The Grumpy Griffin

A Living History

2012-01-21T16:56:00.000-08:00

Nearly two years ago Dr. Elizabeth Baer, a professor of Holocaust Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College, approached me about a course on the Dakota Conflict she was planning for 2012 along with Ben Leonard, the director of the Nicollet Historical Society at Traverse des Sioux. We met at Centennial Lakes and sat on a bench overlooking a tranquil pond. A summer sun glinted on the waters, incongruous to the violent events we discussed. We, the inheritors of history, ate our lunch and talked about the privations leading up to the war. How could a course on this event do justice, include voices on all sides?

It must have been one of many such conversations that Elizabeth Baer had while planning the course. January of 2012 seemed like a long ways away to me then, an abstraction. I was pleased to be included, honored to represent the role of the imagination in interpreting history. When the lunch ended, we went our separate ways and checked back in now and then over the course of next twenty-four months as the speaking engagement crept closer.

This remains a troubled, controversial history. In a recent column welcoming the state's first female American Indian legislator, columnist Lori Sturdevant draws a direct connection to the "150th anniversary of the Dakota War." She reminds us of William's Faulkner's injunction that "the past isn't over; it isn't even the past," a lesson she learned all too well when she was bombarded with angry emails from all sides after a column she published about the conflict. "Good luck" she wishes to the Minnesota Historical Society or any other groups organizing events around the sesquicentennial. (See: http://www.startribune.com/opinion/otherviews/137789273.html for the full column.)

Like Lori Sturdevant, I'll admit a little nervousness heading into my presentation. I'm happy to report that in this case she was wrong. The people did come, but there wasn't any spirit of contention, nor clamors of protest. That summer day I first spoke with Elizabeth, I could not have pictured anything like what happened when I showed up last Tuesday to speak at Alumni Hall on the Gustavus campus. Over two hundred people had gathered to listen and dialogue about the Dakota Conflict, along with another forty or so more who watched the lecture via simulcast at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

It’s a strange feeling to stand in front of such a crowd, especially for me, an author who is grateful if just one person happens to show up for a reading. The mood I picked up from the crowd was one of hunger, if that is even the right word. They were hungry for knowledge and understanding. I did what I know how to do: I told stories. I reminded them of how the word “story” lives inside the word “history,” of the importance of keeping stories alive, and of all the ways stories honor the dead. When Glen Wasicuna, a Dakota language instructor, began telling a few stories passed down to him during the question and answer session, stories he is now passing along to the next generation of youth, I felt how the audience leaned toward him.

August of this year will mark the sesquicentennial of the Dakota Conflict and this history remains what I've described as "a living wound in the time continuum." Look at the picture above, how many people came from the community of St. Peter and surrounding areas, gathered to honor the past. It’s something I’ve also seen in places like Cambridge, Minnesota and Winona where my book was a community wide read. If this history is a wound, it’s only through such dialogues that a possibility for healing might emerge.

You can find out more about the Commemorating Controversy series on the Dakota Conflict here: https://gustavus.edu/calendar/commemorating-controversy-the-u-s-dakota-war-of-1862-speaker-series-2/32191 There are videos of past presentations and two more events remain in the series: Corinne Monjeau-Marz speaks on Tuesday, January 24, and the final evening features Gwen Westerman-Wasicuna on Thursday, January 26.

Two years of planning on the part of historian Ben Leonard and Elizabeth Baer went into the making of this series. It’s wonderful to see so much thoughtful preparation bring about such a fruitful and necessary dialogue. I urge you to check out the lecture series, either in person or online. History lives inside each one of us, as close “as our own heartbeat” as Asa learns in The Night Birds. Taking time to remember shapes our lives, our families, and our communities in ways that have a positive, lasting impact.

Dreaming Your Stories into Being

2012-01-15T12:38:00.000-08:00

Do mystical words like “white-hot center” and “yearning” and “trance” make you squirm in your chair, or light up from within? From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction is a collection of lectures Robert Olen Butler delivered while at Florida State University. Janet Burroway, whose text on writing fiction is a cornerstone for workshops around the nation, edited the lectures from their original “extempore” delivery into what is a cohesive and fascinating look at how Robert Olen Butler believes writers should compose novels.

Let me say this from the beginning: From Where You Dream is unlike any other book out there. Yes, you’ll find advice on characters and plotting, but Butler’s emphasis is on process, and his primary concern is that most of us out there, including published novelists, are doing it wrong. Some might quibble with what occasionally comes across as an overly-prescriptive approach, but we grow as writers when we reflect on our writing, and that includes the way we do it. I am one of the least efficient writers on the planet, requiring many drafts and revisions before my work finds a unified form. I read books like Robert Olen Butler’s because I am ever searching for a better way, and I am happy to report there is so much that is good and helpful in this book. As a writer who also teaches fiction at the college level, I know I will be referring to it during the semester.

Robert Olen Butler begins by quoting Akira Kurosawa, who once said “To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.” Here is the focus of his methods and his lectures: high art. “You must, to be in here, have the highest aspirations for yourselves as writers,” Butler says from the start, “—the desire to create works of fiction that will endure, that reflect and articulate the deepest truths about the human condition” (10). If you believe this, you are going to love this book. It’s true that some writers have simpler aims, to tell a good story, to create an imaginary realm where another reader might spend a few happy hours, and there’s nothing wrong with that. “There are two of you,” Butler opines at one point, “one who wants to write and one who doesn’t.” Wherever we fall on such a continuum—high art or pulp fiction—how we confront the blank page and the scary secret thoughts of our unconscious is one of the most important questions we face.

“Art comes from the place where you dream,” (13) Butler tells us, while advising us to live and write as “sensualists” and not “intellectuals.” Sensual. Dream. Ravenous. These are not terms we ordinarily find in texts on writing and yet they lie at the core of writing and art. The problem, according to Butler, “is that the artistic medium of fiction writers—language—is not innately sensual” (17). We have to find a way to seek out the unconscious mind, a place brimming with livid energy, and describe this world in sensual terms. “[F]or those two hours a day when you write you cannot flinch. You have to go down into the deepest, darkest, most roiling, white-hot place…you have to go down there; down into the deepest part of it, and you can’t flinch, can’t walk away” (18). Are you nervous yet? The way we find this place is through the trance, the “flow state.” Robert Olen Butler wants you to find the zone.

His chapter on “yearning” is a must read for all fiction writers. One of Butler’s primary concerns is that authors have set aside emotion, have forgotten that the “phenomenon of desire” should be at the center of every story. “We are the yearning creatures of this planet” Butler says (40). In a statement that also appears in Janet Burroway's seminal textbook Writing Fiction, he notes that “desire is the driving force behind plot. The character yearns, the character does something in pursuit of that yearning, and some force or other will block the attempt to fulfill that yearning” (42). Sound simple? The trouble is all too often we forget what our characters want, muddy the water, create characters who are passive observers instead of active seekers. Butler doesn’t think you should start writing until it’s absolutely clear what your character yearns for.

In this respect, Robert Olen Butler reminds me of another famous writer. I like to quote Kurt Vonnegut to my students. “Make your character want something right away” Vonnegut says, “even if it’s something as simple as a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaning of life still have to drink water from time to time.” Vonnegut goes on to talk about a story one of this students wrote, about a nun who needs to remove a piece of dental floss from her teeth. According to him, “the story was about deeper things than that, but no one who read the story could do so without fishing around in his or her mouth.”

The main advice in From Where You Dream is how to get access to that molten part of our unconscious minds. Robert Olen Butler wants you to consider “dreamstorming, “ a process he describes like this: “You’re going to sit or recline in your writing space in your trance and you’re going to free-float, free-associate, sit with your character, watch your character move around in the potential world of this novel” (87). Butler wants you to do this day after day, before you ever start writing. What emerges out of the dreamstorm should be a scattering of images, sensual moments, between six or ten words that indicate what is going to happen in this scene. He advises doing this until you have filled two hundred or so three-by-five cards with potential scenes. The goal of this dreamstorming is what “psychologists call functional fixedness.” By seeking out a trance state day after day, your mind naturally responds, opening up doorways into the unconscious. Once you have all the cards in place you organize them, searching for your opening scene. The structure he says, grows “organically” from the process. “When you are driven by the desire for the organic wholeness of the object, and by the need to recompose the elements that are already in the work, and by the dynamics of your character’s desire, structure will inevitably come from that” (94).

Do you buy into the process? In a way it sounds like the advice I give my students for putting together a research essay, but with a strong mystical dose of meditation to tap into the right side of the brain. I thought of Ray Bradbury (see my post from a few years ago) and his brainstorming lists from The Zen of Writing. The primary thing I took from Where You Dream was the highly important emphasis of finding a way to enter that waking dream state, the trance mind, where all good writing originates. I thought more deeply about my characters and what they want and how important it is to never lose sight of this.

I have an hour a day to write during the school year. It’s all I can spare once the papers start rolling in. Even if I don’t go all the way into using Butler’s three-by-five cards, I know from reading this book that I need to spend more time clearing my conscious mind, meditating, and the result will deepen my fiction.

There’s much more From Where You Dream than I have space for here. The chapter on “The Cinema of the Mind” makes reading it worth your time and money alone. For writers there’s an abundance of good advice about the process of shaping a novel and stories. For the teacher of writing, there are great examples (and a neat activity using anecdotes that I’d like to try) about the writing workshop, including an appendix with an older short story of Robert Olen Butler’s, “Open Arms,” and student examples that incorporate analysis.

If you love writing, if you want to learn and grow, buy this book. It’s one of the best books on writing that I’ve read in a long time.

Does Exercise Matter for the Working Writer?

2010-06-19T17:24:00.000-07:00

I expected to love Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, since it features two of my favorites subjects, jogging and the craft of writing. Throw in a dash of memoir and you have what should have been an inspirational read. I hoped the book would jumpstart my exercise program and fuel my progress through the final revision of my second novel.

To those ends, the book disappoints, but I was still glad I read it. Maybe I was expecting too much from one of the world’s premier authors, but this thin memoir doesn’t measure up to classics like Stephen King’s On Writing or Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. If you don’t already love running or writing, Murakami’s memoir won’t do much for you.

Why? Let’s get the bad out of the way first and then discuss what the book does right. Murakami’s descriptions of running feature some of the most flaccid prose I’ve encountered this year. He even resorts to cliché, complaining of it “raining cats and dogs” during a training session for the New York Marathon. Consider this passage about his run between Marathon, Greece and Athens:

The road within the Athen’s city limit is very hard to run on. It’s about three miles from the stadium to the highway and entrance and there are lots of stoplights, which messes up my pace. There are also a lot of places where construction and double-parked cars block the road, and I have to step out in the middle of the street. What with cars zooming around early in the morning, running here can be dangerous. (Murakami 61)

Note the painful passive tense, the lack of sensory imagery. Much of this book contains exactly these kinds of snooze-inducing descriptions of running. The memoir portions from a man characterized as a “guardedly private writer” probably won’t surprise longtime Murakami fans. We learn he once owned a jazz club and was a former smoker. He collects LP’s and has a special fondness for classic rock and roll. There’s little insight into the man’s psychology, the unique forces and life events that shape a great writer. And maybe this is a good thing. Murakami comes across as slightly dull in his memoir. There’s no messed up childhood, no triumph over alcohol or drugs. This is a record of one writer getting it done. He leaves the magic for his stories.

There are surprises in this book. Murakami discusses artists who hit their peak as they approached middle age, like Dostoevesky, who produced his greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, shortly before his death. The book becomes most dynamic and hits some soaring notes when it makes the connections between running and writing. Noting that both are a matter of talent, Murakami, who doesn’t consider himself talented at either, believes that:

I have to pound the rock with a chisel and dig out of a deep hole before I can locate the source of creativity. To write a novel I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort. Every time I begin a new novel, I have dredge out another deep hole. (Murkami 43)

Many of us have seen runners crippled by aching joints and bad knees in old age. What Murakami points out in this book is that writing offers similar highs and joys, but also takes a toll that is both psychic and physical. Art always involves sacrifice. In another passage, he makes his thoughts on discipline and concentration abundantly clear:

Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor. Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor. It doesn’t involve heavy lifting, running fast, or leaping high. Most people only see the surface of writing and think of writers as involved in quiet, intellectual work done in their study. If you have the strength to lift a coffee cup, they figure, you can write a novel. But once you try your hand at it, you soon find it isn’t as peaceful a job as it seems. The whole process--sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track—requires far more energy than most people ever imagine. You might not move your body around, but there’s grueling dynamic labor going on inside you. Everybody uses their mind when they think. But a writer puts on an outfit called narrative and thinks with his entire being; and for the novelist that process requires putting into play all your physical reserve, often to the point of overexertion. (Murakami 79-80)

When my teaching schedule or home life gets hectic, the first thing I let go is the exercise. The hour a five mile jog—or plod, in my case—is an easy cut. As the papers pile up, or the children get sick, I cling to what little time I have. I keep writing, trying to carve out a little space in the day. What I gained from this book most clearly is a realization of how important my physical health is to the writing that I need to do. If I want to write, I need to run, or like Charles Dickens, take up an evening walk which will allow me to think about the stories I’m working on. I’ll leave with Murakami’s thoughts on these things:

In any event, I’m happy I haven’t stopped running all these years. The reason is, I like the novels I’ve written. And I’m really looking forward to seeing what kind of novel I’ll produce next. Since I’m a writer with limits—an imperfect person living an imperfect, limited life—the fact that I can still feel this way is a real accomplishment. Calling it a miracle, might be an exaggeration, but I really do feel this way. And if running every day helps me accomplish this, then I’m very grateful to running. (Murakami 82)

For the Murakami fan in your family this book is well worth a purchase. For the runner with literary ambitions, it offers some heady delights. It’s by no means a perfect little memoir, but this is a book on writing worth your time and effort.

2009-11-09T19:38:00.000-08:00

Robert Boswell's The Half Known World is a great read for anyone interested in writing "literary" fiction and the first two chapters are a great read for anyone period. Chapter one is the book's cornerstone. Here Boswell inveighs against creative writing classes that have students making character lists, about birthdays, jobs, etc. This reminds me very much of Flannery O'Connor who insisted on the "mystery of personality" as the core of good stories. Anything that kills mystery for readers and writers is bad practice. Boswell describes wandering an unknown, forbidden territory as a boy, a destination he and his friend never successfully reach. To really write well and make evocative characters "the writer must suggest a dimension to fictional reality that escapes comprehension. The writer wishes to make his characters and their world known to the reader, and he simultaneously wishes to make them resonate with the unknown." It's this territory of the unknown, the mysterious, that is our true aim. I loved every moment of this first chapter.

Likewise, the second chapter captivated me. By telling a story of an encounter with a troubled woman at the bar, Robert Boswell describes his writing practice. I heard him read this aloud at the AWP convention a few years ago and was enthralled. It's something I could share with my undergraduate students. I also really liked his chapter on the "Alternate Universe" and his thoughts on omniscience are likewise indispensable.

Other chapters were intriguing, but a little troubling for me. Boswell's repeated use of the term "literary" is meant to establish a hierarchy in the fictional world and to make his points he sometimes dismisses the work of popular authors like Barbara Kingsolver or Sue Miller. He speaks of his own loves, for baseball and film noir, as "soft spots" that he wouldn't be able to write about in his fiction. This feels like bad advice to me. I think our core material often grows out of our obsessions, what we love. However, these are small quibbles. This one of the best books I've read recently on writing, one that has me longing for the free time to get writing again this coming month when school lets out, to once more set out to explore that mysterious terrain, the woods and iced over streams leading down to that unreachable river beyond.

You can read more about Boswell, including links to his stories, here: http://www.robertboswell.com/_center_the_half_known_world__center__69674.htm

Worth the Price of Admission

2009-09-03T07:24:00.000-07:00

Now Write! Fiction Writing Exercises from Today's Best Writing Teachers, edited by Sherry Ellis, is a useful addition to the bookshelf for writers, especially those who also teach creative writing. I immediately started using some of the exercises in my fiction class.

I had a moment where I laughed out loud. Amidst the usual exercises on character and point of view there was this advice from Kathleen Spivak in her "The Writing Exercise: A Recipe."

Ingredients and Preparation

Before bedtime, pick up the alarm clock. Set it to ring two hours earlier than your usual wake-up time.

Sleep. Or don't. But get up anyway.

Put a mug of coffee, tea, or other comfort in your hands. Now go to your desk immediately. Sit down. Look dazed. Open the computer-mind.

Work on a writing project--somehow for two hours. Don't complain. (Spivak 64).

Spivak goes on to describe doing for this a year, comparing the writing project to a "dominatrix" and a "virus that takes hold." I loved it. Here is the writing process boiled down to its stark essence. Art will always require sacrifice, as she makes clear. If you want to write you must be willing to give up sleep, set aside distractions, and carve a space for yourself seperate from the world. As Rilke once said, "Ask yourself in the stillest hour, must I write?"

I loved it, but this is very difficult for me to do now right now. I'm in the midst of a new semester. I have two lovely young daughters, age four and one, to help raise. I'm content with my life and why would I spoil such contentment to work morning after morning on something that may never see the light of day?

Art. I know I'll be returning to the novel soon. In the stillest hour I will write!

There are many other worthy chapters in this essay collection. For teachers of writing, chapters like Crystal Wilkinson's "Birth of a Story in an Hour or Less" make Now Write! well worth the price of admission.

Book Lovers Night at the College of Saint Benedict's!

2009-08-01T10:55:00.000-07:00

I am very excited about this upcoming event. I'm heading to the College of Saint Benedict's as part of the summer reading program next week. I look forward to the evening and conversation!

SB “Book Lovers' Night" features author Thomas Maltman

07/27/2009

Thomas Maltman, author of The Night Birds, is the featured guest at the College of Saint Benedict’s “Book Lovers' Night” Wednesday, Aug. 5 at Teresa Reception Center, Main Building, CSB.

The book program begins at 6:45 p.m., and is free to the public. An optional “light” dinner will be offered at 6 p.m. for $7.

The Night Birds is Maltman’s first novel and was released in 2007 by Soho Press. Set in 1876 in Minnesota, the book spotlights 14-year-old Asa Senger and his German immigrant family. It is a time of uncertainty for the family, as vast clouds of locust descend on the Great Plains. The James-Younger gang, a band of murderous thieves, is rumored to be riding north of the area.

During this time of uncertainty for Asa and his family, his Aunt Hazel arrives on the scene. Confined for years in an asylum, she brings with her stories of the Dakota War (also known as the Dakota Conflict) of 1862. Her arrival propels the story into the past, as far back as the Senger family’s initial settlement in slave-holding Missouri.

The Night Birds has received the Alex Award from the American Library Association, the Friends of American Writers Literary Award and the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America.

"We all set our sights on the Great American Novel. . . . (Maltman) comes impressively close to laying his hands on the grail," wrote reviewer Madison Smartt Bell in The Boston Globe newspaper.

Maltman’s essays, poetry and fiction have been published in the Georgetown Review, Great River Reviewand Main Channel Voices, among other journals. Maltman, who lives in Minneapolis, is expected to release a second novel, Little Wolves, soon.

The Night Birds will be on sale at 20 percent off at both the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University bookstores through the event. For more information on the event, please call 320-363-2119, or e-mail bookevents@csbsju.edu.

Diane Hageman
Director of Media Relations
College of Saint Benedict
Phone 320-363-5748
Fax 320-363-5136
dhageman@csbsju.edu

Burn Calories - wikiHow

2009-07-27T09:26:00.000-07:00

Okay. This blog is supposed about aspects of creative writing, but I had to post this. My Google page includes many odd links including a daily Wiki-How, a "how-to" of the day. The subjects are unfailing esoteric and interesting, everything from how to tell a good horror story, to how to look good naked. The following post is creative, even if it's not about writing so much. It includes odd ways to lose weight, from fidgeting to linking your work station to a treadmill. (Could you treadmill while writing a novel? The idea intrigues me. ) So it's not about writing, but after a long winter of dark beer and heavy foods, I am still looking for ways to lose weight this summer. Here's some tips, courtesy of Wiki-How.

Burn Calories - wikiHow

Rules for Writing a Novel?

2009-05-27T09:53:00.000-07:00

As I work on this final draft on Little Wolves over the summer, I'm constantly thinking about craft and principle. "There are three rules to writing a novel," W. Somerset Maugham once said, "but no-one can agree what they are." The truth is that you have to teach yourself how to write every novel. Writing one is no guarantee that you'll ever finish another. Many don't. One of those depressing statistics I've encountered is that 80% of all debut authors never go on to publish another work. That's frightening for those of us in the trenches, so when I get frightened I look for a helpful guide.

One of those guides that I've written about in my Goodreads account is Sol Stein's How to Grow a Novel. Stein is a former agent and author and provides an insider's view of the art. (He's also the author of Stein on Writing, and The Magician.) He places a writer's focus where it should be, on the reader. In the appendix section he offers some "principles" that I'd like to list here for those of you spending your summer writing. I'm a lover of lists and I find this one instructive. For copyright reasons this is just a partial sampling of the book. The list itself does not hint at the full riches the book offers. For that you'll need to buy yourself a copy!

Before Beginning to Write

What does your protagonist want badly?
Who or what is in your protagonist's way? ("Who" will be more dramatic)
Get into the skin of characters who are different from you.
Why would you want to spend time in the company of the person you are choosing as your protagonist?
How do your characters view each other? Write a short paragraph about each character's views of the virtues, faults, and follies of other important characters. Save these paragraphs for referral and guidance.
How are you planning to hook your reader on page one?
Consider starting a with a scene that is already underway.
What are the dramatic conflicts you intend to let the reader see in each chapter?

Keep in Mind While Writing

The "engine" of your story needs to be turned on as close to the beginning as possible. The "engine" is the point at which a story involves a reader, the place at which the reader can't stop reading.
Keep the action visible on stage as much as you can.
Don't mark time; move the story relentlessly
Is your hero or heroine actively doing something rather than being done to?
Use surprise (such as an unexpected obstacle) to create suspense.
During your descriptions of places do you also move the story along?
End scenes and chapters with thrusters that make the reader curious about what happens next.
To increase a reader's interest, deprive him of something he wants to know.

There are many items on this list (25 in all!) and I recommend you buy the book which includes many instructive examples highlighting why each point is so crucial. Copyright:

Stein, Sol. How To Grow a Novel: The Most Common Mistakes Writers Make and How to Avoid Them. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1993.

2009-03-07T05:39:00.000-08:00

My book's been out for awhile, so I wanted to post some of my favorite reviews before they vanish from the web entirely.. This one below came from Tad Simons, the art critic at Minneapolis-St. Paul Magazine: The Best of the Twin Cities. The review came out months after the book was print and was a wonderful surprise. The other book feaured is Warren Read's The Lyncher in Me, which I still look forward to reading.

http://www.mspmag.com/entertainment/books/103400.asp?action=print

Hang Time

Two of the most notorious incidents in Minnesota history provide the backdrop for books that grapple with our collective shame in very different ways.
April 2008
By Tad Simons

When it comes to lynchings, Minnesota does not have a stellar record. More than a few times in our state’s history people have opted for the expedience of the rope over the plodding rule of law, and each time it has happened, whether the motive was to hang a few black men or rid the prairie of Indians, a wave of shame and guilt has rippled through Minnesota’s collective conscience.

Minnesotans are good people by and large, not given to bursts of vengeance, but these tragedies are part of our legacy, and though we might wish otherwise, all of us share the responsibility for making sure such things never happen again. One of the ways we do this is by continuing to tell the stories of these unfortunate events; or, as two Minnesota– bred authors have done in their new books (one fiction, the other nonfiction), tell the story behind the story.

Thomas Maltman’s novel, The Night Birds, is set in the prairie outside of New Ulm in the decades before and after the infamous 1862 Dakota uprising, which resulted in the massacre of scores of white settlers and the subsequent hanging in Mankato, after a hasty tribunal, of thirty-eight Indians and sympathizers—an event that still holds the United States record for number of people executed simultaneously in one day. Though the massacre is central to the tale, Maltman wisely lets the horror of that day burble in the background, creating a slow, seething tension that builds for nearly 300 pages before he even mentions it.

In the meantime, the narrative shifts back and forth between 1876 and the late 1850s, telling the story of a German immigrant family that settles in a valley outside of New Ulm, across the river from a band of Dakota Indians. Through much delicate and beautiful writing, the saga of the Senger family unfolds and their relationship with the tribe of Indians on the other side of river grows more complicated. The children play with each other and occasionally fight; the adults have an uneasy but respectful friendship; and when push comes to shove—when one or the other is sick or in need of assistance—they act like neighbors and help each other out in order to survive. But they are not the same. Both sides know it, and their differences eventually lead to bloodshed.

There is nothing didactic or cloying about The Night Birds; it is simply a first-rate tale of historical fiction that rings true with every word, amplifying one of the most horrific episodes in our history without exploiting or sensationalizing it. However, Warren Read takes a far more personal and confrontational approach to history in his memoir, The Lyncher in Me: A Search for Redemption in the Face of History.

During a random Google search, Warren Read discovered an awful truth: That his great-grandfather, Louis Dondino, was the man responsible for inciting the riot that led to the infamous Duluth lynching in 1920 of three black circus workers accused of raping a white girl. Starting with the seed of this unsettling fact, Read does a brilliant job of showing how his grandfather’s shameful legacy (the men were later proven innocent) was not an isolated event, but rather part of a pattern of violence and bigotry that extended through the generations to his own abusive, alcoholic father all the way to the present and the hatred Read himself has felt as a once-married man with three kids who is now openly gay.

Read doesn’t just tell his story, though—he attempts to make amends for his family’s ignorance and brutality and in the process fashions a kind of heroic template for how a thoughtful, conscientious person can take active responsibility for their own life, however uncomfortable or inconvenient the facts of one’s life may be. Read can occasionally be faulted for polishing his own halo a little too brightly, but for the most part he presents the facts of his personal life and the back story of the Duluth lynching with unflinching honesty and a great deal of effective, poignant writing on a subject that Minnesotans, try as they might, can’t seem to forget.

The Night Birds, by Thomas Maltman, Soho Press, 2007. 370 pages, $24 The Lyncher in Me: A Search for Redemption in the Face of History, by Warren Read, Borealis Books. 208 pages, $24.95

2009-03-01T17:04:00.000-08:00

I am always on the hunt for good books on writing so I gave this one a try based on the recommendation of a good friend. I liked it so much I assigned the book for my fiction workshop last fall and I'm glad to report that students responded well to it, too. I've included some of my favorite quotes below, along with my comments in italics.

Quotes from Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird

“Publication is not all it’s cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part.”

Writing is a lonely business filled with rejection slips and disappointment. For most of us, it just won't pay the bills. Publication does matter, however, but Lamott is right in pointing out that there's more to strive for. We should try to make art with our writing, something lasting and true. We should savor those rare successes, a publication, an award, but the key thing is to keep up with the daily struggle of writing and growing in our craft.

Getting Started

“The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth” (3).

“But after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat. Some lose faith” (3).

“Flannery O’ Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life” (qtd in Lamott 4).”

“You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively” (6).

I love the Flannery O'Connor quote. I recently had my students complete an activity where they draw the floorplan of the first house they remember living in--an activity inspired by Janet Burroway's great introductory text Imaginative Writing. Once the floorplan is complete they trace the map with their fingers, marking places of special significance. The bathroom mirror where they invoked "Bloody Mary." The spot on the white carpet where they spilled kool-aid. It's always surprising to hear the memories that rise to the surface. We then talk about the O'Connor quote and how each of us has experienced the requisite emotions--sadness, joy, betrayal--the raw working material of good fiction.

Daily Work

“What’s real is that if you do your scales every day, if you slowly try harder and harder pieces, if you listen to great musicians play music you love, you’ll get better” (14).

“It reminds me that all I have to do to is write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame…just one paragraph describing this woman, in the town where I grew up, the first time we encounter her” (18). “E.L. Doctorow once said that ‘writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way” (qtd in Lamott 18).

I love the idea of the frame. Not everyone can write Stephen King style--2000 words a day. For busy parents, for those who teach, Lamott's idea of a frame is more practical.

First Drafts

“Now practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts” (21).

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people” (28).

“I think that something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds—the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both—to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out” (30).

“Kurt Vonnegut said, ‘When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth’” (qtd in Lamott 32).

“Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can’t—and, in fact, you’re not supposed to—know exactly what the picture is supposed to look like until it has finished developing” (39).

On Character Shaping

“And finally as the picture comes into focus, you begin to notice all the props surrounding these people, and you begin to understand how props define us and comfort us, and show us what we value and what we need and who we think we are” (40).

“Knowledge of your characters also emerges the way a Polaroid develops: it takes time for you to know them. One image that helps me begin to know the people in my fiction is something a friend once told me. She said that every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own […] One of the things you want to discover as you start out is what each person’s acre looks like. What is the person growing, and what sort of shape is the land in” (44-45)?

“Go into each of these people and try to capture how each one feels, thinks, talks, survives” (46).

“One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can’t” (47).

“Someone once said to me, ‘I am trying to stay in the now—not the last now, not the next now, this now. Which ‘now’ do your characters dwell in” (48)?

On Hope
“In general, there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this” (51).

Plotting Your Work

“Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen” (54).

“Drama is the way of holding the reader’s attention. The basic formula for drama is set-up, buildup, payoff—just like a joke…Drama must move forward and upward, or the seats on which the audience is sitting will become very hard and uncomfortable…The climax is that major event, usually toward the end, that brings all the tunes you have been playing so far into one major chord, after which at least one of your people is profoundly changed” (59-61).

“…which goes ABCDE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw us in, make us want to know more. Background is where you let us see and know who these people are, how they’ve come to be together, what is going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they most care about. The plot—the drama, the actions, the tension—will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean” (62)?

Jim the Boy

2008-07-27T13:52:00.000-07:00

I'm ashamed to admit the first time I tried reading this book I put it down. "What a dumb title for a book," my wife said when she saw what I was reading. Last summer, about sixty pages in, I put it away, thinking it too simple and quiet.

But of two of my good writing friends were unwavering in their testimony about this novel, so I picked it up again a few days ago, and I am so glad I did.

Jim the Boy is a wonderful novel, one of those books other writers pass around. It's the kind of book people will still be reading fifty years from now. From the perfect metaphors to the indelible scenes-- a twilight baseball game, a town blazing with new electricity--this novel draws you in to a universal experience. I love the stories of Jim's father, which come second hand through his uncles. I've dogeared passages that I'd like to share with you below.

Compelling Scenes
It's one thing to be a sensory writer, to write in such a way that the reader sees, hears, tastes, touches, or smells the moment we are trying to capture. The hard part is rendering that moment so that it also resonates on a deeper emotional level. Here's Jim, describing what should be a joyous moment, when electricity finally comes to Aliceville:

"Jim climbed up on the steps and looked down onto Aliceville as if he were a prince and the town was his kingdom. Soon he felt weighted by a prince's worries. The brightness of a few lights burning in Aliceville only magnified the darkness that still surrounded the town. The uncles' electric lights drew fragile boundaries around their houses; around those boundaries a blackness crept that suddenly seemed as big and powerful as God. Jim had never noticed the darkness before. He felt on the verge of knowing something that he didn't want to know. He jumped off the steps to be closer to the uncles" (149).

Notice how this moment derives its power. Jim is a "prince," the darkness is "God," or the "unknowable." What could have been a simple image, a town lit up, instead has all of these mythological connotations. It's not what we were expecting and that rendering of the moment, emotionally complex and even contradictory, is what takes our breath away.

Potent Metaphors
"Jim stepped closer to Mr. Carson without realizing it. He had heard every story his mother and uncles had to tell about his father so many times that over the years his father had become less vivid. It was as if each story was a favorite shirt that had been worn and washed and hung in the sun so often that its fabric, while soft and smooth and comfortable, was faded to where its color was only a shadow of what it had once been" (104).

Now that's a rather plain metaphor plucked from a lovely book. It does convey how the telling of familiar stories dims their power over time, rendering them comfortable. And then along comes somebody one day who shakes up how we see things.

Starling Description
Here's Jim viewing his grandfather, the despised Amos, for the first time. "As his eyes adjusted to the light, he made out a bed pushed close to the window. In the center of the bed lay an old man, naked except for a sheet bunched around his waist. His body appeared to be constructed of sharp sticks, covered with the gray paper of a hornets' nest. Yellowed claws twisted from the ends of his fingers and toes. His head lay in a matted nest of long white hair: a bramble of scraggly white beard sprouted on his sunken cheeks. From the dark oval of his mouth came a liquid, metallic rasping. Jim realized in a rush that his grandfather was going to die soon" (222).

This is an old man of the mountains, a whiskey runner who's spent time in jail. I love all the wilderness imagery wrapped up in the description of his body. He almost becomes fairy-tale like, a troll. Through tight observation and startling metaphor the old man becomes otherworldly.

Suspense
And then there's that final bugaboo, the way to keep a reader involved. Notice how the Uncle's telling of a story Jim has never heard before hooks both boy and the reader hovering over the scene...

"Mountain boy like your daddy ain't scared of nothing, Doc. So there they were. They didn't have a gun and the lantern was broke. They didn't have enough pine knots to keep the fire burning all night, and there was the panther stalking them, just waiting for that fire to die out. And the dogs--and these were dogs that would run a bear to ground--were crawling around their ankles, whimpering, scared to death.'

'What did my daddy do then?'

'Well, just as the fire was about to die out, the panther screamed a second time. And it was closer. This time it sounded like it was right there in the light where they were. And then it spoke.'

'It spoke?'

'It spoke. It said, in a woman's voice, 'Help me for I am killed.'

'What happened?' Jim asked. 'What happened then'" (191)?

By writing the scene in dialogue, Tony Earley adds a second layer to the story. The boy's prodding questions add to the urgency. If we were primed for a ghost story, many contemporary readers might roll their eyes, but the way this story is told, in homespun simple dialogue, is chilling. It adds an extra chill knowing how Jim's father died.

These are just a few scenes from a great book. "What happened? What happened then?" That's the question we want our readers asking.

And there is darkness in this story, too. I won't forget Uncle Al shooting those vultures that have come to feed upon horses a farmer killed to keep the bank from taking them. I won't forget Abraham, an African-American, risking his own life to save Jim and a friend after town "roughs" surround them. I won't forget the folklore-tinted story of Jim's father and the "haint" who puts a chill in his heart.

Such scenes, it seems to me, defy summary. I have one final thing to say. If you care about craft, if you care deeply about the human condition, and all the possibilities for goodness that exists in each one of us, then read this book.

Here's the link to my Goodreads review"View'>http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1328495?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.

Imagined Realities

2008-07-17T12:33:00.000-07:00

How much of this really happened? At readings and author events this question ranks right up there with the standard where do you get your ideas from? But I’ve been thinking about it recently since my family moved back to Minnesota where we are spending the summer on a small family farm. Last summer, I baled hay with my father-in-law at sundown. There was a rain-cooled wind, a storm on the horizon, and the swallows skimming insects just above the mown hay. We raced to beat the rain and it was a perfectly lovely time. The next day I wrote this idyllic passage about haying for my second book, Little Wolves, a redemptive scene that follows a dark moment in the book. There’s too much else happening in the novel to explain in a short blog entry. Little Wolves is based on a true story of murder and betrayal I heard in a small town we lived in. I’d like to show just a brief page-long passage here and then discuss whether or not it’s realistic. Did I really capture the truth of hard physical labor?

Late afternoon finds them in the hayfields once more, the old man driving a lumbering International tractor that is trailed by a baler and Bear standing on the hayrack. The tractor glints silver; the baler licks up lumps of hay from the green ground and spits out neatly-roped, twenty pound bales that Bear catches and stacks on the hayrack behind him. He has to keep a wide stance as the rack sways over the uneven ground and the bales come without ceasing. Each bale has to be wedged in tight, a mountain of hay that might all come tumbling down if Bear’s aim is not quick and true.

Hay sticks to sweat-streaked skin. Blades of it probe for tender places to make fresh wounds. He breathes in the tractor’s exhaust and dust and bugs kicked up from the fields.

And yet it is beautiful to be with the old man in the hot sundown. Swallows dip and dive around him, hunting insects the tractor stirs up from the soil. The fields shine emerald in the fading light. From this upper meadow, they have a view of the river valley and the old man is turning now to point toward the west where black clouds are flexing into thunderheads. They will have to hurry before rain comes. If the hay gets soaked, it will mold and rot and all their hard work will be for nothing. The wind already carries the sweet smell of wet. A shadow from a chicken hawk passes over the field and chases away the swallows. Bear takes the bales and forms neat square stacks while Seth kicks the tractor into a higher gear. They work in wordless rhythm, moving faster to beat the rain, the old man’s focus on maneuvering the tractor in tight turns, Bear yanking out bales and tossing and stacking.

Then the work is done and Bear rides down the hill standing atop his lurching hay mound, sapped but triumphant. From his perch, twenty feet above the mowed ground, he can see Aden’s Landing on the other side of the valley and the copper glitter of the river, and beyond it the rim of the world itself, turning black now with storm.

There’s more to this scene as the storm unleashes itself and Bear fights wind and rain to get a tarp stretched over the rack in time to save the hay. Did I capture the truth of the moment, what it’s really like to bale hay? It’s easy to sentimentalize physical labor. Think about it. Writers spend all day in dark basement rooms fighting off carpal tunnel syndrome while working on stories, poems, and chapters and sometimes at the end of the day they throw all that work away! There’s something deeply satisfying about the outdoor life, about working with your hands. But since writing that scene I’ve baled many racks of hay and alfalfa. I’ve climbed into the loft of the barn where the temperature roasts well over a hundred degrees. I’ve been gashed and bled and drained and inhaled so much alfalfa chaff that even my teeth went green.

Is it true? Is it a realistic scene? Would I write it differently after coming to know the labor of haying so much better this summer?

No. I don’t think I could change that moment in the book. It has to happen. Our work shapes and changes us and sometimes, and if we are very lucky, even a hardship can make us into a better human being. Some moments in our life are transcendent and sometimes these moments happen even while doing ordinary jobs.

Guru and the Initiate

2008-01-19T18:00:00.000-08:00

Guru and the Geek

Over winter break, I rediscovered an old favorite in John Gardner. Three decades after its publication, The Art of Fiction remains a staple in creative writing courses across the country. Let me say this from this outset, Gardner is a snob, and his elitism colors his works. What can you say about somebody who dismisses Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, one of the truly great American novels, as mere melodrama? Worse, Gardner often attacks female writers, dismissing Edith Wharton and Jean Rhys as “second class.” It’s no accident that he exclusively uses the pronoun “he” when referring to the “writer” in his work.

Prejudice aside, Gardner is also a genius and a wise guide for any initiate seeking to understand the art of storytelling. His tragic death in a motorcycle accident deprived the world of great teacher and writer. In preparation for the fiction workshop I’m teaching this semester at Silver Lake College, I reread Art of Fiction and also discovered one of Gardner’s lesser known works, On Becoming a Novelist. In this post, we’ll take a good look at the first section of this book. Later posts will cover parts II and III.

On Lyricism

“Though there are exceptions, as a rule the good novelist does not worry primarily about linguistic brilliance—at least not the showy, immediately obvious kind—but instead worries about telling his story in a moving way, making the reader laugh or cry or endure suspense, whatever it is that this particular story, told at its best, will incline the reader to do” (5).

Gardner is a big believer in what he calls the “vivid, continuous dream.” It is the creation of this dream, the shaping of a believable world, that he concerns himself with above all, and anything that interferes with the dream must be discarded.

But I wonder what Gardner would say about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road winning the Pulitzer Prize? McCarthy is a stylist and a poet. Language crackles within every sentence and the rules of semantics and syntax are suspended in the telling of his stories. For McCarthy “linguistic brilliance” walks hand-in-hand with suspense and story. When I consider The Road, I think what makes it McCarthy’s greatest work is that he tames his prose and instead hones in on an emotionally harrowing tale, the journey of one father and son trying to stay alive in a post-apocalyptic world. Linguistic fireworks take a backseat, and the result is every bit as “moving” as Gardner commands a story to be. “Shakespeare fits language to its speaker and occasion, as the best writers always do,” Gardner points out later, seeming to contradict himself, until he adds that “[in] the work of Shakespeare language always serves character and action” (10).

Exercises for the workshop

Throughout Becoming Gardner does provide exercises to dramatize his points. As an instructor of workshops, I was particularly struck with the idea to have students perform a “psychodrama” before the class. The actors play the parts of a psychologist, a harried mother, a druggie son. The rest of the class takes notes and describes what they witness. Afterwards, the workshop discusses what students noticed or failed to notice about non-verbal signals in the actors. It’s worth a shot. Some other ideas:

--Write an authentic sentence four pages long (do not cheat by using colons and semicolons that are really periods).
--Write a two-or three-page passage of successful prose (that is prose that
is not annoying or distracting) entirely in short sentences.
--Write a brief incident in five completely different styles—such an incident as: A man gets off a bus, stumbles, and looks over and sees a women, smiling. (16)

In this same section Gardner also advises a writer to work on improving word power by “systematically copying from your dictionary all the relatively short, relatively common words that you would not ordinarily think to use…and then making an effort to use them naturally.” I see echoes of the simplicity and minimalism of Raymond Carver (a disciple of Gardner) in this advice. Aside from the dictionary, Gardner also advises beginning writers to copy, by hand or word processor, great works like James Joyce’s "The Dead." I haven’t done this yet, but I know Francine Prose has similar advice in another book I’m reading right now, How to Read Like a Writer.

Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist is largely about “what makes a writer a writer.” The entire first section is dedicated to describing what Gardner terms the defining characteristics of a writer: “verbal sensitivity, accuracy of eye, intelligence,” and most of all “daemonic compulsiveness.”

There are no shortage of books on writing being published every year, but as a friend points out, many of those books quote from Gardner, or borrow indirectly from his work. Here’s his definition of a story, for example: “A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts) and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw” (54). I can’t recall how many times I’ve seen similar definitions in other works. If you are looking for a guide on writing, I suggest starting with Gardner. Shrug away his priggishness, as you would a ranting professor, who is a little touched. There is genius in his writing.

Up and Away

2007-08-01T19:42:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine scored me a galley of Amy Bloom’s forthcoming novel, Away. The novel is a model of compression—at 236 pages it reads like a much vaster story. Those pages contain a mother’s migration from Russia after her family was massacred during a pogrom, to New York where she takes up life as a seamstress and mistress of two Yiddish actors, onward to Seattle and the Yukon, as she undertakes an epic journey to Siberia where she has heard the daughter who haunts her dreams and nightmares is still alive.

This is a bawdy story, a carnal little tale, since Lillian, the protagonist, will sell everything she has to see her daughter again and this often means selling herself. Still, this is a book that will be around a long time and has much to offer any disciple of the craft. I’d like to explore a few principles of the creative process and focus on what Amy Bloom has to teach us with her splendid novel.

Forward Momentum
On a basic level, any good story must create in the reader a desire to want to know what happens next. Bloom has a knack for the perfect, chapter ending. Here’s the final sentence of the first chapter: “She has gone on, she has traveled through a terrible darkness and come upon Jerusalem surrounded, Jerusalem saved.” In this chapter, we witness the horrifying, dreamlike massacre of her family and also Lillian’s plucky determination in the New World, after she latches onto the Burnsteins who offer wealth and hope to an exile. Bloom’s final sentence is a poetic summary that also propels us deeper into the story.

The Perfect Detail
“Lillian takes a deep breath to calm herself, and she smells her mother beside her, perspiration and green onion and the singed, nutty scent of buckwheat groats tossed from one side of the skillet to the other in a perfect, nonchalant arc.”
Lovely, isn’t it? I've never eaten groats, but I can sure see that arc and smell the buckwheat! One single telling image transports us to another time and places us in a deeply sensual moment. Do you believe this story? How you can doubt when the details are so perfectly chosen? This is what art does.

Extended Metaphor
When a cousin brings the news that Lillian’s daughter is still alive, Bloom slows down and pays close attention to the emotional resonance of the moment. Here’s her describing what’s happening to the icy landscape inside Lillian:

“Sophie’s name is a match to dry wood. Ice is sluicing down Lillian now, running off her in sheets. Trees of fire are falling across a frozen field, brilliant orange, blue-tipped and inextinguishable; fire leaps from the crown of one tree to another, until the treetops send waves of fire back and forth between them, tossing flames like kites. Lillian’s hands are bleeding fire, her hands and feet rippling with it. Hawks and sparrows drop down from a blackened sky. Lillian’s face hurts. She stands in front of the window, her wrapper open, and presses her face and body against the cold glass. She has clawed four dark red scratches on her cheeks, and she will have them for weeks and the fire will not go out.
Alive. Not dead.”

This is rich prose, one long extended metaphor that carries the reader into a frightening interior landscape. Rich prose has the pitch and cadence of poetry. Look at all those short sentences, packed with tight details. I am haunted by those hawks falling out the sky. A truly awe-inspiring paragraph that is a doorway into emotion while never crossing over into sentimentality. Despite the length of the extended metaphor, it does not feel extravagant. Bloom shows here how to open up a moment in time using figurative language.

Time and Compression
Part of the sprawl in this short novel comes from the masterful way Bloom moves back and forth in time. While the story is almost always tightly focused on fully rounded scenes, occasionally Bloom will take a great leap, such as here: “Later it will seem to Lillian that only Yaakov Shimmelman was truly her friend and everything he recommended or encouraged or suggested pointed her toward death.” Bloom doesn’t give anything away with this sentence, while still projecting us into the future. Even minor characters take on the flesh and blood of real people, because even as Lillian’s life touches theirs and then moves on, Bloom takes the time to describe what will happen to each of them after Lillian is gone. They don’t just vanish never to be seen again. They live and die within this story.

Using Lists to Create a Landscape
“They walk away and it is darker than before. Lillian can see nothing of the country she is passing through. She smells traces of the man’s bay rum and the woman’s attar of roses. Apple orchards, green, red, yellow, brown, and dark plowed fields and muddy grazing cattle, and hoboes ducking through railroad yards and shoeless children in flour sacks waving to the train as it comes ‘round the bend, and clusters of shacks and red silos and large bodies of water whose name Lillian doesn’t know…”

Here, Bloom deviates from the short, punchy sentences, stretching out her lines. We’re on a train, moving quickly, and through this listing, joined by the word “and” a landscape flickers by. Long sentences, paradoxically, move the reader at great speed, as Bloom shows in this passage, all through smell and the focal character's imagination.

I’ll come back later, because there are few other issues I’d like to discuss about this novel. Read it when you get the chance, when you’re done reading The Night Birds!

Now and Zen

2007-07-31T19:00:00.000-07:00

Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing is a jolt of energy straight from Mr. Electro himself. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality can’t destroy you,” Ray writes at one point, capturing in a memorable sentence the intensity of our craft. The entire book is hyperbolic and charged with such statements. Ray’s like a kid talking to us with his mouth full of pop rocks and fizzing soda and when you skim away the froth there’s plenty here to sustain any writer.

I met Bradbury about seven years ago at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books where he was signing his newly re-released copy of Farenheit 451. Attending an MFA program was a distant dream then, much less one day writing a novel. I was teaching middle school and lugging around a backpack full of poems, hoping to be discovered. White-haired and Buddha-chinned, Ray was kind to me. I didn’t show him any of my poems, but I did ask him about dealing with rejection. (I was still a few months away from my first acceptance.) Ray could have dismissed me with a wave of his hand. I’m sure, by that point in his career, he’d been approached by thousands of would-be writers, but his response was measured and patient. I left his presence inspired to go on and that’s ultimately the effect I think this hyper little book will have on readers.

Like many others, Ray advocates writing every day, or “[t]aking your pinch of arsenic every morn so you can survive till sunset.” Sometimes the book seems to oversimplify the process. “Find a character, like yourself, who will want something or not want something, with all his heart. Give him running orders. Then shoot him off.” Is it really that easy? With all of our terminology we do have a way of complicating the process of structuring a narrative work.

“In quickness is truth,” Ray says, suggesting the lizard as the totem animal for writers. Ray makes lists, big, brimming lists and from out of these free associations grow his greatest works. Can you recognize this novel from the list that follows? THE LAKE. THE NIGHT. THE CRICKETS. THE RAVINE. THE ATTIC. THE BASEMENT. THE TRAPDOOR. THE BABY. THE CROWD. THE NIGHT TRAIN. THE FOG HORN. THE SCYTHE. THE CARNIVAL. THE CAROUSEL. THE DWARF. THE MIRROR MAZE. THE SKELETON. “And the stories,” Ray writes, describing these lists “began to burst, to explode from those memories, hidden in the nouns, lost in the lists…”

He’s also getting somewhere important when he notes “that is the personal observation, the odd fancy, the strange conceit that pays off.” Ray advocates reading poetry everyday, noting that even if we don’t understand the words, the sense of them burrows into our brains.

“The most improbable tale,” he writes, “can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands in the middle of events.” There are echoes of Flannery O’Connor here. Like Stephen King, Ray also pushes toward our fascinations, our deepest loves. “I was in love then, with monsters and skeletons and circuses and carnivals and dinosaurs and, at last, the red planet, Mars.”

To reveal more would siphon away the kinetic energy of this book. Zen is a collection of essays about his work and writers and fans of Ray can both benefit. If you need a jolt, pick it up and you won’t be disappointed.

Becoming a Novelist

2007-07-19T19:47:00.000-07:00

While visiting the family, I happened upon my mother’s copy of O and paged through “The Reading Room” section with great interest. In the article “Inside the Writer’s Mind,” the magazine’s editors put this question before six working writers:

Besides talent, what are the particular human qualities it takes to be a novelist?

Joshua Ferris had this to say:

“It takes no particular human quality for one to become a novelist save this: the ability to endure long stretches of time at one’s desk." Mr. Ferris goes on to elaborate what you might be doing at this desk, describing the imagination as:

"…Preoccupations and curiosities you believe best served not by the casual anecdote, the emotive email, the journal entry, or the autobiographical essay, but through the variegated freedom that comes from making people out of words. People and planes landing on tarmac and lost tourists at nightfall in a land of casual murder. Words spoken in a voice you search for and hold like water in your hand. A voice lost and recaptured over and over during your hours at your desk. A voice borrowed from a chorus of voices you like best, now distilled from that chorus and distilled and distilled down your specific range and harmony. A range and harmony that coalesce your preoccupations and curiosities into a story of people made with words inhabiting a world inimitably yours. The people and the tarmacs and the tourist anxious to find their hotel in the dark. Inimitably yours because you shaped them hour after hour at your desk. Their conflict, their destiny, in your inimitable voice, confronting the vagaries of your imagined voice. Will they survive? The two hooded figures are approaching. The moon-dark beach is endless. What they would do to be at home right now. What they would do to be at your desk, determining the fate of their world” (O, The Reading Room, 160).

Wow! What a lyrical, lovely passage to capture the essence of our craft, that magical shaping of characters and landscapes from the raw cargo of words. Ferris structures his homage to the writing process through parallel, incomplete sentences, repeating openings to create a cadence and lull me into believing his thesis.

Yes, I’ll buy it in part. Hours at the desk, is another way of saying discipline, but none of us will be able to sculpt such poetic passages unless we are also readers. A writer is a passionate reader first. Stay in the desk and spin your daydreams, but also make sure a good portion of the day is saved for reading with a writer’s eye for detail. Read poetry, both contemporary and classic. Read the masters and read your peers. Read Chekhov and Alice Munro. Read novellas and read the sprawling epics. Read magazines and newspapers and let your imagination spread out like a fisherman’s net, hauling in anything strange and wondrous to be saved for a later day. Yes, spend your hours at the desk, but never forget that it was your passion as a reader that brought you there in the first place and will sustain you during the times the imagination runs dry.

Sage and the King

2007-07-05T18:25:00.000-07:00

Last year at Silver Lake College I had the chance to teach both an introductory creative writing course and an advanced poetry workshop. For this post, I’d like to take a closer look at the texts I used for these courses.

Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft has an immediate appeal for the beginning writers. Half of his book is a charming memoir, filled with moments as surprising and vivid as anything King ever wrote in fiction. The other half is a primer on writing fiction, and the tone here is also charming and approachable. I first read On Writing while I was on my honeymoon and I found the book so inspiring that when I returned I went down into my basement and began the novel that would become The Night Birds.

The second text we’ll consider is Ted Kooser’s Poetry Home Repair Manual. Again this post seems to be taking a thesis/antithesis approach to books on writing. King made $400,000 for selling Carrie, an astronomical sum. Kooser, on the other hand, sold insurance for a living and has only made his reputation late in life. Kooser’s a craftsman, the former Poet Laureate of the United States, but I believe it's a mistake to dismiss King as just a writer of horror. You don't make a career as a novelist unless you understand a thing or two about how to tell a story.

Aside from these differences, both texts are simple, entertaining, and filled with wonderful examples of what makes a good story or poem. I’ll know I’ll be using them again in future classes and I highly recommend both. Can you be both a poet and a novelist, even though one deals in microcosms the other in the sprawling canvas of world creation? I believe so and many writers--from the classic example of Thomas Hardy to a contemporary John Updike or Louise Erdrich--prove that it's possible.

For this post, I’ll format it a little differently. Below, we have a fun quiz on King. Just looking at the questions will give you a great idea about the book and I challenge you to ferret out the correct answer. If you really want to know if you're right you’ll need to buy the book. How do you think you would do? After the quiz, I’ll discuss some of the highlights of Poetry Home Repair Manual, including how we used it in our workshop.

Quiz on King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
1. Stephen King says the following about where a writer gets ideas for stories:
A) “From out there…man!”
B) A secret place in the subconscious a writer can access by practicing deep breathing and twilight dreaming
C) Heavy use of chemicals, especially opiates and Budweiser
D) There is no such thing as an idea dump. You show up to work and recognize two unrelated ideas to make something new under the sun
E) All of the above

2. Eulah Buelah was:
A) A psychotic first grade teacher
B) A heavyset babysitter with digestive difficulties and a perverse sense of humor
C) A critic who worked for the Village Voice and wrote nasty things about King’s first novels

3. Stephen King’s first really great idea for a story came from:
A) The happy stamps he saw his mother licking
B) A 1950’s movie about zombies
C) His fascination with Tonto and the Lone Ranger
D) Comic books about deranged teenagers

4. Why does King throw away the first draft of Carrie? What connection did he need to realize in order to save the story?_________________________________

5. When it comes to write a story, you should write about:
A) ideas based on life experiences that have shaped you
B) formulas that will likely please your teacher
C) write what you know
D) anything you damn well want

6. Stephen King believes that stories are:
A) two parts wishes, one part terror
B) found things, like fossils in the ground
C) carefully outlined and plotted beforehand

7. Flannery O’Connor once said that stories are shaped by the “mystery of personality.” She believed that you should begin with a “real” character and go from there. Stephen King would:
A) agree 100%
B) believes that the situation comes first
C) emphasizes pure plot above all things

8. Describe how Stephen King discovered the idea for Misery: ___________
9. Take a look at this example passage of description below. What did King say was most important about description?

"After the hot clarity of Second Avenue, Palm Two was as dark as a cave. The backbar mirror picked up some of the street glare and glimmered in the gloom like a mirage. For a moment it was all Billy could see, and then his eyes began to adjust. There were a few solitary drinkers at the bar. Beyond them, the maitre d’, his tie undone and his shirt cuffs rolled up to show his hairy forearms, was talking with the bartender. There was still sawdust sprinkled on the floor, Billy noted, as if this were a twenties speakeasy instead of a millennium eatery where you couldn’t smoke, let alone spit a gob of tobacco between your feet…The air was redolent of steak and fried onions. All of it was the same as it ever was."
10. What’s wrong with this passage of dialogue from Hart’s War below? How might it be fixed?

Pryce grabbed Tommy once again. “Tommy,” he whispered, “this is not a coincidence! Nothing is what it seems! Dig deeper! Save him, lad, save him! for more than ever now, I believe Scott is innocent…You’re on your own now, boys. And remember, I’m counting on you to live through this! Survive! Whatever happens!”
He turned back to the Germans. “All right, Hauptmann,” he said with sudden, exceedingly calm determination. “I’m ready now. Do with me what you will.”

11. How does King show the goodness of Johnny, the protagonist of The Dead Zone? How does he show the evil of Stillson, the villain?

12. If one of your characters hit her hand with a hammer, you should have her say:
A) “Oops, I did it again.”
B) “Jeepers! That’s gonna leave a mark.”
C) A simple “ouch” will do the trick.
D) “@#$%*&@@!”

13. The reason you should have her say the above is:
A) To maintain FCC regulations
B) So that your mother can read it and not cringe
C) Because a writer must always tell the truth
14. In King style, invent one of your own “What If’s” that might make an interesting story... (What if a woman rented a hotel room and discovered a dead body in the bed…)

The Sage
“While you’re writing your poem, there’s one less scoundrel in the world,” Kooser notes toward the beginning of The Poetry Home Repair Manual. “And I’d like a world, wouldn’t you in which people actually took the time to think about what they were saying?"

I’m going to divide this into three sections. The first includes some highlights, favorite parts of the text. The second centers on activity we focused together on as a class. Just as Kooser advised, I sent my students out on Poetry Patrol. Many of my poets enjoyed it so much, they stayed “on patrol” long after the class ended. Lastly, I’ll conclude with a few more quotes courtesy of the text. These are only highlights and a small glimpse of what is an extraordinary book!

“Poetry is communication and every word I’ve written here subscribes to that belief."

“We serve each poem we write” (3).

We say we loved the earth, but we could not stay” (5).

“The aim of the poet and of poetry is to be of service” (6).

“We teach ourselves to write the kind of poems we like to read” (9).

“When you find a poem that is a terrible mess, think how it could have been made better” (12).

“While you sit quietly scribbling into your notebook, memories and associations rise like bubbles out of the thick mud of your mind” (13).

“A work of art defines itself into being, when we awaken into it and by it, when we are moved, altered, stirred. It feels as if we have done nothing, only given it a little time, a little space; some hairline crack opens in the self, and there it is” (13).

“Revision, and I mean extensive revision, is the key to transforming a mediocre poem into a work that can touch and even alter a reader’s heart. It’s the biggest part of the poet’s job description” (16).

“A poem is the invited guest of its reader” (18).

Poetry Patrol

Kooser tells us that “if we want to engage our listeners and readers we need to shake off generalizations and go for the specifics. It’s the details that make experiences unique and compelling” (93).

How do we get more detail in our writing? We must practice and hone our skills of observation.

Task One: For two days next week, take a close look at six things. Jot down your observations in a notebook. Turn one of these observations into a poem. (See page 94 for example.) I would suggest going to a favorite place or exploring somewhere new. For one of your ventures, try to focus on the people around you.

Conclusion:
· “Henry James advises writers, ‘Be one of those on whom nothing is lost.’ (qtd in Kooser 96)
· “What about writing about things outside of ourselves? There’s no end to possibilities” (97).
· “I’ve heard it said that God is in the details and the devil is in the details. Both aphorisms attest to the powers that details carry” (103).
· Search for the “authenticating detail” recognizing that “the imagination makes a lousy realist”

Artist or entertainer? Which do you strive for in your writing? Perhaps the truth is a blend of each of these. Bestselling novelists can learn from the quiet craft of poetry, just as poets need to be reminded that this ancient craft began as entertainment--a skald telling stories of the impossible to an audience gathered around a fire.

One For the Money, Two for the Show

2007-07-04T19:30:00.000-07:00

For this first post, I’d like to compare two disparate books on the art of writing fiction, one geared toward commercial interests, the other literary writers, both fresh voices and the “elderly statesmen” of the arts. So we’ll call this first duel “big money” versus the “high arts.” Which do you aim for as a writer? We’ll start with the money.

Recently, I attended an all day conference in lovely Madison, Wisconsin. The keynote address was delivered by New York agent Donald Maass. I expected him to focus on the kinds of novels I don't intend to write, mainly thrillers and pop lite fiction, but I was pleasantly surprised at the depth of the lecture.

Donald Maass drew heavily from his book Writing the Breakout Novel to talk about the sacred trade of storytelling. What makes a story timeless, a classic? How can novelists write in such a way that our readers go on thinking about our stories long after they set them down? I highly recommend his book and if you ever get the chance to hear Maass, he's an excellent speaker, both charming and humorous. As an agent, Maass sees hundreds of manuscripts come and go in a month, so he's honed a keen sense of what works and what doesn't in a novel.

Below, I've included some highlights of the lecture. I took copious notes, eight pages worth in fact. I was a hundred pages into my second novel when I attended the session. Afterwards, I immediately decided to start over and apply some of these wise storytelling principles. If you attend one of his lectures, I guarantee you'll come with ideas for your story!

Add heroic qualities and add them right away. Do we care deeply about the characters we are reading about? What causes us to care about a character?

You must show opposite qualities, too. This opens extra character dimensions, by creating conflict and a possibility for change.

Build Inner Conflict. A powerful quality, being torn in two directions. What the hell is this author doing? When are you still thinking about a main character after finishing a novel? The inner conflict will stay with you and resonate. The reader will be aghast at the moment of quitting.

Create larger than life characters. What’s one thing your character says or does the way anybody would? Now how can you make this as odd as possible, unexpected or just plain strange?

What is the goal for this particular scene? Write out the goals and go down the list to the lower portion. Dig deeper into motivations.

Who is the antagonist in the story? Make them more multi-dimensional, so they will be frightening. Enemies are sometimes closer than friends. The more we understand the antagonist’s view, the more gripping the conflict.

Raise the personal stakes. What is your protagonist’s main problem? Now how can you make it worse? Much, more worse? You must reinforce the problem and raise the stakes. Can you make those terrible circumstances the end of your story?

Storytelling should take us extraordinary places. In order for that to happen you must make the hero go to hell and make your reader afraid of the outcome.

Try to weave in three plot layers. Have scenes take place in unexpected places. Weave plot layers together so they intersect.

Delineate the inner turning point by fixing down the passage. You must find a way to measure change, to measure how your character feels differently about a place. You must make the change dramatic.

In the first thirty pages look for back story. Cut it. Three defining moments in the past, three separate scenes. Put this later in the story, where it will illuminate the character. Back story bogs down the beginning of a story. It should instead answer a question we’ve had all along. Let it be revelatory.

With individual passages, add tension. Take your pages and toss them up in the air. Pluck up a page at random. Introduce apprehension. What tension comes from the point of view character? Tension all the time is the great secret of successful fiction. What happens next? How are all these tensions going to be resolved?

Notes from: Writing the Breakout Novel, Donald Maass. Cincinatti: Writer's Digest Books, 2001.

The second text focuses on literary writers, the ones who win the Pen/Faulkner and grants from the Guggenheim foundation, even if they don’t score big contracts from publishers. Published by Writer’s Digest Books, Novel Voices was edited by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais. The editors interviewed seventeen authors for this collection, so I’m going to include my favorite quotes from each working writer.

Averaging seven pages, the interviews provide a good quick read, a little infusion of energy during your coffee break before you head back toward writing that great American novel. Because of this format, I consider this text more helpful for teachers of creative writing. There are quotes here that are instructive toward teaching fiction and the craft of short stories. Here are the authors featured along with a favorite quote.

Richard Bausch. “When asked about his fiction, Bausch says that he takes characters whom he loves and visits trouble upon them.”

A story generator he uses for students. “Here is an opening line; write a story about it: ‘I kicked him in the stomach; it was like being in church.’…One exercise is to describe a field of flowers from the perspective of someone who is about to kill a child. Or try to deliver a situation through dialogue only.”

“I don’t teach writing. I teach patience and toughness, stubbornness and willingness to make mistakes and go on.”
Charles Baxter. “The truth is that you can say most of what you want to say about human beings and their behavior with a relatively limited number of characters if you send them through enough fiery hoops.”
Andre Dubus. “…and a wise old Jesuit once told me, “If there were no sins, there wouldn’t be art.”
Stuart Dybek. Responding to a question about “underlying rhythmic coherence:…It’s a feeling akin to understanding a character in order to be able to inhabit that character either on the page or stage…Gardner has another great line in which he talks about description as writer’s connection to his unconscious.”

“I believe craft is the way the writer makes magic, the gifts through which the writer transcends his or her limitations and participates in a power borrowed or stolen from the gods.”
Richard Ford. “And I had begun, out of youthful ignorance and ardor, to associate darkness—emotional, spiritual, moral darkness, with high drama. It’s not unheard of. But I realized I could no longer sustain identifying darkness with drama.”
Ernest J Gaines. “They say if you steal from one person you are a plagiarizer; if you steal from a hundred people, you are a genius.”
William Gass, on reading as a writer. (Something this site is dedicated toward.) “This is one of the great losses of the profession, either as a critic or a writer. You don’t have the innocence or the openness that says, ‘Let me read and have a good time,’ that you might have had when you started out. Instead you think, ‘What am I going to say about this?’ or ‘What is the story telling me about how I am to write?’”
Tim Gautreaux. “People own the territory they are born into.”

“Most editors have a vision, or least a notion of what’s good for their readers, and I trust that.”

“When you teach creative writing, you basically say the same things over and over.”

“Understand that if you are writing fiction it will probably take twenty years before you begin to know what you’re doing.”

“A Jew and an Arab get onto a streetcar. There’s an immediate conflict there. A joke is the archetype of all human entertainment.”

“I’ve considered myself more of a teacher than a writer all these years, and a husband and a father. I’ve put twelve million hours in honey-do projects into this marriage. That has always been first.”

“I’ve read that a woman is born with all of the eggs she is ever going to produce. I think that a story writer is sort of like that. Sometimes, when a story is successful and complete, I feel like I’ve given birth to something.”

From: Novel Voices. Levasseuer, Jennifer and Kevin Rablais. Cinncinati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2003.