Category Archives: Role of the Writer

My Big Writerly Lesson for 2017

10 Wednesday Jan 2018

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I am happiest as a writer when I’m neck deep in the throes of creating a book-length manuscript. I already knew this. I found it out while I was writing my first novel. Here’s the revelation for 2017:

I am a mess when I’m between projects.

I am out of sorts. I am a wondering vagrant. I am like a bear roaming from campsite to campsite in search of some morsel. I think I have a concept for the next novel and when I start trying to form the idea I find that it’s flat, empty. No delight. It’s like sand through my fingers. So I pack it in and move on to the next idea – the next possibility that might, just might, hold the excitement that I so desperately want to recreate.
It has gotten ridiculous. Not only am I jumping from idea to idea – metawriting for months on one of them – but I’m circling back and revisiting ideas thinking, hoping, digging, imagining there will be fire there when before there was barely a spark.
This is new territory for me. This is my first stint between long-form projects. I have no idea what to do, how to act. I don’t even know how to think about my writing in the midst of this. I feel useless. I binge on chocolate and episodes of The West Wing.
I’ve lost my way.
I know what you’re thinking. That I must fight through it. It is part of creating. I must put my head down and keep trudging through the woods. That I’ll find the next project in time.
You’re right. And this will have been part of the experience.
I’m still miserable.

The Power of Place

29 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Character in Fiction, Qualities of Good Fiction, Role of the Writer

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Among the elements of fiction – conflict, character, and place – I could argue for any one of them being the more palpable, the key to quality story. Conflict is the engine. No question about that. But place…world-building…the environment in which the story happens – that is central.

I have a fellow writer who recently wrote a poem about walking through the Atlanta airport and how alone she felt among so many people. There is so much truth in that. How does that happen? How does a place illicit universal feeling and emotion? How do our psyches and souls become intertwined with physical spaces?
And it seems that the further you go back, into youth and then into childhood, the greater this phenomena becomes. Pause in those memories and place will tug, transport, and consume.

Place is unique among the elements of fiction. Practice reverence in constructing where your stories will unfold. And know that if the place you create lifts off the page it could, just maybe, transform into a character.
And that would be a gift.

The Energy of Experience

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

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It is that moment when you are emotionally moved, when you are shocked, in awe. When damage is done or redemption is realized. The epiphany, the dumbfound, the fear and delight – sometimes small, sometimes large. Sometimes public, often private.
Take note, for these are the turns in which the writerly aesthetic lives.
To observe in such moments is human. To realize that the observation is material to be creatively mined, this is writerly. This is the skill – to learn to harness, capture, and form the energy of experience into craft.
Here are a pair of examples:
I have a fellow writer who recently wrote a poem about a drunk driver hitting a tree in his front yard in the middle of the night. For most people this is a story you tell over coffee with friends. Everyone is amazed and this spurs a series of stories of drunken tragedy. But for the writer, this is an experience that can only be properly dealt with by being set down in language.
Another fellow writer recently wrote a poem about sitting on an airport bus and receiving an email that he’d just been fired. This is more private, but is it less violent? Not as he tells it. Not as revealed in short, stark lines.
In both cases we are escorted past what happened and shown the residue of truth we might otherwise miss.
We fail our craft when we are like all other mortals, when we let our experiences simply come and go. Let us do the work of shining our spotlight on such moments.
Our readers will be the richer for it.

The Problem of Journaling – Solution #2: The Travel Journal

01 Wednesday Nov 2017

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Whenever I travel – whether its a long weekend getaway or a trip outside the US – I cease my daily creative writing routine (for the most part) and instead spend my allotted time each day scribbling in my travel journal.
There is a delight in carrying a notebook as you tour a distant town or coastline, stopping occasionally to write your impressions or to sketch your surroundings. What you have with a notebook is not a camera or a map, but instead you have a tool that expects you to develop a skill. The skill of interpreter. You are not simply taking, you are leaving something behind – a record. You are interacting. You are a writer.
In my travel journals (I’m on my second volume now) I have an etching from Henry Thoreau’s grave, a page of signatures of Mexican orphans, a drawing of a southern Irish countryside, and (tucked in the back) a chart of common fish caught off the gulf coast of Florida.
Of course there is a practical value to keeping a travel journal as well. I know that it was on August 4, 2011 that we drove from Carmel down Highway1 to Big Sur. I also know that on the weekend of July 13, 2014 we discovered the quaint beauty of Westerville, Ohio, the home of Otterbein College.
Travel journaling causes you to develop new writerly muscles. And it later serves to aid the memory.
Who among us could not benefit from a bit of both?

The Problem of Journaling

04 Wednesday Oct 2017

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Every time I hear or read the praises of journaling my anxiety goes up and I feel I’ve lost out. The over-achievers that harp on journaling, the die-hards who swear by it – they say that the practice of daily journaling yields riches of life and craft that cannot be summarized.
I’m 49 years old. Am I going to start keeping a diary?
There is something attractive (albeit a little strange) about those few of you who have kept a diary since the day you learned to write and have an entry for every day since the first day of second grade. You can go back and read what your childhood mind was thinking on any day in 1976.
But what about the rest of us? We all agree that journaling is important for a writer, but the idea of beginning to write a daily entry seems self-absorbed, pointless, and above all, mind-numbingly boring.
Then several years ago I heard about the practice of specific, purposeful journaling.
Here a few very good examples.
The Reagan Diaries. Ronald Reagan began keeping a daily journal the day he entered the White House and stopped the day he left. It is said to be in simple chicken-like scratches and full of misspellings. And highly personal at times.
The Genesee Diary by Henri Nouwen. Nouwen needed some time away from the rat-race and so he entered a Trappist monastery in Genesee, New York. The book has become a classic on solitude – and marked the beginning of what became Nouwen’s legacy as a monk and a beloved teacher and writer.
Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon. Here we have a journal that became a classic of American travel writing – and that provides a first-rate primer on how to write as a contemplative and transient observer.
In the next two posts I will offer a couple of solutions to this problem of journaling. There are two types of journaling that I’ve incorporated into my writing life without turning the practice into a part-time job. These are keeping a Commonplace Book and a Travel Journal.

Failure of Feelings

20 Wednesday Sep 2017

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There is a grit, a strength of will, a determination inherent in the work of writing that has NOTHING to do with art, inspiration, or the wonder of making story.
The discipline of sitting down to write must not be predicated on “feeling like it.” Our feelings can’t be trusted to guide our actions when it comes to getting work done.
Our feelings are not our ally. If left alone in the front seat, our feelings will drive us to a premature and fattened ruin.
If I did what I “felt like” doing, I would sleep till 9AM every day, get up and go out to breakfast, come home and read for a couple of hours, take a nap, go to dinner with friends, stay out late carousing, and return home to crash and do it all again. There would be no productivity. No accomplishment. No craft. No tending to the soul.
Well wrought fiction doesn’t come from inspiration or a great idea. Good fiction is the result of putting your butt in the chair to write when there is no inkling of desire and no likelihood of progress.
It doesn’t matter how you feel.

The Rush of the First Draft

09 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Role of the Writer, Starting a Novel

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The first draft is about gathering all the basic materials you’ll need for the finished product and organizing them before you. Laying them out, taking inventory, making sure nothing significant is missing. If you can do this, you have a very successful first draft.

The first draft is about paragraphs and ideas. It is about laying the beams, not hanging the curtains. There will be time to tend to the sentences, to the language. The first draft is written from several yards away. Don’t look too close. There’s no point in it. Few of these words will survive. Look only close enough to ensure the bones are in place.

The first draft is ugly and unfit for a reader’s consumption. Show it to no one. It is a waste of their time. Its only purpose is to get you to the second draft. It is a fumbling start. It is full of holes. It is held together by chicken wire. And it is the only path to the “next”, and to “done.”

The first draft is horrifying and exhilarating. The rush of the first draft. It is always amazing to see what comes out. What inhabits the first draft is raw energy, hope, promise. A first draft is optimism incarnate. And it is a wonder how a thing that did not exist an hour before now is.

The first draft seeks a tone, a thing inherent in the first words that emerges. Listen for it. As you come to hear and feel it, and then see the hue or color – focus in and move toward it. Sneak up on it. Don’t rush. Creep in from behind and throw a net over its form and drag it onto the page. In a few drafts it will seem that it has always existed, that you simply heard it, honed in on it, and subdued it for all to see.

Cut and Tape

05 Wednesday Jul 2017

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Here is a very practical tool that has served me well time and time again. Most recently a little over a week ago.

When to Use It –
There come moments in writing where the prose is well-honed, from a micro perspective, but is unordered and disorganized. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does it is always 7 or 8 drafts in. And it is a stopper. It becomes evident when reading it over a few times. You see that all the material is there and it’s written well, but the rhythm and tone feel rough. As a reader you are distracted and unable to settle in, but you can’t determine precisely why.
If you continue to try to edit and rekey you’ll only spin your wheels. You need a more dramatic move.
This tool will free you from the linear manipulation that is the edit & rekey cycle (which is THE primary way to quality prose) and give you an entirely new perspective on the draft at hand.

How to Do It –
Step 1: Make sure the prose is double-spaced (you’ll need the white space) and then print it out.
Step 2: Read it once more. Look for awkward breaks in the prose – those moments that jolt you out of the dream as a reader. Mark them. Look for sentences that follow each other but vary in color or tone and don’t seem well paired. Mark these too.
Step 3: Cut these sentences (or groups of sentences) out of the page with a pair of scissors.
Step 4: Repeat Step 2 and 3
Step 5: One you’re done cutting free your sentences discard the margins and other scraps. There may be sentences you decide to discard along with the scrap.This is good.
Step 6: Grab a clean sheet of paper.
Step 7: Reorder the sentences by laying them out. Keep the scissors handy as you may need to cut apart a few more sentences.
Step 8: Once you have reordered the entire piece, tape the sentences to the paper.
Step 9: Read the piece again and make the hand edits that are now needed in order for this new draft to hang together.
Step 10: Go back to your computer and rekey the newly taped section of prose from scratch.

There! You have a fresh draft, you understand how it’s fitting together, the prose is tighter, and you’ve added material during the rekey.
Now you’re over that hump. On to the next draft.

Why I Write Long Form Fiction

21 Wednesday Jun 2017

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It is what the boatwright feels when the hull has taken shape and shavings from the mast are beginning to litter the floor.
It is what the mountaineer feels when he is a mile above base camp and the trees are beginning to thin out.
It is what the marathon runner feels at mile 15 and her shoes feel like part of her feet, like wheels she is riding.
It is what I feel when I’m in my eleventh draft of the seventh chapter of a novel.

It is the sense that your skills are being pushed, and doing the work is layered with meaning that you couldn’t imagine yesterday.
It is the discovery that you’re honing your process more than creating a product.
It is the realization that this same process is being expanded to fit this new achievement, and that the product is now informing you and your process as it’s revealed before you.
It is that moment when you are keenly aware that you are learning about your craft and deploying that learning at the same time.
It is the fact that it cannot be done in an afternoon, a week, or a month – and the delight you take in this delay.

The finished manuscript, the boat built, the mountain climbed, and the finish line crossed do more for the person who has done the work than for anyone who might observe the outcome.

This is why I write long form fiction.

Read Aloud

07 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Qualities of Good Fiction, Role of the Writer

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Do you read your writing aloud to yourself? Is this part of your writing process?
Yes? Good. You can stop reading here. Well done. Carry on.
No? It should be.
Why? Two reasons:
It will improve your writing. You can hear problems in your writing that you can’t see. Language is processed differently by the ear than it is by the eye. We can hear what we can’t see. Likewise we can’t fully imagine the sounds of language when reading in silence. There is music in well-written prose. There is rhythm and tone. These are important aspects of high-functioning prose. But you can’t see them. And you can’t write-in these elements effectively if you don’t read and listen for them.
Reading your work aloud is a skill that you will need if you achieve any significant success as a writer. All writers who have published more than a little will be asked at least a few times to read their work aloud. You may read to a high school lit class, a book club of a half-dozen souls, or to several hundred devout fans in a university lecture hall. In any case, your ability to read your work in an entertaining and captivating way will increase your readership and exposure. Conversely, if you don’t develop this skill it will prove limiting. You’ll be frustrated. And if you’re successful as a writer you’ll experience the misery of developing this skill as your readers sit in the flesh before you and watch.
So make reading your work aloud a part of your creative process now. It will benefit your writing and you’ll be preparing for future success.
Besides, reading stories aloud to your kids or to your spouse after dinner, is wonderful. Try it.