Writing: Grab Your Ideas Fast

Pre-Memorial Day wishes to all you writers out there. This is Adair Heitmann scribing this post from chilly Connecticut. A proverbial writing question is “Where do ideas come from?” Well, they come from your mind, heart, and soul. Ideas come from your observations, reflections, and experiences. They arrive from conflict, loss, despair, joy and ecstasy. Plots, plays, and poems bubble up from an instant connection that percolated its clarity to you in a heartbeat. As clear as a sparkling blue glacier-fed lake, those are the ideas to grab.

Keeping pen and paper notebooks handy in your car, purse or pocket helps. Jotting down ideas in your mobile device using Evernote makes writers on the go even more organized. Writers can snap photos, take notes, and even record videos and voice memos. The content syncs to all of your desktop or mobile devices.

For Android users, you can use an app called Colornote Notepad. Colornote is a simple, color-coded note taking app that uses sticky note style homescreen widgets to give you quick access to your note from your homescreen. You take your notes on a stylized notepad, and can organize them by color and category so they stand out easily. Red for immediate! Or blue for, need to sleep on this one.

While brushing my teeth, I’ve been known to open and flatten a cardboard toothpaste box, just to have something to write on. I also have what’s called a tickler file. It’s a three-ring notebook with pockets. I scribble the idea on whatever scrap of paper is at hand, date the concept and add it to binder. That way I never lose the inspired moment.  My seeds are kept safe and dry until planted. Until yesterday, when I didn’t follow my own advice.

I took the day off from work. I was opening an antique washstand in my living room, by twisting an old-fashioned key into the lock. The washstand was from the farm my mother grew up on in Virginia. I keep votive candles and tablecloths in the washstand. As I retrieved what I was looking for I had a Maxwell House moment. A crystal clear idea for a play rose to the top of my mind. A play! I’ve never written one! The idea had to do with a totally different perspective on Memorial Day. One I’d never heard of or read about. The idea was so strong and so good and so complete I didn’t jot it down. Today the idea is a wisp in my memory.

So fellow writers, do as I say, not as I do. Grab those creative ideas, and jot them down anywhere, anytime. Don’t falter.

Until next time, keep on writing.

Hiding in Your Own Ink

Hello writers! This is Adair Heitmann scribing a short post today. How can a 385 year-old English Naturalist help you with your writing? Read on . . .

“He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.” – John Ray

Until next time, keep on writing.

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.

 

In Praise of Poetry

Hello writers, this is Adair Heitmann writing to you on this cold morning in January. This week’s presidential inauguration reminded me of the power of poetry. American poet and teacher, Richard Blanco, was the inaugural poet, reading his poem, “One Today.” I didn’t hear him recite it, but I read it online later in the day. His reflections were powerful, simple, and thoughtful.

Poetry has always touched me deeply, it reaches places in my psyche that prose never can.

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one. -John Ruskin

The poet doesn’t invent. He listens. -Jean Cocteau

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. -Plato

Until next time, keep on writing, and if a poem tumbles from your soul today, cradle it.

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.]

I Was a Wrimo Again

Hello writers, from Adair Heitmann. With the recent, tragic and unimaginable losses in the Sandy Hook community in Newtown, CT, I can barely focus on this post. Yet, writing helps me through grief, it has universal curative powers.

Kahlil Gibran wrote, ”When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” Much of our collective grief has to do with the senseless killing of innocent children. Children who were in a safe place, school. Children who were with teachers and administrators, loyal to the children’s welfare and capable of taking care of them, until, the unthinkable happens. Gibran’s quote helps me see that I cry because I love children, because I’m a mom, because I’m a teacher, and because I love teachers. All those things, when taken in the balanced order of life, bring delight. I mourn, with the rest of our country and the world. As a writer, I write, to help me get through this grief. So, I am going to continue with the essay I planned, an article about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).

Dipping my toe in the NaNoWriMo seas again this year was truly delightful. This past November, I managed to participate in NaNoWriMo and still keep my job. Plus keep all my diverse professional and personal plates spinning. The purpose of NaNoWriMo is to inspire writers of all ages to write 50,000 words in one month. I entered with my eyes wide open, knowing that reality prohibited me from having the spare time to write a 50,000 fictional novel. However, if I added up all the words that I wrote for work, I’m sure I’ve written several full-fledged novels during the month of November. I used NaNoWriMo as a way to fertilize my own writer’s platform, by playing in a national arena. I knew I couldn’t complete a new novel, but my day job gave me the opportunity to participate as part of a community outreach. (It’s nice to write for a living.)

To complete the participation in NaNoWriMo, I needed to look into my own resources of what I’d previously written. I brushed off a parable, for children of all ages, that I wrote 21 years ago. I re-worked some sections, and wrote some with fresh eyes. NaNoWriMo inspired me this year. I had to submit something to get the dandy “Participant 2012″ icon you see above. I submitted my children’s parable in a word document to the official NaNoWriMo word count counter on their website. The word count added up to a spanking 2,369! Like any good teacher who acknowledges an advancement that his or her student makes, I’m giving myself an A for effort.

Being involved in NaNoWriMo writing circles also gave me a chance to learn more about their Young Writers Program for kids and teens. It looks like an energizing and creative way to engage young writers. I’d encourage any teacher out there, reading this post, to incorporate this into next year’s Language Arts syllabus.

I end today’s piece in a dedication, with love, with compassion, and with inspiration to all the children and teachers of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT.

On a holiday note: All of us at the Fairfield Writer’s Blog wish you a peaceful season and a New Year filled with hope.

Until next time, keep on writing.

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

Writing w/o Distractions

As Hurricane Sandy hits the east coast, this is Adair Heitmann chiming in, writing to you about staying focused on your writing.

Of all professions, it seems like writers are the ones who always have the most excuses not to write. Today, as the wind howls outside, my family and I are in the home of friends. I thought distractions would be a good topic for today’s blog. Here’s my list of hints and observations:

1. Only you are in charge of your focus, be ruthless in carving out your mental space.
2. Like rubbing a knife on a whetstone, look for ways in your everyday life to sharpen your writing skills. Those exercises help you down the road.
3. Writing for social media trains your mind to cut to the chase. Condensing a topic to 140 characters or less on Twitter is a good way to hone your writer’s brain.
4. If you have to write captions for your job, like I do, that can sharpen your communication skills.
5. When you write, write, don’t edit.
6. Set aside time just to write. Don’t pick up the phone, do laundry, or check your Facebook account.
7. Make sure your tools are up to date before you start writing. Check the ink in your pen before you sit down. Make sure you have a full toner cartridge in your printer.
8. If you are stumped on what to write, set a timer for 20 minutes. Write nonstop, don’t edit or ponder. Write stream of consciousness, when the timer goes off, stop.

Enough of my ideas, what are your favorite suggestions?

Until next time, stay safe out there, and keep on writing!

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

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!