sale until I had finally taught myself how to write .... 1991!

Q: What comes first for you, story or character?

A: Character, although I sure wish it was story. I am great with character and dialog but plotting is my weakness. It's no coincide I don't write mysteries!

Q: What is the hardest part of writing for you and how do you get past it?

A: Deciding on what to write next. I have so many terrific 'what ifs' waiting in the wings. Great characters waiting for their chance to really come alive. Once I got past it by taping about a dozen story ideas to the wall and throwing a dart over my shoulder to see which was got picked!

Q: How do you push yourself to take risks as a writer?

A: It seems the older I get the riskier I allow myself to be. From dangerous settings to dangerous dialog. First drafts are always very dangerous for me. I will over-write knowing that, for me, it's far easier to cut back than to add.

A: Tell us something most writers would not know about you, but find interesting.

Q: That I make a soundtrack for each novel when I begin it. I fill my IPod with dozens of songs that evoke the time and the emotions of my work in progress. I listen to it constantly while working. By the time I am done with that book, I never want to hear ANY of those songs again!

Q: What do you do for fun besides write?

A: Writing is fun??? I didn't get that memo! I am an internationally ranked handball player and play three times a week, if time allows. I also run, lift and bike.

Q: Sushi or pasta?

A: Pasta!

Q: What books are on your night table?

A: My 'night table' is the CD player in my car. Having to read so much for research I find that my recreational reading time is limited to my driving time - which is a lot. Right now, I am on an autobiography kick.

Q:What comes next for you?

A: Looking forward to the 2012 release of another historical YA, LIBERTY JUSTICE JONES. 

Fog is lingering this morning in the Willamette Valley. Yesterday afternoon there was another deluge here and some of my students were talking about SAD and how when the sun had arrived the previous day we felt like we'd been injected with an energy drug--bouncing around like ping pong balls. 

Reminder:

If you're planning to stay at the Hallmark Inn & Resort for Summer in Words, register by Mary 24th to receive the discount (about $100 off per night) on a room. Be sure to mention Summer in Words.

And here Nathan Bransford writes about Making the Case for Putting a Manuscript in the Drawer.  He writes: "Trust me when I say this: It's hard putting a manuscript in the drawer. It's a huge blow to the ego, it's utterly painful to think back of all the time you spent writing that novel and dreaming about what would happen when you're finished and admitting to yourself that you came up short.

But it's not time wasted, and you didn't come up short. The next novel you write is bound to be better. That time you spent writing that novel was an essential learning experience. I'm so glad that the first novel people will read with my name on it is JACOB WONDERBAR and not that other novel.

Now... not every novel belongs in the drawer, and I'm not trying to say here that everyone who can't find a publisher should just give up and forego self-publishing. I really believe that self-publishing is awesome and am not trying to say that no publisher should = no book out there.

But especially when it's a first novel, especially when you're ready to get back on the horse and try again, especially when you have a new idea you're excited about... there's a lot to be said for just putting the first one in the drawer and trying again."

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Quick Take:

Post this one next to your computer:

Scene = Change

Scenes have consequences