One for Mom

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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I took my mom to dinner at the Greenwood Park Mall food court the other evening. I try to do this at least every other week, usually on Friday nights. We eat at Chick-Fil-A or the pizza place near the entrance. Once I got her some kind of chicken from the Chinese place, but she said it was too sweet. I had to agree.
Every time we go it is the first time she has been there. My mom has Alzheimer’s.

I usually struggle with what to talk about over dinner. Often the degree of struggle is guided by her degree of lucency that particular evening. Sometimes I just respond to whatever comes out her. I verify that relatives long dead are indeed dead or reassert family happenings that are months if not years old.
But this most recent evening she was as good as she’s been in a long while, and we got on the subject of writing.
Mom told me that she wrote a couple of dozen articles when I was a kid and how later she was a free-lance editor for some journals. We talked about my novel-in-progress, how it came to its current structure, my professors’ support of it, writing every day, and what to write next – David and Bathsheba or Samson and Delilah. We talked about David and how he abused his power. We talked about Samson and about Nazirite vows.

It was fun to talk to mom about writing. I also felt like maybe it was somehow, even for a few minutes, thawing her brain. “I don’t know how I started to write,” she said in response to a question I hadn’t asked, “I just did.”
It saddened me that her response to our chat was to contemplate, for a few minutes, writing a book. “I don’t know what I’d write about…it would take a lot of time, but it’s better than watching TV.” I told her it is a lot better than watching TV. I didn’t tell her that she might as well consider becoming an astronaut.

Then I thought again. What’s so sad about it? Nothing. In fact, quite the opposite.
For a few minutes the other night she had a dream, an aspiration. The conversation had made her feel alive. For a few minutes, among the thousands spent in the fog of her illness, she felt like there was a thing she might grasp.
So she mused aloud. Talking with me, there in the food court, about what might yet [never] be.

Like a Monk Going to Mass

30 Wednesday Jul 2014

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You may think you can just do it in front of the TV in the living room or at the dining room table in the morning where you can be with the kids while they have breakfast and still get your writing done.
You may think you can just do it at work over lunch. Ignoring that call from your boss even though everyone knows you are in your cubicle and you look like you’re working.
You may think you can just do it in bed, keep your tablet on your nightstand, think about your characters all day and then slip your writing time in before you go to sleep.
You may think that there already exists a crack in your routine which you can fill with writing like you would caulk or putty.

No.
Trust me.
I’ve tried all of these. Let me save you the energy. None of them worked. None of them worked predictably, every day, day after day. None of them led to sure productivity. You’ve got to be more intentional.

There is one thing you really need. A place to write. Seriously. You do.
Your place may be that table at Starbucks right next to the newspaper stand that everyone else seems to overlook. Your place may be a table in a spare bedroom under a window, where you have room for a couple of bookshelves and some lamps (this is mine). Your place may be in your car, after work, a quick 30 minutes before the commute, before you get home and all the stuff you need to do that evening turns against you.
These places all have one thing in common. They are sacred. You don’t do anything in those places at those times other than write. You are alone, anonymous, you are the only one keeping you company.
Feel free to try a few spots. Try a few different times, too. But do it. Find a place and a time.
And treat it like a monk going to mass.

A Great Generalization

16 Wednesday Jul 2014

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In my last post I mentioned that one of the books I am reading is this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt. I am now on page 347 of 771.
Overall I have very much enjoyed this book, but reading it gives me an opportunity to make a highly specific comment.

When an author chooses to use the f-word, it needs to be in a very specific context and for a very specific reason. I won’t like it (for reasons I’ll outline below), but I’ll understand why it is being used.
I suppose you could argue that the word is used in this way in this book – two boys, left to fend for themselves by negligent fathers, doing what teenagers living in Las Vegas with no parental influence do – but there is a pitfall.

This word can become a crutch. It can be used to fill space that the author doesn’t yet know how to fill or as an exclamation point when, if the author had dug a bit deeper, a word(s) could’ve been found that would have pushed the characterization forward in a unique-to-that-character way.

One of the “rules” of fiction is that we don’t want our characters doing or saying things that any character in any story might say or do. The question is what would this character say or do in this precise situation.
I guess my frustration with the word is that it is a great generalization. It gives me no insight into the character. It doesn’t hold any of the nuance of point of view that gives a character dimension.
It isn’t interesting or engaging.
The f-word is cliché. It is everywhere in modern American lit, strewn here and there in lit journals, novels, plays, film, and essays.
And every time I run across it I have this same reaction.
It is like “whatever”. It is like “like”.
It is the very least our language has to offer.

Reading The Goldfinch

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

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If you are attempting to write (fiction or otherwise) and you are not an avid* reader, you are experiencing all sorts of problems. You are plagued with writer’s block, you have little energy for your writing, you lack visibility to the options available to construct a story (you are in and out of ruts), and you don’t understand how the reader and writer collaborate. You are a painter who never goes to an art museum. You are a music composer who doesn’t have an iTunes account.

I find myself reading many books that are not new. They’ve been out for years (or decades) and I am always trying to play catch-up. So, in an attempt to stay current in my reading I have made a commitment to try to read both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning novels, as they are announced. One of the books I am reading is this year’s Pulitzer winner, “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt. I am on page 242 of 771. What do I like about the book so far?
A lot.
First of all it is an American novel. It doesn’t attempt to give the reader a dose of cultural awareness. (Nothing wrong with novels set in foreign lands, I’m just an American lit guy.) It is about a character, a boy, and the adverse reality that is thrust upon him, and how not taking action is action. So far, this book is all I wish for in a novel. The sense of place is strong and the characters carry the conflict forward at the right pace. Along the way you get insights into sailing, antique furniture restoration, and art history, as well as tidbits of French and Spanish – all of which give the story depth and texture.

So what’s the benefit to me as a writer?
Having my nose in this book keeps an example in front of me of how scenes can be filled with (the right) detail, the mechanics of how characters are described from the perspective of a unique protagonist, and a variety of examples of how transitions can work. I used to read purely for pleasure, for entertainment – which I still get. But I am also reading to become a better writer, for I am what I read, or don’t.

*Let’s define avid as having one book going all the time and spending at least a couple of hours a week reading it.

Harrison and Clark at 2:25 Sunday Afternoon

18 Wednesday Jun 2014

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There is a tendency (if not the cultural expectation), on Monday morning when we tell each other stories about our weekend, to simply report the events like a newspaper columnist instead of a novelist. We don’t give all the details. We don’t expound on how it felt plunging into the ice cold lake for the first swim of the summer or how we all cheered as grandmother blew out the candles at her 90th birthday party. We simply state that we had a get-together for our grandmother’s 90th, or we went to the lake and opened the cottage for the summer. We smile and ask, “And how was your weekend?” We assume our listener is not really that interested or certainly not that patient. And generally speaking, it is a good assumption. Such economy eases us through our day.

On June 7th and 8th I had the delight of taking my twin 20-year old daughters to the Printer’s Row Lit Fest in Chicago (http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/printersrowlitfest/). While there, I attended several author talks. One was a conversation between Bonnie Jo Campbell (http://www.bonniejocampbell.com/), Brigid Pasulka (http://www.brigidpasulka.com/), and Justin Go (http://justingo.com/), moderated by Sam Weller (http://www.samwellers.com/).
During this talk, Bonnie Jo Campbell made the following recommendation to writers. [I paraphrase] “Edit your novel manuscript as a series of moments – are you getting all you can out of each moment?”
What she was saying was this:
Reject the temptation to do in your fiction or nonfiction what you do on Monday morning. You are not at the coffee pot or water cooler. And your reader doesn’t have their nose in their favorite newspaper. Your reader is reading your novel, story collection, or true tale precisely because they WANT to feel every splash and sensation. They WANT to hear every cheer and well wish. That is the point. That is why the long form story exists. That is the contract you’ve established with them. That is why you write. That is the coveted product you are providing.

By the way…as the three of us rounded the corner of Harrison and Clark at 2:25 Sunday afternoon, the sunlight glancing in wide spreads between the apartment buildings, mixed with the late spring breeze, and formed that rare temperature – that just-right that causes you to want to walk and walk and walk, soaking in the sounds of the street performers and fire trucks forever and forevermore.

An Especially Great Effort

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

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This morning the task of writing a novel seems to be an especially great effort.
I imagine one day standing before a room of readers and getting a question about the process of writing. I imagine answering them as only a survivor of such an ordeal can. I imagine my answer being a metaphor bulging with wit and meaning – because this is what they expect of me.
“How many of you have put together a 5000-piece puzzle?” I’d get a few hands, and then I’d lay it out for them.
“OK. How many of you have composed a photograph – setting up every detail of lighting, framing, filter and angle – and taken the photograph, on film, set up a darkroom with all the tubs of chemicals and rinse baths and developed the print, on paper that you buy 500 sheets at a time, then went and cut down a tree and took the sawdust and mixed it with a compound made of raw materials procured from the hardware store and your garden – which you tilled and fertilized and planted in the spring for the purpose, molded the sawdust into a block using a form you built from the lumber from the same tree and then with a handsaw cut the block into slices of paperboard, which you soaked, dried, and pressed, glued the now dry photograph onto the paperboard with an adhesive you made from raw materials procured from the hardware store and your garden, cut the giant photo-card up into 5000 pieces with your pocket knife, and then put it together, whittling, filing, and sanding each piece as you went so that they’d fit perfectly together, all while not compromising the quality of the photograph?”
I imagine no one raising their hand except me, a few of my MFA buddies, and maybe a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon sitting in the back row.

Out of Order

21 Wednesday May 2014

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So, what does the daily routine look like years into writing your first novel? (Besides going to and from the office, keeping up with family, chores around the house…)
I spent the winter and spring going through a hardcopy printout of the entire manuscript and making several hundred edits – everything from line edits to adding and taking away text.
This summer (and into the fall) I am rekeying the 5th draft. In April I set the edited hardcopy next to my PC, opened a new Word doc, and started typing. This is an important part of the process. The value of this is huge in that through rekeying you find more edits and you maintain (hopefully strengthen) the consistency of the text. It will not be the last time I rekey the book.
As I’m rekeying I think I’ve discovered something that you should know. Something I think you can use.
It is useful to look at the entire page at once, as a sort of whole, as a composition. It is useful to take this view and reconstruct the dialogue and action at that macro level. I have found that in the draft from which I’m rekeying, the elements are almost certainly out of order. At least they need to be moved around in some fashion in order to bring forward the punch the scene inherently carries.
It is a fact you can use no matter what you are writing – from a novel to signing a greeting card. The order in which the sentences appear on the page is not going to be right until they are all there. Order only comes within the context of the whole.

30 Minutes With 20 Students

07 Wednesday May 2014

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I had 30 minutes with about 20 students. Dr. Paulette Sauders, a former professor of mine, simply said to me in her email, “I would love for you to share with the class whatever you think would be helpful for them to know about creative writing”. And so I was very excited to give my first guest lecture on May 1st at Grace College in Winona Lake, Indiana. Grace has a Creative Writing minor that is only a few years old, but growing.

So what did I think would be helpful for them to know about creative writing?
I could have spoken to them about paragraph structure and ending with the penultimate sentence. I could have spoken to them about the power of dialogue to develop character and drive action. I could have talked about the lessons for the writer found in the creative processes of drawing, photography, and sculpture. But I didn’t talk about any of these things. Instead, I told these 20 students the most important thing I could possibly think of to tell them. I told them the one thing that I’d have been negligent not to have said. I gave them the foundational message, the only thing they couldn’t live without.

I told them why they must write every day*.

I told them that writing is what makes them a writer, nothing else. I told them that they can write a novel in 30 minutes a day, but not in 3 hours on Saturday. I told them that their brain doesn’t work that way.
I told them that discussions of talent are a waste of time, that the only thing worth discussing, and the only thing they have any control over is the work.
I told them that they can’t trust what is in their brain. I told them that the process of translating an idea to language will prove or disprove its potential.
I told them to get a pen or a pencil, a piece of paper and a timer and write for 30 minutes, not more and not less. I told them longer sessions and “big” ideas will come later, after they’ve established the discipline. I told them it doesn’t matter what they write. No one will see it. I told them to do it on paper and not on their computer so that they can see and hold their work, delight in their accomplishment, and so they don’t end up spending 30 minutes on Pinterest.
I told them that if they miss a day to write the next day.
I told them to read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.

I walked out of room 106 in McClain with no regrets. I wish I’d had more time with the students. I love talking about the process. I could do it all day. But I walked away at ease.
I’d given them the goods. I had accomplished exactly what Dr. Sauders had requested.

*See also post from 23 May 2012.

April 24th is Poem in Your Pocket Day

23 Wednesday Apr 2014

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Did you know that this is National Poetry Month? “Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is now held every April” (www.poets.org).
Part of the celebration is held tomorrow, April 24th. It is Poem in Your Pocket Day. The idea is that you take a favorite poem, and you carry it with you all day, sharing it with colleagues, peers, and friends – whomever you meet.
I did this last year with Tim, a fellow at work, and we’ll do it again tomorrow. Last year I carried Nostalgia by Billy Collins (you can listen to it at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/2698). I remember sitting in Tim’s office and reading it to him. Tim still remembered a line or two from it this week and was able to help me find the title of it again so that I could include it for you here. If I am not mistaken (and there is a darn good chance I am) Tim carried a Shel Silverstein piece. I’m sorry, Tim, I don’t remember which one.
Regardless, this simply illustrates to me the entire point of National Poetry Month. Here are a couple of guys sitting in a corporate office in the middle of Indiana, in the middle of a busy workday reading poetry to each other.
Tim and I have an appointment set up in Outlook for 11AM Eastern, tomorrow morning, to celebrate Poem in Your Pocket Day. This year I will be carrying “Two Sides of a Story” by Aaron Belz. This is a poem from his book “The Bird Hoverer” (http://belz.net/) I am really looking forward to reading this poem to Tim. It is crazy great.
So, here’s your assignment. Go find a poem that you really like. Don’t read poetry?* Pick a song – most of them are poems. Print the lyrics and put that piece of paper in your pocket. Pull it out tomorrow and read it to someone. Anyone.
Know that you are part of a movement.

*You need to start moving in that direction. Subscribe to The Writer’s Almanac podcast and get one great poem in your earbuds every day. http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/podcast/

Desk window. Snow floats,

09 Wednesday Apr 2014

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Did you know that this is National Poetry Month? “Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is now held every April” (www.poets.org).
In celebration, the Danville Public Library here in Danville Indiana, has a poetry contest every year. They collect submissions all month and then judge and award cash prizes in early May. It is called the Melba Geoffroy Memorial Poetry Contest.
[Yes, you read correctly. There is a small-town public library offering cash prizes for poetry! Thank you, Melba! All is NOT lost!]
I am a fiction writer, but this is the second year in a row that I will submit poetry to the contest in order to support the important effort by our small local public library to promote a critically important art form.
Last year I submitted a traditional, non-form piece and was awarded second place in the adult division. I was delighted and humbled. This year however, I will be submitting haiku*.
This is by happenstance, but I think it is also in keeping with the spirit of this poetic form. One day last month, while writing, I happened to look up and out my desk window to see that it was snowing – one of those spring snows where there is no wind and the flakes come in huge clusters and fall like cotton on the grass. It struck me as poetic, if you will, so I captured the moment in time by jotting down a few phrases of reflection. Later, I read the phrases I saw in them a kernel, a seed.
I have concluded that one doesn’t write a haiku; instead the haiku is spotted in everyday life and then revealed in the laying out of the language. This sounds a bit mystical, but to anyone who does creative work, it is a fact.
One thing is for sure, the DPL poetry judges will be counting syllables this year.

*For an excellent primer/reader on haiku, you can’t do better than “The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa”, Edited by Robert Hass.