A Week of Observations: P3

With an extra hour to write and reflect, I figured I'd make a blog list. It's my new thing. Here's what I learned/remembered this week. Next post will be a new interview with the poet and fiction writer, Tina Barry. In the meantime, my week's lessons...

• Saying, "Thanks, that what I intended" in a super low voice is the best way to receive a compliment
• 5Ks are much easier if a dog is pulling you along
• Buying cheap candy means being stuck with cheap candy 
• Getting your short story collection nominated for the Pen/Faulkner is like eating warm bread pudding with a scoop of vanilla
• It's always good to have an extra pair of shoes in the car
• To Do lists are only helpful when they're realistic; otherwise, they are a source of anxiety
• Putting all recurring characters in a single story is awkwardly delicious
• NaNoWriMo could be any month 
• If the conversation is awkward, walking away abruptly is a natural end
• Pot pie can't be dressed up
• The right frame can be tough to find
• People are almost never who they seem
• Ice and heat, in the right combination, can cure most minor ailments
• Handstands after thirty are an exercise in fearlessness - but they shouldn't be rushed

Writing prompt: Write the opening to the next great novel. Just the opening, a mere paragraph. Make that paragraph the best paragraph you've ever written. The next day, read that paragraph and continue to write. 20 minutes minimum. See what happens.

Well, I made it to Vermont. I am in the company of visual and literary artists from around the world. It's cool to be a minority as a writer here. I have enjoyed hearing about the artistic visions of painters, photographers and sculptors over breakfast and lunch, who tell me about projects that I can't wait to see realized.

I am writing fiction. To finish or at least come close to finishing my first novel. I won't get more specific than that, but so far so good. I'll be here for two weeks, and I plan to make the most of it. VSC is pretty amazing. The people are awesome; the weather is cold; there are dogs; there is a meditation building that I will visit twice a day; there is tea and coffee; there are blankets; there is a goood view from my studio; and for one of the first times in my life, there is time available to me, specifically, to devote to writing. I'm taking it. I've put in two hours this morning and plan to work for the next four. I can't believe how much I accomplished with two straight hours; it made me realize how little time I really am able to devote to writing in my day-to-day life. Okay, so given the rarity, I must go... write... I'll check in again over the weekend. 

This is what I woke up to at 6AM





The meditation building. I was here at 7AM and plan to do the same each day.



The view from my studio

Where I hope to type The End, if only for dramatic effect













What if no one ever read another word I wrote?

Writing used to be my secret. It used to be my confidant when I was alone, afraid, overjoyed or perplexed. Then, I decided to major in it, and for awhile it became something else. It became a vessel for me to share said emotions with a select group of people who used writing in the same way. Writers became my community, and my confidant became not only the page but also the audience of teachers and fellow students who read my work. The expansion from solitary act to public act was exhilarating at first, even addictive when, say, some one “got it” and gave me positive feedback.

Then I went to graduate school where my audience expected more than honesty—they demanded something intangible and complex, and I became part of a community that expected things from work that hadn't yet been written. This time was, in fact, when I began to publish and refer to my writing as work.

Something changes when a writer begins to call her stuff work, to write with the knowledge that her confidant has become something else, it has become an art that carries with it the expectation of production. When writing becomes work, it becomes tempting to lose honesty and begin to write to expectations.

I bring this up because I think it's important for my professional writing career to be ignored when I write, especially those first drafts, but I wonder if this is really possible after one takes the leap from solitary action to public output. Ive read writers interviewed who say that they had to stop writing after a while, to try and get back that initial honesty before it will fully mesh with what they've studied of the craft. And I'm beginning to see why. It seems that work is being accepted or gently rejected (less form letters) by literary journals that used to, I thought, have standardized rejection notices with my name on them preprinted and ready for my next submission. Now that I have a fighting chance, that I can put together coherent sentences that reflect my honesty and love for writing and somehow still manage to tell a story, I have an even bigger audience and this audience can often infiltrate my thoughts, even as I write my first drafts.

As an exercise, Ive decided to begin again, to write for the rest of the summer as though no one will ever read my work, just to see what happens. I'm not sure it will work, but I have to try because I feel that even though I have some strong stories forthcoming in journals that publish work I love, I don't want to write for any of them. I want to try and get that initial motivation back, to write for no other reason than to figure things out, to question and assess on my own terms. We'll see what happens. Perhaps it's not possible. But I think it's important to try. Publication is a beautiful thing, but for sensitive types like me, the thought that I will be evaluated and judged before a story is even written makes the process less about what propelled me to write in the first place. I'll record my process, but not my work, and we'll see what happens.    

Back to Basics

There seems two schools of thought on what makes a writer great: a strong education (self or institutionally-guided) or a sort of gift that, like height or a high metabolism, is something that you either have or don't.  I bring this up because I'm currently masterminding the syllabus for my first creative writing course, which will begin fall semester.

This particular course is an introduction to creative writing and it will encompass numerous genres, including drama, fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction.  Truthfully, this feels like play for me--it's so much fun to sift through endless literary shorts, to decide which works I want to include in my course reading.  I have a large compilation of works that I'll have to pare down a bit before fall, but I'm confident that the end result will be an eclectic collection that will appeal to a wide array of tastes and sensibilities.  But this is the easy part.

I have been putting off constructing the craft lessons and writing assignments because I figured this would be the cumbersome work.  Perhaps this is due to a slight bent toward the idea that to teach writing is a limited venture, after all, so much depends on voice and the writer's motivation, ability to create.  Creativity, I hate to say, can be exercised but not taught.

That said, I began today--I began putting together assignments that go back to basics: character development, types of conflict, ways to raise tension, how to avoid cliches, etc... And guess what?  I realized I hadn't really broken writing down to the basics in quite some time.  Not that I forgot the basics, but I just didn't think about them much.  I figured they were all just coming out, naturally.

As I sketch potential exercises for my students, I've found myself taking time to pause and reflect on my own works-in-progress with a newfound (re-found) focus.  So, for me, the education is not necessarily a formula to create a bestselling author or literary phenom, but it does contribute to the perspective I need to have to round out my own work.

Regardless of any creative gifts a writer has, the formula for a strong work will always be there.  X(believable narrative) + Y(defined conflict or topic) + Z (specific descriptions) = A complete work.  Experimental structures and the all-elusive 'voice' can take this simple formula and make it look more like calculus than simple algebra, but the basics will endure; and they can be taught.



                                                                                                         Kurt Vonnegut's story graph for Cinderella

Are Writers Full of Themselves?

Recently, I was asked if I thought writers were egotistical and self-indulgent by nature.  A student, who admitted to despising the very act of writing essays said that he felt writers are full of themselves, and he smartly asked if I agreed before suggesting he be dismissed of an essay assignment.  If I were teaching philosophy, I might have given him an A+ for the class, told him to go home.  Instead, let's just say that I said something incredibly concise, smart and profound in response, but I made him turn in the paper.  The fact is, his question has stayed on my mind and I wanted to address it here, in more depth.


According to Freud, the Ego is the rational part of the brain, the bridge between reality’s limitations and the Id, which contains a person’s passions and instinctual drives. The way the word ego is commonly used, it implies a person is full of self-rationalization or more simply put, is full of ones self. Many times writers and other artists are accused of being egotistical, which to me, makes sense. I mean, if a person that spends hours recording thoughts that he or she deems worthy of an audience, there has to be some ego there—otherwise how could that person rationally believe those thoughts are important enough to share?

I like to think that a good writer puts the ego aside when writing a draft, and simply attempts to record passions, deep-seated beliefs and desires, and that revision is the ego’s place to examine and rationalize such thoughts. Or, if we’re talking non-fiction, a more philosophical take on writing, the writer will actually question his or her motivations and attempt to step outside or at least briefly try to imagine a view that is counter to what is instinctual.

Personally, I am drawn to memoir and personal essays, as a reader, for this very reason—the form insists upon self-examination and reflection that extends beyond mere navel-gazing. When it comes to fiction, the topic is more nuanced, but I think even the best novels and short stories have enough shaded meaning that they can be discussed and argued rather than taken literally as social commentary or a veiled personal story.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that ego might drive us to the very act of writing, but the willingness of a writer to put said ego aside, to step outside of it for even a moment, is what separates (apart from the obvious: craft, word choice, etc…) a strong story from the more common preachy writing that often finds a predictable future: from computer screen or notebook to slush pile and eventually, the trash can or recycle bin.

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