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

The Submission Process--Part IV: Some Advice About Contests

2012-04-02T09:30:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the last installment of our four-part series on submitting your work to the literary journals. In Part I we discussed identifying the right markets for your work. In Part II we talked about the submitting process. In Part III, we took on the nuts and bolts of formatting your manuscript, and preparing cover letters and SASEs. Today, we take up the issue of Contests, since many literary journals not only take submissions but also sponsor writing contests.

Some Advice About Contests

Okay, so--Contests. My students always want to enter contests even if they've never submitted a single piece of writing to a literary journal or magazine. This I don't understand. There are hundreds of journals and presses out there just waiting to read your stuff for free. So why would you want to pay somebody a lot of money to read your submission? The entry fees for contests often run twenty or twenty-five dollars or higher.

It's true that winning a contest can bring you attention as a writer. That is the main reason to enter. But it is unlikely that you'll win any contest of note if you've never published anything, anywhere. Contests are usually not the place to start. Literary journal submissions are. Once you've published some of your shorter work in the literary journals, and have yourself in circulation, then you can begin selectively entering contests that you think you might have some prospect of winning. But build up your resume first, or you are wasting your money in my opinion.

When you feel that you are ready to begin entering contests, please please please do your homework. Contests can be a great way of calling attention to a writer's work, but you have to know who you are dealing with. Contests can also be scams that prey upon unwary writers desperate to get their work into print. See my previous blog post on bad contests; and check out the Writer Beware website, which keeps track of such things, and has lots of good advice on what to avoid.

The Reason to Enter Contests

So are all writing contests bad? Absolutely not. I enter many of them myself. Indeed, contests are one of the few ways of gaining recognition in the "less commercial" avenues of writing, such as literary short fiction and poetry, where you are unlikely to make your mark based upon sales alone.

However, as I have noted, even good and reputable contests often have very steep entry fees, and your chances of winning are slim, so you will want to set yourself a budget. If you are going to send in that kind of money, please use your funds to support presses and writing organizations whose work you believe in. You are not going to mind sending your contest fee to a press or literary journal that is publishing good work by authors you admire. And if the sponsoring organization is not publishing good work by authors you admire, then why are you sending that organization $25 for a contest? Support organizations with which you yourself would want to be affiliated. Contests are only as good as the presses, journals and writing societies that back them.

This concludes our Four Part Series on Submitting Your Work to the Literary Journals. I hope you have found the information in this series helpful. Please feel free to leave any additional information or resources that you may have in the "comment" section following each post.

Thank you for reading, and good luck with your submissions!

The Submission Process--Part III: Formatting, Cover Letters, SASEs

2012-03-26T08:00:00.001-04:00

Welcome to Part III of our series on submitting your work to the literary journals. In Part I we discussed identifying the right markets for your work. In Part II we talked about the submitting process. Today, we take on the nuts and bolts of formatting your manuscript, and preparing cover letters and SASEs.

Formatting, Cover Letters, and SASEs

So now you are ready to send out your story. How should you format your manuscript, and what should your cover letter say? Do you need to send enough postage to return your whole manuscript? To whom do you address your cover letter?

Formatting a manuscript

Despite what some will tell you with great conviction, there is no ONE RIGHT WAY to format a manuscript. The main thing is that you don't want your submission to "look strange." Generally speaking, your manuscript should be in 11 or 12 point type, and in a standard font such as Times New Roman, Courier or Arial. You should probably double-space, and have one inch margins all around, since that is standard for prose. On the first page, most writers drop down 1/3 of a page, or a little more, before beginning with their title and text.

If you are submitting to a print publication, or if you are writing dialogue, you should--if at all possible--use standard "indented" paragraphing. With dialogue, each new speaker gets his or her own new paragraph, making the dialogue easier to read. However, online markets sometimes forego indenting, making reproducing dialogue difficult.

You should probably number your pages at the bottom, and include your basic contact information at the top of the first page. Practice varies as to whether a word count is necessary, and whether a header should be used. Personally, I like using a header so that if my pages get separated, everyone will still know what story they are reading, and who wrote it.

Submissions Guidelines

So those are some general formatting instructions. However, you should always check a literary journal's submission guidelines before sending your work, because the guidelines trump any other instructions you may have read or heard. To take an example, I just said to include your contact information at the top of your first page, but sometime the guidelines will indicate that submissions are "read blind" and that you should not include any identifying information on the submission itself, just the title of the work. So always check the guidelines.

In addition to formatting requirements, submission guidelines may also indicate the length of the submissions being sought and the genres accepted (poetry, fiction, essay). They may also say whether simultaneous submissions are allowed, or tell you how your submission should be addressed--to "Fiction Editor," for example, or they might give you the name of a particular editor or guest editor to address. Writers often obsess over the issue of the right person to send to. It's certainly a good idea to locate the name of the appropriate editor if you can. However, if you can't with reasonable efforts determine the right editor to send your work to, then there's no shame in addressing "Poetry Editor" or "Fiction Editor." If you have a connection with a particular editor, you can certainly remind that person of how you know him or her, and what your connection is. However, it's probably not a good idea to try and milk an extremely thin connection. (Example: "I saw you speak at a writers conference ten years ago.")

The submission guidelines also usually indicate when the journal actually reads--A lot of literary magazines don't read submissions all year round and have a specific Reading Period. If you submit outside the reading period, your manuscript will not be considered, and may not even get a response. Sometimes you will see submissions being solicited for a particular "theme" issue.

While you are checking the submission guidelines online, you might also check on how often the journal comes out. Keep in mind that you are going to have a better chance of placing a story at an online literary magazine that puts up new stories each month, than you are at a small academic print journal that only comes out once a year, and publishes just four to six stories in each issue.

Cover Letters and SASEs

If you send by snail mail, your cover letter should be short and sweet. Long letters are a rookie mistake. Do not describe your story. This is not like pitching a book idea or submitting to an agent who wants a one page synopsis of your novel. The first paragraph of your cover letter should be your "bill of lading," and should just state the name of the story you are submitting and what genre it falls into ("enclosed is my short story, X"). The second paragraph of your cover letter should be very brief as well, and should simply list any credentials you have. Hopefully you can say, "My work has previously appeared in," and list the journals where your work has been published.

If you don't have any prior publications, you can offer up things like the fact that you are attending an MFA program, or have taken writing workshops with a well-regarded writing teacher or author. If you don't have any solid credentials to put in your second paragraph, then just send your one paragraph "bill of lading" letter.

Include a business sized "SASE" for a response. This should be a simple business-sized envelope addressed to yourself, with first-class postage for an ordinary letter. Unless the submission guidelines state otherwise, you should not expect a literary magazine to return your whole story. Most magazines "recycle" paper submissions, and respond with a half or quarter page form, upon which--if you are lucky--an editor may have scrawled some comment or note of encouragement. So sending enough postage to return your twenty-page story is a waste of money. If you get an actual letter in response to your submission, consider this extremely positive feedback, even if it's a rejection. Editors are very busy these days, and it's rare for anyone to take the time to compose a letter back, or even to send an email with substantive feedback.

If you are submitting online, the submissions manager usually has room for a cover letter, or for a brief "Author Bio," which is a lot like the second paragraph of the usual cover letter, and just briefly lists your publications and credentials. Again, if you don't have any previous publications, don't worry about it. Lots of new writers get published every year without any prior credentials. It's the quality of the work that counts. Note: An advantage to submitting online or by email is that you can link to previous publications, or to your author website, assuming you have one.

If you are submitting by email, you may need to patch your story or essay into the email, rather than including it as an attachment. Some editors won't open attachments because they can carry viruses. If you need to submit this way, you can compose your submission in Word or in some other word processing program, and then copy and paste your story into your email. If you do this, usually most of your formatting will be preserved. However, be aware that your page numbering and headers may not survive the trip. As with all electronic submissions, paragraphing can also be a problem when submitting by email. Submissions managers usually have a way to review your manuscript after it uploads, so that you can check to make sure your formatting came through correctly.

In our next and last installment of our series on submitting your work: Some advice about Contests.

The Submission Process--Part II: Submissions and "Playing Tennis"

2012-03-19T08:00:00.003-04:00

Welcome to Part II of our four part series on submitting your work to the literary journals. In our last installment, we discussed identifying the appropriate markets for your work. In this installment we take on the actual process of submitting itself.

The Submissions Process and "Playing Tennis"

Okay, so now you have your story written and revised, and you've located the relevant markets. Do you submit online? Or do you send a hard copy by regular mail? And what about simultaneous submissions?

I personally still prefer snail-mailed submissions where they are allowed. It gives me some comfort to know that digital copies of my work aren't flying around out there without my knowledge. Also, I think it's way too easy for a busy editor just to delete a digital submission without really looking at it. However, I should note here that the places that allow mailed submissions are becoming fewer and fewer. Many markets have gone either to emailed submissions or to online submissions managers. The one caution I would put forward about online "submissions managers" is that they really should not be asking for a credit card in order to accept an ordinary submission during the regular reading period.

I know there are reputable literary journals out there that charge a reading fee for regular submissions, but I personally don't love that practice. If you want to be a professional writer, then they should be paying you, and not the other way around, even if they are only paying in the form of a couple of "contributor's copies" of the magazine where your work appears. (Sadly, this is how most literary journals pay you these days.) The only time that you should be paying them is if you are submitting to a contest with a decent cash prize run by a reputable organization, such as an established press. I will have more to say about contests in our fourth installment in this series.

Whether you handle the submissions yourself, or turn the work over to a submissions service like Writer's Relief, please don't "carpet bomb" the literary journals with your stories. Look for the right markets for your work, and then submit each piece a reasonable number of times. Follow the submission guidelines that you will find online for each literary journal. If your story or essay has gone out ten or twenty times to the appropriate markets, and still hasn't gotten even a nice handwritten note back from an editor, then you probably need to pull that one back, and revise it again. You also might need to investigate whether you are submitting to the right markets for your work, and consider "dropping down" a notch for your next round. (See the previous installment in this series for how to locate appropriate markets for your work.)

Simultaneous Submissions

Simultaneous submissions should, in my view, be encouraged for the literary markets, which can often take from several months to a year to report back to you on your submission. I have gotten responses to my own work that have come back up to a year and half after I sent them out. With these kinds of slow reporting times, it is unrealistic for the literary journals to expect you to limit your submissions to only one market at a time. (Please note that this is very different from submitting to "journalism" markets, such as newspapers, where you submit only one story at a time, and the turnaround is almost instantaneous.)

The risk of submitting to more than one literary market at a time is that you will have a story out to more than one market when it is accepted by one of the markets. You will then have to write the letter that nobody wants to write, thanking the other markets and withdrawing your accepted story. Let me say this: If you are going to do simultaneous submissions, then you MUST write this letter the moment a piece is accepted. It is only common courtesy to let the editors at the other markets know, as they may already have invested time and effort in your story. And you don't want to have THE MOST EMBARRASSING THING happen--Namely, having your story or essay run in two journals at once. I know writers to whom this has happened just because they couldn't bring themselves write the letter or email saying, Sorry, someone else took my story. Thank you for your time and consideration. Don't let this happen to you. Write the letter.

The harder issue with respect to simultaneous submissions is that some of the more prominent literary journals--and by this I mean some of the journals where you'd really like your work to appear--claim not to take simultaneous submissions, this despite having the same extremely slow response times as everyone else. What to do in this situation is a real quandary for writers. I personally think that these literary journals are sophisticated enough to know that a good proportion of their submitters are probably also submitting elsewhere, despite the guidelines, so perhaps the loud prohibitions upon simultaneous submissions from certain markets are intended mainly to limit the size of the slush pile. It's hard to know how seriously to take submission guidelines that forbid simultaneous submissions.

However, you do take your chances violating the submission guidelines. I know writers who claim to have been "blacklisted" by an editor or a magazine with a "no simultaneous submissions" policy after they had to withdraw a piece that had been accepted elsewhere. If you are going to submit to a magazine with a policy like this, consider sending to them when you aren't submitting to other places. If you look, a lot of the same magazines that forbid simultaneous submissions actually read all year round, meaning that you can be sending you work to them in the summer or winter when most of the other journals aren't reading.

A Word About Rejection

A lot of writers get extremely anxious once they start submitting their work and the rejections start rolling in. A single "no" from a big-name market can send them reeling. Often they stop submitting their work altogether. This is madness. If you are going to be a writer, then you must be submitting your work on some kind of a regular schedule. And you must expect to receive back not just a few rejections, but many. It's part of the game. And that is how you must think of it. Think of the "back and forth" of submitting as a game of tennis that is providing you with "statistical information" about the quality of your work and about the nature of the markets. Submission responses are your "metric" as to how you're doing. If what you're doing isn't working after a reasonable number of tries, then make appropriate adjustments, and try again.

In our next installment, we'll discuss Formatting, Cover Letters, SASEs, and other such "nuts and bolts" topics.

The Submission Process--Part I: The Markets

2012-03-12T08:00:00.018-04:00

This time of year I get a lot of questions from my student about sending out their work to literary journals and contests. So I'm going to do a series of four posts laying out some advice and information I've accumulated over the years, both through submitting my own work and by watching my students and colleagues submit theirs. Writers, please leave any further comments or information you may have by clicking "comments" at the bottom of this post. I don't claim to have all the answers. Let me know if I've missed anything, or if you have other resources you've found particularly helpful.

The Markets

The first question, of course, is where to send your work. If you are writing short "literary" work (short fiction, poetry, essays, short memoir), then you will want to submit to the many fine literary journals that operate in print and online. There is a good list of literary journals on the Kim's Craft Blog sidebar. There are also many more exhaustive lists available online. Poets & Writers Magazine has a searchable database. So does The New Pages. Poets & Writers tends to be on the "literary" end of things, while The New Pages carries listings for many different genres, as well as online and Indie magazines that some other lists might miss. Another major research tool is Duoptrope's Digest, which also has a searchable database. Duotrope's has a wider listing than Poets & Writers, and is notable for providing rates of response and acceptance. These statistics, while not always entirely accurate, can help you sort out where to submit that "you might actually have a chance."

I guess that's the big point to make about the literary journals. A number of the most prominent literary magazines, the ones you may have heard of, take very few "newcomers." That's not to say that you should never submit to those places. It's just that you should have realistic expectations about your chances with some of the more prestigious markets. You can check the "contributors notes" at the back of a magazine to see what kind of background the writers being published there tend to have.

You should also take a good hard look at what each magazine publishes and how that matches up with your own writing. If you are writing genre horror fiction, you probably don't want to be submitting to a "high literary" market. It's easy these days to get a quick look at what a journal publishes just by Googling around. In the old days, you had to visit the library to find a back issue.

If you are having trouble locating appropriate markets for your work, one avenue to try is a submission service like Writers Relief. Some of my students have had good luck finding just the right markets that way. I personally like to do my own submitting, so I find such services more helpful in terms of locating markets, rather than for handling the submissions themselves.

However, you certainly don't need to hire a submission service, especially since you aren't going to get rich publishing in the literary journals. Most writers are perfectly capable of doing the work of submitting themselves.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of markets out there, and just want a shorter list, either use the Kim's Craft Blog list of literary journals, which we try to update periodically, or check out the list at the back of Best American Short Stories, which is a culled list of the top two to three hundred markets publishing short stories and essays in the United States.

In the next part of our series, we take on the actual process of submitting.

Personas and Alter Egos in Marketing and New Media

2012-02-27T08:00:00.003-05:00

This week in the private writing workshop I'm teaching, we are discussing the use of "personas" and fictional alter egos in creative writing, especially for marketing and new media. There are a lot of reasons to take on a persona as a writer. Sometimes adopting an alter ego or a fictional presence can assist us in dramatizing something dry, like insurance (think of the Traveler's Insurance dog guarding his bone), or can help us make a story more vivid and attention getting (such as the "Evil Wylie" twitter feed).

A persona or alter ego can also provide distance for us as writers from what we are saying. This is especially useful if you are doing a rant, or taking some outrageous position that you'd never want to put in your own voice. Poets, like Pound and Eliot, have been doing this sort of thing for a long time, so this is nothing new.

However, these days we all swim in a large ocean of digital print and other media where we are constantly adopting new stances and new positions that vary depending upon which format we are using. A blog post might be long and thoughtful and authentic, for example, whereas a Twitter feed or YouTube video might require swift, attention-getting impact in order to be noticed among the avalanche of tweets and cute cat videos.

Obviously, you don't want to offend your intended audience, or attract the wrong kind of "eyeballs." Adopting a pornographic avatar might get you more traffic on Twitter, but that's probably not the sort of traffic you want. However, you also don't want to work long and hard on a marketing platform, or media campaign, only to have it get lost out there on the web. Everyone is waving their hands for attention online. How are you going to stand out beside that skateboarding bulldog?

When you are trying to reach an audience these days, it's hard to fight your way through all the noise. There's such a haystack out there, ready to hide your needle. Perhaps it's this need to fight through the weeds, but new media and marketing today seem especially full of "cute" personas and fictional characters, such as the E*Trade Baby, the Aflac Duck, and the LOLCats.

There also seem to be plenty of outrageous "stances" designed to make a point or draw attention, such as Twitter feeds like Shit My Dad Says or Stuff Hipsters Hate. Often these feeds get hugely popular before it is revealed who is behind them. Usually there's a writer back there somewhere, plugging a book, though that fact often gets lost. Which is, of course, a risk for the writer--You might become more notorious than respected.

Still, I think personas can be extremely helpful to dramatize problems and situations, and help make them more vivid. So if you're writing about something dull, like why you might need insurance, what could be better than putting forward a cute terrier worrying over his bone? Or telling a little fable about a guinea pig who has the same problems as your clients.

Of course, whenever you take on a persona or an alter ego, you are always going to open yourself up to the charge that you "aren't being authentic," or that you are "fooling" people. That's what I often hear when I teach this subject in my writing classes, particularly if I suggest to my students that they might want to take on different "personas" for the different roles they assume online. My students often find this notion offensive. They want to believe that they can "be themselves."

But the truth is, even they aren't being themselves.

My students often have well-groomed images that they tend on Facebook and other sites. They also adopt different styles of dress when they see their parents, go out to a club at night, or show up to a job interview. While I, too, like the idea of authenticity, I think that slavishly adhering to always "being yourself" can be very limiting, and can thwart the creativity you bring to your writing. There's a much bigger risk today that your work will simply be ignored than there is that you will be accused of misleading people because you happened to adopt some creative stance or persona online.

Writers, I'd love to hear about the personas and alter egos you've adopted. Has using a persona undermined your "authentic" work or limited you in any way? What has your experience been? Have you gotten into trouble for pretending to be someone other than yourself? I would love to hear actual experiences from other writers in Comments.

Spring Workshops Enrolling!

2012-02-11T05:38:00.002-05:00

For anyone interested in a spring writing workshop, I currently have the following classes enrolling for the spring term at the Cambridge Center in Harvard Square:

Starting on Tuesday, April 3, I will be teaching my "Advanced Skill Set" Workshop for Fiction and Memoir Writers. In this 10 week class we take on some of the higher level craft issues involved in writing fiction and creative nonfiction.

Starting on Thursday, April 5, I will teach my Creative Nonfiction Workshop. This 10 week class is appropriate for anyone working on a memoir, essays, or a creative nonfiction project.

In addition to these classes, stay tuned for news about the Cambridge Center's Summer Writing Intensive, an intensive week of writing workshops, craft talks, readings, and more. The Summer Writing Intensive will take place July 23-27.

The Ghost of a Big-Box Bookstore (Wandering Around Inside What Used To Be A Thriving Borders)

2012-01-30T06:00:00.014-05:00

I had to take my teenage son to Pearl Vision the other day, to get a new pair of glasses and renew his contacts prescription. The Pearl he has been going to for ages is located in a less-than-prosperous mall about twenty minutes drive from our house. What I had forgotten was that this particular store was next to what had formerly been a thriving Borders. In fact, the last time we had visited that particular Borders, it was Christmas time, and the store was jammed with customers. There were long lines at the coffee bar and checkout counters, and the scent of cappuccino floated in the air.

Now, though, it was winter 2012, and we had heard that this Borders had long since closed. We were therefore surprised, as we approached the mall entrance through the sanded brown snow of mid-winter, to spy a large sign proclaiming, generically, BOOKSTORE! Dan and I glanced at each other, and said, "Really? Bookstore?" We peered in through the windows, mother and son, squinting with anticipation against the glare of the tinted glass. "Huh," Dan said, after a moment. There did, indeed, appear to be books displayed for sale inside the store. "Amazing," he said. And so we decided to check it out once we were finished at Pearl. Dan and I have both been feeling a bit sad these days about the fate of bookstores, since we are both types who have always hung out a lot at bookstores, caressing the physical books, checking out the staff recommendations, reading magazines, and drinking coffee. We are both fans of big-box bookstore coffee bars, where we can sit and peruse our latest purchases, and talk about them. So once my son had been fitted for his new glasses, we wandered around the corner, and entered this unbranded "Bookstore."

The space had a very strange feel to it, walking in. A lot of the old Borders build-out had been removed and replaced with industrial metal shelving. There was a fair amount of this metal shelving arrayed around the floor, and there were actually quite a number of books, although not really enough to fill the enormous floor space that the old Borders had encompassed. And so the space echoed as you walked in. I don't think I had realized until that moment how completely over-built some of the old big-box bookstores had been, but of course in their hey-day they were also selling a lot of music CDs and videos, physical products that, like physical books, are rapidly being replaced in whole or in part by tablets and digital downloads.

I guess I had wanted physical books to be in a different category from videos or music, and to be a little more resistant to being replaced by the digital competition. And perhaps they are. I certainly still prefer to read a physical book. A lot of people do. And you want a real book, at least a paperback if not a hardcover, if you are giving a gift. I was therefore heartened to read last week on Twitter that Amazon may be making forays into bookstores through a distribution deal with a major publisher. But then, over the weekend, the New York Times ran a long essay by Julie Bosman speculating about whether Barnes and Noble, the last big-box bookstore standing, still had a future, and if so, what that would look like. Smaller stores, perhaps, and more non-book merchandise?

At any rate, on this particular day, walking through this reverberating space of the former Borders, it was hard even to remember how lively and vigorous big-box bookstores like this one had been not so long ago. In fact, that last Christmas that I'd shopped there--was it '09 or ''10?--I remember that, being short on time, I had bought nearly all of my Christmas gifts there: books, music, gift cards. How times had changed. And how rapidly they had changed. When these technological transformations hit, they hit hard don't they? Think of the carnage wrought by digitization upon photo developing, newspaper classifieds, pay phones, land lines, road maps, movie rental stores, even wearing wristwatches for goodness sake.

In addition to books on metal shelving, someone had set up a small stage in this new generic bookstore, surrounded by chairs for a modest audience. It looked like the new store had been doing some sort of readings, probably for children in the afternoon? Or perhaps readings for independently published authors? I couldn't tell, though I didn't see any Indie-looking books. Rather, the stage and its surrounding chairs had more the look of entertainment the mall was bringing in to try and drum up some foot traffic on the weekends. Malls are under their own sort of pressure these days, from online retailers, as more and more of our lives go digital, and about a third of the mall stores appeared to have closed since our last visit.

There was also something in the bookstore that looked like a coffee bar, though upon closer scrutiny the old Borders coffee bar had been replaced by soda machines. Yes, I'm sorry to report that the baristas had been shoved aside by soda machines selling power drinks. Oh dear.

Dan and I began strolling around to look at the actual physical books for sale. As I said, there were lots of them, but it was hard to find what you wanted because most of the shelves weren't labeled. The books appeared to be mostly remaindered books and mass market paperbacks, and I wondered if I was seeing books that had been purchased by this clearance bookstore when the old Borders store failed--Borders filed for bankruptcy just about a year ago. Or was I seeing publishers' warehouses being emptied out, with more and more publishers going to print-on-demand to supply physical books to customers? Again, I couldn't tell.

The books were dirt cheap, I had to give them that. A lot of the shelves were marked "2 for $5" or "buy one get one free." The selection, though, itself was quite sickening. Upon scrutiny, the books appeared to be mostly the sorts of things that the big publishers have been churning out to try and save themselves. A lot of celebrity memoirs. A lot of cookbooks. A lot of genre stuff. Toys and games. Not much for a lively mind in search of literary adventure. Not much of actual literary value for all that floor space. Where was the poetry? Where were the new plays? And, you know, I think that's part of the trouble. I think publishers for some years now have been underestimating their reading audience. But that, I suppose, is another conversation.

My son and I poked around for a time, and then we both said, simultaneously, "Ready to go?" We were both wearing the same tired, slightly homesick expressions on our faces. The whole experience had been quite disheartening, and I thought on the way home about why that was. It had been like wandering around inside a ghost, a shade, a shell. The dynamism that had once animated the big-box bookstore was utterly gone. Gone were the stacks of new hardcovers waiting to be Christmas gifts. Gone the smell of freshly made coffee and the hiss of the cappuccino machine. Gone the crowds. What remained were echoes, and a profound sense of things gone past.

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

2012-01-01T07:30:00.012-05:00

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"

Buy from Clickertraining.com at THIS LINK.

Buy from Amazon.com in PAPERBACK or on the KINDLE.

Click through to Amazon:

Watch for promotions on Amazon during the Spring of 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.