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Be Careful With Whom You Allow to Read Your Work

October 9, 2013 1 General Advice , , , , Permalink 0

Henry Varnum Poor- The Orchardist and His Family (Summer Afternoon)Years ago, a member of my extended family asked to read one of my stories, and so I gave her one.

When we spoke next, to sum it all up, she pointed out connections my story made to my personal life.

For example, she explained how–like one of the characters in my story–my mom had purchased an item from a television infomercial. She also was quick to point out a typo I’d made.

At the time, I had just begun to take writing seriously, but even then, this conversation didn’t sit well with me. I had no idea my mom had purchased such an item, for one thing. It felt as if this person was trying to pick apart and rationalize a story I had crafted out of imagination, out of a creative trance, out of “the zone.” Her statements functioned under the assumption that the process of writing fiction was strictly limited to a writer’s personal life experiences.

Ann Beattie addresses this in Frederick Busch’s Letters to a Fiction Writer. (If you’ve never read this book, I’ve previously blogged about it here.) She writes:

People want to think what you do is not magical. That it is not far removed from the kind of thinking, and imagining, they themselves experience.

To compound the problem, this was someone who had her own aspirations with writing a novel; she just “didn’t have the time.”

Beattie also addresses this:

People who do not write will tell you that they haven’t gotten around to it yet because they know they can do it. They just need to get the kids in school, hire a lawn service and spend weekends writing, recycle their notebook into useable material, make a concerted effort to remember their dreams. It can be done tomorrow. Any time.

As writers, we need to be careful with whom we allow to read our work-in-progress.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like all writers need two kinds of readers: one set of readers who will continually praise anything we write and another set of readers who will give us raw, intelligent feedback with how to improve our stories.

Not all of our friends and family members will fall under either of these two categories. It’s dangerous to assume otherwise, regardless of all of their good intentions.

Why or why not? Please leave me a comment below.

And as always, write your heart out.

 

Photo credit: deflam / Foter / CC BY

The Opening to Alice Munro’s ‘Thanks for the Ride’

July 3, 2013 0 General Advice , , , , Permalink 0

Pop's CafeIf you ever want to get better at anything skill-related, like writing, it’s always a good idea to study the greats that have come before you. Without question, I would categorize Alice Munro as one of these greats.

This week, I thought we’d take a look at the first four paragraphs of one of her short stories, “Thanks for the Ride,” to see what we could learn from it and steal for ourselves as writers.

(In case you would like to finish reading the entire story, “Thanks for the Ride” comes from Dance of the Happy Shades: And Other Stories. The collection includes fifteen stories, some of which come from as early in her writing career as 1968.)

The story begins:

My cousin George and I were sitting in a restaurant called Pop’s Cafe, in a little town close to the Lake. It was getting dark in there, and they had not turned the lights on, but you could still read the signs plastered against the mirror between the fly-speckled and slightly yellow cutouts of strawberry sundaes and tomato sandwiches.

In this first paragraph, Munro sets up characters and place. The last sentence gives us an inkling of tone, time, and place.

‘Don’t ask for information,’ George read. ‘If we knew anything we wouldn’t be here’ and ‘If you’ve got nothing to do, you picked a hell of a good place to do it in.’ George always read everything out loud–posters, billboards, Burma-Shave signs, ‘Mission Creek. Population 1700. Gateway to the Bruce. We love our children.’

Munro continues establishing character and place in this paragraph with sharp specifics.

I was wondering whose sense of humor provided us with the signs. I thought it would be the man behind the cash register. Pop? Chewing on a match, looking out at the street, not watching for anything except for somebody to trip over a crack in the sidewalk or have a blowout or make a fool of himself in some way that Pop, rooted behind the cash register, huge and cynical and incurious, was never likely to do. Maybe not even that; maybe just by walking up and down, driving up and down, going places, the rest of the world proved its absurdity. You see that judgment on the faces of people looking out of windows, sitting on front steps in some little towns; so deeply, deeply uncaring they are, as if they had sources of disillusionment which they would keep, with some satisfaction, in the dark.

Munro uses three lists in this paragraph to introduce an ironic, cynical, mocking narrator. Also, Munro establishes lines of tension here.

There was only the one waitress, a pudgy girl who leaned over the counter and scraped at the polish on her fingernails. When she had flaked most of the polish off of her thumbnail she put the thumb against her teeth and rubbed the nail back and forth absorbedly. We asked her what her name was and she didn’t answer. Two or three minutes later the thumb came out of her mouth and she said, inspecting it: ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’

This waitress personifies place in this paragraph. One of my past writing mentors, John Keeble, a very kind and wise man, often said beginnings and endings know each other.

By now, we can predict to some extent that the story will be about care. “Thanks for the Ride” is also an elegant, graceful example of introducing your narrator later on in the story.

 

However, let me just clarify that the kind of analysis we’ve done is not the kind of work that you should do while drafting. It would destroy any chance of entering a “creative trance” or “the zone.” This is the kind of thing that should only be done later on, during final stages of working on a manuscript.

It’s my hope that, as writers, if we love a particular story or book, we should slow down and study it to understand why we actually love that particular story or book. We can learn a lot from it!

Until next week, write your heart out.

 

Photo credit: orngejuglr / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Steve Almond’s Rules for Writing Fiction

June 12, 2013 0 Rules for Writing , , , , Permalink 0

My Life in Heavy MetalSteve Almond is the author of several books, including three short story collections. My favorite of these is to the left: My Life in Heavy Metal.

As provided on the back of its cover, The Boston Globe notes, “Almond writes graphically, vividly, and with unflinching detail about relationships, mostly between men and women, in and out of bed. At times it’s the hum of conquest in the air that drives a story, but at least as often it’s something more complicated: the potential for love, for salvation, the possibility of possibility.”

I met Almond years ago at the Festival of Books at UCLA, where he spoke as part of a panel, and afterward, he mingled with his fans and autographed books.

 

I praised him for his work in My Life in Heavy Metal, and he was very humble and gracious.

When I handed him two of his story collections to sign, he didn’t hurry me along (like some writers do). He asked me which of his stories I liked best. And I told him “Valentino,” which seemed to surprise him. He asked me if I wrote, and I told him I tried. He opened one of them and wrote:

Ryan–

My rules:

  1. Love your characters at all times.
  2. Slow down where it hurts.
  3. Don’t give up.

Hell Yes,

Steve Almond

I thought I’d share his three rules with you today in hopes that you might find them as useful as I have:

1. “Love your characters at all times.”

If you don’t love your characters, it will be much more difficult for your readers to love them, too. It’s noticeable when writing characters we’ve judged and dislike, especially if they are our viewpoint characters. Their complexity will be stunted. Their rationale will read as shallow. And the writing falls flat. Besides, if we have time to judge a character, we are not in “the zone.” We are not in the “creative trance.” People are never completely good or completely evil. It is our job as writers to present fully realized, tragic, and flawed individuals on paper. Allow them to be vulnerable. We act as conduits to our characters’ dreams and fears and emotional baggage. Even antagonists have redemptive qualities.

2. “Slow down where it hurts.”

To slow down where it hurts is to “never avert one’s eyes” (to borrow from Akira Kurosawa, the famous director). It can be difficult for us to slow down painful scenes. If you’re like me, our tendency is to want to blow past these uncomfortable moments, to get out of them. But if we can’t slow down the images, sounds, and feelings of our characters, opportunities will be missed–the power of a scene utterly diluted. At best, our scene will read as complete B.S. When creating art, this is unforgivable. Readers need to experience what our characters see, hear what they hear, feel what they feel. This doesn’t mean that we are contradicting the first rule at all here. We still always need to love our characters.

3. Finally, Almond wrote, “Don’t give up.”

The life of a working writer in this day and age is difficult, to say the least. For every Stephen King or Stephenie Meyer, there are millions of struggling writers working odd jobs just to pay the bills. We battle rejection. We battle illegitimacy. We battle a culture of immediate gratification and consumerism. The writing life is hard. But we must not give up. Talent is overrated. It is paramount to establish a routine and to sustain the drive and focus to keep it!

 

I hope you found this week’s post helpful. Please drop me a line below in the comments to let me know what you think. Do you have any writing rules that you live by? If so, please share.

And above all else, write your heart out!

 

P.S. Here’s a short clip of Steve Almond talking about how he became a writer:

 

From Where You Dream

May 22, 2013 0 Books on Writing , , , Permalink 0

From Where You DreamRobert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction is the most helpful instructional writing text I’ve ever read.

It chronicles an actual writing workshop Butler taught for MFA candidates at Florida State University in 2002. Butler wore a mic while in class, one of his students transcribed the audio recordings, and Janet Burroway edited the manuscript. It’s structured into three parts: The Lectures, The Workshop, and The Stories.

Butler sees the writer as a literary artist, and as such, emphasizes that art must originate from our unconscious in the form of a creative trance. This art cannot and will not come out of thinking–what he refers to as “generalization, analysis, and abstraction.” He discusses this in detail in his first lecture of the book, “Boot Camp.” He correlates this creative trance as having similarities to the athlete’s zone:

Jackie Stewart, the great race car driver, said in his autobiography that when you drive a car really fast and really well, you don’t have a sensation of speed at all; things slow down around you, you can count the bricks on the wall at the next turn. Baseball players, when they are batting and in a streak, say they can count the stitches on the ball. They are in the zone, and that means they are not thinking at all. They call it muscle memory. But for you, it’s not muscle memory; it’s dream space, it’s sensory memory.

Athletes at all levels experience this, from dancers to runners. Some of my best moments on the golf course have come during stretches like this–and, coincidentally, my best writing, too.

For example, in 2002, while attending a writing workshop at Cal State Long Beach, on the night before one of my stories was due, I sat at my desk in front of my laptop. I already had a story ready, one I had “generalized, analyzed, and abstracted” for weeks. But something happened that evening. I slipped into this trance, and when I snapped out of it, two hours had passed, and I’d completed the first draft of a new story. I thought I had stumbled on some kind of strange mutant ability. Ha! But really, this is the kind of place you want to be in. And, as I’ve learned, it becomes more and more difficult to tap into this place as you continue to grow as a writer.

Butler ends “Boot Camp” on one huge difference between the athlete’s zone and the artist’s zone:

Let’s look at Michael Jordan in his later prime–let’s say his last season with the Bulls, when they once again won the world championship. When Michael received a pass at the top of the key in full flight and he left the ground, he defied gravity, floated through the air, let that ball roll off his fingertips and into the basket. Tongue unconsciously extended. When he did that, he had to be in the zone. He could not be thinking about what he was doing. But to make his zone exactly analogous to the art zone, you have to add this: every time he shoots, in order to make a basket Michael Jordan would have to confront, without flinching, the moment when his father’s chest was blown apart by the shotgun held by his kidnapper. You know that happened in Michael Jordan’s life. Well, Michael would have to confront that in order to make a basket every time. Without flinching. Now his zone is equal to the artist’s zone. And now you understand the challenge of being an artist.

I could go on and on, sharing my other favorite moments from the book, but I don’t want to cheapen the experience for you in any way. Nestled within its pages is a wealth of helpful, writerly advice. I mean, the stuff I just shared came from the first of his lectures!

Whether you are a beginning writer or an experienced one, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction should be on your reading list. (If you haven’t read it already, of course.)

About a year ago, I emailed Robert Olen Butler to ask for clarification on the process of “dreamstorming,” a process he introduces in one of his later lectures, and he responded back to me quickly with extremely helpful feedback that has only furthered my progress as a writer.

What more can you ask from a book?

That’s all I have for this week. Until next time, write your heart out!

 

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