Being Grateful to Be A Writer

Happy Thanksgiving from Adair Heitmann. During this season of abundance and gratitude I offer you a toast to your writing. I raise my glass to each and every one of you. The act and art of writing is a calling. We write because we have to. We have a story to tell, or a message to share. As writers, we write to right a wrong, or to give voice to a part of ourselves that yearns to be heard. May you rejoice in your own creative writing, whether you put pen to paper for five minutes a month, or put fingers to keyboard for five hours a day. Take a moment, to appreciate yourself, and your devotion to the amazing world of writing.

Cheers!

Workshopping+Submitting=Publication

The late George V. Higgins revolutionized the crime novel genre with his first book, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. The story was told almost entirely in idiomatic, tough-guy dialogue, which became Higgins’ trademark through 25 or so more novels.  Among his nonfiction books was one titled On Writing. In that book, Higgins wrote, “If you do not seek to publish what you have written, then you are not a writer and you never will be.”

Twice a month, our library workshop meets to read and critique our writing among ourselves. By now, we regulars are comfortable with and trusting of one another, and we are committed to the goal of helping one another improve our writing and our stories. Except in rare instances, we do not fear the others’ critiques. We push each other to do better, while cheering for each other’s success at the same time.

We write because we have stories to tell. But if we’re honest, we should admit that we also write because we want our stories to be read.

As wonderful as writers’ workshops are, I think we participants tend to let ourselves off easy by being sufficiently satisfied when our colleagues read and praise our manuscripts. We should commit ourselves to getting our stories read in published form. We should be sending our writing out to magazines large and small, to contests, to websites and to literary agents.

I’m fortunate to be surrounded by several writers who are willing and determined to move their material beyond the cozy cove of our workshop into the great sea of submitting.

JoAnn is reviewing a final draft (about No. 15 or so) of a literary novel that she’s about to send to agents. We’ve heard several chapters in our group.

Martin has a book proposal out among agents, has entered a spec script in a top-rated TV show’s contest, and sent a spec op-ed piece to a national newspaper’s pundit search. All of those pieces got critiqued in our workshop.

And Sue, who has recently joined our group for feedback on her novel-in-progress, is a serial submitter of shorter work she often starts in a different workshop. The result? She has published many stories, one of which was nominated for a famous national prize.

Why don’t the rest of us submit our work? Is it laziness, or lack of interest, or lack of time to do so?  Perhaps. Above all, though, the real reason is probably fear. More precisely, fear of rejection.

Just the other day, I found some helpful thoughts on this from a writer named Jennifer Blanchard at her blog, procrastinatingwritersblog.com. Blanchard writes:

“Just because your writing was rejected, that doesn’t mean you’re not a good writer. All writers get rejected at some point in their careers. It’s the writers who use rejection as fuel to become a better writer and keep putting themselves out there [who] eventually succeed. . . .

“Plus, it’s better to have a ton of rejection letters and know that you’re actually attempting your writing dreams than it is to have none because you were never brave enough to try.”

Hear, hear. Please join me in making a renewed effort to seek to publish what we’ve written.
—Alex McNab

Creativity and Writing

Hello, Adair Heitmann writing to you today about creativity. As writers we expect our inspirational well to always be full. Our readers, agents, editors, and publishers do too. Yet, there comes a moment, every so often, when the brain freezes, we pause, and the words don’t come out right, or they don’t make it out at all. Or, in the real world of writers, you just don’t have the time to write today, but want to stay connected to your muse. If this happens to you, why not use a tried and true creativity technique? It is . . . move a muscle. Get up out of your chair, and walk over to your “Quotes” file. Remember the file I told you about in my July 22, 2009 “The Power of the Written Word”  blog?

Dip your hand in and randomly choose a quote. Let it fill your writing vessel, enjoy the stimulating moment. Today’s quote is:

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused. ~ Ernest Hemingway

Until next time, keep on writing!

Writing & reading

The unread volumes are stacking up, like incoming planes over LaGuardia at five in the afternoon. My books-to-be-read shelves are ready for Dewey Decimal System sorting.

Start with the recently-released novels by renowned authors Richard Russo, James Ellroy and Pete Dexter. (Does Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland belong in that group? It’s in a holding pattern, too.) Add popular American histories of the last few years, such as Tony Horwitz on explorers in North America before the Pilgrims, Hampton Sides on Kit Carson and the Old West, yet another title about the Plains Indians and Custer, and the story of the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth. Don’t overlook sports, in the form of Pete Sampras’ autobiography and Sports Illustrated scribe Scott Price’s memoir of living in Europe. Remember the biographies, too, including those of blues harmonica legend Little Walter Jacobs and the late, great George Plimpton. And there is always a host of works by mystery and crime mavens James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, James Crumley, Laura Lippman, Andrew Vachss, Don Winslow and others. Even a literary classic is waiting to land in my lap; I’ve been intending to resume my once-annual rite of spending an evening re-reading The Great Gatsby. (Is this a guy’s list, or what?)

So why are these volumes serving as wallpaper instead of getting read? It’s become increasingly apparent to me that I am reading fewer books as I write my own novel. It’s a habit I find frustrating and, frankly, embarrassing.

If you want to pursue creative writing, if you want to write books, you ought to be an avid book reader. I was rather surprised when I joined a writers’ workshop for the first time and discovered that’s not always the case. Roughly half of the storytellers around the table in that first group said they rarely read books. In the overall scheme of things, they are exceptions.

At our Saturday morning workshop here at the library, my colleagues Joanne and JoAnn, both fine writers with novels in progress, use reading to help them with the work they bring in. “It gets me writerly-ish,” said one. “It makes me pumped that I’m going to write my own awesome novel,” said the other.

The advantages to reading as you write are easy to enumerate. Reading primes the writing pump. Reading immerses you in putting words together and gets you excited about doing it. In short, reading makes you a better writer. Reading also can entertain you. Reading a chapter of a novel can be a good way to relax. Getting lost for an hour or two in another writer’s imaginary world may take the edge off your anxiety about your own work. Finally, reading can dangle out there as a reward for keeping to a regular writing schedule. When you reach your day’s quota of scenes or pages or words or hours, what could be better than sitting down with a good book?

Where there are pros, there inevitably are cons. Often they are the flip side of the same coin. Reading can distract you, not only from your writing, but also from the important thinking you should do about your story when you aren’t at your desk. In other words, someone else’s story can take you too far out of your story. It can subconsciously worm its way into your own work, affecting your style, your plot, your characters. As you review your latest chapter, you may realize that your hero or heroine is speaking in the language and cadence of the protagonist of the novel on your bedside table. Finally, reading a good book might be discouraging. It could prey on your self-belief, making you doubt that you can put down a story as compelling and artful as the one you are reading—so why bother trying?

There’s more to the reading-writing nexus, though, than just the mechanics of craft. It has to do with becoming part of a community. Here’s what Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon said the other day to Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air”:

“All of us are looking for people who will get us, who will love the same things that we love. Reading, getting lost in a book, provides you—as soon as you are able to do that as a child—it provides you with this immediate fulfillment of that longing and that desire. You get. . . a sense of connectedness. . . . You have the urge to share it. You want to talk about it. You want to be with other people who also love it. That’s part of being a reader, too. Just learning how to read and how to love books and stories, it primed me to want to then turn and try to make them myself. . . .I love this stuff so much I want to make more of it.”

Should we workshoppers read books as we are writing your own? Yes, of course we should.

James Ellroy, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times’ Carolyn Kellogg on the Barnes & Noble Review website, said, “The greatest education you’ve ever had as a novelist is the books you’ve read.”

And we should never stop learning.

—Alex McNab

Plant the Seeds of Writing: Online

Hello, Adair Heitmann, the Wednesday Writing Critique Group leader, writing to you today. As Fall officially begins, gardeners turn their sights to next Spring. Like gardeners, good writers, men and women of the intellectual soil, must dig deep. We plant and reap seeds not only for inspiration and message, but for our creative endeavors to blossom in the future.

In September 2008, I was pitching my manuscript to agents. One nibbled, and after telling me she was interested in my proposal, in the same breath asked, “Do you have a website?” I knew, as a writer, I should. But back then, I didn’t. In that moment, I learned an important lesson in getting your work published — you need an online presence.

Being a self-starter, by the time our “Winter Words” conference rolled around last December, I had a website. It was inexpensivly done, and I did it myself. I then set a 2009 writing goal: To increase my online presence. I’ve learned a lot this past year, I’ll share some of my hints and tips with you today.

1. Join and use a professional networking site. Many writers use LinkedIn. Fill in your Profile and join Groups. I found an upcoming anthology to submit my work to, from the Group, Metro Writers Community. After awhile on LinkedIn, when you Google yourself, your name will come up first in the search engines, that’s what publishing agents want! FREE. http://www.linkedin.com

2. Join Facebook for additional online career building. For writers, Facebook isn’t a place to talk about your shoe size or to complain. It is a place to market to, and connect with, readers. Recommend a book, or another author, talk up your current writing project in a casual and user-friendly way, it’s all about building community. Again your name will start to rise in computer search engines. FREE. http://www.facebook.com

3. Take a class to further your technology skills. A good one to take will be coming up on October 14, 2009, 7:00PM, here at the Fairfield Public Library. It is called, “LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter Can Further Your Career” FREE. Go to Events Registration on the Library’s website, look under Jobs 2009.

4. Comment on someone else’s blog. Online rule of thumb: Don’t be rude, crude or impolite. Note that everything you say online stays online, be sure you say what you want. FREE.

5. Volunteer to teach a class or give a speech at your local church, temple, alma mater or library. Your name will get linked online with those institution’s websites. FREE.

6. Write a blog. Remember, it is not necessarily an infomercial for yourself. Choose a topic that you are an expert on and share your message. I use WordPress http://www.wordpress.com for my own creativity and wellness blog, and it’s what we use for our blog here at the Library. Author Mary Carroll Moore has a Blog for Writers, http://howtoplanwriteanddevelopabook.blogspot.com/ in which she inspires weekly writing exercises.  FREE.

7. Create a website. I use InMotion, http://www.inmotionhosting.com/ many writers use GoDaddy and others. Research authors that you like, check out their websites. Go to the bottom of their Home Page and see who hosts their site. Do your research and find the one that works best for you. If you want to check out my website, simply Google me, my website will come up.

So, on this sunny Fall morning, enough about managing your career online. Get yourself back to the art of writing, and plan for your online presence to grow.  Harvest your seeds and be sure to let us know here, at the Fairfield Writer’s Blog, what you do, and how it works for you. Until next time, keep on writing!

P.S. To comment on this or any other blog post, go to the bottom of the post, click on “Leave a Comment” and proceed.

The Artist’s Way

In our 1st and 3rd Saturday writing group, we discuss a wide variety of topics related to writing. Through our conversations, we learn from, and are inspired by, each other. Often, our conversation turns to life experiences and how they impact our writing.

I recall one such experience in a sophomore college course. I can still remember the emotional sting and confusion I felt when my professor returned my essay. “Not enough detail!” was scrawled across the page in her bold handwriting.

Not enough detail? What was she talking about? At the time, I thought I included plenty of detail. My essay covered a wide array of items related to the topic, and to my mind, this was all of the detail that was needed.

It wasn’t until decades later that I fully realized what she meant.

That revelation came after I read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and carried out the exercises in the accompanying workbook. If you’ve never read this book, you owe it to yourself and your creative writing dreams to rush out and pick it up immediately. It will change the way you SEE the world around you – and that will lead you to change the way you WRITE about it.

Don’t believe me? Close your eyes and picture a tree – any tree. What do you see in your mind’s eye? How would you describe it?

Before reading The Artist’s Way, I would have answered this question with a description along the lines of “I see a large plant with branches covered with green leaves that spread out in many directions to provide shade for those who sit beneath it.”

After reading The Artist’s Way, however, I found myself noticing details in everything around me, and committing those details to memory.

Houses I’d passed every day and barely noticed suddenly became “the blue clapboard house with the eyebrow windows… the annuals bursting with color along the foundation of a green ranch… the white Cape Cod with black shutters, a wrought-iron railing bordering the front steps and a curving path leading to the street”.

And when I looked at trees, I saw the gnarled, striated bark on the trunk… the branches stretching up and outward, rarely in a straight line… the leaves lit by sunlight on one side …and the ground beneath the tree deeply shaded or less so, depending on the angle of the sun as it filtered through the leaves.

This intense awareness of my surroundings brought with it a joy in writing down the details of a scene, a setting, a character’s thoughts or actions…and the realization that, because of these details, readers would gain more from my writing as they accompany me on my literary journey.

So that’s what my professor meant!

- Mary Stramski

Small steps to a long story

How do you go about writing a novel?

If you’re John Irving—author of The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany and other novels—you write the last line of the novel first, he said at a lecture I attended a few years ago. Then, as you begin each chapter, you write its last line first, Irving added.

If you’re James Ellroy, writing American Tabloid, you produce a 300-page outline and then write the book, according to an interview with his agent by writer Stuart Neville.

If you’re Michael Connelly—author most recently of The Scarecrow and the forthcoming Nine Dragons—you don’t bother with an outline: “But that said, I never start writing a book until I know what happens at the start and what happens at the end,” Connelly says in a Q & A in the latest issue of The Writer.

If you’re a workshopper like me, however, one who is trying to complete the draft of a novel for the first time, you’re in awe of those masters who can see the entire progression of the story before they begin writing it. Unlike them, you’re dealing with a more fundamental question:

Do I have the chops to invent a story that holds together for 300-plus pages and meets all the criteria it’s supposed to meet? Such as? Such as an organically-evolving plot with unexpected twists and turns. Compelling characters. Alluring setting. Meaningful theme. Surprising, revealing and yet inevitable ending. And, oh yes, such as getting it all down on paper in artful language.

That’s why we should follow the Richard Russo approach. Here’s what the Pulitzer Prize winner (for Empire Falls) and author most recently of That Old Cape Magic, told an interviewer from “Barnes & Noble Review”:

“The task [of writing a novel] is so enormous that if we ever really thought about what we were letting ourselves in for, we’d never begin. Early on we learn to worry only about what we do today. If I get my two or three pages written on Monday my day’s work is done. It’s useless to worry about Friday or four years from Friday. Pages need our attention; books take care of themselves.”

Inevitably, there will be days when composing two or three pages seems impossible. What should we do? Try using the Lawrence Block method, as the mystery Grand Master describes in his writing manual Spider, Spin Me a Web: “I still write a paragraph at a time, a page at a time, and a day at a time. Because that, as far as I know, is the only way to get the work done.”

Once we commit to the “small step” or “small bite” approach, says Don Winslow, whose latest novel is The Dawn Patrol, the key is to “write it every day, no matter what, no excuses. [You’ll] be shocked at how quickly [you]’ve produced a book. It’s a Nike thing – just do it.”

I’m game. Are you?
—Alex McNab

Listening

Adair Heitmann here, writing to you on this hot August day.

The eminent doctor and author, Rachel Naomi Remen wrote:

Listening is the oldest and perhaps the most powerful tool of healing. It is often through the quality of our listening and not the wisdom of our words that we are able to effect the most profound changes in the people around us . . . Our listening creates a sanctuary for the homeless parts within the other person. Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear truth in themselves, often for the first time. And in the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone.

Listening is what we do in our Writer’s Groups, we listen to each other’s words. In our groups we create a space of trust and confidentiality. Many writers are vulnerable beings, we, at times, wear our hearts on our shirtsleeves. Where else in the world, except possibly in a church, confessional or therapist’s office can a person go and have his or her words simply listened to?

Yes, in our writing critique groups we offer constructive feedback which helps the writers improve their craft. But really, today, I am thinking it is in the power of listening, with respect and reverence, that our deepest work gets done.

Writing by the book

In 2002, Vanity Fair cultural critic James Wolcott published his first novel, The Catsitters. I remember reading an interview with Wolcott at the time in which he was asked how, as a nonfiction magazine writer, he had prepared himself to tackle a novel. He spoke of reading Dorothea Brande’s 1934 book, Becoming a Writer. I had never heard of Brande before, but as a magazine guy with aspirations toward fiction myself, I promptly went out and bought a reissue of her 175-page treatise (my copy is a Tarcher/Putnam paperback; the latest version is a Mariner Books paperback). Becoming a Writer sits on my bookshelf to this day, along with all kinds of other books about the craft.

You don’t have to tell me, and I don’t have to tell you: We learn by doing, not by reading about how to do it. Nevertheless, I am something of a sucker for how-to books about writing, in my case with an emphasis on novels. I also lean toward books whose approach is more practical and anecdotal than psychological and inspirational.

For our library workshop, I recently catalogued the writing books on my shelf. They fall into 11 different categories:

• Overview How-to
• Catch-Phrase How-To
• Touchy-Feely (Brande’s book is one of these)
• Genre-Specific
• Grammar & Style
• Getting It Done
• Famous Authors
• Nonfiction
• Writers’ Advice Anthologies
• Screenwriting
• Literary Agent Guides

There is plenty of cross-category advice in these tomes, from developing and sticking to a routine of putting words down each day, to when to write in scene and when to write in summary, to how to structure your story in the traditional three acts. Rarely does an author offer something entirely new. But a passage that expresses a familiar lesson in a new way may be all that’s needed to jump-start the composing battery when it runs low.

So writing guides do serve a purpose for many of us. As I continue to work on making the transition from sports-magazine staffer to fiction writer, I might think of my writing books as a coach on the sideline, ready, during a timeout, to remind me of a trusted play or give me a motivational kick in the pants.

Despite the many titles in my collection, were I starting all over again, I’d follow the Wolcott model. I’d sample a few writing books, pick one, and rely thereafter on it. Here are a few suggestions, cherry-picked from my list (with its category in parentheses), that you might consider as your primary source:

• Gotham Writers’ Workshop Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide from New York’s Acclaimed Creative Writing School; Edited by Alexander Steele (Overview How-To).

• The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them); Jack M. Bickham (Catch-Phrase How-To).

• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Anne Lamott (Touchy-Feely).

• Words Fail Me: What Everyone Who Writes Should Know About Writing; Patricia T. O’Conner (Grammar & Style).

• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft; Stephen King (Famous Authors).

• Telling Lies for Fun & Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers; Lawrence Block (Famous Authors).

• Follow the Story: How to Write Successful Nonfiction; James B. Stewart (Nonfiction).

• The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller; John Truby (Screenwriting).

Another option you might consider is beginning a book exchange among the members of your workshop. Chances are good that each writer has one or more how-to manuals at home.

Or you could find a copy of Brande’s Becoming a Writer. My book has yellow highlights scattered about it that I haven’t re-read in more than a year, at least. But I just opened it to page 71, where there is a marked passage that seems to speak specifically to me:

“A journalist’s career does teach two lessons which every writer needs to learn—that it is possible to write for long periods without fatigue, and that if one pushes on past the first weariness one finds a reservoir of unsuspected energy—one reaches the famous ‘second wind.’ ”

Time to post this blog and put those lessons to the test.

—Alex McNab

The Power of the Written Word

Hello again, Adair Heitmann here writing to you today about a writer’s life in the real world. Over the course of my careers I’ve had a rare opportunity, one that allowed me to write full-time. The joy of it! The accomplishment! The focus! Isn’t that every writer’s dream? I was lucky enough to live that dream for a while, but now I am on the other side of the gift. With a new job and other responsibilities I am going through writer’s withdrawal.

As writers, we can become addicted to being a writer. This morning I was in a blue funk, I attributed it to the fact that while I need and like my good job, I miss the time I used to have to write.

Luckily, I am a member of and lead the Wednesday Writing Critique Group at the Fairfield Public Library. Our group meets twice a month and the accountability makes me put pen to paper and fingers to computer keys, no matter what. Our group is eclectically diverse, we have fiction, non-fiction, and poetry writers as well as writers creating professional blogs, writing op-ed pieces, plays and journals as a legacy for a child. In the past I have completed full manuscripts, both fiction and non-fiction, articles and personal essays. What I am working on now is the art of haiku writing. The traditional Japanese formal structure is challenging and the work is limited to 17 syllables. I like the puzzle of it, seeing the emotion that can be conveyed in a few words and creating haiku keeps my writing brain active.

When, as it did this morning,  my writer’s malaise cuts too deep I use another technique to lift my mood. I go to my collection of quotes.  This morning the quote I randomly pulled out of my dog-eared manila folder is by Helen Keller, “No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.”

Her words are a soothing balm. They embody the power of the written word. That majestic ability to reach across time and space to comfort and breathe life back into a tired soul.

What techniques do you use to keep your spirits going as a writer? I’d love to hear about them here.

Until next time, keep on writing.