A great definition of a good writing day

Are you a writer who becomes obsessed—or worse, discouraged or demoralized—with the struggle to meet arbitrary daily page or word quotas? Is your quest to reach a magic number having an averse effect on the quality of your storytelling? Perhaps you should change the way you measure success.

Karen Russell’s (right) first novel, Swamplandia, was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012 (the judges decided not to award the prize). Her new short story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, has just been published and is featured on the cover of the February 10 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Reviewer Joy Williams writes of Russell, “Her work has a velocity and trajectory that is little less than dazzling and a tough, enveloping, exhilarating voice that cannot be equaled.”

In a recent “How I Write” Q&A at thedailybeast.com, Noah Charney, art historian and novelist (The Art Thief), interviewed Russell. (A note to locals: Charney will be the speaking at Fairfield University on Sunday, March 24 at 3 p.m. as part of the Open Visions Forum). One of his questions was, “How much do you have to write, in order to feel that you’ve had a productive writing day?”

Russell’s long reply is worth reading in its entirety.

“I know many writers who try to hit a set word count every day, but for me, time spent inside a fictional world tends to be a better measure of a productive writing day. I think I’m fairly generative as a writer, I can produce a lot of words, but volume is not the best metric for me. It’s more a question of, did I write for four or five hours of focused time, when I did not leave my desk, didn’t find some distraction to take me out of the world of the story? Was I able to stay put and commit to putting words down on the page, without deciding mid-sentence that it’s more important to check my email, or ‘research’ some question online, or clean out the science fair projects in the back for my freezer? For me, a good writing day is when I can move forward inside a story, because I take so much pleasure in tinkering with sentences that I often have to fight my own impulse to dither and revise in order to keep the momentum of the narrative going. So if I can move in a linear way through the story, and stay zipped inside the story, not jinx myself with despair or frustration or over-confidence or self-consciousness, and be basically okay with not-knowing what is going to happen from one sentence to the next, that’s a great writing day. Writers are such excellent self-saboteurs, though. I swear, I can hijack my own writing day in a hundred ways—I can eject myself from a story because I’ve decided it’s ‘going good.’ There’s this excruciating aspect of joy, I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, where you almost want to interrupt it. For me, the experience of losing myself in a character can feel intolerably wonderful. So I’ve decided that the trick is just to keep after it for several hours, regardless of your own vacillating assessment of how the writing is going. Is that setting the bar too low. . . ? Showing up and staying present is a good writing day.”

Let me try to boil Russell’s wisdom down to bulletin-board length—

Stay inside your story and move it forward.

Whether we count pages or words or neither, Russell’s daily measure of success is one we all should embrace.—Alex McNab

Click here to read the entire Russell interview at thedailybeast.com.

 

Attention writers! Read this piece

This week’s issue of The New Yorker, dated Jan. 14, 2013 (right), arrived in the mail with a gift for all writers. Under the rubric “The Writing Life,” the great John McPhee has written a piece simply titled “Structure.”

You need to read it.

And that directive applies regardless of whether, like McPhee, you write nonfiction narrative journalism, or you write memoir, short stories, novels or some other form of prose. There is something in there for any writer who has ever struggled with how to organize a piece of writing—which means all of us.

I haven’t even finished the article yet. It is so dense with wise advice that I am purposely taking my time. But I wanted to let you know about it right away. Here is one excerpt, from many, that distills a fundamental challenge of structure clearly and brilliantly:

“Developing a structure is seldom. . .simple. Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology traditionally wins. The narrative wants to move from point to point through time, while topics that have arisen now and again across someone’s life cry out to be collected. They want to draw themselves together in a single body, in the way that salt does underground. But chronology usually dominates. As themes prove inconvenient, you find some way to tuck them in. Through flashbacks and flash-forwards, you can move around in time, of course, but such a structure remains under chronological control and can’t do much about items that are scattered thematically. There’s nothing wrong with a chronological structure. On tablets in Babylonia, most pieces were written that way, and nearly all pieces are written that way now. After ten years of it at Time and The New Yorker, I felt both rutted and frustrated by always knuckling under to the sweep of chronology, and I longed for a thematically dominated structure.”

McPhee, now 81, then shows us how he met this challenge in his 1967 profile of Thomas P. F. Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum, complete with a diagram of the eventual structure. It is one of several illustrative examples he offers in the article.

You don’t need to try to get into Princeton, pay $55,000 in tuition, room and board, and then hope to get into McPhee’s famous “Creative Nonfiction” course to learn from the master. (One who did study at Princeton with McPhee, and told us about it at the Library, when she spoke at an author lunch several years ago, is Jennifer Weiner, whose best-selling novels couldn’t be more different from McPhee’s work. Nevertheless, she said his advice helped her become a successful writer.)

Just read “Structure.” It is the latest in a series about his life as a writer that McPhee been contributing to The New Yorker. Someday, if his usual m.o. applies, McPhee’s pieces on his writing life will be published as a book, and we’ll be struck by how well they hold together as a unified whole rather than as a collection of previously published articles. It will be a book I’ll buy.—Alex McNab

[A note: On The New Yorker’s website, the full text of McPhee’s article is locked to all but subscribers. A simple Google search listed a link that tied into the entire text, so you can try doing that—although, as a former magazine editor, my conscience prohibits me from publishing the link here. Of course, the print edition of the magazine is available in the Periodicals Room in the Main Library and at the Fairfield Woods Branch.]

Watch & Listen: Authors Online

Warning: the following may be hazardous to your writing habits.

We aspiring writers who live in Fairfield County, Connecticut, are fortunate. With the center of publishing only 50 miles away in Manhattan; with vibrant public libraries and their energetic events coordinators in almost every community; with fine chain and independent bookstores within easy driving distance; and with several universities featuring creative writing programs and commitments to cultural outreach close by, we have a steady schedule of author appearances to attend for education and inspiration. As I reported in my previous post, for example, bestselling writers Dennis Lehane and Peter Abrahams shared their wisdom with us in person less than 24 hours apart. Like Western pioneers on the Santa Fe Trail arriving at Bent’s Fort, authors on the book-tour trail find our area a welcoming stopover.

But what if you cannot get to an author talk? Or if you live in a place far from that book-tour trail? How can you sit face-to-face with a National Book Award winner, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a bestselling crime writer, a unique-voiced memoirist? That’s why the Internet and YouTube were invented, of course.

Herewith an annotated index of a baker’s dozen links to a random sampling of author talks online. And I’m not referring to someone’s latest appearance on “Today” or “Charlie Rose.”

A caveat: I have watched only a few of these. Thus, I cannot promise you they all impart ready-to-use writing advice. Nor can I promise that these are the best available videos of each writer. My purpose is simply to show that, if you are looking for inspiring sights and sounds from one of your favorites, you may be able to find it. So here’s the list, in alphabetical order, except for Ian McEwan in the anchor-leg spot, the reason for which will be apparent.

• Michael Cunningham. The Pulitzer Prize winner for The Hours, from the fabled Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

• Louise Erdrich. The new National Book Award for Fiction winner (The Road House) on Well Read.

• Elizabeth Gilbert. Her famous 2009 lecture on creativity at the TED conference.

• Mary Karr. The poet and memoirist (The Liar’s Club, et al.) from the Writer’s Symposium By The Sea at Point Loma Nazarene University.

• Barbara Kingsolver. Thoughts on libraries and on being a writer from the author, most recently, of Flight Behavior, from Minnesota Public Radio.

• Elmore Leonard. The now-87-year-old crime master on his writing schedule and process, one of several short segments from AuthorLearningCenter. Given his lofty spot in my pantheon of writing heroes, I also recommend his recent acceptance speech at the National Book Awards (scroll down), where he received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. (I skipped over Martin Amis’ introduction; Leonard gets his medal and takes the mic at roughly the 6:30 mark).

• Laura Lippman. Her illustrated master-class lecture—on how she does it—at the Crime Fiction Academy.

• Alice Munro with Diane Anthill. The short-story genius with the British novelist and editor, plus a moderator, at the International Festival of Authors in Canada. There is a much longer, biographical interview with Munro at TVO.

• Richard Price. How to capture the sound of the streets in dialogue is one of several segments in this presentation at Big Think. Other writing experts at this repository of no-frills, in-their-own-words videos include, Margaret Atwood, Anne Lamott, Tom Perrotta, Salman Rushdie, The New Yorker Editor David Remnick, Robert McKee (the screenwriting guru) and Gay Talese.

• Gay Talese. Take an author-guided tour of his English-basement “writing bunker” in his East Side of Manhattan brownstone via The New Yorker.

• Kurt Vonnegut. Listen to him enumerate, in this clip, his famous instructions on how to write a story .

• Tom Wolfe. Oscar Coral’s 72-minute documentary, “Tom Wolfe Gets Back to Blood,” on the 81-year-old white-suited wonder’s reporting and writing of his new novel. (This on-demand viewing may require registration and perhaps a fee.)

• Ian McEwan. In a video produced by his publisher for the Anchor paperback release of his novel Solar in 2011, McEwan offers “Advice for Aspiring Writers.”

Now, having proffered this list, I urge you, before clicking on the Play arrow of any of the above, to read the first comment beneath the McEwan video, posted by someone named Lucian O’Rourke. It reads:

Aspiring writers: stop watching YouTube!—Alex McNab

Advice from Peter Abrahams & Dennis Lehane

If you are lucky, an author appearance at the local public library can resemble a master class for an aspiring writer. The Fairfield Writers’ Blog (FWB) was two times lucky in less than 24 hours not long ago.

Our home base, the Fairfield Public Library, through its “Friends of” support group, hosted a lunch on Tuesday, October 9 with author Spencer Quinn, the pen name used by suspense novelist Peter Abrahams for his Chet and Bernie Mystery Series, in which human shamus Bernie is assisted, Dr. Watson-like, by narrating dog Chet. The fifth and newest title is A Fistful of Collars. The previous evening, the nearby New Canaan Library, in its “Authors On Stage” program, featured Dennis Lehane reading a chapter from his new Prohibition-era gangster novel Live by Night before spending close to an hour answering audience questions, many related to craft.

Abrahams is a writer of bestselling success in many styles. His thrillers include The Fan, made into a 1996 movie starring Robert DeNiro, Wesley Snipes and Ellen Barkin, and End of Story, which Stephen King called a primer on writing disguised as a crime story. For young readers, he wrote the Echo Falls Series of mysteries. The Chet and Bernie books are targeted at adults.

Abrahams has a demanding fan base. He told us of a letter he had received from a schoolkid about one of the Echo Falls titles: “I have to do a report on your book Down the Rabbit Hole. Please tell me the story in your own words.”

At age 7, Abrahams began trying his hand at writing adventure stories. His mother, a writer herself, was his first editor. After reading the opening passage of one piece, she explained why he ought to cut an unnecessary adverb, then imparted a lesson he still follows: the need to find the exact word to use, not a word that is a close second.

Perusing Abrahams’ website before the lunch, the FWB came across more timeless writing wisdom from the author’s mother, summarized as “Enid’s Laws.” Here is the streamlined list; for further explanation, go to the chetthedog website.

1. Organization is everything.
2. Fiction is about reversals.
3. Torment your protagonist.
4. Push everything as far as you can without contriving.
5. Always advance the story.
6. Be original.
7. Be playful. (Abrahams added this later.)

Abrahams revises his books chapter by chapter, printing out a chapter only after revising it. When the warning bell goes off that something isn’t working, he doesn’t let it go for later, he fixes it before printing. Thus, when the whole draft is printed out, essentially the book is done. He allowed as how a lot of writers just want to get the story down, “Get to Z, then rework,” he said. “That’s not my way, but there is no right way.”

During lunch, Abrahams followed up on a comment the FWB related from the author talk night before. “Writers who over-research under-imagine,” he said. “Their stories are often dead on the page. You only need the telling detail.”

Indeed, Lehane had said as much in New Canaan. The chapter he read was set in the mid-1920s at Boston’s Charlestown State Prison, which opened in 1805 and closed in 1955. The site is now occupied by a community college. Lehane did not turn up a lot of information about the penal facility, but it was enough. “Give me the basics and let me run with it,” he said. “How much research do you want to do before you let your imagination rip? My job is to sit in a room, stare at the wall and make stuff up.”

Even if you have never read a Lehane book, you may recognize his work. First came the Patrick Kenzie-Angela Gennaro novels, of which Gone, Baby, Gone was made into a movie. His three favorite books are Mystic River (Sean Penn and Tim Robbins won Oscars for their acting in the Clint Eastwood-directed film), The Given Day and the new one. “All three were the closest to what I had in my head to what I got on the page.” he said. His least favorite to write? Shutter Island, also later a movie, because he “knew 26 major beats of the story” before starting. Usually, he knows only three: “One thing from the beginning, one from the middle and one from the end.”

The protagonist of Live By Night, Joe Coughlin, was a young boy in The Given Day. The two books are part of a trilogy—Lehane is at work on the third—connected by family bloodlines. As any aspiring storyteller should be able to do for his or her own protagonist, Lehane was able to describe in one sentence the arc for Joe in Live By Night: “a character goes up a ladder [to success] and down into a moral abyss.”

At times a slow writer, Lehane found that the new book went fast because of his affinity for his protagonist. The lesson: “When a character speaks to you at high volume, you never turn him off until he stops.”

High volume refers to amount, not decibel level. For a writer, Lehane said, “The last thing to learn and the hardest thing to learn is to whisper. If you shout, the person leans away. If you whisper, the person leans in. It’s seduction.”

For any aspiring novelist, the learning curve is steep. “Here’s the thing I tell students,” Lehane said.  “. . . It takes 10 years to learn how to do this. . . .The first time you write a book, you don’t know what you’re doing. It takes a long time to learn the toolbox.” Eight years after he started, he published his first novel, a result he described as “lucky.”

Lehane offered a quick lesson on starting your story, and a longer one on point of view.

The first: “Don’t start [your story] on Wednesday if Friday is where the action begins.”

The second: “Write a scene from the point of view of the character in that scene who has something to lose.” The point of a scene is whether the character gets what he wants or doesn’t. He cited playwright David Mamet’s theory that, if a character wants so much as a loaf of bread, the audience will follow. So if you write about the beginning of your character’s day, don’t have him waking up, Lehane advised.  “Have him opening his fridge and being out of milk.”

With two young children, these days Lehane only has time to write for four hours in the morning. “That has made me a better writer,” he said. “You give someone all the time in the world and they’ll take all the time in the world. If you compress their time, they’ll use it—if they really want it.” He also advised that writing early or late in the day is the quickest way to connect to the dream world—an alternate universe, the world of your characters.

Lehane was asked whether he thinks about his audience as he writes. “I don’t,” he admitted. “I love you, but I don’t owe you the book that you expect. I owe you everything I’ve got.”

Finally, how does a writer assess how well he or she has written? Lehane said, “At the end of the day, is it honest?”

Class dismissed.—Alex McNab

Talking revision with a novelist-in-progress

Shortly after I began checking in on Connecticut writer A.J. O’Connell’s weblog, “The Garret,” she published a post about preparing to revise her novel-in-progress. The accompanying photo of pages laid out on the floor of her office (right)—pages that, no doubt, had gone through the workshop gantlet—now that was something I could identify with!

Right away, I knew the Fairfield Writers’ Blog (FWB) had to talk to O’Connell about revising. We met at the Fairfield University Bookstore downtown, where O’Connell was to be reading a couple of weeks later—at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, October 10—from her novella Beware the Hawk (Vagabondage Press), which was published early this year.

“One of my mentors used to say you’re either a Hemingway, and you go into journalism to write, or you’re a Woodward, and you go in to report,” O’Connell, a former newspaper reporter for The Hour in Norwalk, told the FWB. “I always was a Hemingway.” She earned her MFA in Creative Writing as a member of the second class of Fairfield University’s low-residency program.

First, the novella. The first draft of Beware the Hawk went through that workshop gantlet years before O’Connell began her MFA program. When she pulled out the 37-page manuscript to revise, at the request of a former workshop member who had started a new publishing company, she had not looked at it in nine years. And the first draft wasn’t finished. Yet by then, O’Connell had earned her degree. Reading the first draft from start to finish “was painful,” O’Connell recalls. “It was so bad. The prose. I mean, it was written by a 23-year-old. I’m not saying there aren’t some talented 23-year-olds, but I wasn’t one of them.” She had no idea where her workshop notes were. Still, she began revising. “I had the benefit of all of the craft that I’d learned. I now know how to write better.” She added five pages at the end.

O’Connell provided me with the first five pages of her original manuscript, which I compared to the first few pages of the printed book. The published version demonstrates how all of those fundamentals you read about in craft books make a story better.

One example, the first sentence:

(First draft) “I was exhausted when I got off the bus from New York.”

(Published version) “I hurt my ankle almost as soon as I stepped into Boston.”

Active verbs versus passive. Character entering a setting rather than having left one. Pain in a specific body part versus a general feeling. Stronger sense of foreboding.

Other improvements in the opening pages include: Using all five senses in description. Eliminating unnecessary character movements and backstory. Intensifying an atmosphere of conflict between the protagonist and another character.

Now, the novel-in-progress. O’Connell submitted chapters of her novel for critiquing to both classes in her MFA program and outside workshops. She put the critiqued pages into big manila envelopes, on the outside of which she wrote what the piece was, which workshop it was distributed to and the date.

“I tend not to work from those until the very last minute,” she says. “Either there were so many of them that you’d just go all cross-eyed looking at them or they were so critical they were not helpful. For me, it’s still important that I’m in charge of the revisions, and I don’t want to be steered by that kind of thing.”

But for her most trusted group, she went a step beyond. She had her entire first draft printed in book form by Lulu, one of the top self-publishing companies. She passed out those few copies and asked her colleagues to read the novel in its entirety. Meanwhile, she did the same:

“One of my professors, Rachel Basch, told me to put [the first draft] in a drawer for a couple of months, go back, pick it up and then try to read it in a day. Don’t read it with a pen in your hand to make notes on your manuscript. Don’t pretend you are correcting your own work. Pretend you’re reading someone else’s manuscript. Make notes on a separate pad.” Just as with those enveloped pages, “I rarely read my notes. As a journalist, I know when my pen’s moving I’ll remember something.”

The upshot of the others reading her whole book? “They came back with, I don’t know these characters very well. Now, I know them pretty well. But I hadn’t done my job—fully developing the characters. So I spent a week writing index cards out for each character. While I’m writing, the wall in front of me and the wall to the side of me are covered in my characters’ index cards. If I have a question, I just have to look up or over.”

Index cards sound a bit 20th Century, don’t they? “I prefer them to the character function in Scrivener,” O’Connell says, referring to the popular, downloadable organizing program for writers. In fact, she is a convert to it. “I thought I was going to hate it because I’ve been using Word since I was a kid. I really like Scrivener because I can, without having to mess up my floor any more than it’s already messed up, see chapters and can group them.” That idea of spreading printed scenes out on the floor? It works better for a short story than for a novel.

Also on her office wall, next to the character cards, are O’Connell’s cards for “new scenes that need to be put in.” When working on a first draft, “My first inclination is to write the scenes that are interesting to me and leave a bunch of holes,” she says. “Then I’d try to connect the dots with some lame prose. If I can’t write my character from one place to the next place, and if I can’t make the transitions as interesting as the scenes that appeal to me. . . .”

On many of her projects, including that unfinished first draft of the novella and her current work, O’Connell would run into a familiar problem: “Plot is my biggest snarl. When I think of this story in terms of plot, that’s when I lose my way. It’s part of the reason I stopped. . . .What I was taught at Fairfield, and the thing that’s helped me most, is just to stick to the character. How to Write a Damn Good Novel is one of those craft books. . . .The author talks about keeping your character in the crucible. And keeping your character in the crucible has always been the thing that’s carried me through with plot.”

So here’s how O’Connell is tackling the revisions of her novel. She’s been retyping the entire manuscript from the first page, making the alterations she feels necessary without looking at hers or her colleagues’ critique notes as she goes along, although she will occasionally look at her professors’ comments. Some writers have been known to work on one specific part of a book in each successive draft: plot, character, dialogue, etc. O’Connell is revising everything that needs it as she moves from page to page. “One page takes a long time,” she says.

“That’s what the second draft really is for, to go back and find the things that aren’t fully developed and develop them,” she says. Or the opposite.

“Every scene in a novel has to carry some weight,” she says, again citing Rachel Basch. “It has to raise a question, it has to be there for a reason. I look at each thing, and if it’s just in there because I think it’s cute, then it’s got to go or I have to make it carry some weight. I don’t have a hard time cutting.”

There is one other thing she is striving to do as she revises: “Really working on the level of the sentence. Making sure the sentences are as good as possible.”

The prospect of revising a novel can be daunting. “Like anything else, it’s momentum,” O’Connell says of what you need to do the job. “Now. . .I have momentum going with the revision. . . .But it took me more than a few months to get back into my manuscript and start revising. Because it was so terrifying. And because there is more research to be done.” In addition, the publisher of Beware the Hawk wants a sequel, the writing of which requires momentum of its own.

O’Connell has employed another unusual tactic, like the Lulu books, to keep her on course. “I have a contract with another writer,” she says. “We wrote ourselves a contract saying how long a day we would work and what we would do. We set weekly goals for ourselves and share it with each other. If we don’t [meet the goals], we have to admit it. We check in with each other every Friday or Sunday.”

The reward for all this diligence is the joy of being published. Beware the Hawk first came out as an e-book, and O’Connell says, “I was very thrilled. I was especially thrilled when it came out in hard copy. I remember getting the proofs in the mail. I couldn’t believe that I had something with my name on it. But. . .”

Does there have to be a “but”?

“. . .I have a very hard time reading it because I want to make corrections whenever I go out to read. It never ends.”

Now that’s a real writer.—Alex McNab

Humor and Mystery = Fun

It’s my turn for the blog. This is Adair Heitmann writing to you about the Author Talk I recently attended at the Fairfield Public Library. Susan Santangelo, who is the author of the humorous Baby Boomer Mysteries: Retirement Can Be Murder, Moving Can be Murder and Marriage Can Be Murder spoke to a crowd of writers and non-writers alike. The photo I took of her (l) and a happy reader (r) shows the connections this author makes with her fans.

The author’s writing process starts each book with a dead body, but it sometimes takes her six months or more than five chapters later, to figure out who it is. “The characters tell you what they want you to do,” she says. Santangelo added that for a mystery to be good, “it’s very important for it to be logical.”

She wrote book one and was rejected by three major literary agencies. Two agencies told her that they loved the book but there wasn’t a market for it. The third wanted such a major re-write that Santangelo gave it a try for a month then realized as a reader, she wouldn’t read the book the agency wanted her to write. So, she and her husband started their own publishing company on Cape Cod, Baby Boomer Mysteries.

After self-publishing her first book (and including her email address in the back), she heard, via emails from around the world, “You are writing about my life.” This encouraged her to write more books. Santangelo’s writing and public speaking style are like sitting down with her over a cup of coffee in her kitchen. Her quick wit comes across in speaking, and her real life experiences inspire her fictional works.

She noted “inspiration is everywhere, especially among the clothing aisles of stores when women are talking on their cell phones.” This author writes what she knows and her fans gobble it up. She is working on book four, a mystery about a high school reunion. Santangelo ended the lecture by saying, “Once the book hits Kindle, the sales skyrocket.”

Susan Santangelo is a member of Sisters in Crime and the Cape Cod Writers Center, and also reviews mysteries for Suspense magazine. As Santangelo stated in the comment section of this blog last month, she is obsessed with writing murder mysteries. From the look on her fans’ faces, they are thrilled with her obsession too.

Until next time, keep on writing!

What it takes to be a fiction writer

Alliterative lists are a staple of how-to advice, so why not a few for aspiring fiction writers?

For example, a few years ago, when I asked award-winning Fairfield author Nina Nelson (who has been known to write in the Library) for some tips I could pass on to our writers’ group, she included her list of Three C’s, writing activities in which we aspirants should partake: critique groups, conferences and contests. In fact, her first book, Bringing the Boy Home, a middle-grade title, began its path to publication as a contest entry. It won the 2005 Ursula Nordstrom Fiction Prize and was named a Smithsonian Notable Children’s Book.

A second list might be Three I’s: intelligence, imagination and inspiration.

What truly successful fiction writers share, I believe—what makes them start and, more importantly, finish one book after another—is another trio of C’s: craft, commitment and compulsion.

At least, that’s what I thought of when I read a recent interview with James Lee Burke (right) in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Burke writes bestselling novels set in Louisiana, Montana and Texas, the most notable being the 19-title series about New Iberia (La.) sheriff deputy Dave Robicheaux, including the recently published Creole Belle (copies are in both the Main and Branch Libraries). Burke is in his mid-70s and has published 33 books—and he shows no signs of slowing down; he’s hard at work to meet an autumn deadline for his next novel, he told the LA Review. When you are a writer, he said in the interview:

“[Writing is] all you think about. It is an obsession. The writing never stops for me. If I’m not actually doing it, I’m thinking about it. When I taught creative writing, students would sometimes ask me, ‘Do you think I have the talent to make it?’ I would never answer, because it is the wrong question. Those who have it, know it. You have a kind of arrogance, but you have to be able to see the drama that surrounds a person every day. Drama is all around us. It does not have to come from a grand panorama.”

Burke’s first few novels, all literary, were well-reviewed sales duds. Then he wrote The Lost Get-Back Boogie. How does it tie in to my three C’s? Concerning Burke’s craft, once The Lost Get-Back Boogie was published by the Louisiana State University Press, it was nominated for the 1987 Pulitzer Prize. Prior to that, though, over a period of nine years, it was rejected by publishers 111 times. Yet Burke did not give up. Now that is commitment and compulsion.—Alex McNab

Writing thoughts from a professional reader

From time to time the Fairfield Writers’ Blog (FWB) has spoken with published authors about what makes good storytelling and about the other challenges we deal with in our writing groups at the Library. Now it’s time to hear from a distinguished published reader.

Bridgeport’s Joe Meyers, book and film critic of the Connecticut Post and Hearst Media News Group, was presented with the 2012 Ellery Queen Award by the esteemed Mystery Writers of America (MWA) at its annual black-tie awards dinner in New York in April. In announcing the award, the MWA said, “Meyers writes about mystery/thriller books, reviews them, and blogs about them. . . .His reviews are thoughtful and perceptive, and his criticism is constructive. He is a scholar of mystery and crime fiction, attending conferences and moderating panels.”

Meyers’ reading extends far beyond genre titles, as evidenced by three of his recent “Book Beat” pieces in the Sunday Post. One covered Fairfield University Creative Writing MFA graduate David Fitzpatrick’s Sharp, a memoir of mental deterioration and self-mutilation. A second spotlighted literary novelist Alice Mattison of New Haven and her new book, When We Argued All Night, about which Meyers wrote, “We get a real sense of lives being led.” After speaking with him for an hour about what makes good fiction, it is clear that that is high praise indeed. And a third featured newcomer Maggie Shipstead’s Seating Arrangements (a novel the category-obsessed book business might label as commercial rather than Mattison’s literary). In our discussion a few days before his article ran, Meyers said that the book “gives you such a view of WASP culture. Middle-aged malaise. . . .The story is strong, but [Shipstead’s] grasp of character is really outstanding. For a first-time novelist, it blew my mind.”

Here’s an edited transcript of Meyers on other writing topics he spoke about with the FWB:

Keys of good fiction writing: “A story that grabs me. A setting that interests me. Human psychology and human behavior played out in believable characters. A key thing—you want to go to the next chapter. To me, if you have to work too hard at reading a book, there are too many other books that you don’t have to work hard at. Not to dismiss very dense, complex novels, but I put a high premium on good storytelling. The style of the writing, the dialogue in the story [should convince me] that the story I’m reading could really happen. That’s why one of my prejudices, and it’s a bad one, is that I veer away from science fiction—it’s never clicked with me.”

Criticisms of some current fiction: “People are rushing almost too fast to grab you with something outrageous. Especially in mystery and suspense. Caleb Carr’s first novel, The Alienist, was set just before the turn of the 20th century and was a big fat book. A lot of mystery writers or readers I know hated it because they felt like he wasn’t getting to the story fast enough. But in that case, the detail of what it was like to live in that time I found fascinating. I got swept up in it. A lot of people did. [The Alienist made bestseller lists and the paperback rights were sold for more than $1 million.] Another one of my criticisms is short chapters. That’s overdone. It’s like the writer is almost afraid of losing your attention.”

Common traits among successful authors he’s interviewed: “Perseverance is the major thing. A good proportion of them tell stories about how hard it was for them to get started. [Bestselling legal thriller author] Lisa Scottoline, who is a friend of mine, wanted to transition from being a lawyer to being a writer. She was a single parent and she wanted to work at home. She got rejected and rejected. She tells a story about an agent who sent her back her manuscript and said something to the effect of, we can’t take any new clients at this point but even if we could, I wouldn’t want to represent this. Some real crushing, mean stuff. They all seem to have an inner determination. They have to do it. And somehow they find the right agent or editor who shares their vision.”

Defining an author’s voice. “There’s a personality. There’s a world view. I was just re-reading Nora Ephron’s last collection of essays. Now there’s somebody who had strong voice. You felt like she was talking directly to you. And even if you didn’t agree with everything she said, you felt like it was a conversational tone. It was so appealing. Here’s a woman who was a daughter of Hollywood, wealthy beyond any of our dreams, mingling with the most celebrated people in the culture, but she had some kind of a common-sense take on things where you could relate to almost everything she wrote about. She did one of the things that’s most difficult in writing, humor. Funny. And self-deprecating. Boy, she was good. It’s a shame, in a way, that she spent so much time in Hollywood. What a writer she was as an essayist.”

Critiquing an aspiring fiction writer’s work in progress. “I’ve done it only a couple of times. And I’ve regretted doing it. I’m not a publisher. I’m not an agent. I’m not an editor. I wouldn’t want to say anything negative to a friend that would impact their finishing the book. Editing is such a skill, to see what somebody’s trying to do and bring it out of them. It’s a separate thing from what I’ve ever done.”

Books made into movies. “When I’m reading a book I like to think I’m getting something that I can’t get from movies or television. I think it’s apples and oranges. I do agree with people who say a lot of times that mediocre or not-so-good books make better movies because you can improve them. The movie ‘Jaws’ cut out the real crap in the book. ‘The Godfather’ is another classic case, where Francis Ford Coppola cut out all the junk and made it so much better. ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ is to me a case where the film is superb and the novel is superb. George Axelrod, who did the adaptation, was very faithful and had to really be creative because under the censorship of that time there were elements of the book he couldn’t use. I think Richard Condon, the novelist, was very happy with that. Another Condon book that was made into a wonderful movie was ‘Prizzi’s Honor.’ One of my favorite examples of a really good book and a really good film is a novel people have forgotten called Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg. The film ‘Cutter’s Way’ is terrific and the novel is terrific.”

Unpublished writers giving one-minute pitches of their books to agents and publishers at writers’ conferences. “I’m not an aspiring novelist. But that depresses me in a way. Because so many good things cannot be boiled down that way. That’s more of a movie thing—this meets that. Trend chasers drive me crazy—and people get sucked into it—because people in the business don’t know what the next big thing is going to be. No one saw The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo coming. No one saw Fifty Shades of Grey. No one saw The Da Vinci Code. And then for two or three years afterward you get all these copies. Rather than try to write copies, why not write something original and good?”

Writing characters of the opposite sex. “A problem with a lot of male genre writers—their women are often unbelievable. What I really admire about [bestselling suspense thriller and romance author] Sandra Brown is that she writes men as well as she writes women. She wrote a book about a football player called Play Dirty that, if you had taken her name off of it, I think you would have assumed it was written by a man.”

Writing violence. “The more that it’s off the page, the more effective it is. Suggested violence is much more horrifying than real violence. I’m not really into serial killers or psychopathic stuff. I think the movies took over serial killers. And they are such a blip on the reality screen. There are so few of them. The stories are so melodramatic and over the top. The other thing I’m not interested in, honestly—and I loved the first couple of Patricia Cornwell novels—is this CSI stuff, autopsies and all, I couldn’t care less. A couple of years ago a Cornwell book came in, and I said, well, I haven’t read her for years, she’s hugely popular, I’ll give this one a try. She did the lowest trick a writer can ever do, which is something out of a daytime soap. She killed a character and then brought him back to life. Give me a break.”

One crime novel worth reading. “A Judgement in Stone. What Ruth Rendell does in the first sentence of the book is say, “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.” So she gives away the perp and the victims in the beginning of the story. You think, why would I read a book when she’s telling me this? She violates the rules right in the first sentence. Then she backs you in right away to the fact that this woman was hired to be the maid to this upper class family that has a house in the country. The suspense becomes almost overpowering because she shows you how tiny slights that these people make, and the fact that this woman is hiding that she can’t read—it’s a very deep shame of hers—are creating a situation which is going to cause a violent collision. It’s fewer than 200 pages; I don’t think you could sustain it for much more than 200 pages.  But it is a classic of the genre because it doesn’t seem to follow any of the rules. It was made into a very fine French film by Claude Chabrol called ‘La Ceremonie.’ ”—Alex McNab

4 Old-School Online Sources of Advice

Type “writing advice” into Google’s search box, hit the Return key and in a few seconds you’ll be looking at the first page of a list that goes on for “about 284,000,000 results.” That’s a lot of how-to about the writer’s craft.

As an old-school print magazine veteran, I’d like to suggest you monitor the digital offerings of four legacy publications for a while.

First, check out The Wall Street Journal’s weekly “Word Craft” piece. Every Saturday, a different well-known writer contributes an essay on a different aspect of storytelling. Some recent examples: Jeffery Deaver on writing thrillers, Hilary Mantel on historical dialogue and Carol Edgarian on desire as the driving force of fictional characters.

Second, stop in at “Draft,” a blog at The New York Times’ “Opinionator” area. Written by different grammarians, journalists, historians, novelists and others, it covers everything from punctuation to the value of diagramming sentences, Some essays, such as those June 18 and March 26 entries on diagramming, may remind you too much of junior high and high school English classes. But entries such as “Make-or-Break Verbs” (April 16) and “The Pleasures and Perils of the Passive” (April 30) do a fresh job of reviewing the basics of good writing.

Third, venerable monthly The Atlantic comes up with some fine stuff at its website. Click on the “Entertainment” button in the bar atop the homepage, then on the “Books” category on the next page. You’ll find author interviews, interesting articles on book- business trends by publishing veteran Peter Osnos, and classic commandments from famous authors that theatlantic.com co-publishes with a partner site, brainpickings.org. A recent entry was Barnaby Conrad’s “6 Rules for a Great Story, Inspired by Snoopy,” a pickup from the Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life (above), which Conrad edited with “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles M. Schulz’s son Monte. The book, by the way, is a charming paperback that includes essays from such authors  as the late Ray Bradbury, Thomas McGuane, Sue Grafton and Elmore Leonard.

Fourth, for a steady diet of successful writers’ personal spins on craft tutorials, visit writersdigest.com. A fresh piece (which may or may not be a reprint from the magazine’s archives) seems to pop up on the home page a few times a week. Of particular interest to me recently, following my previous post here (“The Four Horsemen of Storytelling”), was novelist Joshua Henkin’s “Why ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ Is the Great Lie of Writing Workshops.”

Finally, I would remiss if I didn’t steer you to local blogs by two of the Fairfield Writers’ Blog’s good friends, Gabi Coatsworth and Sandi Kahn Shelton. Gabi’s “The Write Connexion” now includes author interviews along with her usual information and commentary. Sandi’s “booksnewhaven” turns the spotlight on local authors in a Q&A format.

One warning: Trolling for writing advice online can become a huge time suck. Before you lose yourself and waste irretrievable hours that you should have spent creating new pages of your story, remember to obey my favorite piece of advice from an author’s website. I’ve quoted Laura Lippman here before: “Finish the damn book.” —Alex McNab

Bulletin Board Wisdom

According to lore, author William Styron had a piece of cardboard tacked to the frame of the door that led into his workroom at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. The cardboard was inscribed with these words from Gustave Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Looking for some writing wisdom, familiar or fresh, for your workspace bulletin board? See if you find some here, winnowed from an original list of one hundred.

• “Story ideas begin with a simple “Suppose” or “What if.”—Anonymous

• “. . .All art comes out of conflict.”—Joyce Carol Oates (right)

• “Get black on white.”—Guy de Maupassant

• “Words are sacred. They deserve respect.”—Tom Stoppard

• “When in doubt, use a simple declarative sentence.”—Robert B. Parker

• “My task is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.”—Joseph Conrad

• “In every scene something engrossing needs to happen.”—Suzanne Hoover

• “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”—Kurt Vonnegut

• “Everything a character says should tell you something about who he or she is.”—Nell Freudenberger

• “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”—Stephen King

• “Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained.”—Esther Freud

• “Research is best when it doesn’t show.”—Lawrence Block

• “Stop when you are going good and you know what will happen next.”—Ernest Hemingway

• “There is but one art, to omit.”—Robert Louis Stevenson

• “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”—Elmore Leonard

• “Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.”—Jane Smiley

• “The writer’s life is a life of revisions. . . .”—Jonathan Franzen

• “You can always edit garbage. You can’t edit a blank page.”—Jodi Piccoult

• “Don’t be jealous of others’ success. . . .Wish others well and hope to join them someday.”—Po Bronson

• “. . .Never, under any circumstances, give up submitting one’s work.”—James Lee Burke

• “The ordeal is part of the commitment.”—Philip Roth

• “Don’t be ‘a writer.’ Be writing.”—William Faulkner

• “Don’t get it right, just get it written.”—James Thurber

• “Don’t make excuses; make sentences.”—Rick Mofina

• “I decided it was okay to try and fail; not okay to fail to try.”—Hallie Ephron

• “It’s a long haul. Remember to enjoy it.”—Tim Parks

• “Finish the damn book.”—Laura Lippman

• “Being a good writer is 3 % talent, 97% not being distracted by the Internet.”—Anonymous

PS. Congratulations to Joanne Hus. Her story “We All Fall Down,” which she workshopped awhile ago in our Saturday morning writers’ group at the Library, has been published in the new issue of Venü magazine, available at the Fairfield University bookstore downtown. Joanne also did the illustration that accompanies the story. She illustrated and designed the Library’s collection of original essays Around the Table: Food Memoirs from Fairfield that was published last year.—Alex McNab