Cathartic Writing

Hello to all the writers out there, on this rainy, windy day in Connecticut. Adair Heitmann here, trying not to batten down the hatches as the wind howls all around my office window. On my early morning walk, I donned my jet black down coat, indigo blue baseball cap and headed out into the storm. Holding my lime and kelly green umbrella in a two-fisted grip I maneuvered it like the sail on a boat, as I braved the blustery weather. I walked briskly for a mile down to the sea and returned home dripping wet, and purified. Immersing myself in nature’s raw elements reminded me of what we do, as writers, when we express our emotional tensions on paper.

I’ve learned from experience that sometimes the best therapy is to write feelings out. Memoirists do it all the time, as do  journal writers and essayists. Just like going into the storm on my walk, we need the same preparedness and courage to bring our feelings into consciousness on paper. We need to know when to stop, and possibly have a box of tissue handy. It helps to have an understanding and compassionate friend to call or a therapist to talk to if the writing brings up too much too soon. Sometimes our cathartic writing is for our eyes only and at other times it is confidentially shared with a writing group.

Writing helps us get to the heart of the matter. We can purge pity or terror and come through the other side feeling whole. What was once trauma, when viewed with perspective may become the next best-seller. Look at Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love. As an author, Gilbert showed her pain in a universal light, with candor and humor. She turned her devastating experience of divorce into a soul-searching spiritual odyssey and the rest is publishing history.

The Rewards for Perseverance

The need for perseverance in our work to become successful writers never wanes. Nor do the battles we wage with doubt.

I was reminded of how true this is even for published writers in a recent exchange of New Year’s e-mails with my friend Karen Day.

Karen is the author of two middle-grade novels, Tall Tales (2007) and No Cream Puffs (2008). You might think that once you have written and published a book, or two, the next one would come more easily. Not necessarily so.

In her message, Karen wrote of the struggles she has had with her latest story:

“I went a bit sideways with my last draft (book 3) and so we postponed publishing until a year from now. Which was okay and now I’m thrilled. It gave me extra time to really try and figure out what was wrong with my novel. Finally came to me and now it’s better than before. But I had a rough eight months or so. Couldn’t figure it out and then I worried that I’d never figure it out and then I worried that I’d never write again. . . .Doesn’t matter how many books I publish, I’ll always have a lot of self-doubt. It’s due Monday and it’s in great shape.”

Karen epitomizes perseverance. She wrote her first short story in fourth grade, submitted it to Highlights magazine and got rewarded with her first rejection. At 16, she finished her first novel, sent it off to publishers and added to her rejection collection. When she joined the staff at the sports magazine where I worked, in the mid-1980s, she was crafting stories in her spare time, submitting them and getting turned down. Through graduate school, family relocations, motherhood and more, she continued to write. Along the way, she moved from writing stories for adults to stories for young children to stories for middle-grade students.

Long ago she showed me her detailed fiction-filing system. It included each draft of a story, with careful, color-coded notes tracking the revisions she had made. That way, she could learn from her mistakes and trace her improvement as a writer. Her writing day, even now, begins well before the sun and the rest of her family rise.

In 2000, Karen finished the first draft of a middle-grade novel. Multiple revisions and rejections followed. Finally, in 2005, Karen’s perseverance paid off. She sold the novel to Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House. “And then I revised it even more!” Karen said. In 2007 Tall Tales was published. It was selected for the prestigious Bluebonnet Award statewide reading list in Texas. A year later No Cream Puffs—started in 2003, many times revised—was published. Now the revised manuscript of book 3 is being evaluated.

Despite the decades of writing without the reward of publication, despite the self-doubt even after having two middle-grade novels published, Karen perseveres. The need to write, the urge to create stories and, ultimately, to connect with readers, is what all true writers have. Reaching that final stage of having a story that a publisher wants to publish, though, is hard work. “I think too often that beginning writers don’t understand/believe/realize how important revision is to the publishing process,” Karen says.

If you stick with it, there is a wonderful reward at the end of your long slog. Here is the inspiring way Karen is greeting each day of this New Year:

“I love that feeling of waking up in the morning and thinking, today might be the day that I hear back with an acceptance!!”

My wish—for Karen, for my fellow workshoppers and for you reading this blog—is that such a day arrives in 2010.

—Alex McNab

2010 Writing Goals

Happy New Year from Adair Heitmann. As the leader of the Wednesday Writing Critique Group here at the Fairfield Public Library, I’d like to share with you my thoughts on creating goals for the new year. Just do it! Make your goals simple, realistic and attainable.

For 2009 members of my group stated their writing goals during our first meeting of the new year. One member C. wanted to increase her professional blog and deepen her Internet business. She now gets new clients from the inspirational power of her blog! N. wanted to write and write she has! She has attended writing programs in Virginia, Provincetown and Vermont. She writes and comes back from each sojourn vitalized. K. wished to get feedback on his fiction. Our raucous laughter in response to his multilayered characters had us in stitches, he got his feedback! M. wanted to improve her writing for her business and in doing so uncovered her creative writing spark. We continue to help her fan those flames. D. knew she had a book in her and just had to sit down and write it. In the process she wrote some magnificent poems and enlightened us with her passion for paradox. E., our newest member is still considering her goals and B. wants to find out if his work is good or not. S. wanted her message to become more clear and interesting, and in the process of doing that wrote a prayer that changed her life. For me, my goals were to start a professional blog on my own website and to enter more contests. With the support of my writing group I did it all, and you can now follow me on Twitter.

Joining a writing group can help you stay focused in your writing. You can also have fun and be accountable for meeting your own writing goals. Here’s to a great new year filled with all the writing of your dreams.

Dear Santa

Here’s a holiday treat for everyone penned by Lorraine Vollhardt from the Tuesday writers’ group.
Happy Holidays everyone!
Mary Ellen McLean

Dear Santa,

Twas the night before Christmas and the house was a wreck,
I’d been writing for hours with a crick in my neck.

My characters seem lifeless even those that were dead,
They were giving me troubles and an ache in my head.

But Santa I’m counting the hours ’til you come
And I really really hope that this book will be done.

I want you to read it and tell me your thoughts
Cause I know if you like it, it will be bought!

So Santa sit down in my big easy chair
Make yourself comfy and drink down this beer

Just take a few hours to check out this chapter
I’ll know that you like it by the sound of your laughter

For only you, Santa, can make dreams come true
And my dream on this Christmas is not really new

It’s to get this book published and out of my hands
And selling like sponge cake throughout every land

The book signings would be endless and the book really selling
Oprah would want me, Rachel Ray and Ellen.

The advance would be hefty with a contract for more
My books, bestsellers, and in every store

And Santa, only you could make it happen this way
Try leaving a copy under the tree at Doubleday

So Santa I expect you’ll be feeling pretty dizzy
As my whole writers’ group has been getting really busy

Each and every one of us deserving our goal
It’s now up to you Santa, go get our books sold!

And with only a keystroke to my final re-write
Happy Holidays to all and to all a good night!

Copyright 2009 by Lorraine Vollhardt

Workshops & reading aloud

In every writing workshop I’ve been a member of, the format has been the same. My colleagues and I sit around a table and read our writing aloud.

As we progress from session to session, our primary objective, of course, is to improve our writing. We should keep in mind another aim as well: to improve our reading. That is, our spoken reading.

Go listen to accomplished authors when they make an appearance in your area. Almost all are good readers. Of the many authors I have heard, two stand out. Sue Miller, reading from The Senator’s Wife, was perfect: her diction, her tone, her pace—everything. She never used her voice to dramatize her prose, but as a listener you were swept up in the writing as well as in the story. Junot Diaz, reading from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was equally enthralling but different. His tone and diction were distinctive; his pace was almost painfully slow. As a result, though, each word hit home.

The masterful magazine writer William Langewiesche, in an interview in Robert S. Boynton’s The New New Journalism, says the following:

“Writing has to be readable. It has to be readable-out-loudable. Sound and rhythm are extremely important. By reading out loud I can see whether it’s working.”

A blogger named Taylor at the menwithpens.ca website expands on Langewiesche’s idea in a helpful way.

“[T]here are writers with an innate ability to understand which words flow together and which do not. However—and it’s a big however— just as there are natural dancers and singers and all the rest of it, there are also dancers and singers who became good at it through practice. This is what reading aloud does for you. It is practice in flow.

“So read aloud. If you catch yourself skipping words, take them out of the draft. If you catch yourself substituting one word for another or rearranging the grammar in your head, make the correction.”

Too fast and too flat. From my experience, those are the two most common flaws in the way workshoppers read. Don’t race, and don’t drone.

Also, don’t “act” your story. If your writing is effective, the reader will adjust the volume and impart the proper tone of voice in his or her head.

Remember, you are neither a robot nor an actor. You are a storyteller. Tell your story.
—Alex McNab

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!

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