Well, last Monday came around with me staring down the blank sketchbook. It was my one day off from work and I had a book to fill. Not letting a time crunch deter me, I remembered waking up in the middle of the previous night with the answer. I’ve been working on a series of haikus for about three years. When I’m inspired, usually by the intersection of mother nature and human nature, I write one. Working on the haikus, on and off, as time allowed, I shared the poems periodically with my writing critique group. I’d re-work them, and place them in my familiar manilla folder labeled “Haiku,” and then file them under “Poems” in my filing cabinet. There they sat until a few days ago.

I brought the folder down to my kitchen table, grouped them by the four seasons of the year, and created an outline for the book. Needing to round out the book I wrote a brand, spanking new haiku, on the spot, and included that too. So the book really was three years in the making, an hour for the outline, and two hours for the artistic crafting of the book. Like a cook who invents a delicious meal based on what is in the cupboard, I used what I had. I parboiled my words, sautéed the right ingredients, set the table, and lit the candles. I completed the book, and mailed it, meeting their deadline.

The Sketchbook Project is all about process, and it sure reminded me that you never know where your words will end up. You just have to trust and believe they will find a home. Before The Sketchbook Project I never thought of grouping my haikus by season and publishing them as a collection. Now I am.

Until next time, keep on writing!

Otherwise, that man would be unable to read The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life (right) by Ann Patchett (State of Wonder, Bel Canto), a delightful “Original” from the digital publisher Byliner. It was the first work he downloaded and read on the Kindle Touch his household received for Christmas. It also was his first time reading Patchett, whose style as well as substance made that maiden voyage on an e-reader memorable.

Consider the charming way she describes the aspiring writer’s dilemma:

“Logic dictates that writing should be a natural act, a function of a well-operating human body, along the lines of speaking and walking and breathing,” Patchett writes. “We should be able to tap into the constant narrative flow our minds provide, the roaring river of words filling up our heads, and direct it out into a neat stream of organized thought so that other people can read it. Look at what we already have going for us: some level of education that has given us control of written and spoken language; the ability to use a computer or a pencil; and an imagination that naturally turns the events of our lives into stories that are both true and false. We all have ideas, sometimes good ones, not to mention the gift of emotional turmoil that every childhood provides. In short, the story is in us, and all we have to do is sit there and write it down.

“But it’s right about there, the part where we sit, that things fall apart.”

Byliner defines its digital offerings as running “at lengths that allow them to be read in a single sitting.” In that space, The Getaway Car blends Patchett’s personal development as a writer with astute advice in smooth prose. Here are two other for-instances:

“Novel writing, I soon discovered, is like channel swimming: a slow and steady stroke over a long distance in a cold, dark sea. If I thought too much about how far I’d come or the distance I still had to cover, I’d sink.”

And,

“Although my [first] novel [The Patron Saint of Liars] was written in three separate first-person sections, I wrote it linearly—that is to say, page two was started after page one was finished. . . .Even if you’re writing a book that jumps around in time, has ten points of view, and is chest-deep in flashbacks, do your best to write it in the order in which it will be read, because it will make the writing, and the later editing, incalculably easier.”

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of reading on the Kindle, and I certainly enjoyed paying only 99¢ each—at the time I downloaded them—for three titles about writing that are not available as printed books. Waiting (or is it still permissible to say “shelved”?) for later perusal in the e-reader are The Liar’s Bible: A Handbook for Fiction Writers and The Liar’s Companion: A Field Guide for Fiction Writers—from mystery maven Lawrence Block, whose trade paperback Telling Lies for Fun & Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers has long been a favorite.

And for future consideration there is another Byliner Original, Sara Davidson’s Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion. What piqued my interest in it was an update Davidson wrote, which you can read at the Byliner website, answering the question, What’s the most important thing you learned about writing from Joan Didion?

“Anything can be fixed,” Didion told her. There’s more good stuff there, so follow the link above. But let me leave you with Davidson’s final thought for us fellow writers:

“It took me 30 years to have faith that this is true. Once you’ve got something on paper—anything, no matter how bad it seems—you can fix it, steadily, one word or phrase at a time. You can turn something awful into something reasonably good.”

Oh. One final note: The Library now has a digital collection from which you can borrow eBooks and more. And at the time of this writing, at least, you can download the prequel to the opening sentence of this post, along with the rest of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, from amazon.com to your Kindle for free.—Alex McNab

Imagine all those writers feverishly writing within the same erudite community during the same month. How could anyone not be psyched? I certainly was. Becoming a member of this intergenerational writing society was so cool! As authors we are often alone at our kitchen tables writing longhand on yellow legal-size pads, as our dishwashers churn away. Or, with open laptops, sitting isolated in a busy coffee shop, hammering out our stories, while blends of French Roast fill the air. Being an active participant in the NaNoWriMo literary adventure helped me feel a part of something larger and greater than just me.

However, I knew from the start that I only had time to brush the surface with NaNoWriMo this year. With my other professional deadlines and personal responsibilities, writing a new novel 2-3 hours a day would be out of the question. But I still wanted to play. I figured, I may as well enter and see what NaNoWriMo was all about from the inside. I had a ball, and the memories from my month are keeping me all a-flutter.

The entry form asked for a genre, which made me pause and think. As a mostly non-fiction author, how did I want to spend my infinitesimal NaNoWriMo fiction prose time? It was a toss-up between Satire, Humor & Parody or Erotic Fiction. Going into this with an open mind and a cavalier attitude helped free me up to recognize that I had nothing to lose. I may as well stretch my creative muscles, and write something outside my comfort-zone.

As November progressed I straddled my world of by day being a mild-mannered literary consultant and by night flying wildly in free expression. This lack of inhibition, however, caused me to be confronted with literary questions that I don’t ordinarily have to face.
1. As an author of non-fiction, my articles, books, essays, and blogs don’t require a disclaimer. But as I wrote in my chosen NaNoWriMo genre I started to realize that I may want to change my name. You see, I need my day job and wasn’t sure if the genre of my fictional piece would jeopardize it. Entering “NaNoWriMo-Land” had really inspired me to let my hair down, I’d become downright reckless.
2. As a parent of a budding teenager, I wondered if what I was writing might be an embarrassment.  I can mortify my child very easily on my own without intentionally adding to it.

Then, through a Facebook connection I learned of a writing contest in one of my genres of choice. Hmmmmmmm, could I be published and paid very nicely for my new novel? I wondered that I might be able to pay for my child’s college education by writing with such freedom and frivolity.  November found me juiced up every time I sat down and wrote.  I didn’t even need an oven; the heat coming off my pages cooked the Thanksgiving turkey. Then I got to wondering, with all the time and effort I’ve spent building my writer’s platform with my real name, if I had a nom de plume for this new genre I’d have to start creating an entirely new writer’s platform for my pen name. Oh, when would I find the time?

My NaNoWriMo month ended as I finished fleshing out tantalizing characters, entwined with moments of dizzying delights. At the end of the contest, I leaned back, inhaled deeply, and smoked a cigarette. My month was like a good one-night-stand, filled with tantalizing memories, but I didn’t end up marrying the man. Will I date him in 2012? You bet I will. Delving into fun fiction was like stroking my hand along luxurious silk. Could I wear it every day in my active life? No. But would I put it on for certain occasions? Yes, oh yes.

As 2011 draws to a close, all of us at the Fairfield Writer’s Blog wish you a very happy holiday season. May Santa fill your stocking with your heart’s desires, and may the New Year bring you ecstatic hours of literary abandon.

Until next year, keep on writing!

The next time you are tempted to buy or borrow another how-to book on fiction writing, do yourself a favor. Go to the Library instead and check out F. Scott Fitzgerald’s posthumously published unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon (right), edited by the late scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli. You will be treated to wonderful writing and interesting characters, and to the thinking and craft that stood behind them—as well as to historical insights about the business of making movies.

There are two versions: the venerable Scribner trade paperback and the Cambridge University Press critical edition. Both incorporate Bruccoli’s substantial reorganization of the author’s original narrative and notes, which first were assembled for the debut 1941 edition by Fitzgerald’s Princeton University friend, the eminent literary critic Edmund Wilson. In addition to the first 17 of a projected 30 episodes of the novel, including a complete draft of Chapter 1, both the Scribner and Cambridge volumes contain fascinating, if slightly different, explanatory essays by Bruccoli, plus pages of Fitzgerald’s notes and outlines, a synopsis Fitzgerald wrote for the editor of Collier’s magazine, and more. All of the quotations used here, in fact, come from the author’s notes or the Bruccoli pieces.

Fitzgerald died, at age 44, in December 1940. During the last 13 years of his life, he worked on and off as an unsuccessful screenwriter in Hollywood. He began writing his Hollywood novel in 1939. His portrait of “the last tycoon”—a studio executive he named Monroe Stahr—was drawn from the life of Irving G. Thalberg, the “boy wonder” chief of production at M-G-M in the 1920’s and early ’30’s who died in 1936 at age 37. Stahr’s love interest is a young woman named Kathleen Moore.  The book’s periodic narrator, Cecelia Brady, is the college-age daughter of Stahr’s partner in the executive suite.

The Love of the Last Tycoon takes you into the heart of a great American writer’s composing process. Fitzgerald’s secretary, Frances Kroll, told Bruccoli: “Fitzgerald’s work patterns on TYCOON started with notes; then the sorting of notes into chapters; then brief biographies of the characters; then chapter outlines and finally roughly written chapters. . . .Work on the chapter notes and outlines was interrupted many times before they were completed and before the actual writing began.”

In one of his weekly letters to his wife Zelda—who was in a sanitarium in North Carolina—in the fall of 1940, Fitzgerald wrote: “My room is covered with charts like it used to be for Tender is the Night telling different movements of the characters and their histories.” No doubt he would have been addicted, had they been available in his day, to Post-It Notes, as this writer and so many others are.

Fitzgerald, Bruccoli writes, “was a painstaking reviser whose fiction went through layers of drafts.” A note the author scribbled on the first page of his last draft of Chapter 1 read, “Rewrite from mood. Has become stilted from rewriting.” There was much important work yet to be done.

One of the perplexing issues apparent in the unfinished novel is point of view. It begins with Cecelia Brady narrating in the first person. Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s legendary editor at Scribner, wrote to Zelda, however, that “as the manuscript stands, a good deal of it seems to be told directly, and not as seen or heard by his ‘heroine’ Celia [sic]. Scott would have found some way to obviate this difficulty.”

Fitzgerald set the bar high for what he wanted to achieve. Consider, for instance, this excerpt from his notes about conveying that most difficult element of all in fiction, what a character feels, in this case regarding Cecelia for Stahr:

“I would like to do some very strong, quiet writing there to describe her feelings. . . . I want to find some new method [italics added] of describing this. Some method in which everything that surrounds him assumes a magical touch, a magical quality without resorting to any of the old dodges of her touching the objects that he touches. I want her feelings to soar to the highest pitch of which she is capable and I want her in this episode to, for the benefit of the reader, to [sic] set away everything tawdry or superficial in her nature. This should be one of the strongest episodes in the book.”

Despite all of his plotting, Fitzgerald was not totally tied to his outline. “I think I’ll do my own method of ending probably on a high note about Stahr but that will solve itself in the writing.” [Italics added.]

Bruccoli states that “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s incomplete work has come to be regarded as the most promising—and the most disappointing—fragment in American fiction.”

And Perkins, writing to Wilson, said, “[A]s to Scott’s novel, it would break your heart to read it and see what beautiful and illuminating things there are in it—Scott’s old magical sentences and scenes—and realize that it is unfinished. . . .”

Let some simple description from one of those scenes serve as an example. Stahr takes Kathleen to Malibu to show her an unfinished retreat he is building, or, in Fitzgerald’s words, “the fuselage of Stahr’s house.” There, “Beyond the strip of anticipatory lawn was the excavation for a swimming pool, patronized now by a crowd of seagulls who saw them and took flight.”

Perkins, writing to the executor of Fitzgerald’s estate about the novel, said, “It is a tragedy it is unfinished. . . .It has a kind of wisdom in it, and nobody ever penetrated beneath the surface of the movie world to any such degree. It was to have been a very remarkable book.”

Indeed, The Love of the Last Tycoon, with the supporting material, is a remarkable book—for both readers and writers.—Alex McNab

1. hands to write with
2. eyes to see
3. a nose to sniff out a good story
4. ears to hear
5. a sense of taste from which I can describe my world
6. touch – one of the hardest senses to describe in words, but one of the sweetest
7. the Internet
8. journals of all sizes, shapes, colors, textures, and kinds
9. pens, paper, bark, charcoal, paint, even a hammer and chisel, anything to incise my words, making them permanent
10. writing contests - to keep me percolating in my writer’s craft
11. agents, of course
12. readers, of course
13. my heart – that swells to fullness when I communicate
14. publishers
15. my writing critique group
16. friends that love me and my writing just the way I am
17. social media
18. libraries
19. book stores, especially the independent ones
20. trees from which the printed word can last for generations

Happy Thanksgiving everybody.

Keep on writing!

After he turned an unsold screenplay into his first novel, Access to Power, in 2001, Ellis began planning his next book. “My dad had just passed away,” he said. “I wanted it to be a tribute to him, I wanted to set it in Philadelphia and the neighborhoods where I grew up, and I noticed that those writers, like Michael Connelly with The Poet, all had tributes to this remarkable Red Dragon. I was going to do mine.” The Dead Room, with neophyte lawyer Teddy Mack the protagonist, sold out 45,000 paperback-original   copies in three months.

“I always thought Teddy would be my guy,” Ellis says. Instead, his next three thrillers—the newest of which, Murder Season (Minotaur—right), comes out on December 6—feature LAPD robbery/homicide detective Lena Gamble. Here, with specific thoughts about thrillers, is the second installment of Ellis’ writing advice for readers of the FWB.

Make it about more than a crime: While some might dismiss Red Dragon as a horror novel, Ellis says that is mistaken. He believes intelligent crime novels are the modern equivalent of the great Westerns by directors such as John Ford, metaphorical works of the American myth. In that sense, he argues, Red Dragon “is a mapping of the human spirit and is ingeniously told,” with villain Francis Dolarhyde so mesmerized by William Blake’s art that he actually eats a painting. “What we’re seeing,” Ellis argues, “is a character trying to shed his past just the way a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.” In the same way, he says, “I don’t think my books are about the crime. It’s a metaphor. It’s hidden social criticism. My books are about more than the crime.”

Tell a multi-tiered story: Ellis says his thrillers tell three stories in one book: “There is the apparent level. That’s what you think the story is. There’s the level that the [protagonist’s] opponent is trying to make it look like it is. And then there’s the level that’s real.” Such tiered storytelling requires planning, says Ellis: “You can’t do that without an outline. [See FWB, October 12, 2011] Any writer who’s doing to do a multi-layered story and says ‘I don’t outline’ is full of it.”

Ask yourself, what if? At some point in an Ellis thriller, and perhaps at more than once, there comes a twist that turns the story on its head. “Was it in the outline?” he says. “Not all the time. There’s always magic. You’ll be writing there and you’ll say, Oh my God, what if? In The Lost Witness, I wasn’t sure it was going to work. I had to write it to know if it was going to work.” But don’t be afraid to try, because “Those little hits are like gasoline. The story’s going along, but now we need a jolt. . . . As long as it works.”

Get past the three-act structure: Despite the conventional wisdom in storytelling manuals, Ellis says, “I think the concept of three acts, if that’s what you’re doing, may mean you’re not going to make it today.” In a contemporary thriller, two big plot points—dividing Act I from II and Act II from III—are not enough. “You need more of those hits than just something that separates an act,” Ellis says “The more the better. And if you can pack the end—boom, boom, boom, boom—well, that’s what I try to do.”

Change your template: “Usually the new book is a reaction to the last book,” Ellis says. In the first Lena Gamble novel, City of Fire, Gamble is an unsure newcomer to the LAPD Robbery/Homicide division. In The Lost Witness, she is assigned a seemingly dead-end case by unhappy higher-ups looking to get rid of her. Now, in Murder Season, “It’s the opposite,” Ellis says of his protagonist and her bosses. “Now they need her.” Gamble investigates a high-profile killing that could make her a scapegoat for police-department and district attorney’s-office bumbling. The story involves “a character shift,” says Ellis, who this time took his inspiration from an even more-detailed outliner than Ellis himself, James Ellroy, who has been known to compose a 300-page plan before turning it into a novel. “I’ve been wanting to do this since I read LA Confidential.”

Establish a theme with the thrills: While his thrillers have whodunit and police-procedural elements, Ellis says they are much different from mysteries: “In a detective story, there’s a murder on page one and we’re off.  Mysteries are faster at the beginning. Thrillers are slow in the beginning. A thriller is a very personal story. You’ve got to get that personal stuff out and done so that when you get to the end the thrills resound.” He cites an Alfred Hitchcock movie to illustrate his point. “Look at ‘Rear Window.’ The first 30 minutes, nothing happens. Jimmy Stewart’s just sitting in his room talking to Grace Kelly (below) and talking to his nurse about marriage.

“That’s another thing about a thriller, the difference between it and a mystery. Usually you have a stronger theme in a thriller, and every character in that story shares a part of that theme. For instance, in ‘Rear Window,’ it’s about love and marriage. In every one of those windows [Stewart and Kelly are looking at], it’s a variation of a theme, such as the apartment with Miss Lonelyhearts.”

A reading recommendation: So what’s the best book our local thriller writer has read recently? The latest Michael Connelly offering? Or one of Thomas Harris’ evergreen titles, given that he hasn’t published anything in five years? Nope. “Nonfiction,” Ellis says. “Unbroken.” That’s right, Laura Hillenbrand’s story of Olympic runner, World War II hero and Japanese POW survivor Louis Zamperini.—Alex McNab

Forget preparing the house for Thanksgiving guests, let your friends eat from tarnished silverware. Have to cook every night after work? Let your family eat frozen dinners for a month. Clean clothes, who needs them? Rides to school? Let the kids walk, it’s healthier for them. Spend time at the gym? What are a few extra pounds anyway? Sit down, claim your inner writer and focus on writing a draft of your entire novel in a month. Don’t edit, just write. I’ll bet you come out a different person, filled with more joy and passion, and a better writer after just thirty days.

A colleague shared with me the storyfix.com website which offers on-going day-by-day encouragement, information, and support for all NaNoWriMo veterans. Here’s another resource to check out it’s called Primer and shares information on how to survive writing your novel in a month. Some local libraries are posting daily hints and tips on their Facebook pages. There is a groundswell of interest in Fairfield County about NaNoWriMo. Why not join in the fun?

NaNoWriMo has even recruited an all-star team of contemporary, leading-edge published authors to give you pep talks, all through the NaNoWriMo website. What could be better than that? I’ll leave you with one last thing before I go and stock up on frozen dinners for the month . . . this quote by Teresa Jordan, “If we don’t tell our stories, they will be told by people who do not understand them at all.”

Until next time, keep on writing!

“And the next day,” Ellis recalls, “I said, OK, I’m going to turn this screenplay into a novel. Happily, I sold it in about three days.”

Access to Power, which is set in Washington, D.C., was published in 2001. The following year The Dead Room, featuring young Philadelphia lawyer Teddy Mack, hit the shelves. In all, Ellis has written five thrillers, the most recent three featuring LAPD Robbery-Homicide detective Lena Gamble. The last book of that trilogy, Murder Season, will arrive in stores from Minotaur Books in December. The first, City of Fire (2007), made the Los Angeles Times bestseller list, and both it and the second, The Lost Witness (2009), have been racking up big sales in Europe in 2011, achieving top-20 positions among books and top-10 status among ebooks sold in Germany.

In a recent wide-ranging conversation—not surprisingly, frequently illuminated by movie references—Ellis offered readers of the Fairfield Writer’s Blog insights on the following:

Outlining: The crafting of an Ellis thriller comes down hard on one side of the plotter vs. pantser debate (for more, click back to the FWB of March 18, 2010). No seat-of-the-pants improvising for this author. “My outline for The Last Witness was a hundred pages long,” he says. “First I do what I call a bullet outline, which is one sentence per chapter. Exactly what’s going to happen in that chapter, so I can watch the flow of story.” He follows “what [director] John Ford always said about a scene. And that is, one action, one scene.” From his bullet outline, he writes the more elaborate outline, incorporating ideas from his notes and research in the relevant scene.

Writing: With that lengthy second outline, most of Ellis’ story-building work is done. “Number one on the outline becomes Chapter 1,” he says. The result is that, for all intents and purposes, “You read my first draft. I write a chapter and then I re-read it. The next day I go over it again, and then I move on to the next, and it’s done. When it’s all done I’ll go through the whole thing and polish.”

As for his style, “I write as speech, not language. I write the way we internally think. I try to keep things as simple as I can.” Like a lot of thriller writers, that means he is not loath to use sentence fragments. “That’s OK, though, because that’s the way we think. Sometimes you can get underneath somebody’s skin easier that way, with the staccato.”

Character: “You’ve got to put what you do in your characters or they’re not going to be alive,” Ellis says. I can attest to that. More than once in The Lost Witness, Lena Gamble is listening to songs played by great blues guitarists. I knew the guitarists, had see them play in person and, in the case of the late Mike Bloomfield, had a CD with the song “Stop!”—which Lena was listening to in one scene—sitting on the windowsill right above my writing desk!

Become your character, Ellis advises, when you come to a halt in writing your story. “All plot is is what the character does. The story is a handshake between the two, plot and character. Really, if you’re ever in a fix, it’s, what would my character do? That’s the fix for the plot. What would anyone do? Does it make sense? Does this character have a reason to do this? What is this character’s goal? What are they trying to get out of this, in this situation?”

Adding Background: When reading a book, even a crime novel, “everybody likes to learn something,” Ellis says. In The Lost Witness, he weaves in compelling information about the negative effects of ties among pharmaceutical companies, Gulf War veterans and medical drugs. “There’s a secret. It’s the same with most exposition, and that is, slide it in, pepper it in, in a scene that has conflict. Like in The Dead Room. I wanted you to know Teddy’s past. So I put him in his car. He’s looking at the temperature gauge. He’s scared to death that he’s driving on ice and his tires are slipping. All that exposition is in a scene where you’re worrying about him. In each chapter you may do a little thing. All those things add up in the end.”

Moving Forward: Ellis recommends that you “do what [another noted Southern California crime writer] T. Jefferson Parker says, write the one page and move on to the next. Don’t worry. Do not worry. Know what you are trying to say in that chapter, what the end point of that chapter is, and get there. The first hundred pages are really hard because you’ve got to do all the setting up. It’s painful. But once you get over that hump. . . .”

Fighting Fear: At some point, every writer, even one with five novels to his credit, dreads facing the blank page on the computer screen. It’s not a fear of the act of creation, Ellis says, it’s a fear of meeting expectations. With each project, you want to improve, to write your best book ever. “It only gets worse, the fear, at least in my experience,” Ellis admits. When he first moved to California, he became friends with director Sydney Pollack’s assistant. Pollack’s films won 11 Academy Awards and he received Oscars for directing and producing “Out of Africa” in 1985. Yet the assistant, Ellis says, “told me that, before every project, he (Pollack) was scared. I think it’s a good thing, but sometimes it gets in the way. You’re facing the unknown. You don’t want to mess it up. That’s a big part of it. It’s natural.”

Story—and More: “If you are a storyteller, it doesn’t matter what medium you’re working in,” Ellis says, before adding, “But it was when I was writing my first novel that I realized, Oh my God, I can get inside the guy’s head. Film is just a blueprint. One thing I loved about Connelly’s books was the internal creation of the main character. Robert Crais [yet another of the top L.A. crime novelists] in the Joe Pike series does it. I really love doing that. That’s the only advantage a novel has, and the reason why I hope they never go away.”—Alex McNab

PS. Next time, I’ll post more from Robert Ellis, including his ideas on what you can do when writing a thriller that you can’t do when writing a mystery (with tips from Thomas Harris and Alfred Hitchcock) and where his new book takes the character of Lena Gamble.

Today I’ll be talking about putting samples of your writing on the website. The answer to the question should you or shouldn’t you is a resounding yes. You’re a writer, right? Every artist works in a medium and words are your medium. If you have published a book, you might offer a sample chapter on your website. If you are unpublished you may want to add a few of your poems, always copyrighting them of course.

This past summer I led a program on how to build a writer’s platform, at the end of the event a writer asked if she should include articles previously published in newspapers. I answered, “Yes.” This brought me to a technology teaching moment that I’ll share with you now. If the article has been published recently it will be online. Simply include a hyperlink from your website to that published article. However if the article is from 1967, before the digital age, what can you do?

If you have hard copy of the printed article you can scan it into your computer and make a PDF file of it. Then insert the PDF file into your website. If you don’t own a scanner, never fear, bring the hard copy of the article to your local copy shop, along with a flash drive. Have them scan it and copy it to your flash drive. Upload that at home to your computer and add that link to your website.

Until next time, cheers, don’t let the technology get you down, and keep on writing!

I recently read two books about the IWW. Mentor: a Memoir  by Tom Grimes, published by Tin House Books in 2010, recounts the strong mentor-mentee relationship of workshop director Frank Conroy and Grimes, beginning in 1989. We Wanted To Be Writers: Life, Love and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop by Eric Olsen and Glen Schaeffer, published by Skyhorse Publishing in 2011, is an oral history of the IWW experience drawn from current interviews with students and some teachers who were in the Workshop during the authors’ time there, the mid-1970s. The voices include those of Jayne Anne Phillips, Jane Smiley, T.C. Boyle and John Irving

The books couldn’t be more different. Grimes’ story is written, not spoken and compiled. It paints a portrait of the day-to-day life of an Iowa student both on and off campus. Mentor is the better continuous read. The Olsen-Schaeffer collaboration is the kind of book you can open to any page, with the likelihood that in a few minutes you will come across nuggets of advice for aspiring writers, and perhaps a humorous anecdote as well. Some of the voices ring with great passion, such as those of Sandra Cisneros and Doug Unger. At its best, We Wanted To Be Writers is instructive, fast and, at times, quite fun.

Here’s a taste of the two.

From Mentor:

• On the first day of class, “Conroy went directly to the blackboard and picked up a piece of chalk. He wrote: meaning, sense, clarity. Then he faced us. ‘If you don’t have these, you don’t have a reader. . . .The writer cocreates the text with the reader. If a writer gives the reader too much information, then the reader feels forced to accept whatever the writer says and eventually stops reading. If a writer gives the reader too little information, the reader feels compelled to search for whatever the writer says and eventually stops reading. So, you want to meet the reader halfway.’ ”

• “My stories seemed to operate according to the laws of a boomerang. I’d fling one into space, and a few months later it would return.”

•“[C]oncentrating on sentences makes time dissolve. Your mind searches for the perfect word. You locate it. You type it. You look at it. Your hear it. Maybe say it aloud. Then you decide it’s the wrong word. You change it. Look at it. Hear it. Say it aloud. Decide it’s the wrong word. You try a third word, repeat the above, decide it’s also the wrong word, and restore the original. Then you count the word’s syllables. You listen to its tone. Is it sharp, flat, or out of key? By chance, you notice the clock. Sixty minutes of your life have been swallowed by eternity and you still haven’t found the right word.”

From We Wanted To Be Writers:

• Sandra Cisneros: “I like to use the metaphor of writing being like cutting your own hair; there’s only so much you can do yourself, then you need someone to help you with the back. That’s what we do at the workshop; we cover each other’s back. So you don’t walk out with a bad haircut.”

• Gordon Mennenga: “[H]alf the time, you wanted to ask, have you actually read my story? People complained about things that didn’t matter, and left the important stuff untouched. In class, comments got too personal. . . .There was a lot of posturing in the workshops.”

• Dennis Mathis: “I remember when [Kurt] Vonnegut came back to do a guest workshop/reading at Iowa. He said he’d pay for a plaque dedicated to the 90 percent of Workshop graduates who don’t go on to become writers. He said, ‘Can you imagine if 90 percent of the graduates of the Harvard Law School didn’t become lawyers?’ ”

• Rosalyn Drexler: “Writing is not only torture, it’s fun. It’s Let’s Pretend. It’s a cheap vacation.”

The number of MFA programs, both full-time and low-residency, since Iowa began awarding its degrees in 1936, has grown into the hundreds. The other day I attended a local writers’ salon where three women who had earned their MFAs in the first class of Fairfield University’s low-residency program spoke of how rewarding their experiences had been, in some ways that went far beyond the writing itself.

Before applying to the Fairfield program, one of the graduates recalled, she asked what she would get out of it. Program Director Michael C. White answered, “Community and craft.” For us in this challenging, often isolating pursuit, those are two precious offerings.—Alex McNab