A memoir about writing

"Above all, avoid melodrama. Understate the narrator's emotional reaction. What the author withholds, the reader supplies. Establish and maintain the story's cocreation; it's essential."

The quote is from a memoir, Mentor, by Tom Grimes. Not only is this a compelling well-wrought story worth studying for its craft, it's also full of gems--even entire teaching scenes lifted from workshops--about writing.

No Stories after Supper

On several of my grade school report cards, teachers cautioned my parents: Don't tell her stories or read to her after dinner. Settle her down for bed. She gets riled up easily.

I think of that advice sometimes now, as I try to calm down after listening to the powerful stories my students write and read in my classes, which, guess what, meet after dinner. Sometimes long after everybody's gone home, I pace and toss into the wee hours, my mind flooded with narratives.

I'm on break for the month of August and am reading Moby Dick Settle down? Tonight? After ingesting this robust passage? Note to self: Read only in the morning.

". . . After a stiff pull, their harpooneer got fast, and, spear in hand, Radney sprang to the bow. He was always a furious man, it seems, in a boat. And now his bandaged cry was, to beach him on the whale's topmost back. Nothing loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up, through a blinding foam that blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden the boat struck as against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing mate. That instant, as he fell on the whale's slippery back, the boat righted, and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over into the sea, on the other flank of the whale.

"He struck out through the spray, and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking to remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed round in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his jaws; and rearing high up with him, plunged headlong again, and went down.

"Meantime, at the first tap of the boat's bottom, the Lakeman had slackened the line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly looking on, he thought his own thoughts. But a sudden, terrific, downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his knife to the line. He cut it; and the whale was free. But, at some distance, Moby Dick rose again, with some tatters of Radney's red woollen shirt, caught in the teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase again; but the whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared."

5 Reasons Why I Don't Blog More Often

We've been making lists in my journal writing workshop these last two weeks:

1) Lists of things that give us energy (+) and rob us of energy (- )

2) And lists of why

3) Lists of beliefs and superstitions our families held when we were growing up--overt and covert

4) Lists of beliefs we hold now

5) Lists of what matters

And I just read a post, a list of 7 links for bloggers, which made me ask myself (again) why I don't blog more often.

Five Reasons I don't post more often:

1) I teach at least 4 workshops a week and feel talked out--about writing and everything else--at the end of the day. Write a post, now? Are you kidding?

2) I spend a lot of time each week editing and making post-like comments on writers' work. Go write a post? Busman's holiday.

3) I enjoy being a voyeur, anonymous, reading other people's blogs and not having to comment or post in response. I'm not responsible for or to these people in any way. And that's liberating.

4) Hmmm . . . I'm breaking a sweat. See, I don't have staying power for posts. "Just take something you've discussed in class and turn it into a post," my blog-man husband says. "But, that's work," I say. "So?" he says. And we have a tiresome little spat over who works harder. And I don't get a post written.

5) Here it is, folks. I'm not really clear about my niche. I mean I could post a lot about my mother's face, or my theories on why my cat is acting out on rugs and in suitcases, or my client who can't find drafts on his desktop. But isn't a blogger supposed to know her niche?

Summer Writing Goals: Write Them Down!

I make one final request of all my students before we break for the summer: Write down your summer writing goals and send them to me.

When I have the entire workshops' goals, I email them to everyone in the group.

"Print this out," I suggest, "and post it by your computer."

And when we get together for our monthly summer sessions, we devote part of every meeting to going over each person's goals.

The act of writing down--and sharing--goals helps us achieve them.

If you're not in a writing workshop, find a writing friend to share goals with. Meet over the summer--online if not in person--and review your goals.

Questions Writers Ask

As an editor and writing coach, I am often asked questions like: Am I a good writer? Do I have potential? Do you think I can sell this piece to The New Yorker?

This question will come up this week at the writing workshop I'm teaching in Doha, Qatar. Many of the fledgling writers here have had little opportunity to take workshops or discuss their literary dreams. I give them a lot of credit for signing up and showing up. I have some answers and suggestions for them but I can't tell them they'll be best-selling authors. I can't tell anyone this, of course.

In this post Jane Friedman, of Writer's Digest, offers solid responses to those Can-I-do-this questions writers so often ask.

Pushing the Boundaries: Writing Deadline

Nothing like a deadline to get us all in gear.

Here are some good summer dates that will keep us working and submitting--on our

nonfiction essays. Three thousand words or fewer and the truth. I think you can do it.

A Blog? A Website? What Does a Writer Need: When and Why

This is an excellent post about blogs and websites--when you need which and how to use both.

12 Submission Possibilities

My students are always looking for good markets for their writing.

Some of these publications sound interesting--definitely worth checking out:

http://www.writersdigest.com/article/12-literary-journals-your-future-agent-is-reading

Lost

I just lost a post. It was one of the best things I've ever written. Trust me. After some serious edits I published it.

Voila!

What appeared?

The first draft.

My honed piece?

Gone.

What!?

So this is why my husband tells me to compose in a text editor, then cut and paste into the blog. Sigh.

I should have watched the final episode of "Lost" instead of writing tonight.

Lost

I just lost a post. It was one of the best things I've ever written. Trust me. After some serious edits I published it.

Voila!

What appeared?

The first draft.

My honed piece?

Gone.

What!?

So this is why my husband tells me to compose in Word, then cut and paste into the blog. Sigh.

I should have watched the final episode of "Lost" instead of writing tonight.

Weekly Writing Roundup, May 7

Hey there. Every Friday I'm going to post links to a few articles and essays I've come across during the week that I hope you'll find useful and interesting. Feel free to comment; I'd love to hear from you.

What are you doing (or did you do) after college? I love this Op-Ed from the Times about the author's experience after graduating. I want to write about the cross-country tour I took with a dance company--in an old school bus and with our director's three young children. How about you?

Many of you are writing about your ancestors. Here's a craft piece on giving them flesh and blood:

A writing friend, Lyn Hawks, just published "Gramma's Day," a piece that uses a simple device to explore her grandmother's life and her own. You might want to play around with the form--using then and now.

And who better than William Zinsser to offer tips on memoir writing? (By the way, he publishes a piece every week, William Zinsser on Friday).

And for grammar geeks! Getting started on sentence diagramming:

The Big-Word Problem

Recently I vetoed reading a poem as a writing prompt in a workshop--it used big words that people might not know. I didn't want the participants to spend any time having to decode the poem's meaning.

"I am so glad you didn't use a poem with words we might not get," one workshop member said. "Poetry needs to be accessible, have strong images, not difficult words."

"Yeah, I hate that," another student said. "Big words put me off the author."

I thought of the scene in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when Alice and her new rodent and bird friends are trying to dry themselves after swimming in a pool of Alice's tears. (She shed the tears when she was huge and crying about being too big to fit through the tiny door that led to the lovely garden.)

The Dodo chimes in about how to get dry: "I move that the meeting adjourn, for the immediate adoption of more energetic remedies."

"Speak English!" said the Eaglet. "I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and, what's more, I don't believe you do either!" And the Eaglet bent down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly.

"What I was going to say," said the Dodo in an offended tone, "was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race."

Such a wild yet wise book.

Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English (originally published in 1926) advises writers to be: "direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid."

The vocabulary chapter says: "Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long."

Oops. Big word alert: Circumlocution, in case you don't know, means: a roundabout or indirect way of speaking; the use of more words than necessary to express an idea.

Well, sometimes a big word is simply the best word. Still, I try to avoid them in my own writing and in the writings I share with my groups.

William Zinsser states in Zinsser on Friday that we should write with "no unnecessary parts." Big cumbersome words that are off-putting and intimidating are, indeed, unnecessary parts.

Sugar-Coated Exposition

If you haven't yet read Out Stealing Horses, do. You're in for a treat.

By page 67, the reader is really curious to know more about Trond Sander, the protagonist in this book. In chapter one, he has moved back to a cabin on a river in Norway where he spent a summer as a boy. He is a sixty-seven year old man. He seems broken but we don't know why or how. In chapter two we are with him in his childhood for some vivid and evocative scenes. By chapter five we're back to the narrative present--Trond, out walking with his dog Lyra, has recognized a neighbor. We have no idea what has happened to Trond between his teen years and now but we're hooked on the sensual, melancholic writing. We want to know more about Sander.

Here's how author Per Petterson informs us. He has our main character go into the small town to shop at the Co-op. Here's Trond Sander in the store:

"I exchange greetings to right and left, they are used to me know and realize I am here to stay and that I an not one of the holiday cottage crew who pile out here in their mammoth cars every Easter and summer to fish by day and play poker and swig sundowners in the evening. It took some time before they started to ask questions, cautiously, in the queue for the check-out, and now everyone knows who I am and where I live. They know about my working life, how old I am, that my wife died three years ago in an accident I only just survived myself, that she was not my first wife, and that I have two grown-up children from an earlier marriage, and that they have children themselves . . . " and so on.

As readers we always need to know about characters. We demand to know, and if we don't know enough we will detach. At the same time we bristle at direct exposition. So this is a great way to let the reader know in a totally believable and indirect fashion.

Sugar-coated exposition, my husband calls it.

Reading for Life

I saw this on a student's email signature and had to post it.

A woman in a class this week talked about her six-year-old son saying something to her like, "You're always reading, Mom. Nose in a book."

At the time she was sitting on her couch devouring Mary Karr's The Liar's Club. She read him the part about kids shooting BB guns. He got wide-eyed.

Later, he wanted to hear more from the BB gun book.

Don't Bear It

"There is no greater ______ than bearing an untold story inside you."

Maya Angelou

This is a clue in the Sunday New York Times Magazine.

The five-letter word answer?

AGONY

So don't bear. Write it! Share it.

Cluster Crazy

I've been telling my students this week about the cluster: you put a word that represents something important in the middle of a large unlined piece of paper. Draw a circle around it. Let ideas and chains of thought spill onto the page: spoke, new idea, circle it, spoke, related idea--all stemming from this central theme. (Below is a cluster with revision ideas for a book I'm working on. It's hard to see but the central idea in blue/green is "book revision.")

The bubbles contain related changes and ideas.

Clusters are like outlines except they aren't linear. And I like that. It's easy to see the whole picture. I can pick a circle, any circle, and start writing.

I use clusters for all my writing projects and to plan workshops.

A woman I'm working with needs to move ahead right now writing her memoir, but she wants to come back at some point to expand a section that's incomplete. She has lots of ideas for this section and wants to record them--quickly, in shorthand. But she doesn't want her writing momentum to lag right now. Enter: The cluster.

Another client uses a cluster for each chapter of her book--and sub clusters for sections of chapters.

Try one. And let me know what you think, what you learn.

Only You Can Do Yours

Henry James told Edith Wharton: "There it is round you. Don't pass it by — the immediate, the real, the only, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for. Take hold of it and keep hold, and let it pull you where it will."

What is it that is yours alone? Don't know? You'll find out by writing.

Ready Set Write!

Playwright and New Yorker writer Paul Rudnick says: "As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly."

Amen.

I sit here in my spot--the morning still almost young at 8:58 AM--with the timer at the ready. But what am I doing? I am shuffling photos on facebook, reheating my coffee, confessing my undying devotion to my cats, checking email, texting with my daughter about the comfort of her new boots, enjoying watching the light pass across Linda's painting on the far wall, wondering if I should eat before writing. OK. Enough.

Timer, let's go. VAMOS!

Love that Paper

Here's a good prompt poem. Take any line as a starting point and write. Remember to set the timer: 15 minutes?
http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14606

Into Our Own Experience

Edna O'Brien was working in a chemist's shop in Dublin when she discovered a slender volume called Introducing James Joyce: a selection of Joyce's prose,with an introduction by T.S. Eliot.

She later said: "I opened it to a section from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the Christmas dinner scene, with the blue flame over the Christmas pudding. Up to then, I had been writing rather fancifully, with a lot of adjectives. When I read that, I realized one thing: that I need go no further than my own interior, my own experience, for whatever I wanted to write. It was truly, without sounding like St. Paul, an utter revelation to me." (Writer's Almanac)

Into our own interiors, our own experience--this is where we must go to tell the stories we can tell and to write well.