Category: writers

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Margaret Atwood & Hope

…if you don’t value people you don’t wish to communicate with them. And any writing is a form of communication, just as any writing is a form of hope.

Because think of what you’re hoping for: you’re hoping, number one, that you’ll finish whatever it is you’re writing; number two, that it will be comprehensible; number three, that your message will somehow reach another human being; number four, that they will open that bottle that’s washed up on the shore, and they will take out the message, and they will be able to read it; and number five, that they will be able to comprehend it and derive meaning from it. And that’s a pretty long list of hopes.

This quote comes from the end of an interview Margaret Atwood gave with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s show, BOOKWORM. For most of the interview, they talked about her latest book, Maddaddam, the third of a trilogy.

If you are a writer and unfamiliar with this show, I highly recommend you start downloading the podcasts. You can listen to the whole interview here.

Some thoughts:

Atwood’s words remind me of what I’ve started to call the “Stevie Wonder Principle:” It’s not a religion, people. It’s a relationship.  Writing can become, quite fast, a religion.  We have our ceremonies (prizes, readings, book signings), and rituals (turning off the internet, staring at a blank page and staying put until something comes, listening to podcasts of author interviews), and there are several denominations (or genres and poetry schools). We have our leaders whose approval we might, if we’re not careful, depend on too much.

Nonetheless, like what Atwood says here, it’s important to go back to the very core of why we do what we do: to communicate with people.  Once we start to sacrifice the “relationship” for “religion,” our writing becomes self-indulgent, mean, without any sort of redemption, hard to stomach, and, you know, corrupted by the same thing that corrupts all religions: greed.

All of that aside, it was nice to hear that Margaret Atwood express a need for hope in order to write what she writes, despite the fact that in the hierarchy of writers, she’s probably pretty close to the Vatican. Writing is always a process, no matter who we are or what we’ve written.

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Meet Nick Sturm (and his book of poetry)

Nick is my colleague down here in Tallahassee but I think of him as a Midwestern poet, specifically an Ohio poet because he’s from Akron.  He makes Akron seem cool, like the Black Keys make Akron seem cool. The first time I hung out with him, he came and joined a bunch of poets on my porch, brought a bottle of excellent whiskey, and wrote a bunch of poems with the group on the backs of pizza boxes.  I still have those pizza boxes.  They are, as Nick would say, “Rad”. He’s not just cool though, he’s impressive.  Every time I turn around, Nick’s doing something awesome related to poetry, or he’s got a new poem appearing somewhere awesome.   Like when I went to his Facebook wall to catch up on where he’s at on his current book tour, I saw that many of his friends were re-posting this new poem of his, which was recently published on the PEN American Center’s website.  I would say that Nick is just having a really good summer but believe me, he’s like this all year long.

H_NGM_N recently published his first book of poetry:

Like Nick himself, his book is doing things. Lots of things. He’s got several poems called “What a Tremendous Time We’re Having,” spliced between other poems, my favorite of which have titles that start with “Basic Guide…”  He’s got a Basic Guide to History that would make Woody Guthrie and Emma Goldman blush.  He’s got a Basic Guide to Friendship, which made enchiladas sound delicious and necessary. He’s got a Basic Guide to Success, Basic Guide to Growing Up, and a Basic Guide to Emergency that had one of my favorite lines in the whole book:

Every moment is an emergency and every emergency is an array of juxtaposition and grace.”

His book is anything but basic.  It’s an unbasic guide to a whole bunch of truths, and many of these truths had me laughing in public.  In some ways, reading Nick’s poems reminded me of last Thanksgiving, when I spent the afternoon in my apartment with my brother listening to all the Mitch Hedberg Youtube had to offer.  Like this line of Nick’s:

I wash my laundry in blue sauce.

and this line, which comes from the same “What a Tremendous Time We’re Having!” poem:

Sunflowers have the hospital surrounded

Like Mitch Hedberg, Nick’s poems are full of moments that make me stop and say, “Huh.I never saw it like that…” Moments that, I would say, indicate that I’m reading great poetry.  Some of these moments are sad, or nostalgic, or humble:

I feel like an air conditioner emitting/a kind of stupid music for you all but all I want/is not to be invisible.”

In the end, his repeated title proves true. We’re having a tremendous time and we don’t want it to end. Knowing Nick, there are plenty of tremendous poems coming soon.

You can buy his book here.

You can also watch H_NGM_N’s promotional video for his book:

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Meet Khary Jackson (and his book of poetry)

One of my intentions for creating this website was to have a space for promoting my friends’ work.  I have a lot of friends with new books, or with books coming out soon, so I’m here to get that ball rolling with one of my oldest and favorite friends, Khary Jackson.

Khary and I both attended the Detroit High School for the Fine and Performing Arts (he graduated a year before me), and he was always a little weird and a lot talented. Usually those qualities come hand in hand (for example, Khary Jackson). One of my favorite memories of him is when I came into our drama teacher’s office and he was standing in front of the television, conducting all of the symphonies along with Tom Hulce in the film version of Amadeus.   Khary and I both majored in theater/drama and we competed together on our school’s state champion forensics team.  We competed in a dead people competition.  Not really.  Forensics, in that context, means speech and drama.  Khary was one of the most stand out, uninhibited performers on the team, so it’s no surprise that he continues to write and perform his poetry in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he now lives.  Few things make me happier than talking to him on the phone, not only because he has a marvelous speaking voice, but because when I’m listening closely, I can catch snippets of the Minnesota accent he’s picked up over the last decade.  It’s adorable, though adorable is not a word I’d use to describe his work.  His words are imaginative, memorable, and usually pretty heart-wrenching but also pretty funny at times.  His poems, like his performances, are uninhibited.  There is no fear or hesitancy in Khary’s work, which makes it a blast to read.

This week I finally got around to ordering and reading his first poetry collection, Any Psalm You Want, which came out last spring from Write Bloody Poetry.  The book is as marvelous as its title. It’s also got a great cover:

There’s a lot of themes going on in this book: music, Detroit, the African American experience, grieving and suffering, living life to its full capacity.  Of course, if you know me at all, it was the Detroit aspect of this book that captured my interest the most. In a poem called “Frida in Detroit,” he details the miscarriage she had at a hospital named after Henry Ford:

Frida./This is my city before Motown. It is a body/that walks with no rhythm in its limp./There is no music here but what you scrape from the concrete,/what you break from your back in the liver of a factory.

Many of the music poems are conversations:  George Gershwin tells Janis Joplin what he thinks of her version of “Summertime.”  Leadbelly makes sure Kurt Cobain knows what he’s really singing about. In another poem, Khary ponders June’s reaction to Johnny Cash’s version of Hurt.  You know, things you wish you’d thought about before and are grateful to be able to think about from this point on.

Reading Khary’s poems excites me because he presents poetry as a medium of infinite possibilities*, especially when it comes to subject matter.   Aaliyah Haughton’s brother apparently re-dubbed some of her lines in her last film shortly after she died in a plane crash.  Khary hears about this and says, “Really? I have to write a poem about that.”

You can order his book here.

*This phrase is an inside joke that I’d be happy to explain in person because it’s pretty hilarious.

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SONGWRITING MONTH DAY THREE: A Sonnet Song

Happy Songwriting month! Are you ready to write a song now?

We’re going to be writing a new song every three days so that we can come out of this adventure with 10 new songs.

Intimidated? I get it, so am I, but we can do it.  Remember, the songs don’t have to be brilliant, just workable.  We have all month and then the rest of our lives to make the song spectacular.

TODAY’S PROMPT: Write a sonnet and put a tune to it.

It’s okay if you don’t know or remember how a sonnet works because I’m about to tell you.

It’s simple: The only rule is it has to be 14 lines. In a song, that’s probably going to look like three verses and a rhyming couplet at the end.

You can go Shakespearean on the rhyme scheme:

ABAB

CDCD

EFEF

GG

Or Petrarchan:

ABBA

CDDC

EFFE

GG

Or you can do whatever you want! The only rule is that it has to be 14 lines.

You can be super formulaic and write each line in iambic pentameter, but in my experience, ten syllable lines sound terrible in songs. (Yes, I have tried to fit iambic pentameter in a lyric line before.  Have I mentioned that I’m a nerd?)

One thing you might try, which works wonders in getting the song to move, is to try the traditional sonnet form for subject/verse relationship.  It goes something like this:

Verse one makes a statement or proposes a problem.

Verse two develops that statement or problem.

Verse Three counters the statement, or tosses a curve-ball into what you’re developing.

The end, or rhyming couplet somehow brings conclusion to the problem you’ve set up.

Have a go!

SONG OF THE DAY: Ol’ 55

This song has nothing to do with sonnets.  It’s the first Tom Waits song I ever loved.  The real reason I’m choosing it is because I’m hitting the road real early this morning to embark on a long drive home. It is the world’s best song for an early morning’s drive.

By the way, someone posted the whole Closing Time album on Youtube and that’s what I’ve posted. Listen to the whole thing! It’s so good. And sexy. Young Tom Waits is actually sexy.

He’s also a poet, which makes him appropriate for sonnet day.

You’re a poet too, Shakespeare. Now go at it.

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Last Thoughts for Revise the Novel Month

Whoa–what a month it’s been. Besides trying to understand what it means to be a writer, I also found myself embarking on a serious self-improvement overhaul.  That’s why so many of my thoughts are life-thoughts.

Writing is a life.  It’s a lifestyle.  It filters into every other aspect of who we are.  It’s an identity–it provides a certain perspective on the world around us.  Hopefully, it provides a more generous attitude towards others and ourselves; hopefully it keeps us curious and non-judgmental.  It definitely keeps us disciplined.  It keeps us persistent, a little ambitious, and resilient towards the things that seem to want to try and steal that identity away from us.

I highly recommend these month-long projects, which I’m now just starting to embark upon.  Here’s a bit of reflection on the experience:

I tend to make goals for the distant future, but by keeping the month in mind, I found myself more focused on keeping the daily routine.  I didn’t work on my novel every day (in fact, I deliberately took Sundays off from it), but by knowing I was in May, and that May was Revise the Novel Month, I had an easier time keeping a clear goal in mind. For me, it was shape the thing up to send to manuscript clearance for the MFA and to send it off to a few friends for the next time I dedicate a month to the novel.  I did this, but it was a severely bumpy ride.  I had drama to deal with (which is why you got a post about it, of course), I had a lot of self-doubt and days of flat out laziness.

It’s not done. (I didn’t expect it to be.) There are many months of work to come; as many as it will take to see this thing come to a place that feels ready to send off to agents and publishers.  I plan to keep on dividing the work into month-long projects.  I might spend a near-approaching month on character development, for instance, with short exploratory assignments.  I might spend the month writing scenes that may or may not go into the novel.  I might then spend another month shaping the first fifty pages, or the first act, or however this project unfolds.  My routine is going to change drastically because I won’t have as much time once I start working again in the real world.  This scares me, but I think the monthly plan is going to be a huge asset.

If you do the monthly project thing, I highly recommend you start with poems.  They don’t have to be good (mine weren’t especially).  But they are manageable and they help us to think more deeply about words.  And I found myself continuing to write poems, even through revise the novel month.  They are, at their most base state, a fantastic verbal exercise for the prose writer.

My next project is to take a bit of a break from the novel in order to work on music.  I did this in April, when I focused on poetry and language.  I think that the month off definitely helped me in terms of filling the well with energy and willingness to work on the book.  By the end of April, I couldn’t wait to hang with my characters again.  Hopefully this will be a repeated experience.

My last thought: You can do it.  If you’re writing a novel, you have to keep reminding yourself that.  It’s hard, but you can do it.  You have everything you need to do it well.

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Thought for Day 30: Don’t Be That Person

I’m thinking a lot about awareness, lately. Self awareness.  Knowing my flaws, being able to take criticism, and working towards self-improvement.  Of course, as you can tell from the way I’ve been writing these blog posts, I believe that most life wisdom can also be translated into writing wisdom.

If you’ve been in a workshop, you know what it’s like to spend 45 minutes talking about someone’s work and then listening to the author for 15 minutes defend their work against all points of criticism.

Don’t be that person.

It doesn’t matter if the story “actually happened.”

It doesn’t matter if the characters dictated the story in some mystical writing process.

Part of serving the work is improving the work.  A huge part, actually.  I’ve seen writers get slaughtered in workshop and then limp around–I’ve been one of these.  I’ve been slaughtered in workshop and then limped to the bar.  I was less mature then.

It’s a matter of maturity, of course, but an ideal writer already knows what the flaws in the story are before anyone reads the draft.  An ideal writer takes unanticipated criticism home, sleeps on it, and then, when the emotional response has dissipated, re-reads the story to see if the critic is right.

Writers must be ruthless at self-improvement–self-writing-improvement.  A professional chooses story over ego. The critics aren’t always right, but a writer who defends their work to critics is always wrong.

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Thought for Day 29: Round Up Your Allies

Being a writer takes a lot of discernment about the kinds of people you let into your creative process.  I can’t imagine being a writer without friends to read my writing.

Allies are people who make you feel confident. They are your friends, first. They want good things for you.  They, like you, are on “team better world.” They are honest but never mean.  This doesn’t mean they are always nice for the sake of being nice, or don’t offer criticism.  But their criticism is always constructive.

Unfortunately, there are some competitive writers out there who want us to feel bad about our writing so they can feel better about their own.  Learn to spot them.  Put them on a list of writing enemies. Don’t let them go near your work.  That doesn’t mean they are your enemies though.  You can still grab a beer with them from time to time.  They just don’t get to be your writing ally.

Your new writing project is a newborn child.  You’re not going to let just anyone hold it.  No one has the right to tell you to kill your newborn child.

Also, ask yourself if you are a constructive critic when someone asks you to read their work.  Are you generous while you read?  Assume that there is something good about what you’re reading and look for it.  Then try to spot what’s getting in the way.  You wouldn’t publish it because … but you would publish it if …

Make a list: who can you trust with your writing? Who brings confidence to your work, wants you to write the best you can possibly write because, well, they like you?

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Thought for Day 28: Strength

If you want to be a writer, you have to be strong.

I have just spent a couple years in what Iyanla Vanzant calls, “The Basement.”  It’s when you feel like a victim.  It’s when you cling to self-destructive people and self-destructive behavior. People walk all over you all the time. The “First Floor” is when you are able to recognize the destruction and start making changes.  I’m on the second floor now, which means I’m learning how be strong.

From the second floor, I can see how living in the basement has affected my writing.  My characters tended to be passive.  The conflicts were unclear–it was hard to tell what the characters wanted.

A good story has a strong character with flaws.  Weak characters with a few glimpses of strength rarely cut it for a good story.  We’ve heard it in workshops again and again: What’s the conflict?  What does the character want? What does the character need to do in order to achieve their desire?

What workshops don’t teach us is that in order to write strong characters, we need to know how to be strong people.

What does strength look like?  It looks like knowing what game you’re playing.

It means you find out the rules for the game you’re playing and follow them.

It means going to work, no matter what.

It means that you don’t get destroyed by destructive criticism.

It means you never give up, never never give up.

It means that you don’t get caught up in other people’s drama that makes you weak.

It means you learn how to adopt a healthy lifestyle that doesn’t contribute to your weakness.

The stronger you are, the stronger your writing will be.  Don’t write characters who are victims.  Don’t be a victim.

To get started, I recommend getting to know Hedwig and the Angry Inch.  Be like Hedwig.  Especially in this song:

 

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Thoughts for Day 26 & Day 27: Listen

Yesterday, I found myself in the company of some improv comedians/performers.  They were brainstorming for a writing project.   These actors were very respectful to each other, and most of them were really funny, but I noticed that they were funniest, not when they were one-upping each other or trying to impress each other, but when they were listening to each other and responding accordingly.  Comedy is timing, as they say, but guess what: so is writing.

Each sentence is a response to the one that came before it. Cutting off a subject and switching to a new one is a kind of response.  I guess the opening sentence is an exception, though I do like that writing trick of starting a story as if the reader is coming into the middle of something.  In order to pull that trick off, the author needs to know what came right before the moment on the page before the first paragraph begins–what’s on that white space that the reader can’t see. Either way, I believe good writing centers on the writer’s ability to listen.  Listening to language, listening to the tone of the characters who are playing the movie out in our head, etc.

I like writing that is language-driven (as opposed to plot-driven), and by language-driven I mean, where punctuation does more than create the meaning of a sentence.  That’s its basic function, of course, but in order to advance to Cormac McCarthy’s level, punctuation becomes a tool for making rhythm happen within a sentence.  We can’t know what sort of rhythm our sentences have if we’re not listening to them.Most of that stuff comes naturally, though.  I’m learning that doesn’t come naturally, and takes bit of effort, is listening during the revision process.  I tend to sort of gloss over the sentences I’ve seen so many times before.  Revision, though, should be the time when I’m listening extra-closely.  If it doesn’t jump off the page, it’s probably a dull sentence.  Dull sentences are probably okay sometimes, by way of emphasizing a sharp sentence, but we have to nail the ends of paragraphs. We nail them by listening to how that sentence lingers in the small space we create with the enter and tab buttons on our keyboards.

Sentences can be quiet and loud (WITHOUT CAPS).  Sentences can be abrupt, or smooth, or energetic.  For more about this, read John Gardner’s THE ART OF FICTION.  He talks about this quite a bit, and recommends poetic technique for the writer (scanning your sentences, using scansion).

Here’s another listening-related anecdote: a friend recommended, as I was putting an ending on my last draft, that I should listen to the kind of music that creates the sort of tone and mood I’m going for.  I sort of wrote to match the rhythm of the music (which was Rufus Wainwright, by the way…)  This worked pretty well for me.  I found that my sentences responded to what I was hearing from my computer speakers.

Okay, so listening to sentences and language is one thing.  There is another aspect of listening for a writer that goes beyond what’s on the page.  I’m thinking of a story Peter Rollins tells in his latest book, The Idolatry of God, where he’s proving that we impose so much onto conversations that we risk closing ourselves off to what the person speaking is actually saying.  He used an example where his friend, who was considering getting a divorce, said that he didn’t want to hurt the children in the same way his parents hurt him and his siblings when they were kids.  Peter Rollins instinctively thought that the guy was posing an argument against his decision to get a divorce–that the guy was saying that going through his parents’ divorce was really difficult.  Later, Rollins realized that the guy’s parents were still married; he completely misheard the guy because he was listening to what he figured the guy was saying, rather than what he was actually saying.

I find this useful in thinking about writing.  I’m a more mystical type of writer, and by that I mean, I believe that writing is more like uncovering something that’s there than filling up an empty void with words. That’s why, again, I like to think of writing as an act of discovery. Sometimes this uncovering takes a few drafts to get it right.  Once we know what’s there, then we can tweak the language to suit it best.  The language then, its nuances, rhythms, serve the work and the work itself is what we are uncovering.

I blame Madeleine L’Engle for these crazy ideas.  And Julia Cameron and Steven Pressfield, who I’ve been reading lately.  Listening is how we tap into whatever is inside urging us to write (the child of a few posts back).  It’s also how we connect our story to a larger conversation.  We have to listen to what’s in and outside of us, paying close attention, if we want to write great works.

I was listening to this song while I wrote this post, which happens to mention listening in its chorus.  Coincidence?

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Thought for Day 25: What to Write About

This thought comes, again, from Steven Pressfield’s THE WAR OF ART.

I have noticed two major terms writers like to use when insulting other writers:  hack and precious.  I’m not exactly sure what precious means, except I get the impression that it has something to do with the kind of writing one associates with greeting cards.  I’m positive that it is always a matter of taste and opinion because I heard someone call Italo Calvino precious and Italo Calvino is a god.  See what I mean:

Precious, again, is a matter of opinion.

Hack, I understand, especially because Pressfield lays it out for us at the end of this book:

A hack writes hierarchically.  He writes what he imagines will play well in the presence of others.  He does not ask himself, What do I myself want to write?  What do I think is important? Instead he asks, What’s hot? What can I make a deal for?

(152).

Hacks sound pretty smart to me but I still don’t want to be one.  Hence, my poverty.

I found, during my MFA, that I can’t commit to a project that makes me feel like a hack.  I wrote about 200 pages of a novel and then stopped because I let someone see it who said that the writing was unimaginative.  That scared me, because imagination is a pretty big part of my (and your) identity as a writer.  If he was wrong, which I don’t think he was, I think I would have felt that and persisted.  I knew instead that he was right, that I wasn’t at all connected to the language in the book I was writing because I wasn’t really writing it from that, “I must write this!” place.  I didn’t care that much about the characters.  The situation, though interesting, was not really something that I felt like my life’s journey has given me authority over.

Today’s thought is about what to write.  Your intro to creative writing class taught you to write what you know.  I don’t like that phrase much.  Instead, I think “write what you’re obsessed with” is better advice.

If you’re obsessed with something, if there is a sliver of a narrative that you overheard one day and think about once or twice a week, you know enough about it to write about it.  You don’t have to know everything about what you’re going to write.  That’s why I don’t like the advice to write what you know.  Writing is an act of discovery, by gosh, and nothing is more dull than reading a narrative from the perspective of a “know-it-all.”

No. Write what you’re obsessed with.

Write what you need to know more about.  Write about what makes you curious.

My novel that I’m working on now came to me when a mentor asked, “What do you wish you could find on the shelf at a bookstore? Write that.”

There was a time when I only wanted to read the kind of novel I was writing, but due to personal experiences/circumstances/tragedies at the time, I knew that the book I was working on was the last thing I’d go to the bookstore to read.  I needed something funnier.  I needed something more triumphant, more strange, more delightful than what I was working on.

I spent a day grieving.  Deciding to put a novel down for a while (or perhaps drop all together) that you’ve worked on for 200 pages feels like taking a puppy into a field and shooting it in the head because it has some strange disease that you can’t afford to cure.  It’s awful.

I’m guessing that there will be a time, or five times, this current project will seem like a diseased puppy to me.  But I’ve already written a draft, so I am more confident that I have what I need to cure the puppy.  I have more in stock now, I mean. More tools to fix it.*

Plus, I have made it through a full draft so I know that enough about it works to keep going. (I ditch drafts a lot.  A LOT. I don’t recommend that, necessarily, but I also won’t say it’s something I don’t do a lot.)

*That paragraph is for the record.  Please remind me of this post when I start talking about my novel like it’s a diseased puppy.