Kim's Craft Blog -- Fiction, Memoir, Creative Writing

What Do Writers Want?

2012-01-16T09:00:00.019-05:00

I am delighted to welcome today to KCB my fellow Climbing Ivy Press author and fellow Brown alum, Brookline writer Susan Meyers, author of Check This Box If You Are Blind, now out in paperback and Kindle edition. Here is Susan blogging on the subject of what writers want once that long-anticipated book finally comes out. --Cheers! Kim

What do writers want, really?

The answer isn't complicated.
Writers want to hear these five words: You're such a good writer.
Or these five words: You really made me think.
Or these: Your book changed my life.

A needy bunch, aren't we?

I've thought a great deal about publishing over the past year. My memoir, Check This Box If You Are Blind, was published last June by Climbing Ivy Press. It had taken ages to write, but the extra time and endless revisions had paid off handsomely, I thought. I had coaxed onto the page a brave, funny story about my complicated relationship with my brother, a blind man who refuses to admit that he can't see for beans. Some writers, and this is what happened to me, are private people with personal stories that they feel compelled to write.

The trouble arrives when we leap over the garden hedge. We go from private acts of writing to public acts of printing out and passing around.

Publication. Could there be a blander, more bureaucratic-sounding word for what we writers do with our freshest, most electric work?

The dictionary defines publication as the act of bringing before the public, and there are many ways to achieve this today. It can be as simple as printing a few pages and handing them around in a workshop . . . or signing up to have your book printed on demand . . . or finding an agent, wooing a publisher, and then choosing a cover design.

Some writers don't seem to need readers, and actually I felt just this way when I was younger. But last spring, as I finished my memoir, I felt for the first time that I wanted readers. Lots of them. Publication didn't sound blah to me anymore. It sounded, after the long nourishing meal of writing, like the chocolate eclair for dessert.

And yet, I felt uneasy about it (see private people/personal stories, above). I was so invested in the story I had written. Rewritten. Revised. Revised again. I'd poured myself out, mostly in solitude, at moments uncertain about what I'd gotten down on paper. Now I was opening myself up to reactions, feedback, responses.

Writing can be a pretty messy process. It's amazing how neat and tidy published writing often looks. It's like a magic trick. I still want to laugh, sometimes, when I hand someone my book, because I have such an intimate knowledge of the mess that came first.

And so, for all of these reasons, I had my trepidations. Fellow writers, I am happy to report that most friends and family members (let's leave reviewers out of this) have a sense of how vulnerable a writer can feel when they publish. The compliments, comments, questions I have fielded have been, almost without exception, supportive and wonderful.

Readers, please celebrate your writer friends when they publish. Lukewarm praise is hard for us to stomach. So please avoid this pat on the head: How great that you finished! And here's my pet peeve, the comment I really dislike: What's next? Please, can't we just celebrate this one first?

We writers also want to hear that what we've written is meaningful. We want to hear that our writing matters. We want you to confirm that you are here in this brief life with us, and that we have reached you with our words: That we have shared something important.

Which come to think of it, is something we all want. --Posted by Susan Meyers, January 16, 2012

Susan Meyers' delightful memoir, Check This Box If You Are Blind, is now out and available for purchase in paperback and on the Kindle. PURCHASE NOW. You can also follow THIS LINK to watch Susan's kick-ass book trailer on You Tube.

"Teaching the Dog to Think" is Now Available for Purchase

2012-01-01T07:30:00.011-05:00

Hello Kim's Craft Blog Readers: I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays. As we start the New Year, I just wanted to let everyone know that Teaching the Dog to Think, my new memoir about building skills and enhancing creativity, is now available for purchase. While this is ostensibly a book about my encounter with dog agility training, it is also a path towards understanding positive learning theory, as mapped out by Karen Pryor and others. You can refer to my earlier blog post on Revising the Workshop to read more about applying positive learning theory to teaching creative writing. What follows here is a synopsis of my book, together with some blurbs, links to purchase Teaching the Dog to Think, and further reading.

Happy New Year, Everyone, and Happy Reading!

SYNOPSIS OF KIM'S NEW BOOK

Teaching the Dog to Think is Kimberly Davis’ engaging memoir about her crash introduction to the sport of dog agility—with its jumps, tunnels, balance beams and weave poles. An award-winning poet and blogger, Davis vividly describes her frustrations trying to get her dog to “mind.” We then watch as her first steely-eyed agility coach shames her into giving up choke collars and scruff shakes in favor of the “positive” training methods used by agility instructors.

Davis’ breezy, often humorous account shows how these new techniques allow her to communicate with the “alien” mind of a dog. Also how they transform her unruly yearling collie, Willow, into a loyal, hardworking teammate. Davis ultimately carries the lessons she has mastered in dog training class into other areas of her life, particularly into parenting and teaching creative writing. In a climactic scene, Davis stands over her young son browbeating him to do his homework, and realizes, I wouldn’t do this to a dog. She knows now better ways of encouraging an inexperienced learner to perform.

In the end, this memoir becomes a soul-searching exploration of how to get others to do what we want without bullying or cruelty—by using our heads and forcing ourselves to be a little smarter. A subtly subversive book about dealing responsibly with those less powerful than ourselves, Teaching the Dog to Think speaks not only to dog lovers, but also to anyone who has ever felt helpless, angry, or frustrated as a parent, teacher or pet owner.

"A wonderful entry point for anyone learning about these important new methods for teaching skills and enhancing creativity." --Catherine S. Mayes, Independent Autism Advocate and Autism Project Advocate, Massachusetts Advocates for Children

"You MUST read this book if you have children or pets, and want to change their behavior without coercion!" --Richard McManus, Founder and President, The Fluency Factory

"An interesting story of how switching to clicker training vastly improved one agility fan's dog and also changed her own approach to family life." --Karen Pryor, author, Don't Shoot the Dog and Reaching the Animal Mind

WHERE TO PURCHASE "TEACHING THE DOG TO THINK"

Now Available from Amazon

Watch for the Kindle Edition, Coming Spring 2012

FOR FURTHER READING

Karen Pryor has lots more information about "operant conditioning" and positive learning theory on her website, as well as fun animal videos, and training classes for canine and human instructors. Visit Karen Pryor's Clicker Training Website.

Painful Proofs: A Christmas Nightmare

2011-12-26T07:00:00.107-05:00

Writers have it tough these days. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that. If you are reading this blog you are probably a writer yourself. And, for a writer these days, there's no moment quite like the one when your physical book comes rolling off the line for the first time, and you get to lay your eyes on the corporeal embodiment of the project you have slaved over, usually for years, obsessing over each phrase and comma. This moment has been likened to childbirth, but frankly I found childbirth to be a snap by comparison.

Hopefully this moment will be a good one for you--that inestimable juncture, which usually takes place on your front step or porch, when the real live physical book comes to you at home stamped, "Proof." You tear open the cardboard box or package hoping that your every dream of joy will be realized. And then, in this age of editing staff triage and print on demand, often something horrible has gone awry. The book emerges from its container an ugly monster, a joke on what it was you wanted your book to look like. A dwarf, a mutant, a horror.

Oh, the stories I have heard from my fellow writers. Typefaces that change halfway down the page, or sometimes several times throughout the book. Formatting that appears almost random. (Who knew there were so many places that a section heading might appear on a given page?) And, my own recent nightmare: The pretty red cover I ordered for my book Teaching the Dog to Think that came back a dark and hideous purple-brown.

Sigh. Sob.

So much for your dreams and fantasies of what your book was going to look like, right? Welcome back to the real world, foolish writer.

And the real world it is, for now you have a rotten decision to make for which there are no easy answers. How close is this book to the one you wanted? Are the problems repairable? If so, are they worth the additional money (sometimes considerable) and weeks (often many) that will be required to fix the mistakes and errors that have crept in?

What is one to do? (I mean, what is one to do AFTER the strong drink. After the long hot bath and the valium. After the rants over the phone to your editor, your friend, your spouse.)

Well, the first guidance I have, and the easiest, is to make absolutely every textual edit you can before the book ever goes to the printer. Hire freelance editors, copy editors, fact checkers. Hire everyone you need to get it right, and enlist friends to be your second pair of eyes. Once the book is sent off to the printer, everything gets much more expensive to fix, so do all of your editing and fixing ahead if you possibly can.

Also, edit every proof as if it were the only one. Why? Because problems can creep in later in the process, particularly coding problems, where someone just happens to hit the wrong key by mistake. It feels personal, but it isn't. Every page needs to be checked each time you get back a proof.

But of course, as with my book, there are things you don't actually see until you are holding the physical object in your hand. Like the actual cover color. Like where those titles, headings and quotations really sit on the page. So then what? What do you do when the titles and section headings you've slaved over are riding a bit too low. Is it worth fixing? How low are they, really? How low is low? How high is high?

And what about the way you feel? Your dreams have been dashed after all, so you aren't going to be particularly happy at this moment, especially when you have already planned the book launch party and are postponing it for the third time. Or when you've told friends and family that your book would be coming out "any moment now"--and that was three months ago. Oh, the personal and professional embarrassment. Oh, the grinding and gnashing of the teeth. Is it worth fixing the problems? Or better just to push the flawed object out the door, and hope that you are the only one who notices. Because, in truth, you are the only one who cares THIS MUCH about your own book.

And that's really the problem, isn't it? Until we writers have control of every aspect of the publishing process, we are never going to be truly happy. Because we are fixers, obsessors, tweakers. It's a congenital problem among writers. We became writers in the first place because we liked to move commas and chicken scratchings around the page. There will always be things to tweak and change. At some point, you have to cut it off.

And so we must decide, as we gaze at our "proof" books, which will never quite match up to the ideal inside our word-obsessed heads, if it's close enough. Or is the trouble inside of us? Is it something we actually need to fix? Or, like the ding in the paint job you obsessed too much over in the living room, is it something that only you will ever really notice.

Okay, I had to find out. So I showed the ugly brown cover to my husband. I didn't tell him anything ahead of time, just held it out in front of his nose, and said, "What do you think?" His face wrinkled up, as if he'd just smelled something bad. "Ewww," he said, and looked at me.

"It was supposed to be red," I explained.

"You'll need to get that fixed," he said.

I felt a great sense of relief when he said that. It wasn't just me. The cover really was extremely dark and hideous. It really was worth fixing, even if it meant putting off the book launch party yet again, in this case until after Christmas.

It was nice that someone else, someone I trusted, could confirm this for me. As another friend put it, "It's been a long marathon, writing this book. Don't quit on heartbreak hill." I knew what she meant. She had watched this book go through numerous drafts, two agents, various editors. Nearly a year of production. I hadn't come all this way to settle for something unsatisfactory.

In the end, this experience was, for me, about persistence. About not quitting until I got it right. We went back to our creative team, who found just the right persimmon red that you see above, and made it a reality. While it's not the red cover I originally imagined, I think it's a good one. It's a nice color for an early spring book launch. It sets off the black and white cover photo well. And, most importantly, in this newly digital age, it shows up well online.

I think, now, that my book is right. Everything. The cover, the section headings, the formatting, everything. And if it isn't, and you happen to find a typo on page 56, or on the back cover, then don't tell me about it. I don't want to know. I'll just want to fix it.

Kim's new memoir, Teaching the Dog to Think, about her touching and hilarious encounter with dog agility training, is now out and available for purchase HERE. The Kindle Edition will launch in the spring of 2012.

Writing in Winter

2011-12-14T06:59:00.000-05:00

As the cold begins to settle into New England, I often find it hard to coax out the writer in me. I find it difficult to write at this time of the year. Writing usually involves a lot of sitting still, and even with a thick pair of woolen socks this means it's easy to get chilled. I find myself looking catlike for patches of sun to sit in, in order to stay warm and fend off the shadows and slanted blue light that mark this time of the year. That blue winter light makes me want to curl up in bed and hibernate for long hours.

No, no, I tell myself, I must inhabit the sensual body and communicate the experience of "what it was like" (whatever I'm writing about) to my hypothetical perfect reader. And yet, it's hard to relish inhabiting the senses when the physical body is, well, cold. I find that a walk outdoors seems to help. A brisk walk outside can assist the writerly body to embrace the cold, rather than recoil from it. Cold is a happier thing when it meets your cheeks as you hike your favorite trail than it is when it bites your toes as you sit at your laptop. Still, it's hard to write while hiking.

Sometimes I find it better to write at night, or in the early hours of the morning. The dark is particularly dense in Boston in the winter, particularly thick and complete. The lights--streetlights, moonlight, holiday lights--all seem especially pure and vivid at this time of year by contrast to the darkness. Perhaps it's the way the cold air conducts light. Science probably has an explanation for this. But whatever it is, my senses seem to respond. And so I rise at four am to sit at the dining room table with my first strong cup of coffee. Often I will find myself in a sort of wee-hours trance of alertness that seems conducive to writing, or at least to writing poetry, which is what I'm working on now.

I wonder if other Northern climate writers have found this. Perhaps, if it's going to be this dark at this time of the year, then we should embrace the night and the strange alertness it brings. In such moments, I'm less aware of the cold. My senses are more keen. And the words start to come together.

Thoughts on Revision: On Stepping Back and Seeing What's on the Page

2011-11-17T08:51:00.000-05:00

We had an interesting conversation about revision in my workshop recently that I thought I would share. One of my workshop participants had written a terrific story--a taut, frightening Joyce Carol Oates inspired piece. We were all praising this story, but I kept trying to lop off the opening and the ending, which seemed less successful than the body of the story itself. The opening and the ending seemed to be creating an unsuccessful "frame" for the story, and they were marring what was an otherwise excellent bit of work. The writer, though, was resisting my cuts, and perhaps rightly so. She said that the opening and ending were critical to her "vision" of the story, and that she was trying to address certain "themes."

I was reminded of this discussion this morning as I was revising some of my own poetry, and I hit upon a poem with an unsuccessful opening. When this happens to me, I always try and put my work away for awhile, and then come back to it. And when I do come back, I feel like a painter, and as if I'm "stepping back" from my easel to see what I actually got down. There's nothing like reading your work with a fresh eye to see where you've gone wrong.

I think the more difficult issue is the one my student was grappling with: What to do about it once you've seen the trouble. I have to say that my own instinct is simply to cut the offending tissue. Sometimes if you cut, you leave a hole into which rushes some very interesting language. However, my student had a valid point. Sometimes you just need to keep writing forward in order to get your whole vision on the paper. She is her own artistic director, after all, and it is her right to try and implement her vision. So I was perhaps being a bit disrespectful or hasty in simply hacking off her opening and ending.

I suspect that where she was going wrong with her frame was that she was trying to "impose" specific "themes" on her story. This, for me, brings back the worst of high school English class. A story or a poem is an organic thing, with drama, voice, and felt description. We must work with this organic life on the page as if it were a living, breathing creature. There is no imposing a "theme" from above, despite what we may have been taught in high school English. Themes and universals must rise, if at all, from the material, and not be imposed upon it.

For me, this is why it's so important to step back and see what we have actually accomplished before attempting to revise. We must try and keep what feels dramatized and authentic; and cut anything that rings false or feels imposed upon the text. It requires courage as an artist to do this. It's a little scary in that moment--when you step back and and your eyes come into focus, and your flawed work of art comes fully into view.

Lessons in Lingering: Getting the "Inner Life" on the Page

2011-11-02T09:15:00.000-04:00

We are now in my "heavy teaching" period for the fall term. I encounter this period both spring and fall, when I'm teaching my fiction and memoir workshops at the Cambridge Center, usually in the sixth or seventh weeks of my classes. My workshops have gone on long enough that our writers are turning out lots of pages, and suddenly I'm being followed around by an increasingly tall stack of manuscripts and exercises to review. I always dread this moment a little because my students' work begins to cut into my own writing. But I also find it an interesting moment because I have enough student manuscripts in front of me to see how my classes are doing as a whole, and how well my students are absorbing my teaching methods. Are my lessons getting through to them? What do they seem to be missing?

This fall, I seem to be doing pretty well at getting my workshop participants to "dramatize" in scenes. And their narrative voices seem to be coming along in a satisfactory way. (Perhaps I have been blogging about these topics long enough that writers are coming into my workshops already primed to learn these things.) The place where my students seem to be falling down is in getting on the page the inner lives of their characters. I thought that I would blog today about what I think is going wrong for these writers.

The trouble is what I would characterize as "a failure to sustain key moments." I've had several manuscripts this week and last week, from both fiction and memoir writers, where the writer placed us nicely in scene. And the scene was proceeding through the right "moments" to tell the story. And yet, something wasn't quite getting across. The individual moments were just going by too quickly. This is often a hard thing to discuss with writers. I tell them, "I'm just not feeling it"--at that moment when, say, Judy is trying to fix up Mary with her old boyfriend. The writer says to me, "But it's right there on the page. Mary is offended."

The writer goes on to tell me, Look, I have dramatized the scene where Judy is floating the idea of a date for Mary with her old boyfriend, and--see--right there is where Mary feels offense. If I squint, I can usually see what the writer is talking about. Usually there's a line or a phrase or a gesture indicating that Mary is unhappy. And because that moment is right there in the manuscript, I'm usually accused by the writer of being a "poor reader." So, it's all my fault. I'm just a bad reader. I haven't read the writer's manuscript "carefully enough," and the writer feels that he or she doesn't need to revise.

But the fact is, I'm not a bad reader. Since I teach creative writing, I'm probably in fact a far better reader than your average inattentive Amazon shopper. And if I didn't pick up on the line about Mary taking offense, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there's probably something wrong with the manuscript, and not with me. What has happened is that the writer has dramatized, and has chosen the "right moment" to tell that part of the story, but she has failed to give the moment sufficient emphasis in the manuscript so that the reader will focus on it, or in some cases even notice it.

So how do we get our readers to "notice" our key dramatic moments?

Well, for one thing, we just need to linger on those moments a little longer. If being offended by Judy trying to fix her up with her old boyfriend is a big part of Mary's inner emotional life, just mentioning her irritation in a single clause or in a gesture buried in a long paragraph isn't going to communicate what's really going on. The narrator may need to provide, for example, a little dialogue where Mary resists being fixed up, along with perhaps some aggravated gestures. Or, the narrator might summarize some interior thoughts where Mary tries to suss out what Judy is really up to, and once Mary figures out what Judy is doing--fixing her up with her old boyfriend--our writer might have her narrator step in for a little interior rant: Did Judy really think Mary wanted her cast-offs, well did she? What ever gave her that idea? Hadn't they just been through months of Judy's breakup with Hank? Through the infidelities and broken dates? Why on earth would Judy now think that Mary would want to go out with this fellow? Or was this really all about Judy? Was this some sort of strange plan that Judy had cooked up to get back with Hank?

By staying with Mary's inner life longer, note how we are not only registering Mary's offense at Judy better, but we are also getting a lot more nuance on what the offense is all about, and what that might mean for the characters. The reader is lingering longer in the moment that so it registers as much more important, and we are hopefully being primed for what happens next and building suspense for coming scenes.

So writers--don't be afraid so slow down and "linger." Make sure you are devoting sufficient space to the "key moments" in your manuscript so that they register with your readers. Your writing will resonate much more clearly and vividly if you do. One final note: If you are writing a lot of Interior Monologue, as in my example above, make sure to use summarized thought, and not direct thought for the most part. For more on why, check out my earlier post on Exploring the Inner Life of Characters.

The Pleasures of the Regional Museum (And A Shocking Family Photo!)

2011-10-06T10:44:00.000-04:00

I found myself one morning furiously drying my hair and frantically packing my briefcase in my Lake Placid hotel room. I was already running late. I had a date to keep with an assistant curator at the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, New York. I was surveying the effects of Irene, and researching my new collection of poems about the vanished world of Adirondack subsistence farming. I had learned that the Adirondack Museum had a huge cache of photographs from the period that interested me, roughly 1880 to 1950. Getting there, though--to the museum--meant a long winding trip down through the mountains through a series of hamlets named after their lakes, Tupper, Saranac, Long, and I wasn't sure if I was going to hit detours and road blockages due to the damage from the hurricane.

I got lucky that morning. The roads were pretty clear in the western Adirondacks. I did hit a traffic tie up at one spot where a shoulder had washed out and the road was down to a single lane for repairs. But given the extent of the devastation I had seen--especially around Keene and Keene Valley--I counted myself lucky to be only fifteen minutes late for my appointment. Soon I was signing in at a thriving gift shop and gliding down a long hallway that held the velvety, low-humidity air of a library.

I was greeted in the back offices by the cool handshake of my assistant curator, a gracious young woman, and beautiful in the way of "gallerinas." She had already pulled some archival photographs for me. She had the advantage, in this task, of being a "local." She had a deer head with a large rack of antlers mounted on her office wall, and had grown up in nearby Long Lake with a father who was in the logging industry. So she had some appreciation of what I was up to: Trying to retrieve photographic evidence of the near-primitive world that had existed in the Adirondacks and surrounding foothills up through the forties and fifties, one in which the local people wrested a living almost exclusively from the natural environment in a constant cycle of hunting, fishing, sugaring, timbering, mining, dairy farming and cheesemaking. It was a world I dimly recalled from my youth and the many hours my twin brother and I had spent on my grandfather's small dairy farm while growing up.

This is not to say that there aren't still natural resources being harvested in the Adirondack region. In some parts there are still farming and timbering operations ongoing, though they tend to be much larger today. Fishing and hunting are still big draws, but mainly for hobbyists and tourists, and not to supply family subsistence. Gone are the days when nearly everybody had at least one cow, chickens, a large garden, and so forth. Hunting and fishing were done to put food on the table, and not for their entertainment value. (The local deer were sometimes known as "Adirondack beef.")

Back then, natural resources were employed to gain, in some form, nearly all of the things that we now take for granted as available at the grocery store. This was a world of constant and unrelenting physical labor, but also one which--to contemporary eyes--appears admirably self-sufficient and renewable, and filled with rewarding work--Although the photos--like the family photo above--often appear shocking to the modern eye for their grittiness and casual brutality. That's my grandfather in the photo at the top of this post, standing with his freshly killed buck. I have vivid childhood memories of my father and grandfather slaughtering deer in our garage. The thousands of photographs at the Adirondack museum--combined with my own family photographs and memories--promised a glimpse into this vanished way of life.

My curator guide, knowing that I was coming, had already culled what photos she could find from the museum's collection. Of course, if you are interested in the life of the common man, museum collections can be a disappointment because they tend to preserve records of the famous, the wealthy and the powerful, and not the lives of ordinary folk. However, the situation is often better at local and regional museums. One of the great pleasures of such museums is that they often have donated photographs and audio recordings from local families, as well as objects that were used for work and play in the area. They also tend to have a more local focus than the larger museums. In some cases, this can be a bad thing. If they don't have the resources for a professional staff, regional museums can turn into showcases for particular benefactors to tell overly flattering stories about themselves or their families. However, for a museum like the Adirondack Museum--one that is sufficiently well-endowed to hire a professional staff and to collect the best local and regional items to organize and display--there can be treasures available to writers and researchers that would be very difficult to find anywhere else. To take just one example, the Adirondack Museum has a wonderful display which includes a long rambling audio narrative from a cook who worked at one of the old logging camps. Listening to her story is like stepping back in time.

My assistant curator set me up on a high stool before a long bench, and instructed me to pull on a pair of cottony gloves so we could examine the archival photos. Then she brought them out one by one. There were really just a few that showed what I wanted, but they provided a fantastic view into a world I barely remembered: A low wooden sugaring house with a tin roof surrounded by the steam, woodsmoke and melting snow of late winter--a picture that looked just like the shed behind my grandfather's cow barn when I was six or eight. The best photo of all was a grainy snapshot from inside a tiny, old-fashioned dairy, with its long gleaming stainless steel pans where cheese curd was likely manufactured, probably in the thirties or forties. This, of course, was long before my time, and not the same dairy that my brother and I used to visit, but the photograph was so similar to what I experienced in my childhood that the neurons in my brain shouted their recognition. I could taste the fresh buttery cheese curd in my mouth, and feel in my teeth the sharp bite of the rock salt we used to sprinkle on it from big cardboard drums.

And there were other memories evoked as well. I won't try to list them all. You'll have to read the poems when I'm done with them. I guess what I want to say is that I found things at the museum that day that weren't in any of my own family's photographs. Our family photos, like the photograph of my grandfather above, are wonderful, but they do tend to focus on specific people, and not upon a way of life, or on what it was like to live in a specific time and place. What's great about local and regional museums is that their collections, if they are conscientiously managed, can rise above individual family members to reveal a whole society and way of life as it once existed. If you are writing poems or a memoir about one of these vanished periods, you might consider checking out your local museums and historical societies. You may find, as I did, a trove of historical treasures and photographs that will spark your own memories.

SOME PRACTICAL ADVICE with respect to researching writing projects at regional museums: Plan ahead. Most local and regional museums are happy to comply with research requests. However these are largely nonprofits, and their staffs are limited, busy, and usually at least partly volunteer. So you need to call ahead and schedule a convenient time if you want to visit. Also, if you are dealing with professional staff, tell them what you want and give them some time before you arrive to pull items of interest. In some cases, materials can be made available online or can be sent by email, saving everyone time and travel. You should also expect to pay a fee if you are going to take up significant staff time, or if you are seeking permission to republish archival photographs as part of a book project. Finally, most smaller museums are open only on a limited schedule. So check the hours before you go. Many Adirondack museums and historical societies, for example, are open only during the summer months.

Photo credits: The photograph above is of my grandfather, Guy Davis, of Salisbury Center, New York, and was probably taken by my mother, Janet Davis. Thanks to my brother, Tim Davis, for saving these old family photographs, and for having them digitally scanned.

My Research Trip: The Damage from Hurricane Irene

2011-09-10T09:01:00.001-04:00

I awoke this morning in a hotel room overlooking Mirror Lake in Lake Placid, and found myself watching mountains and fir trees emerging from a shimmering fog. And then, what was that across the lake? Something like two tails wagging. But the tails were too far away and too large for dogs. It took a moment for me to realize that I was seeing two large white draft horses grazing in a small field across the water. Then, as I watched, they disappeared again into the white fog the mountains insist upon shedding up here, in the wake of Hurricane Irene.

Since I am currently writing about the Adirondacks, I couldn't resist coming up here to take some notes in the aftermath of the hurricane. Water power and flooding have long been a big part of the story of this region. Later, I will drive down to survey the storm damage in devastated Keene--to see the effects of the sheer power of the downward thrust of mountain water. It is something we humans tend to take for granted, as we harness the power of water to run our mills and generate power, but in the spring and fall the power of water in the mountains has a way of getting a bit out of control, especially after a big storm comes through.

There is a supplement to the Lake Placid News with incredible pictures of the storm damage. I'm putting in a link to some of the photos if you want to see them. You can see the way the East Branch of the Ausable has undermined the roads in Keene and Keene Valley, leaving jagged sheets of torn asphalt bitten away to mud and boulders. The Keene fire station has washed away, and there are huge snarls of brush and downed trees piled against every dam and bridge abutment.

If you are a writer, you have to get out amongst this stuff, and feel the way it hits the nerve endings. For we writers don't just tell what happened, but what it was like. And what it was like exists in the details hitting the senses, in the angry scars of mud ribboning through town, and the yellow Department of Transportation trucks swarming like large, oily bees to effect road repairs.

I will sit outdoors with my legal pad at the ADK Cafe in Keene, drinking coffee and taking notes under the most innocent-looking of blue September skies, where so recently Irene scowled. I will take it all back in my notebooks, and hope that something comes of it in the way of poetry.

A Good Reviewer Sees Things In Your Writing (That You Might Not Have)

2011-06-21T08:23:00.001-04:00

The poet Susan Jo Russell has just reviewed my new poetry chapbook, Alchemies of Loss, over at Fiddler Crab Review, the poetry chapbook reviewing magazine. I have--as a result--had the uncanny experience of having someone articulate things about my writing that I could not have said myself, or that I could not have said as well. I suppose we writers have all had that experience, right? In workshop. That's one of the things workshop participants do. We try and identify what's going on in the work, what the writer is doing, and the aesthetic choices that he or she is making. So it's not a completely unfamiliar experience.

Still, it's a different thing to have a whole book or collection reviewed, even a short collection like my poetry chapbook. In the workshop, we are usually dealing with just one poem at a time, or perhaps with three or four poems over the course of a weeklong writers conference. It is a deeper and more comprehensive experience to have someone delve fully into a whole finished set of poems. Things emerge about the body of work, about the temperament of the poet, or--in my case--about the nature of the larger project that has been lurking in the mind of the writer--of which the writer herself has been only half aware.

So, thank you, Susan Jo, for such a searching and deep look at my work. You have taught me things about what I was doing with space and time, and what lies beyond the visible, that I didn't see until you showed me. Thanks also to Editor Emily Scudder at Fiddler Crab Review--This is a terrific new journal doing important work.

My chapbook, Alchemies of Loss, is now available for purchase online. Visit the poetry page of my personal website for further details.

Has anyone else had an experience with having work reviewed? If so, leave a comment and tell us your story.

Selecting the Right Size "Moments": Structure in Memoir, Essay, and Narrative Nonfiction

2011-06-01T06:00:00.014-04:00

If you are working on a creative nonfiction project, be it a memoir, essays, or a narrative nonfiction story, you are going to need to identify the "moments" you want to write about. The "moment" is the basic unit of dramatic structure for any nonfiction work, and is comparable to the "scene" in fiction or playwriting. Nonfiction tends to move forward in one of two ways, either dramatically through the exploration of a "moment," or through the forward motion of the thought process underlying piece. There are a few essays I can think of that consist purely of thinking or rumination. More commonly, though, an essay or memoir will concern one or more dramatic "moments," when something changed or when some essential truth emerged, combined with narrative reflection upon that moment.

A trouble that I see over and over in my workshops is a failure to pick a moment of "the right size" to explore. Participants in our workshops at the Cambridge Center often come to us with big stories they want to tell. A family history spanning several generations, or a large research project with several different movements or stages. Sometimes a writer is trying to shape a messy life into a coherent memoir. Our workshop participants, in their zeal, often try to tell the whole story all at once. Inevitably they fail. Things get muddled and confused. One topic flows into the next. The writing resists any sort of organization. Usually these students complain about a "lack of structure." I'm sure this sounds familiar to anyone who has worked in creative nonfiction, since such projects tend to resist finding a structure.

So, what to do?

The trick in helping these students move forward seems to lie in getting them to break off a small enough piece of the project to allow them to write the story in a way that is both scenic and intimate, yet that doesn't lose sight of the overall flow of the story. This, for me, is the very definition of a "moment" in nonfiction.

The Right Size Moment. It is this intersection between the larger flow of the story and individual dramatic action that gives the "moment" its power. If you aim too large, and try and tell too much of the story all at once, you'll lose the reader. If you aim too small, or pick the wrong moments, you lose the momentum of story. And so the selection of the right moments, and the right size moments, becomes critical.

Of course the pressure to select the "right moments" is exactly the sort of thing that can make a writer freeze up. Where, then, to begin?

What I try and do in my workshops is to get students busy writing moments that they already know they are going to want to include in their work, and encourage them to forget about what order the moments need to fall in, or how the story ultimately will be arranged. That, to my mind, needs to be left for later. You aren't going to be able to make key structural decisions like this until you've written at least part of the story and found the right voice to tell it in. It's better just to get started. Stories have a way of shaping themselves once you figure out how to write the important scenes. The key thing is for the writer to give up this sense of "trying to tell the whole story all at once." Rather, he or she needs to focus upon the important individual moments. (Examples: The day I realized my father was in the mob; The moment I realized I wasn't cut out to be a waitress; The moment the president decided to go to war.) The writer then needs to render each of these individual moments as completely as possible, including everything that was going on that day, getting down all of the conflicting emotions on the page, and recalling vivid scenic details.

The need to identify specific individual moments like this in order to write your way into your material is not limited to essay and memoir. Other forms of creative nonfiction and narrative journalism are also quite careful about picking moments of just the right size to write about. I was writing recently in this blog about that wonderful scene by Sebastian Junger in The Perfect Storm where he discusses what it's like to drown. If you look at that chapter, it's classically organized around a single specific moment, a moment when something changed--in that case it was the moment when the Andrea Gale flipped over and the men aboard started to drown. Junger explores the drama of that moment, what it was probably like for the men, together with all of the information bearing upon that moment, such as scientific research on what it's like to drown. You can see how much trouble this writer would have had if he'd started, not with the specific moment, but rather with the piles of research he had amassed. The task would have been too large and too disorganized. Instead, he focused upon a very real and specific dramatic moment, and as a result things are simplified and arranged within the writing. The drama of the moment comes forward to engage the reader's senses, and the copious research falls into the subsidiary if important role of providing perspective and depth. The selected "moment" not only helps reach the reader, it also has the added benefit of organizing the story. The structure, then, is in the moment.

The "Benefit" Book Launch: Reflections on a Book Party

2011-05-23T11:18:00.000-04:00

When I started thinking about a book launch party for my new poetry chapbook, Alchemies of Loss, a friend who has spent years promoting the work of her musician-husband suggested that I make it a benefit. This idea instantly appealed to me. There was of course the thought of connecting the content of my book with an audience. And how lovely, I thought, to be able to give something back, and not just have the party be about me and my book, which felt rather awkward to me. Also, the idea of doing a benefit for a cause seemed to open up the possibility of making the book launch more press-worthy. The local papers were bound to have more interest in someone raising money for a good cause than in some obscure poet launching her chapbook about grief as a process. This topic did not seem likely to bring hordes of people to my book launch on a sunny Saturday in May. I adore poetry, but I'm somewhat realistic about its mass appeal.

Happily, I was presented with an opportunity to raise money for a cause that was directly related to the book. The photographer who had taken the beautiful cover photograph of Hingham's "Angel of Grief," John Hooper Dean, was involved with a healing fund founded by his family to provide assistance to people struggling to afford alternative therapies such as meditation and acupuncture. My own mother, to whom the book was dedicated, had found great solace in such therapies near the end of her life, and so I felt a connection to the cause and was happy to do a benefit. Jack Dean was also something of an amateur local historian, and had investigated the history of our beautiful "Weeping Angel" here in Hingham, which was erected as a funeral monument for his great great grandmother. Jack offered to give a talk at the party about the history of the angel. And so the launch party came together as a lovely afternoon of food, poetry and local history. Jack talked about the angel, I read my poems, books were sold and signed, and money was raised.

So, here I am on this rainy Monday morning afterwards, sitting in my office and assessing how we did. Was it worth the added effort and cost of doing a book launch party as a benefit? Did it increase the reach of either the book or the party?

It's hard to say whether it was worth it from a purely marketing standpoint. I do think that doing a benefit helped with the press, since we got good coverage in our local papers. However, I'm not sure that the added attention really turned out anyone for the party who wouldn't have come anyway. The truth is that nearly everyone who showed up at the book launch did so because they had a personal connection with me, and not because of the catered food, the historical talk, or because of the cause being supported--though those things certainly helped make it a more enjoyable afternoon. I guess that's the point to make here: There are factors other than marketing that go into planning a successful book launch party. I think everyone who came felt good about attending a party where money was being raised for a cause. The historical talk broadened the appeal of the presentation. And having someone else talking took the pressure off of me as the writer to carry the whole event by myself. The result, I think, was that a better time was had by all, myself included.

So would I do a "benefit" book launch again? Absolutely, without question, although the facility of doing a benefit as a marketing tool for a book remains to be seen. I'd love to get comments from other writers who have attempted this sort of thing in the past, and to hear what their experience has been.

In closing, let me just add--for those who weren't able to make the party--that donations to the healing fund can still be made online, by following this link to the website of: The Our Weeping Angel Foundation. If you'd like to purchase a copy of my book of poems, it is now available for sale online. To buy a copy, just follow this link to: The Purchase Page for Alchemies of Loss.

"Alchemies of Loss" Book Launch Party and Benefit, May 21, 1 to 4 PM

2011-05-06T17:38:00.001-04:00

The readers of Kim's Craft Blog are cordially invited to join us for a Book Launch Party and Benefit to celebrate the publication of my new poetry chapbook, Alchemies of Loss. The party will benefit the Our Weeping Angel Foundation. The event will take place on Saturday, May 21, 2011, from 1 to 4 PM at the Hingham Woods Clubhouse, Beal Street, Hingham, MA. If you are in the Boston area that weekend, I hope you can attend.

The afternoon will feature a poetry reading, book signing, and a talk about the cover photograph of Hingham’s Weeping Angel by photographer John Hooper Dean. The beautiful “Angel of Grief” monument stands in the cemetery behind Hingham’s historic Old Ship Church, and marks the grave of Maria Hooper, Dean’s great grandmother.

Proceeds from copies of Alchemies of Loss sold at the event will go to the Healing Fund of the Our Weeping Angel Foundation started by Mr. Dean’s family. The Healing Fund provides financial assistance to people struggling to afford alternative healing treatments.

At 2 PM, John Hooper Dean will give a talk on the history of Hingham’s Weeping Angel. A poetry reading and book signing will follow at approximately 2:30 PM. Refreshments will be served. The public is welcome, and admission is free.

For further information, visit the News and Events page of my personal website at: http://kimberlysdavis.com/blog. Scroll down for press contacts and driving directions.

To Blog Or Not To Blog--Some Things For A Writer To Think About Before Starting A Blog

2011-05-03T10:10:00.001-04:00

In the current session of my Creative Nonfiction Workshop, blogging keeps coming up. A couple of the members of the workshop are already writing blogs, and other participants are asking if they should start one, and if so how they should go about doing it. There are as many reasons to blog as there are bloggers, but here is my take on whether a writer should consider starting a blog:

First of all, ask yourself if it's worth the effort. I can attest that blogging can be a lot of work, even if you only post once a week, or every few weeks. There is always the constant nagging in the brain asking what you will write about next. Then there is the writing itself. Blogging can be very time-consuming, and it does take away from your other writing. Next, consider whether you have a specific topic to blog about. You are unlikely to develop much of a following if you only post random musings about your own life. Most successful blogs carve out a niche topic or a specific subject matter that is broad enough to support regular posting, but that is narrow enough to have a well-defined audience. Examples of blog topics might be cooking for pets, or bad parenting, or--er--creative writing craft. If you have a topic like this--narrow, but not too narrow--you will probably find that there are only a certain number of voices regularly blogging in your area, and that within a year or two it's possible to become very much "part of the conversation." This is especially the case if you have a vested interest in your subject matter, and your passion comes through in your voice.

The conventional advice that you will often hear is that a writer should start a blog at least two years before their book comes out in order to "build a platform." What this advice means is that even before your book appears you can already be reaching out to build a readership. Blogging can be extremely helpful in making your writing visible to the world. Writing a blog can also help you to identify your audience and their concerns. One of our workshop participants has actually gotten critical comments from her blog readers when she veered "off topic." Her audience was telling her what they were interested in, and what they were NOT interested in. This is, of course, very valuable information.

I have found, with my own blog, that reader comments often assist me in thinking through difficult issues. This can be extremely helpful if you are working on a book. Wouldn't you rather hear critical or thought-provoking comments while you are still working on your book? Rather than waiting until after the book comes out when it's too late to make important edits? Blogging can become a way of vetting the soundness of your ideas, and of finding new avenues you hadn't thought of exploring. Also, writing regularly on a topic can be very helpful in developing your "voice" for a subject matter. I cringe when I look back at my early posts from the fall of 2008, when I first started this blog. I wasn't sure who I was writing for, or how to address my readers. My voice was very tentative, very cautious. It was hard to put together two sentences in a row. It took a few months of writing posts before I really got comfortable and settled into the voice that marks this blog. I have heard other bloggers say the same thing. Blogging is an excellent way to find out if you have something to say on a subject, and to discover a voice to say it with.

So, do you have a specific subject to blog about? Are you ready to start writing weekly posts on a variety of issues within your chosen topic? Can you envision not just one or two posts on your subject, but many of them? If so, then you may be ready to start a blog. Take a look at the blogs that are already out there to see what appeals to you. (There are many writing-related blogs listed on the Kim's Craft Blog sidebar.) See if you think you have something to add to the discussion. Then give it a try. If it doesn't work out, you can always delete the blog. No harm done.

Getting started: There are a number of excellent and completely free blogging platforms available for you to use--The two I use are Google's Blogger and WordPress. I use Blogger for this blog and for my poetry portfolio. My personal website is on WordPress. Both platforms are useful for different reasons. WordPress tends to be somewhat prettier for photo-heavy blogs; Blogger has a few more free widgets and more seamless integration with Amazon. There are too many considerations involved in choosing a blogging platform and setting up a blog to go into at length here. Let me just say that when I was getting started, I found Blogging for Dummies very helpful in sorting through issues like which platform to select and what I required in the way of a blog template. Darren Rowse of the blog ProBlogger also has an excellent book and lots of helpful information for those just getting started. If you do decide to start a blog, good luck--and shoot me your link!

Panel on Writing Creative Nonfiction and Narrative Journalism--This Wednesday Evening, April 27th, in Harvard Square

2011-04-24T11:15:00.003-04:00

I wanted to let everyone know that I will be participating in a Creative Nonfiction Panel at the Cambridge Center this Wednesday evening, April 27th, as part of the Cambridge Center's "Writers Life Series." This one night event will feature an informal and freewheeling discussion on the challenges and pleasures of writing creative nonfiction and narrative journalism. In addition to the panel discussion we will allow time for questions, so bring any questions or concerns you may have about writing or publishing in this sometimes controversial area, and we'll do our best to address them. I hope to see you there!

Event Details: This Panel on Creative Nonfiction and Narrative Journalism will take place at the Cambridge Center's Spiegel Auditorium (in Blacksmith House), at 56 Brattle Street, Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. Follow this link for directions. The discussion is scheduled to begin at 8 PM, to be followed by a book sale and signing.

Book Distribution in the Digital Age: The New World Order Emerges

2011-04-01T09:30:00.003-04:00

Recently, over our local school's spring break, I was in Los Angeles with my family, and I happened to get into a long conversation with someone who had been through the switch-over to digital in the music industry, where "everything crashed in 2007-2008," as this person put it. So much of what this woman said sounded like what is now going on in literature and publishing that it was absolutely startling.

Phrases stuck in my head from our conversation, such as--"We couldn't believe the record album was really going away," and "We were all in denial." And there were complaints about "diminished revenue streams" which made large scale music publishing unfeasible for all but the biggest blockbuster or commercial projects. The music industry was still reeling, three and four years later, with everyone "still trying to figure out" how the new revenue models were going to work, and who was going to curate and field quality content. Who would be the new buyers? Who was going to "cultivate new talent"? How was serious new work going to find an audience?

Any of this sound familiar?

I came home from Los Angeles thinking about all of this, since I have my own publishing projects in the works. I don't think any of these issues have been finally resolved for books and literature, where things are still in a great state of flux. Still, many of the outlines of our new digital world have become increasingly clear over the past few months, particularly in light of the recent Borders Bankruptcy. Here's the way things look from where I sit:

I think it's safe to say that at this point that book distribution is rapidly shifting from printed hardcovers and trade paperbacks sold in bookstores (with warehouses, returns and remainders) to Print on Demand and digital downloads. We now expect to be able to "look inside the book" before we buy it, and we expect to instantly purchase what we like with the push of a button, either on the Kindle or iPad, or by swiftly mail-ordering a copy online. Publishers no longer want to stock up on print books ahead of time, or to devote warehouse space to storage. Retail bookstore and shelf space are shrinking as more and more reading is being done electronically, often on smaller and smaller devices, such as smart phones and Kindles, which appear to be favoring shorter-form content.

We are rapidly moving away from gatekeepers and taste-makers to crowd-sourcing and sampling; from shelf space and book reviewing to keyword searches and recommendations on Facebook and Twitter; from Big Publishing and Brick and Mortar Bookstores to Amazon and Google and Apple. From authors getting advances to authors financing their own "Indie" projects on a shoe-string, and keeping more of the royalties for their smaller niche projects, cutting out the middle men because, frankly, there is no longer a revenue stream to feed the middle men.

Where a larger market does exist for a book or for an author, it seems as if that needs to be demonstrated first digitally, before a move into printed books. New talents like Amanda Hocking seem to be emerging first as "Kindle millionaires" before signing with Big New York Publishing, rather than the other way around. Given this state of affairs, agents appear to be rapidly morphing into marketing and distribution consultants, as writers try and reach an increasingly fragmented audience via digital channels.

The intervention of digital seems to be making everything a bit more democratic and niche-oriented, but is also delivering us a huge haystack of junk to sort through. And this new world appears to provide very little support for serious new talent coming along, as the students in my workshops often complain, or for really high literary values. Interestingly this seems--at least in film--to be giving more power to the big conferences, like Sundance, to do the work of nurturing new talent. As I have written before in this blog, I suspect that writers conferences and literary magazines will serve a similar function for writers in this new world, and will become even more important for that reason.

I certainly hope that is the case, because otherwise I fear that the short attention span of the web will limit the offerings available, despite the new "Indie" ethic taking hold of publishing. Without nurturing places for writers to develop and hone their craft, one wonders if there will be room in the world for the socially astute novel, the long reflective memoir, or the slow poetry reading in the era of the two-minute You Tube video. I am actually heartened by the success of audio projects like The Moth and Poetry Speaks. It seems as if audio has an untapped potential in this new digital world, to preserve "slower" literary values for a harried contemporary audience. After all, we don't want books to "just go away." But maybe I'm still in denial . . ..

The New Art of Book Sampling: Taste in the Digital Era

2011-03-17T09:17:00.000-04:00

Time was, if I wanted to read something new, I would stalk into my local bookstore, scowl at the crowded shelves for awhile, and then gradually begin to assemble a precarious stack of books--some recommended by a friend, or by a review or a "staff pick,"others simply plucked off the shelf because they "looked interesting." Eventually I would retire, juggling my unwieldy stack, to an armchair or to the coffee shop section of the bookstore, where I would read the first few pages or the first chapter of each book, a process which would winnow my selections to two or three books, or sometimes to just one happy find.

Fast forward to the digital age, the era of Kindle, iPad and laptop: How interesting it is to see the way my "sampling" of physical books has morphed into something much more seamless and electronically swift. I have found myself conscious of this over the past few days as the reader in me has responded to the announcements of the finalists for several big book prizes. The spring literary awards season inevitably brings with it suggestions of many things to read, which must be sorted through by the literary reader. You can't read them all, right? And so the process begins of finding the books you really love. Previously this meant trusting the selections at the bookstore, or the taste of some critic in your local newspaper. But really, this was someone else's taste, and not necessarily yours. How all of this has changed!

Now, when presented with a long list of books that have been heaped with accolades, not all of which are likely to actually be "good" according to my own tastes, I can simply sit down on my couch with my Kindle or laptop and begin to "sample" everything. I can download sample chapters on my Kindle, or use the "look inside the book" feature at the online bookstore. Often online newspaper reviews are linked to sample chapters. Or perhaps the author has embedded a sample chapter on his or her website. I may even treat myself to an audio or video clip of the author reading from the book, or to a book trailer providing a teaser synopsis. All of this is becoming widely available for almost every book released by any publisher, making the sampling of books a new kind of digital adventure.

For me, though, the quest for new books always seems to come down to the same thing: "Sampling" for me means trying on each distinctive new literary voice for size, and making my own decisions about its merits. Do I want to spend time with this voice, or not? Is this voice saying things that interest me? Does there exist an essential liveliness here, or is my mind nodding off? What digital sampling has done, I think, is that it has made it easier for us to impose our own tastes upon what we read. The sampling of literature, as it is available today, reminds me very much of my first experiences with sampling music.

I remember the first few times that I was able to chew through a bunch of selections of what some computer thought I might "like" if I liked Ella Fitzgerald or Rufus Wainwright. Many of the "suggestions" were almost ludicrous, but they were also far-reaching, and had a "brainstorming" quality to them. In the end, I have discovered musical artists, some new and some very old, whom I would never have tried without digital intervention. And now I often discover these artists through "channels" on Pandora and other Internet radio stations that make a business out of this "suggesting things" based upon an algorithm. It is a strange morphing of the whole notion of the "beautiful" and the "good" from classical aesthetics, into something far more personal and visceral.

With books and literature, it is beginning to feel as if we are each on a quest for a "literary music" out there that matches a kind of music within. Perhaps this is something we have always done in sampling literature. But the new act of digital book sampling feels to me as if it is even more of an immediate and refined individual response to the emotional tones and thought patterns of another human voice.

I suppose that there is an argument here that this sort of visceral individual selection places us in an "echo chamber" of our own tastes. That, certainly, has been the accusation leveled at this new technology of "suggestions" and "sampling." I have to confess, though, that I find the ability to do this very appealing and freeing. It brings me back to the way I felt as a teenager, discovering Vonnegut or Salinger for the first time. Or my first experiences of Jane Austen, her wit and the breadth of her intelligence, which felt as if it were all for me alone. If the digital world allows me to sample lots and lots of writers, and to unearth more of her salt, then it will all have been worth it.

The Leisurely Voice

2011-03-01T08:01:00.044-05:00

An interesting thing happened this past term in my workshop. A couple of my old students came back. These were participants from past workshops whom I hadn't seen in awhile. In one case, I hadn't seen the student for at least three or four years. And something wonderful had happened to his writing over that period.

He had always been a good writer, someone with a strong and fluent narrative voice. But previously it had felt like he was putting his stories together too consciously. He seemed almost to be coaching himself along. Okay, now some dialogue here. I guess I ought to work in some gestures there. Over a couple of years, though, his writing had transformed itself. He was no longer obsessing over choices like this. His moves were more intuitive, more confident.

Confidence, yes, that's the word.

There was something far more deliberate and authoritative in his narrative voice. And more than that, leisurely. As the words were spinning out, he wasn't afraid to have his narrator say to the reader, Look, I know I'm talking about this one thing, but now we're going to go off on a little digression over here. And he trusted his readers to follow him.

I can always tell the fully matured narrative voices in my workshops, because they have this "leisurely" quality about them, this confidence, and an ability to digress, describe and explain.

Why is this important?

Well, as a writer, it's important to develop a certain intimacy with the reader. And as a reader, you need to feel that the narrative voice telling you the story knows all of the story's secrets and dimensions. It must be a voice that can take the time to render lyrical moments, so that they don't go by too fast, and that can discuss meaning, and explore emotional nuances. It also must be a voice that can digress. A voice that can wander off into sidelights that lend meaning and perspective to a story.

There's a common misperception: That digression in writing is a bad thing. But the truth is, digression often builds energy in a story. Tension rises as the arc is momentarily delayed or suspended while the narrator indulges some tangent. It takes a certain amount of confidence to hold a story in abeyance like this, and to wantonly digress. To tell a story not just with forward motion, but also with depth and breadth.

A couple of years ago, we had been cutting the digressions out of this particular student's writing, but now we were going with them. Why? Honestly, I think it was just a matter of that confidence and authority we've been talking about. Think of this as being like somebody asking you to follow them down a dark alleyway. If you are with someone who is nervous or uncertain, there's no way you're stepping into that dark hallway with them. But if you're with someone confident and strong, someone who knows where they're going, you won't hesitate.

It's a con, really, a flim-flam. Who knows if we should follow that voice? And where does this confidence come from? Who gave any mere writer that level of authority. How dare they? And, let's face it, many narrative voices are downright dangerous to follow. Think of Stephen King or Anne Rice. Or Joyce Carol Oates. Who would follow voices like that? And yet we do. We can't help it. They promise to show us things; and they hold out mystery, knowledge, allure. We may need almost to close our eyes, and peek through our fingers, but follow them we do.

The confident voice, the authoritative voice, understands that it is leading the reader into a mysterious and complicated country, full of things that need to be explored and understood. It isn't afraid to dole out the story slowly as it charts the terrain, gradually revealing things as it goes, trusting the reader to follow along.

It takes time for a writer to develop this level of confidence, as I have seen in my workshops. And time for him or her to gain a deep knowledge of the story being told. And the only way to get there is to write, and to write a lot, many drafts often over years. Until you begin to feel that sense confidence, and can spin out your tale with real authority.

The Borders Bankruptcy, Creative Destruction and The Writers Conference

2011-02-14T09:44:00.002-05:00

Over coffee this morning, I was reading the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times with my husband, and I stumbled upon yet another article about the expected bankruptcy this week of Borders Books. The newspapers are making pretty sad reading these days if you have an interest in books or book publishing. The messages are of shrinking publishers who no longer back new or mid-list writers, of closing retail and independent bookstores, of shrinking retail self space, and of online content mills that pay writers little or nothing for their work. Pretty grim, right?

It was enough to make this writer wonder aloud to her spouse whether she was verging on certifiable to continue flogging away at this writing thing. I think a lot of writers--and I include myself in this--make the mistake of listening only to those who are finding themselves disenfranchised by the changes currently taking place in the media marketplace. The fact is, it is NOT all doom and gloom if you weren't already a best-selling author when these changes hit.

There are now far more ways to reach a reading audience than there used to be, through social media, print on demand, blogging and so forth. Sure the audience is now much more fragmented, and aligned around specific interests. And sure, I think it's true that a lot of us have had to give up the fantasy of that swooning moment when our talent is suddenly going to be recognized by some power broker in New York who will pluck us out of obscurity and set us gently atop the bestseller list. And the shift to digital has driven down book prices. All true.

However, I then found myself remembering back to all the great people I met just a week ago at the AWP conference in Washington, D.C. There was no shortage there of smart, ambitious, talented people--some young and some not so young--all highly dedicated to the task of writing and reading great new literary work, both poetry and prose.

The fact is, wonderful work is still being produced out there (and hopefully in my own office). And I think that we writers need to take heart from what is currently happening in the film industry. As with book publishing, the big film companies have been backing only celebrity-laced blockbusters. I think it is no coincidence that a lot of the best films this year were small "indie" movies, made on a shoe-string, made with great actors and great writers, and with a lot of love. I'm talking about movies like Black Swan and The Kids Are All Right. How much better were those films than--what are we up to now--Spiderman VIII?

I'll be perfectly honest here. I can hardly walk into one of those big box retail bookstores these days. They aren't selling books any more, they are selling literary Campbell's Soup. We are talking toys, coffee, celebrity memoirs, calendars, factory-produced genre fiction. If I want to find the literary equivalent of Black Swan, I'm much better off heading to my local independent bookstore, where the staff always has a few great recommendations. But I have to say that, in the last couple of years, when I've REALLY unearthed great writers--writers who I truly wanted to read and whose work has held up--it has been at The Writers Conference.

I'm talking about writers conferences today because I believe that they are really the best resource we writers have today, both for discovering new writers ourselves, and for getting our own work out there for the world to see. I will be at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College this summer, studying with my favorite writers in workshops, going to readings, and hopefully giving a reading myself. I'm also going to try and make it to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center again, either this summer or next.

We writers have our own equivalents to The Sundance Film Festival, in the form of the many writers conferences that happen all over this country in the summer. At any one of them you are likely to discover great writers you may never have heard of, great teachers, and wonderful readings and other events that you can participate in yourself. Poets And Writers Magazine now has a terrific online database so that you can find a conference near you, or a conference that specializes in your area of expertise. And February and March is the time to sign up, before the best workshops are filled. See you there.

Spring Workshops Now Enrolling!

2011-02-05T12:47:00.005-05:00

For anyone interested in a spring workshop, I currently have two classes enrolling for the spring term at the Cambridge Center in Harvard Square. Beginning at the end of March, I will be teaching a Creative Nonfiction Workshop and an Advanced Fiction Craft Workshop.

Please note that my Advanced Fiction Craft Workshop is also appropriate for memoir writers, since we spend much of the class working on narrators, voice, distance, time, etc., and all of these concepts apply equally to memoir and to fiction.

Act quickly if you are interested in either of these classes. The spring workshops fill rapidly!

Revising The Workshop Method: How to Make Writing Workshops Creative, Not Punitive

2011-01-24T11:38:00.005-05:00

I am on hiatus from teaching creative writing until the spring, but I have found myself reflecting this winter upon my teaching methods. Some of this is related to the fact that I am currently making final revisions to my memoir, Teaching The Dog To Think, which I hope to have out in March or April of this year. Ostensibly my book is about an experience that I had with "positive" dog training almost ten years ago, but really the memoir is something of an explanation and exploration of how I have arrived at the teaching methods that I currently use in my creative writing workshops:

What Is Wrong With The Traditional Workshop?

The trouble with the traditional workshop method, as I see it--and as I have previously discussed in this blog--is that it is primarily corrective or punitive in nature, and is a rather ham-handed teaching mechanism. Twelve to sixteen students are placed in a room together, and are allowed to comment on each others' work. Because the students are competitive, the comments tend to be extremely harsh and biting, unless the workshop leader (me) steps in to exert rather strenuous control. Even then, the basis of the commenting tends to be mainly critical or corrective in nature--as in, "I don't like that," or "Something isn't working on page five." That sort of thing.

So is this a bad thing?

Well, perhaps the basic workshop method has some facility in breaking to beginning writers "the news" that their writing needs some work. A lot of very new writers have a rather inflated view of their own skills and capabilities, and when you have fourteen people in a room all weighing in to say that something is going wrong here, the weight of opinion tends to get through in a way that just one beleaguered teacher saying the same thing doesn't. However, that being said, the workshop set-up also makes it very difficult to move beyond this "corrective mode" of simply telling writers that what they are doing isn't working, and leaves most writers floundering, saying, "Well, if this ISN'T working, then what SHOULD I do?" The traditional workshop model offers no answer to this question.

Positive Teaching Theory

The corrective, punitive workshop model is also all wrong from the standpoint of teaching theory. Good learning should be a positive, happy experience. It should be about seeking and discovering new patterns and exciting new information. At its best, learning should engage the "seeking" and "mulling" pathways of the brain, and the learning experience itself should be exciting enough to drive the student forward. And, specifically, in the case of creative writing, no good writing can ever occur without a positive and creative mental engagement with the material.

Creative writing is about the excited, open and receptive mind filling itself up with things in the environment, engaging with those things in an active, creative and thoughtful way, and then converting the results into an almost musical composition of words. What contemporary learning theory is beginning to show us is that these mental pathways of "happy seeking" and "relaxed mulling" are essentially incompatible with harsh or punitive teaching modalities. (This, by the way, is why the Tiger Mother's approach is completely wrong, and in my opinion is essentially harmful and damaging.) If you want more on learning theory, I highly recommend the work of Karen Pryor (Lads Before The Wind, Don't Shoot The Dog), and particularly her latest book, Reaching The Animal Mind. While much of Pryor's writing on "positive" or "operant" training is focused upon animal subjects, the same principles apply to human learners.

Seeking "What We Love" In The Writing

What the work of Karen Pryor and other "positive" teachers and trainers has shown us, since approximately the early nineteen-nineties, is that punitive or corrective approaches to learning essentially "shut down" or "switch off" the learner. This may explain why so many writers find themselves getting so "blocked" in the traditional writing workshops offered by contemporary creative writing programs. A redesigned workshop must take this into account, and must work very hard to make sure that the learning experience within the workshop itself is never harsh or aversive.

So what do we do in a "positive workshop," instead of looking for what is wrong?

Well, we spend a great deal of time looking for what is RIGHT. For what is WORKING. This, in my experience, is much more helpful information for the creative writing student anyway. When the student has done something right, he or she can go out and do it again. If all you tell the creative writer is what isn't working, then they have nowhere to go.

But--I hear you cry--what about all the stuff in the manuscripts that needs correcting? Well, I still allow my students to write each other "comments," and they still have a fine time "correcting" or "editing" each others' work, even though they are learners, too, and they often are poor judges of what is actually good writing. Still, students want feedback from each other, and often if everyone in the room has a problem with something the writer is doing, the writer may find that helpful information to take home with him or her. However, I want to emphasize: That sort of corrective feedback is no longer what my workshop is about. Within the workshop itself, poor performance should be utterly ignored. It needs to be treated as essentially irrelevant information, because that's what it is.

Craft Exercises To Assist Performance

I suppose the risk of a strictly "positive" approach to creative writing is that you don't want to be rewarding or praising bad performance. Certainly, you don't want to be telling someone you "love" their work when their writing just isn't very good. So then the question arises of how to make sure your students produce a good product that you can then reinforce with praise and encouragement. This is where craft exercises come in. I think most of my students believe that I am giving them craft exercises in order to get them to practice skills that they need, and that is true to an extent. Most fiction and memoir writers who come into my workshops are smart people. This is Harvard Square after all. Lots of these writers have a college degree under their belts, or two or three, and many have had successes in other professions, so they are pretty sure they "know how to write." The trouble is that most of these students have a fairly limited set of narrative approaches upon which they tend to fall back again and again. Part of getting them to be better writers lies in getting them to expand their repertoires, and to try new approaches. So this is one way that I use exercises in my classes, to show them a wider range of options and approaches that they can draw on.

However, the larger and much more important reason that I use exercises is this: The skills-building exercises I use essentially make my students do things right. My writing exercises start students off with greater narrative distance than they would otherwise use, or with a greater temporal remove, or perspective. Or perhaps I will create exercises that force them to dramatize, or create better characters, or that provide characters with opposing agendas, making the dialogue in the manuscripts spring to life. Many of these exercises are based upon examples from successful published work, and so we are using narrative attacks that have worked in the past. My students are being asked to emulate these successful approaches. The result is that students who would probably be considered "bad" writers by their peers in a traditional workshop suddenly find themselves producing a much better quality of work that I can then "mark" for them as "moving in the right direction" at the level of skill mastery. The work ends up being praised with genuine enthusiasm by me and by their peers. We suddenly have some truly excellent writing before us that we can then discuss in a positive way, and that we can help the writer shape into truly excellent work. And that's what it's all about, right?

My new memoir will be available in the spring of 2011. Stay tuned for announcements. In the meanwhile, check out Karen Pryor's books and websites, which cover the ins and outs of positive learning theory. Pryor also has many illustrative videos online that are great fun to watch.

Creative Nonfiction: "Little Fictions" within the Bounds of Nonfiction

2010-10-18T10:15:00.004-04:00

Most creative nonfictions operate in much the same way that good fiction does--namely, dramatically. In order to be vivid and compelling, a story must unfold through a series of scenes, and not just be "told" to the reader by the narrator. Scenes provide the backbone of the material.

In my creative nonfiction workshops, I have found that it's easy enough to teach memoirists to "write in scene." Since memoirists have lived through the stories they are telling, they generally have a wealth of scenic material to draw on. With a little coaching, they can easily recount key moments replete with dialogue and vivid sensual detail. The students who have trouble coming up with scenes are our journalists, academics, and other "objective" writers. These writers come to us with piles and piles of research. But they have not themselves lived through the moments they are trying to render, and so they feel hamstrung in their attempts to write vivid stories with scenes. If we ask them to "imagine what it was like" they feel they are being asked to "make things up." And yet, if they are going to tell a good story, they have to move beyond the "what happened" to the "what it was like." Merely relating the content of their research isn't going to do it. They need to reach readers in a way that excites their senses and stimulates their imaginations.

I thought it would be helpful today to look at an example from a journalist who has successfully moved beyond his copious research into "what it was like," and to see how it's done and the techniques used, in order to mine the depths of real world situations with the creative imagination--but in such a way that the reader isn't misled as to where and how the imagination is being deployed. The example I'm going to use (and the one I currently use in my classes) is Sebastian Junger's wonderful passage from The Perfect Storm about the moment when the sword boat Andrea Gail flips over, and her crew starts to drown.

The first thing I want to note here is that Junger has selected a great "moment." As with essay and memoir, this kind of writing requires the selection of a key "moment" from the real world, a slice of life that can be fully explored. Junger has chosen an especially evocative moment to render for the reader, the moment when the crew drowns. He also brings to the scene a pile of research, including interviews with fishermen and their families, the science of drowning, and information about the design and layout of boats and how they behave under stress. Note, however, that there is not a footnote in sight as Junger brings us into this world as though we ourselves were standing inside the Andrea Gail at this important moment:

When a boat floods, the first thing that happens is that her electrical system shorts out. The lights go off, and for a few moments the only illumination is the frenetic blue of sparks arcing down into the water. It's said that people in extreme situations perceive things in distorted, almost surreal ways, and when the wires start to crackle and burn, perhaps one of the crew thinks of fireworks--of the last Fourth of July, walking around Gloucester with his girlfriend and watching colors blossom over the inner harbor. There'd be tourists shuffling down Rogers Street and fishermen hooting from bars and the smell of gunpowder and fried clams drifting through town. He'd have his whole life ahead of him . . . And he wound up swordfishing . . . All that's left is to hope it's over fast. (emphasis added)

A few things to notice about this passage: First, Junger has placed his research at the nerve endings of a conjectured "body" within the narrative space of the scene. It's one thing to tell us that the electrical shorts out, another to show us the "blue sparks arcing down into the water" as if seen by a human eye. Junger also has placed what I'm going to call, for lack of a better term, a "little fiction" in the midst of the passage: a small imagining of what might have gone through a crewman's mind at the moment he sees those blue sparks. Note how this "little fiction" allows Junger to plunge the reader deeper into the moment through his imaginative empathy with this dying man. And while this is essentially an invented moment, the reader is not going to be misled because the hypothetical or conditional language being used makes it absolutely clear where and how the imagination is being engaged--(Examples: "It's said that"; "perhaps one of the crew"; "there'd be tourists").

In our classes, I've found that using this hypothetical or conditional language is what really loosens our narrators' tongues, and allows our writers to fully inhabit the real world scenes they are trying to portray for their readers. Conditional language allows them to ask themselves "What must it have been like?" Because the answer is based upon a pile of research, these writers usually have a pretty good idea of what it was like. And the reader is not being misled because the writer is using syntax that clearly signals where each imaginative departure occurs. Also, note here that often the writer doesn't give a single answer, but explores several possibilities--It might have been like this, or it might have been like that. Here's another example from The Perfect Storm, of Junger spinning out the possibilities in a scenic way:

If the boat rolls or flips over, the men in the wheelhouse are the first to drown . . .; they inhale and that's it. After that the water rises up the companionway, flooding the galley and the berths, and then starts up the inverted engine room hatch. It may well be pouring in the aft door and the fish hatch, too, if either failed during the sinking. If the boat is hull up and there are men in the engine room, they are the last to die. They're in absolute darkness, under a landslide of tools and gear, the water rising up the companionway and the roar of the waves probably very muted through the hull. If the water takes long enough, they might attempt to escape on a lungful of air--down the companionway, along the hall, through the aft door and out from under the boat--but they don't make it. It's too far, and they die trying. Or the water comes up so hard and fast that they can't even think. They're up to their waists and then their chests and then their chins and then there's no air at all. (emphasis added)

Here, we see a searching mind illuminating the various possibilities by depicting them in scene. Junger does not stick to just one "fictional" possibility. This is not a writer who pretends to have all of the answers. Instead he is using his imagination, rather like a searchlight in the dark, to vividly portray the range of possible things that might have happened. To reiterate, the key is to start moving beyond merely telling what happened, and into what it was like. And again, note the use of various conditional or hypothetical constructions that allow this to occur syntactically. The trick, in our workshops, lies in getting our writers to use their imaginations in a really searching way to explore the scenic possibilities, just as Junger does in these examples.

I hope this post has been helpful. I know that there are still those literary holdouts who remain critical of any sort of dramatization within factual or nonfiction books. So, if you are using these techniques, just be aware that you may come in for some criticism. If you are doing this kind of thing a lot, you might want to consider using disclaimers up front to make absolutely clear to the reader what you are doing to put your book together. See my related posts on dramatization and on the use of disclaimers in creative nonfiction.

Publishing Scams: How One Of Our Writers Got Caught

2010-09-27T09:10:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago, I wrote rather glowingly about the upside of reputable writing contests. Today we are going to take a look at the flip side. Namely, how writing contests can also sometimes be fronts for common publishing scams. The occasion for this post is that a writer in one of my workshops found herself snared by what she thought was a legitimate opportunity for publication, which turned out to be something very different. She has given me permission to blog about her story so that you don't find yourself caught in the same trap. I'm going to keep the details vague here, because I don't want to pick a fight with anyone. Still, I would like writers to be aware of the warning signals to look for in entering contests or in evaluating promises of agency representation or publication.

In this case, our writer entered a novel writing "contest" being held online by someone claiming to be a "publisher." Guidelines for the contest were posted on the "publisher's" blog. Our writer followed the guidelines and submitted material from her novel. The writer then, in short order, received an email congratulating her on being selected as a finalist, and telling her that the "publisher" was going to post her name and an excerpt of her work on the "publisher's" website. The winner would also receive a "unique cover" specially designed by the "publisher." The writer was provided "free" materials from an inspirational writing coach of some sort.

It was at this point that our writer contacted me, and asked whether I thought this contest was on the up and up. She said that apparently the "publisher" was going to publish her work on lulu.com. This was an immediate red flag to me. Lulu--while it appears to be a respectable print-on-demand business producing nice books (comparable to Cafe Press or Spreadshirt for T-shirt printing)--is still a self-publisher. And like other book self-publishing businesses, Lulu generally requires the fronting of fairly significant amounts of cash for "packages of services" purchased by the writer in order to get a book up and looking good for sale on the major book-selling websites. (Follow this link to see Lulu's page on the services it offers.)

In other words, what the "publisher" running the "contest" was doing was effectively offering our writer something that she easily could have done on her own, namely, avail herself of the opportunity to self-publish her book at her own expense. I took a quick look at the purported "publisher's" website. It revealed no evidence of any history of book publishing, other than posting excerpts of writing on free document uploading sites like Scribd. (Again, this is something the writer could have easily done herself without involving a middleman.) To its credit, the website did clearly state that the contest "winners" would have to pay Lulu's upfront costs themselves. At least the "publisher" was being honest about that.

Needless to say, our writer was upset and humiliated. She had been taken for a ride. She thought that she was getting some serious interest from a real press, and she got her hopes up (as we all do from time to time). Then, instead, she found out that she was being offered self-publishing at her own expense. What's more, the fake "publisher" was now planning to post her name and an excerpt of her work on its website as one of their "finalists." I'm guessing that this was not the kind of recognition this writer was seeking.

Contests like this are not the only kinds of scams that prey on aspiring writers seeking publication. The most common ones I've seen over the ten years I've been teaching creative writing are "free offers" of various services that turn out not to be free; agents who want substantial cash payments up front; or "book doctors" who, for an exorbitant fee, will "fix up" your book and promise you an "in" with a publisher. Just to be clear: You should never pay an agent anything up front. Agents are paid on a commission basis out of proceeds and royalties from the books they sell. You should never be asked to reimburse an agent for anything before your book is sold, other than perhaps a few copying or delivery charges--and even those kinds of charges are questionable these days when nearly everything is submitted digitally, at least to the big publishers in New York. If you hire a freelance editor, whoever you hire should be working for you at a reasonable per page rate, should have some basic writing credentials, and should not be making vague promises involving connections with publishers. Any claimed connection should be verified directly with the publisher. For a complete list of the kinds of things to be wary of, follow this link to Victoria Strauss' excellent "Writer Beware" pages on the SFWA website. The Writer Beware site makes for pretty sobering reading, as you realize all of the people out there who are trying to take your money.

So how can you tell if you are dealing with a legitimate publisher? Well, a track record of publishing excellent books in your specific area is always a very good sign. It's not like the legitimate publishers hide so you can't find them. Simply by consulting Publishers Weekly and Poets & Writers you can easily see who is publishing quality books in your genre. With just a little research online or at your local library, you can also usually determine which agents represent books like yours, and what presses and editors are likely to be interested in your work. And if you decide, in the end, to go with self-publishing, then go for it. More and more writers are opting for self-publishing and print-on-demand these days in light of the distressed, block-buster oriented state of traditional New York publishing and the ease of reaching specific audiences digitally. What you don't want to do is let your dreams and ambitions blind you to scams.

Franzen Frenzy: On The Novel and Society

2010-09-22T10:39:00.001-04:00

At the risk of contributing to the ongoing "Franzen Frenzy," I thought that today I would discuss the continuing cultural relevance of "The Novel" in the context of Jonathan Franzen's new doorstop Freedom, a social satire wrapped around a page-turner of romantic longing and infidelity. What's been wonderful, watching the uproar over this novel, is that for once it isn't the autobiographical details of sex and romance that have fanned the punditry flames. Rather, it's Franzen's social critique that has columnists like David Brooks (writing on Tuesday morning's Op Ed page in the New York Times) excitedly trying to discern what Franzen is "saying" about American Society, and whether or not he's put his finger on something culturally or historically important.

I've been delighted by all this falderal because, like a lot of writers, I've worried for years over the state of the novel in the digital age. Time was when novels were a major cultural reference point. But these days the form appears to operate too slowly, crawling snail-like through the soil of daily life while the online commentators follow each social glitch and shift like the pulse of a heart patient, on Twitter and Facebook. One is left to wonder whether the novel any longer has a place in breaking news about our historical moment. Franzen's novel Freedom appears to have laid that question to rest, at least for the time being.

I personally found the novel an incisive portrait of the downward trending expectations of the trailing end of the Boomer generation. Like any good novelist, Franzen understands how individual details can speak to the universal and to larger social trends. And so he dishes up memorable tidbits, like the peculiarities of the 240 Volvo his distaff character Patty drives while her children are young, and dramatizes how his hero Walter's environmental idealism gets hijacked by big corporate and energy interests. Anyone who has ever done public interest work themselves will wince at Franzen's accurate portrayal of the way money tends to warp the well-meaning social agendas of Non-Profits.

For the latter half of the Boomer generation--who were reared on inspiring moon landings and told they could "do anything"--Franzen's book is a painful and recognizable portrait of compromised ambitions and dreams, one common to a demographic group now in their late forties and fifties who have found themselves coming into their own in depressed economic times and in an intellectual world where every tenured university chair and significant cultural and institutional seat is already occupied by leading-edge Boomers (who show no signs of retiring) or has been bought up by younger tech and finance money, leaving the Pattys and the Walters of the world to take jobs which, when they were younger, they would have viewed as far beneath them. (By the end of the novel, Patty is working as a school teacher and Walter is under-employed as a conservation land overseer.)

Did Franzen consciously set about to draw this trenchant social picture? Without question. Franzen has been writing about--and worrying over--the role of the novel in society at least since the mid-90's when he came out with his now rather infamous "Harper's Essay" (originally published under the title "Perchance to Dream" and reprinted in the book of essays How To Be Alone). For writers currently slogging away at novels and wondering about the form's relevance, I thought it would be heartening in the wake of Franzen's current success to review a few of the things he said back then about "connecting the personal and the social" at the height of his own frustrations with the novel form--since many of his observations still resonate.

Franzen's original intention as a novelist was to "package his subversive bombs" (his pungent social commentary) in a "sufficiently seductive narrative." In his essay, though, he despaired of finding an audience that "still cared," and likened the institution of writing and reading serious novels in the contemporary age to:

a grand old Middle American City gutted and drained by super highways. Ringing the depressed inner city of serious works are prosperous clonal suburbs of mass entertainments: techno and legal thrillers, novels of sex and vampires, of murder and mysticism.

Franzen lamented the influence of electronic media and how everyone including himself seemed to have less time to read. But still he longed in his work to span "the expanse between private experience and public context." He despaired, though, of capturing historical and cultural changes when those changes were occurring at an accelerating pace, and felt acutely the pressures of working in a slow medium. As he put it:

Panic grows in the gap between the increasing length of the project and the shrinking time-increments of cultural change: how to design a craft that can float on history for as long as it takes to build it? The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read.

Of course these pressures on writers have only grown in the intervening years. Any writer can certainly relate to these frustrations who has worked on a story or a novel draft long enough to have all of the technology referred to in the manuscript pages change several times--and what writer today hasn't experienced that?

Well, for all of us who dabble in the longer forms, Franzen's novel Freedom is a bracing reminder that, yes, it's hard, but guess what? It's still possible to trace the longer arcs of social and historical change in all their complexity using individual portraits of human size. And isn't it nice to know that the glacial work of novel-writing might still be worth it?

The Literary Journals Go Online: Our Summer Intern Reports From The Front Lines of the Digital Revolution

2010-09-06T09:00:00.005-04:00

At Kim's Craft Blog, we try to update our list of literary journals each summer in anticipation of the fall marketing season, but this year the task has seemed especially important. The Internet, the Kindle, and all things digital have thrown the rather staid world of the literary journals into a state of flux, and has led to the advent of a whole new universe of online literary journals and websites, as well as to new and experimental forms of media. We were fortunate this year to have the assistance of our terrific summer intern, Louis Roe. Louis not only helped us to update our list of "traditional" literary journals, but has also created for us a fresh list online literary journals where writers might want to consider submitting—or at least reading. (Scroll down our right sidebar to see Louis' "Online Journals" list.) Here is Louis' report fresh from the front lines of the digital revolution:

A great deal of attention has been paid by the newspapers to the ways in which the Internet and digital media are undermining the traditional fortress of New York publishing. However, an equal or even greater revolution has been at work transforming the papery world of the literary journals, often resulting in bold and adventurous explorations of the medium. Low-overhead digital resources have allowed new online issues to appear monthly, weekly, or even daily, in contrast to the print publications of old, which generally appeared only quarterly or bi-annually, or sometimes just once a year. Everything wants to turn around quicker these days, and the pressure on the slow-moving world of the literary journals is palpable.

Existing literary magazines have responded to a faster world, and to the new digital outlets, in a variety of ways: Some older print journals, like TriQuarterly, have been entirely replaced by digital equivalents. Still others, like Narrative, have coupled Internet editions with traditional print magazines, or have placed some of their pages on the Kindle or other digital readers. Interestingly, one of the most popular journals on the Kindle

right now is the magazine One Story, which as its name implies, delivers one story every three weeks to the reader—suggesting that, with digital reading, less may be more. Some traditional journals have kept operating pretty much the same way that they always have, but with the addition of an online archive, a nice website, or a blog written by the editors. The Kenyon Review, for example, has created an especially organized webpage with online publications, blog posts, and subscription information. And Granta is experimenting with an online archive set up behind a paywall as a revenue stream. In some cases, journals like Slate and Salmagundi have added audio files of authors reading their work, video interviews or readings, or other accompanying materials as a supplement to the stories, poems and essays put forward by the magazine.

Lots of fresh new literary magazines have, of course, also popped up. The most common type of online journal recreates the same experience as the traditional magazine, but for a readership that prefers a linked and clickable digital organization to pen-and-ink pages. Some of these new online journals are formatted to be accessible from a website, while others are downloadable as PDF files. A few journals do ask for subscription fees, but the majority provide free access to high quality creative writing, and--it should be noted--are probably reaching an audience far broader than have the traditional print literary magazines—such as general interest readers clicking through the Internet, or teenagers who never would have found the magazine anywhere other than online and who lack the money for a subscription.

In addition to these "traditional style" online journals, there are also many innovations occurring among the literary journals on the web, such as Every Day Fiction, which shares a new short story every day, redefining the purpose of a literary magazine. In this manner, readers receive fiction in flashes that fit into their busy schedules. Meanwhile, visual style and presentation have taken advantage of the opportunities websites can provide that print magazines cannot--Spine Road, for example, invites visitors to interact with its layout, which is riddled with secretive and unlabeled buttons that lead stumbling readers into surprising stories and poems. The web has made literature far more of an interactive and exploratory experience than ever before.

Not all critics are impressed with the changes introduced by online journals, particularly when they are replacements of cherished print publications. When TriQuarterly went mostly digital, Poets & Writers Magazine described the transition as a "downfall" attributed to a decline in funding. And it is true that, when submitting to the new generation of online literary journals, writers need to consider reputation and quality. While searching for online journals to recommend, I encountered plenty of sites without mastheads, many that were aesthetically unappealing, or that appeared to be lacking in any sort of institutional support or affiliation, which made me wonder how long they would stay in business. And be warned that many online literary magazines are directed at very specific audiences—women over forty, Asian Americans, Sci-Fi nerds, etc.—presumably with the idea of building a community of readers in a narrowly targeted area. Some appear to be mere vanity projects, directed to publishing just the editors and their friends.

Before submitting to any online journal, I suggest you take a close look at it, and decide if it suits your needs and your work. Do you like the journal's aesthetic? What is the quality of the material being published? What audience is it trying to reach? You may have to search out submission guidelines--Some journals keep their rules tucked away at the bottoms of hidden pages, while others request that authors query first in order to be considered for publication.

While some online magazines publish material of questionable quality, plenty of web-based journals are just as selective as their printed counterparts. When I examined Duotrope's statistics, I found that some of the most popular magazines with a strong online presence, like Narrative and Zoetrope, have extremely low over-the-transom acceptance rates, ranging from 0.00% to 1.39%. This suggests that most of the work is probably being solicited by the editors, not taken from the slush pile. Since these are some of the bigger names in the literary world, they should probably appear somewhere on your submit-list. However, newer writers may want to consider setting their sights on journals with higher acceptance rates that still publish acceptable work. The good news is that the online journals are, generally speaking, still a hungry and developing market.

The most exciting thing I found—as someone interested in publishing—is the way that the digital presentation of literature is constantly rebelling against convention and experimenting with forms that reach a wider readership every day. Scarab, for instance, is available as a lit-mag iPhone application for subscribers on the go. For the forgetful reader, Linebreak updates to e-mail, RSS feeds and podcasts, to make poetry continuously accessible in multiple forms. And Cellpoems sends poems via text message to subscribers' cell phones. The audio and visual presentation of literature has been a subject of particular experimentation. Shape of a Box questions the very definition of a literary journal by publishing readings of poetry and flash fiction in the format of YouTube videos. Whether this experiment will be a success remains to be seen, but it is refreshing to experience literature as something other than merely text on a page. If anything, these small revolutions in the medium reiterate and revitalize the message of most literary magazines: to push boundaries, to provoke imaginations, and to never let literature sit still.

Louis Roe is currently a Senior at Hingham High School in Hingham, Massachusetts, and may be emailed at louis-roe@hotmail.com.

Calling Boston Writers: Fall Workshops Enrolling

2010-08-24T11:33:00.002-04:00

Calling all Boston writers looking for a fall workshop: I will be teaching two workshops this fall at the Cambridge Center in Harvard Square. The first workshop is my Fiction Craft Workshop (FTEC), designed to help writers polish their scene-making craft and open up their narrative voices. This workshop is appropriate for both fiction and memoir writers, since the same scene-building skills apply in both genres. My other workshop is my Creative Nonfiction Workshop (CRNN), which is a workshop designed for writers of memoir, essay and creative nonfiction. For further information about classes and enrollment, visit the Cambridge Center's website at www.ccae.org.