Save Your Money, Just Write

At different times in March, three of us in the Saturday morning writers’ group at the Library saw the hit Broadway play Seminar with its original cast, before changes were made at the beginning of April. (Jeff Goldblum has replaced Alan Rickman in the role of Leonard; Fairfield’s own Justin Long now plays Martin, the role debuted by Hamish Linklater; and Zoe Lister-Jones is Kate, following Lily Rabe.) Colleague Ian Peterkin, who is an MFA student in creative writing, offers this takeaway.—Alex McNab

When novice writers realize their passion is more than a hobby, they will invariably seek out instruction. Whether they find that instruction in an MFA program, a writer’s workshop, or autodidactically, they must take the matter of writing seriously. For those hoping to learn their craft through books, there are many sources to choose from. Stephen King has his On Writing and of course there is that old classic by William Strunk and E.B. White—The Elements of Style. If fledgling writers do not have the time or commitment for an MFA program—and sometimes even after completing one—they often attend a writers’ retreat or seminar. This brings me to Theresa Rebeck’s play, Seminar.

Alan Rickman (center in photo) plays Leonard, an editor and writer, who leads a 10-week seminar on writing (at $5,000 a pop). Therein lies the problem. Leonard’s students collectively fork over $20,000 to be told whether or not their writing is any good. Writing seminars and workshops are like gym memberships—they make you feel good about yourself, like you’re actually making progress. But just like a gym membership alone will not get you the body you want, a workshop or seminar is not going to make you “The Great American Novelist.”

This all reminds me of something Kurt Vonnegut said about creative writing programs. He basically told his students they were wasting their time in class and should be writing instead. An interviewer from The Paris Review once asked him if creative writing can actually be taught and he had this to say: “About the same way golf can be taught. A pro can point out obvious flaws in your swing.” The interviewer went on to ask about storytelling talent and Vonnegut offered:

“In a creative writing class of twenty people anywhere in this country, six students will be startlingly talented. Two of those might actually publish something by and by. . . They will have something other than literature itself on their minds. They will probably be hustlers, too. I mean that they won’t want to wait passively for somebody to discover them. They will insist on being read.”

He would know, he taught at Iowa.

I have a wonderful mentor at Western Connecticut State University named Dan Pope. He’s an incredible editor and I hope to keep working with him in the future. He had this to say about writing: “All you need to do—all anyone ever needs to do—is read one book about writing. They are not good for much. Writing is the only way to learn.” And it’s the truth. I’ve more or less gotten everything I possibly can out of my MFA program after less than a year. There are schools in the country that charge between $20,000 and $55,000 a year to teach the same things.

Last semester, I worked as a graduate assistant in the writing department. I taught Writing 101 to more than 40 teenagers. My mentor in the department once told my cohorts and me that our students will be better writers at the end of the semester, not necessarily because of our instruction but from practice. He was right. I could not get most of them to pass their grammar quizzes, but they all became better writers.—Ian Peterkin

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

Thoughts from Papa, and one from Faulkner

Last month (July 2) marked the 50th anniversary of the death of Ernest Hemingway (right). At the time, I passed out to my Library writers’ group a compendium of quotes taken from two books on my shelf. Most came from Ernest Hemingway on Writing (edited by Larry W. Phillips and published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1984). A couple were from a profile by Edward P. Stafford, reprinted in On Being a Writer, a 1989 compilation of articles from Writer’s Digest Books. Hemingway’s work may not be to everyone’s taste, but his influence on how we write was profound. So some of his thoughts about writing are worth another look.

• “The important thing is to work every day. . . .The best way is to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that you’ll never be stuck. And don’t think or worry about it until you start to write again the next day. That way your subconscious will be working on it all the time, but if you worry about it, your brain will get tired before you start again. But work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.”

• “There is no rule on how it is to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it is like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”

• “You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless—there is only one thing to do with a novel and that is to go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.”

• “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”

• “I can write like Tolstoy and make the book seem larger, wiser and the rest of it. But then I remember that was what I always skipped in Tolstoy.”

• “You must be prepared to work always without applause. When you are excited about something is when the first draft is done. But no one can see it until you have gone over it again and again until you have communicated the emotion, the sights and the sounds to the reader, and by the time you have completed this the words, sometimes, will not make sense to you as you read them, so many times have you re-read them.”

• “That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.”

• “. . .Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done—so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well.”

Still say there’s nothing Papa can offer that will make you a fan? Let’s end, then, with a thought from his chronological contemporary and stylistic opposite, William Faulkner:

• “Don’t be ‘a writer.’ Be writing.”

—Alex McNab

When to reread your work-in-progress

The Fairfield Writer’s Blog is delighted to welcome back Connecticut-shoreline author Maddie Dawson, whose novel The Stuff That Never Happened (right) is now out in paperback. A year ago, Maddie gave us insights on creating characters (“Living with Fictional People,” July 27, 2010). In this exclusive new post, she offers her thoughts about reading your own work-in-progress and asks eight other accomplished writers for theirs.

By Maddie Dawson

People think—okay, my friend Sue thinks—that authors have the best jobs of all, because they just sit around keeping themselves entertained reading their own manuscripts.

Ha!

If she were to peek into my life during writing time (and I will not invite her, or anyone, in to witness that) she would instead see somebody pacing, then obsessively typing for ten minutes, then pacing some more, then checking emails, pacing, typing even more obsessively, drinking iced tea, typing, making more iced tea, and then perhaps scrolling back through the day’s pages, followed sometimes by falling on the floor, moaning and groaning, or else doing a little happy dance because things have gone better than expected.

Authors have a dickens of a time reading and rereading their own words because—well, perhaps because nothing is ever quite as perfect in the execution as it was when it bloomed inside our heads, or perhaps because by the time we get to the end of a book, we have read its passages so many times that oftentimes the words feel all used up and dried out.

That being said, we’re also enchanted with reading our work as we go. We have to do it to keep the story moving, of course, but we can’t do it too often lest we get bored with the book before it fully ripens. A dilemma, to be sure.

So I asked some well-known authors just how they handle the when-to-reread problem, and they gave me a fascinating look into their own particular process.

Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You:

I reread all the plonking time. My process (I’m very superstitious) is that I have to have a first chapter I love before I can go on because a good first chapter keeps me from junking the novel as I venture deeper into the jungle of it. I often spend six months just on the first chapter alone, writing and rewriting and rereading. Once I’m past that, it’s a little different. I have to keep moving forward in my first draft, so I assign myself sections or chapters to push through, but I always reread.

Not only do I reread, but I trick myself into seeing what I’ve written with fresh eyes by writing it in a different font! Sometimes I’ll read it aloud. Sometimes I’ll paste it into a textbox on email and read it there! But in early drafts I won’t stay on one section more than a week before I just push on. My goal is to get the book written. And by the way, I usually do about ten to fifteen drafts and I reread and reread every single one of them.

Meredith Maran, author of My Lie: A True Story of False Memory, (nonfiction) and whose debut novel, A Theory of Small Earthquakes, comes out next year:

Fiction and nonfiction are so different for me. With my novel, it wasn’t so much a matter of rereading as much as rewriting. I wrote the first precious five pages and then I showed them to 100,000 people. It was like, “I wrote five pages of a novel! Can you believe it?” I actually felt it was so important to get a good start on it, and then I was able to keep going. Every time I reread it, I changed it so completely.

Katharine Weber, author of The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family’s Legacy of Infidelities:

When I am writing a novel, each day my first act of writing is rereading the entire sections or chapter that I’m working on, which might be as much as 20 or 30 pages, before I start to write new sentences. It’s a way of finding the rhythm and language of what I have written to that point. It feels like running alongside and then jumping onto a moving train.           

 Hallie Ephron, author of Come and Find Me:

Do I reread my manuscript? I do it all the time and at every step along the way. It’s my favorite thing to do instead of writing first drafts! After I’ve typed “The End” for the first time—and what a glorious moment that is!—I set the manuscript aside for a few weeks so when I pick it up again, I’m reading with fresh eyes. The next time I read it through, I want to be thinking like a reader, not a writer. To do that, I have to make myself put away the “blue pencil” and NOT line edit as I read. Because now I want to see the big picture and understand what’s working and what’s not. Excising of nits and warts will come in a final read-through, and with most works in progress, it will take many weeks to get to that point.

Kristan Higgins, author of the New York Times and USA Today bestseller, My One and Only:

I read what I wrote the day before, fix it as best I can in that moment, then trudge onward. When I’ve completed the first draft, I read it all the way through, mark it up with red pen, slashing, hacking, burning. Then one more time for a polish, and it’s off to the agent.

Ann Hood, author of the bestseller The Red Thread:

My policy is that when I sit down to write, I read aloud whatever I wrote the day before. Otherwise, I read the pages either when I hit an obstacle or every hundred pages or so.

Lucy Burdette, author of the upcoming An Appetite for Murder:

Rereading is my go-to procrastination technique—which happens more often than I wish it did! I almost always start the day rereading a part of what I wrote the day before—it reminds me where I was and where I should be headed. All told, I would guess I’ve read each paragraph ten or more times—but not the book as a whole. When I finally get some semblance of a draft done, I like to let it sit for a couple of weeks so I can come back with fresh eyes.

Alice Mattison, author of Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, and of When We Argued All Night, which will be released in 2012:

 When a story or novel is done, I read it two or three times, rewriting, show it to friends, then rewrite, read once more, rewrite again. . . . I print out everything and scribble on paper. It helps to put it aside between bouts for a few days or weeks.  The best revising I ever did was on a group of stories. I didn’t look at them—because I was writing a novel—for three years.  When I finally read them, it was as if someone else had written them.  I didn’t even remember the endings, and revised easily and radically.

A Writer’s Website: Part Two

Hello writers, it’s Adair Heitmann here, is everyone gearing up for a happy 4th of July? I hope so. Today I’ll continue sharing my suggestions, joys, trials and tribulations on my journey of creating my new writer’s website. Please refer to the June 3, 2011 blog for A Writer’s Website: Part One.

I’ll talk today about the importance of themes and the value of time. First off, when you create your own site you’ll need to decide on a theme. A theme is simply a template that has already been designed, as to color, style, typeface, etc.  Give yourself a chance to review several themes but beware! If you already have a blog, as I do, when you click on “Activate Preview” it changes your existing site. Yikes, I ran into this the hard way and had to re-build my blog site.

On your road to making your own website, make friends with “LiveChat!” and “Forums.” LiveChat! is a way to ask a real living and breathing human being in real-time a technical question. It’s a little spooky at first conversing via computer keystrokes with a stranger in some faraway land but the help is valuable. You can also ask questions on “Forums.” Forums are not in real-time so you may have to wait for someone to respond but many times someone else has asked your same question before, you can reap the benefit of that answer immediately.

This leads me to point two, time. Since I have a day job, my time is limited for building my new writer’s website. This is actually good news because it forces me to consider my options before diving into them. The upside of being able to make your own website is that you can do it for free and quickly. The downside is that many writers sadly publish a site that isn’t ready for primetime.

Points to remember:
1. Keep your folder of ideas active and going. Just this morning (while sipping coffee in my sun-filled living room) I gained clarity on the titles of my new website tabs. This hastily hand-written note will go in my website development folder before I leave for work.
2. Tabs Navigation makes sure visitors can properly navigate through the website. You control how simply and easily site visitors understand where they should be clicking.
3. The big picture: what is it you are selling? Is it your book, or services, your speaking platform? The tabs direct the visitor to where you want them to go, like Hansel and Gretel following the breadcrumbs out of the forest.

To sum up, research themes and decide on which one graphically portrays who you are as a writer. Choose the words for tab navigation deftly. Be cognizant of what it is you want to promote on your site and clearly communication that.

This brings me to the next very important step. Write your website content out ahead of time. For clarity and focus run it by your writing critique group, friends or relatives. Fiercely spellcheck, then and only then publish it on your new website.

Stay tuned for A Writer’s Website: Part Three in August. Until next time, keep on writing!

Embracing revision

To be a better writer, you must embrace revision. Not just endure it, embrace it, again and again and again.

I was reminded of that imperative the other day while reading the May 16, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, specifically Malcolm Gladwell’s article, “Creation Myth,” about the legend of Xerox PARC and its connection to the development of the Apple Macintosh computer. Xerox PARC was a research-and-development center in Palo Alto, California where, in the 1970s, the computer mouse, the icon-based graphic computer interface and the laser printer all came to life and, in 1979, were seen by Steve Jobs.

What does computer-engineering history have to do with writing?

After telling the story of these “wild geysers of creative energy” at Xerox PARC, Gladwell cites psychologist Dean Simonton, who wrote, “Quality is a probabilistic function of quantity.”

Continuing, Gladwell says, “Simonton’s point is that there is nothing neat and efficient about creativity. ‘The more successes there are,’ [Simonton] says, ‘the more failures there are as well.’ ”

Gladwell goes on to discuss the case of the Rolling Stones album, “Exile on Main Street,” as told in Keith Richards’ new memoir Life. The songs that stuck “had to fight from under an avalanche of mediocrity,” Gladwell writes.

Irish writer Samuel Beckett’s famous quote is a favorite of writers asked for advice on their craft: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” There is even an online literary journal, failbetter.com.

In a blog I posted here two years ago this month, I recounted the story told by one of my writing workshop mentors, Suzanne Hoover of Sarah Lawrence College, about a New Yorker story written by her faculty colleague, the late Grace Paley. When Suzanne told Paley how perfect the story was, the author replied, “It only took me 19 tries.”

Write your story. Revise it, trying to make it better. Try again, fail again, fail better. That is the path to writing success.—Alex McNab

Learning from a Pulitzer Prize winner

I recently finished the prize-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s (right) structurally groundbreaking book of 13 linked, yet stylistically unique, stories that have the arc of a novel. Those styles, by the way, include a pitch-perfect celebrity profile and, most famously, a 70-plus-page PowerPoint presentation.

Since Goon Squad’s publication in hardcover last July, and especially in the wake of this year’s paperback release and awards, Egan has written and spoken about her evolution as a writer, her pen-to-paper writing process (first drafts by hand on legal pads, 20 redos of each individual part), the thinking that went into the creation of Goon Squad and much more. Tracking this material online is like taking a self-directed seminar in the craft of writing from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is illuminating and inspiring.

Below are a few of the themes that Egan articulates, with samples of her words. First, here are links to three of the many sources of her wisdom: an article she wrote for The Wall Street Journal; a long Q & A at thedaysofyore.com; and a video of an on-stage conversation with salon.com’s Laura Miller at the New York Public Library.

Commitment: “I was absolutely dogged.”

Writing badly: “My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around. For me, the bad beginning is something to build on. It’s no big deal. It won’t hurt you. Forget it! You can’t expect to write regularly and always write well. . . .Maybe good writing isn’t happening, but let some bad writing happen. Let it happen! It seems writer’s block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen.”

Outlining: “I write so blindly I don’t see what’s coming in my first draft. I outline everything in revision. Some of my revision outlines are 50 pages long.”

Revision: “It’s all about re-writing.”

Routine: It is “a gigantic part of it.”

Writing groups: Before joining her first group years ago, “I was in a vacuum. . . .I had lost track of. . .what makes something interesting to read. . . .What I lose by not listening is much greater than what I lose by listening to bad advice. . . .What’s bad falls away.”

Submitting: “I started sending work out, right away. . . .And as soon as something came back, I would immediately send it back out, the same day. So I would sort of convert disappointment into hope, right away.”

Reading: It is “the nourishment that let’s you do interesting work.”

Perseverance: It’s “huge. That is my biggest gift.”

Storytelling: “If you don’t have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you’ve got nothing.”

—Alex McNab

More advice from Linda Howard Urbach

Novelist and writing–group leader and participant Linda Howard Urbach had more to say than I could fit into my last entry, so here, as promised,  is the follow-up.

You’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating:

We aspiring authors plugging away in workshops are not the only ones who lose our way in our stories. Accomplished writers who have published before and are currently under contract on new novels get stuck, too.

“It happens all the time,” says Linda, author of the soon-to-be-published novel Madame Bovary’s Daughter.

So how do you overcome it?

“When you finish writing for the day, leave something to go back to the next morning,” Linda told me. (According to legend, Tom Wolfe stops at the bottom of his tenth page of the day, even if he’s in mid-sentence.) “Well, I didn’t always do that. And sometimes I would get stuck and I would have to jump way ahead. Or I would have to go back and revise. Sometimes in revising, something would come up. Also, I go spinning in the morning. That takes me away from the computer. Suddenly you can start thinking in fresh new ways.”

While there’s little point in beating your head against the wall when you cannot move forward, the important thing is to keep writing, even if it’s someplace else in your manuscript.

Linda also has some timeless protocol pointers for workshoppers: “One of the things that drives me crazy is, before a writer goes to read they’ll say, ‘I know this isn’t any good.’ They preface what they’re going to read with how bad it’s going to be. I mean, I totally understand that, but don’t do that to yourself. Don’t apologize.”

In fact, she says, in her current Momoirs workshops, “I’m just dazzled by the writing. I can’t believe how good these people are.”

As annoying as the pre-reading apologizer is the post-reading defender. She or he might be “a terrific writer,” Linda says, “but you can’t tell her anything. She doesn’t listen. She starts defending before she listens.”

What makes an ideal writing-group member for Linda? “There are a few people in my workshops who are brilliant at rewriting. Take suggestions, go home and do it.”

Hear! Hear!—Alex McNab

Finishing your novel

Photo by Alyssa Scott

You may know Linda Howard Urbach (right) as the creator and group leader of the MoMoirs Workshops, “writing workshops for & about moms,” one of which recently ended its run at the Library. I know her as a colleague at an Autumn 2007 four-day writers’ retreat on Cape Cod, where we both were working on novels.

Four years later, hers—Madame Bovary’s Daughter—is slated for summer publication in trade paperback by Bantam, part of Random House. Linda is now hard at work on her next book. I met with her recently to talk about writing, workshops, and her successful journey with Madame Bovary’s Daughter from the retreat to impending publication.

I asked Linda why aspiring writers often have difficulty finishing a novel.

“That’s a really good question,” she said. “Because the point is, if you don’t finish, you’re not going to publish. The only difference between your manuscript and a book that’s out there in the bookstores is that person’s perseverance. That person stuck with it to finish it, stuck with it to get an agent, stuck with it to get a publisher. All you need is one agent. All you need is one publisher. There are a lot of those around.”

Is there a secret, though?

“The trick to finishing the book? My sense was that I always knew there was going to be somebody there to read it. And if I didn’t have an agent, and I didn’t have a publisher, I was going to make a commitment to a writers’ group, or to another writer.

“Writing, per se, is very, very hard. You can have the world’s greatest idea in your head, but when you’re sitting at the computer, you’ve got to get something down. Once you’ve got something down, even if it’s gibberish, you can make something of it, and then you can re-make something of it. But do it every day.”

Linda did have one thing us first-time novelists don’t: experience. An award-winning advertising copywriter, a playwright, and a screenwriter, she published two novels, contemporary rather than historical fiction, in the early 1980s. Having collaborated on a screenplay that actually got made into a movie was critical when she tried a novel: “That experience of finishing something made me believe I would always finish.”

But it didn’t make things easy this time around. “In between my two novels that were published and Madame Bovary’s Daughter,” Linda said, “I had two fully completed novels—not necessarily polished—that didn’t get published.” Her original agent, the late Owen Laster, had retired and, “I couldn’t get arrested.”

At the time we attended the writers’ retreat, she had no representation. She found her current agent by sending out query letters. At the agent’s urging, she hired an independent editor to guide her through polishing the manuscript before it went out to a dozen publishers. “I got eleven rejections right off the bat,” Linda said. The twelfth bought the book. Then Linda’s in-house editor put it through even more vigorous revisions.

All the while, a key factor that kept Linda going was that imagined reader. “Just one,” she says. “Just one person saying, ‘This is terrific. It’s finished and it’s good.’ ”

—Alex McNab

PS. Next time, I’ll post more from my talk with Linda, including her advice on ways to recover when you get stuck in your story and her thoughts on writers’ groups from her dual perspective as participant and workshop leader.

Revisit the Classics

Hello writers, it’s Adair Heitmann here, writing to you in my last Fairfield Writer’s Blog of 2010. Be sure to stay tuned in 2011, as we have surprises up our sleeves with a possible blog make-over, and the addition of fresh writers to our contributing roster.

During this season, as you travel to visit relations near and far, I invite you to take a breather and journey no farther than your favorite easy chair.  You know that reading makes us better writers. This year why not pick up a classic? Sit back, relax, turn off your phone, and indulge yourself. As you absorb the story let yourself discover why it endures the shifting sensibilities of time. Then apply what you learn to your own writing projects next year.

Two books that linger from one generation to the next are The Gift of the Magi and A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Did you know that neither one was published first as a book? O. Henry wrote his short story The Gift of the Magi in 1906. Dylan Thomas wrote his prose poem A Child’s Christmas in Wales in 1945 and it was first published in Harper’s Bazaar. O. Henry’s story brims with a bitter-sweet tale of the true meaning of generosity. Thomas’s cadence and tempo paint a picture of a time and place that is all but gone, yet his words conjure it up again and again each time you read the book.

The gems from these books that I will bring into my writing next year are:

1. Strive for poignancy.

2. Let my true voice carry the rhythm of my words.

3. Never underestimate the longevity of a short story or poem.

Do you have a favorite seasonal classic? Comment here and share it with all our readers. Tell us why it withstands the test of time.

Until next year, keep on writing!