Writing with Celia

Workshop Hell & How to Get Out of It: The Third Circle

2012-03-01T17:13:00.000-05:00

Welcome back to hell, boys and girls! This week’s horror is: The Sudden Accident! And it’s a doozy. A real favorite of the beginner, The Sudden Accident! combines all that is most terrible about a bad story: flat, boring characters, an unpredictably predictable plot, and a complete lack of awareness of melodrama, as is attested by its professional use in soaps and movies of the week. What is the appeal of arbitrarily derailing your protagonist’s train into a precipice, pummeling his car with an avalanche of boulders, or fraying the rope that keeps him from falling off the mountain? Truly, we must find out.

The Sudden Accident

Let’s start at the beginning: all accidents are sudden. If we could see one coming, we would avoid it, n’est pas? So the whole idea that “Suddenly, a red Toyota swerved out of nowhere in front of Lacy’s car,” is an effective way of injecting suspense into a story is questionable. In general, “suddenly” is a very bad writing word. 99.999% of the time, it’s followed by a cheesy move. If a car has to swerve in front of Lacy’s, please, just have it do so, since “suddenly” is quite the only way it can happen. Otherwise it might just be someone hoping you have some Grey Poupon.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s consider how these accidents happen. Often, they serve as a deus ex machina. You have written yourself into a corner, and offing or crippling somebody is your only way out. Lacy is torn between two lovers, for example. One is her long-time, beloved, faithful husband, the other a bad-boy transient motorcyclist who makes her feel young again. Instead of allowing Lacy to make the difficult decision, you decide to kill her in a car accident (most likely a sudden one). This is bad writing, because you are not allowing the theme nor the characters to develop naturally. It’s a fake resolution: Lacy hasn’t decided a thing—she’s just dead.

This one’s pretty easy to fix. First of all, nix the accident. Spend more time thinking about Lacy and her lovers, in other words, about character, theme, and plot development. Let Lacy make the choice, not the runaway car in the other lane. Read more about natural plot development in my earlier post, here.

Another reason for the sudden accident move is similar to the reason for the divorce or death of parents theme, a desire to explore the loss of security involved when a sudden accident occurs. Usually, these stories involve characters who don’t “appreciate” whatever circumstances the accident conveniently divests them of. Lacy, for example, is seriously considering skipping town with the biker, when—suddenly—the car accident leaves her crippled in some way. Horrified by her mangled beauty, the biker hightails it back to Detroit, but the devoted husband takes her home and spoon feeds her through her recovery, helping Lacy to “appreciate” his devotion and “realize” how wrong she was to take him for granted. If your goal is to write chicken soup stories for Lifetime, read no further; that’s perfect. For literary fiction, however, it’s what we call contrived. It’s still a deus ex machina, and you can fix it in the same way: Lacy must figure out what to do on her own based on her character and circumstances, not on Toyotas and their sudden moves.

I propose, however, that there’s an even more insidious reason why so many beginners’ stories involve sudden accidents: you hate your characters. Yep. Admit it. Why else would you be so compelled to mangle, torture, and kill them? You hate them. They are boring. They exasperate you. They tax you, they heap you. You want them dead, dead! And may God have mercy on their fake little souls. You have become, in short, Anne Sexton’s farmer’s wife. “The Farmer’s Wife” is one of my favorite poems, a seething, scathing cry for help from a woman trapped in an existence so boring death or poetry are the only ways out. You can read the entire poem here, the setup of despair and go-nowhereness that leads to the most brilliant last five lines any poem has ever had:

her young years bungle past
their same marriage bed
and she wishes him cripple, or poet,
or even lonely, or sometimes,
better, my lover, dead.

That’s what you’re feeling, whether you realize it or not, every time your condemn one of your characters to a sudden accident. You just can’t stand Lacy anymore, her simpering, whiny personality, her stupid dilemma between this dude and that. You hate her! So you kill her, or cripple her, anything to end this abysmal story you’d rather die yourself than continue writing. Once Lacy is dead or sort of, she (suddenly) acquires depth. On her deathbed, or her wheelchair, she quite suddenly becomes wise, able to see truths no healthy living person can. You can make friends with her and let her go into the sunset, vindicated, saved. Ahhh.

No.

The sick and the dead are just as stupid or evil as they were when they were fine. Unfortunately, suffering doesn’t always result in the purification of the mind and soul. If Lacy was an idiot when she was fine, no amount of Toyotas can change her into Yoda. That’s the realm of melodrama again, deathbed scenes that feature villains who, suddenly, become victims, elevated by their suffering or impending deaths into deeply philosophical beings who drop pearls of wisdom from their dying lips. No, no, and no.

You can’t rely on swerving Toyotas and falling planes to make your characters interesting. You have to learn to do that carefully, not “suddenly.” If you feel the need to 86 one of your creations, don’t fool yourself into believing you can “suddenly” provide a rescue. What you probably need is a major overhaul—a reconsidering of the whole thing, from whether these characters are compelling enough to even whether this material is worth writing about. Maybe what needs to die under the Toyota here is the whole story or poem.

If you’re not ready for such a brave decision, consider doing the opposite of what the sudden accident is leading you to do. The character realizes nothing, for example. Lacy’s all mangled in the hospital, the mensch hubby nurses her back to life, and she hates him all the more for it, spits in his face and curses the day she met him, cries herself to sleep every night thinking of the biker who dumped her. It’s still a pretty bad story—no way to get around the artificial device of the accident—but at least Lacy gains some complexity.

A reversed stereotype is still a stereotype, however, so this is still not a satisfying solution. What you really want, when you reach for the sudden accident, is insight. You’re as incapable of figuring out what to do as Lacy is, and the Toyota helps you just as much as her. Avoid the sudden accident altogether, and think hard about options you might not have considered before: rather than picking between the husband and the biker, Lacy picks neither. Leaves them both and goes back to school to become a rocket scientist or whatever. Let the story sit for a while by itself until you can get some fresh perspective, but don’t succumb to the temptation of the sudden accident.

Another option is, again, to skip the accident, but keep the results. If the accident serves the purpose of making Lacy appreciate the husband she is thinking of leaving, find a way to make that happen naturally. For example, she could come home one day after a particularly sordid encounter with the biker and be strangely comforted by her husband’s quiet companionship. The end. Conversely, biker dumps Lacy, and, instead of coming home and “suddenly appreciating” her devoted hubby, she hates him, hates him for just being there. Don’t have her stab him or anything, just have her sit there on the couch next to him, seething quietly. The end. There may not be mangled body parts strewn along the highway, but you’ll have accomplished a resolution: Lacy moved from being unsure whether she had grown to hate her husband to being pretty darn sure. That’s it, that’s what the story’s about.

Remember, swerving Toyotas, falling planes, and big boulder avalanches might be exciting or even funny, but just for a little while. They’re not human. They don’t feel, or think. They can never hold our interest. Take a lesson from Faulkner:

There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

You can read the rest of the speech here, or you can watch the video below. Or both. Just don’t do it suddenly!

Workshop Hell & How to Get Out of It: The Second Circle

2012-02-21T11:29:00.000-05:00

Have gotten some good feedback already from my first post on this subject, how to write yourself out of a bad romance. If you missed that post, you can read it here. Meantime, I proceed below with another popular theme: the divorce or death of parents.

The Divorce or Death of Parents Story

It’s no surprise that along with love, the other popular beginner’s subject is death. After all, it seems to carry its own drama, and anything ready-made is particularly appealing to the beginner, who doesn’t quite know how to create her own drama. Of all the deaths one can write about, the death of a parent or other similar figure (a grandparent, mentor, etc.) seems to be a favorite, and not necessarily because the writer has experienced such a loss, although that is sometimes the sad case, adding even more pressure to the workshop.

This kind of story is very similar to the divorce story, another drama-from-the-shelf. What they both have in common is that they are usually told from the point of view of the child or very young person, who is always surprised, then devastated (of course). Both stories usually begin with something like “My life changed forever the day that . . . .”

At the root of the appeal of both these stories is the same theme: the loss of childhood security. It’s a coming-of-age theme like the break-up story, but more frightening, because the ability to adjust to the dramatic event is not usually as easily visible to the writer as in the break-up story, leaving us with stories that seem to have little to no purpose but to vent some vague anxieties the writer has had. At the end of the break-up story, there is usually some kind of epiphany, however cliché. The protagonist learns the reality of love or whatever, and adjusts accordingly: becomes bitter, or savvier, or a homicidal-suicidal maniac. At the end of the divorce or death story, however, the protagonist is left adrift; the story ends at the divorce or death, usually with the same thought with which it begins: “And that was the day my life changed forever.” It’s a story in which nothing has happened.

So, why write such stories? Well, the key is the first and last sentence: “the day my life changed forever.” Though unable to successfully execute it, the writer of such a story understands that life trajectories are interesting, and that a change in a person’s circumstances, especially an important change like the loss of a parent (whether through divorce or death), can be a proving ground for character and a means of exploring the human condition. This is good! The writer should hold on to that theme, and pretty much discard everything else.

For one, children make horrible narrators/protagonists. It’s a really cheap way of making otherwise predictable material seem surprising, mysterious, or momentous. Listen: everyone divorces, everyone dies. Get that through your head. They are neither special nor interesting events. Furthermore, the smaller the child, the stupider. A very small child is equally upset by the loss of an ice-cream cone as by a divorce. It’s only your adult perspective looking back on the events of your childhood that imbues meaning in them. If it seems incredible that the day you heard about your parents’ divorce when you were four you went about your day anyway (napping, watching cartoons, whatnot) and survived it, it’s because it didn’t register on you as a life-altering event at the time. Notice that amazing stories told from the point of view of children or young adults—like “Araby” and “A&P”—are told by the adult looking back, with all the vocabulary, storytelling, and moral/ethical/philosophical abilities of an adult. The beginning writer too often confuses a story about a child with a story that seems to be written by one, and even goes so far as to try to write in some kind of childspeak, like “Mama and Daddy were screaming and I didn’t know why.” Well, we know why, and would like some more insight, please. If children could write stories, they would.

Second, the events leading up to the divorce or death are usually predictable and uninteresting. The proving ground is after, that shady place no beginning writer dares to go. The event changed your life, you say. Prove it! Show the life after.

Three dead parents.
One great story.

I’ve got two more 80’s flicks for you to study (see my apologies in earlier post). The first is The Boy Who Could Fly. It is an excellent case study: the protagonists are Milly, a girl who has lost her terminally ill father to suicide, and Eric, a boy who has lost both parents in a plane crash! My goodness. What’s so great about this film? It starts after both of these events. Milly is a wonderful protagonist. At fifteen, she is young enough to be vulnerable, but old enough to be able to cope with her life on her own. Her mother freaks out as she attempts to work to keep the family afloat, and Milly helps by keeping house and taking care of her little brother. There is a wonderful dinner scene where Milly blows up at her mother and rants about all the things she does for the family. It shows—more than any hospital or funeral scene ever could—exactly what happens when a child is forced to take on adult responsibilities.

Two deadbeat parents.
One great dress.

Another great 80’s flick on this theme is Pretty in Pink. Forget the abysmal star-crossed lovers plot. Focus on the main character, Andie, and her relationship to her father, Jack. Four years before we meet these characters, Andie’s mom has left her family. Jack is devastated, still. He spends his days in his pajamas, and lies to Andie about his efforts at looking for work. That explains Andie’s compelling character, her job at Trax, her quirky fashion sense that makes the best of the cheap things she can afford, her relationship to her boss, even, yes, her desire to become Cinderella and date her way into the fabulous lifestyle of the richies. For years she has been trying to live not just without a mother, but without a father who acts like an adult, or the money to compensate for either. It has made her into the person she is when the film begins, and her test—here represented by our old friend, the love story—is whether to compromise her independent self in a relationship that would provide an instant class upgrade, or to continue being the person that abandonment set her up to be. When she chooses to go to her stupid prom by herself, in her dress made essentially of discards, it’s a choice that has nothing to do with the idiotic rich boyfriend; it’s a delayed reaction to her mother’s abandonment. Her mother left her behind like an old dress, and by golly she’s going to make the best of it and not just survive, but look good doing it.

What would this story have been like if we had seen Andie at five, or at fourteen? It’s clear the mother left because she wanted something better than the ramshackle house unfortunately literally on the wrong side of the tracks. It’s also clear the event was pretty traumatizing for both Andie and her father. There’s no mystery there that deserves our attention. On the other hand, this moment four years after is full of question marks. How long can Andie hang on to this competent little persona she has created to deal with that traumatizing event? Can she hang onto it in the face of economic hardship? Of disdain? Of—gulp!—graduation? That’s the story, baby!

Go write it.

Workshop Hell & How to Get Out of It

2012-02-20T13:57:00.000-05:00

At this point, I’ve spent nearly half my life in workshop—first as a student, and now as a teacher. By far the most surprising thing I’ve learned is how repetitive workshops are. Especially when one is stuck teaching at the introductory level, it becomes obvious that human beings—at least those drawn to creative writing workshops—have a lot fewer than seven stories to tell. Though you might expect each workshop to be different, an assumption based on the expected creativity of the different people involved in each one, the truth is that you often see just a small handful of themes and plots over and over. How do you avoid falling in with the same old, same old? How do you attempt, for the umpteenth time, to address these tired opening moves? That is the subject I intend to tackle in a series of posts, one tired piece at a time.

The trick, I propose, is understanding the roots of the appeal these typical pieces have. I say pieces consciously, because whether prose (fiction or not) or poetry, these themes and plots have a way of dominating the beginner’s efforts. But, why? Why do beginners gravitate toward these typical pieces? Understanding their appeal is the first step in becoming a fresher writer.

Next, the beginner needs to attempt to transcend the typical in some way. One way of doing this is to turn the typical on its head—once you understand what it is that you’re trying to get at, where the appeal is, you can twist the typical around and approach the piece in a fresher way. I will try to offer examples of these twists on the typical as much as possible, but, for now, abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

The First Circle: The Break-up Story

Alas, one of the first stories every student attempts to write is The Great Love Story. Knowing full well that such stories are hackneyed, the beginner thinks it would be a fine idea to avoid the happy ending and provide us with a sad one, showing us how the protagonist lost his or her innocence.

Yikes. Ending in a break-up instead of a wedding is hardly that twist I was referring to—we are still deeply entrenched in the realm of cliché here. Ah, the relationship didn’t turn out the way the protagonist expected. The beloved turned out to be shallow, or betrayed you, or perhaps you had to choose the uglier girl or boy instead, or move to Australia at the end of the summer. Whatever. Bo-rrring!

We all know love ain’t what it’s cracked up to be, so why persist in writing the break-up story? Well, at its root such a story taps into a universal coming-of-age experience, and the beginning writer wants to partake of the eternal theme. It can be done well—two stories I teach consistently on this theme are “Araby” by James Joyce and “A&P” by John Updike. Both stories have the same crush-meets-disappointment coming-of-age theme, but the way these master writers approach it makes all the difference. For one thing, both stories are more than love stories—they are both biting social commentary. “Araby” is an extended meditation on the narrator’s bleak existence on dead-end North Richmond Street, with his old books and his drunken uncle, and the specter of British rule adding a political dimension to the story. “A&P” is an equally bleak look at a suburban beach town and its petit bourgeois values. The number one problem with the beginner’s love story is that there is usually little to no setting or context outside the personal. The setting is usually Generic High School X, and the lovers are suspended from contact with the outside world. Minor characters might include the Best Friend or The Ex, but other than that the theme lacks complexity. You can’t tell a “coming of age” story like that. One doesn’t come of age in a vacuum—on the contrary, the true coming-of-age story is really about the child becoming part of the world such as it is in all its harsh reality, be it a go-nowhere Irish town or a suburban supermarket where the people have all the uniqueness of sheep. The beloved is just a vehicle concentrating all the shit that’s about to hit the fan.

So what’s the beginning writer to do? Well, you can try to provide that context for your love story. Realize that the love story is symbolic—not the main show. The main show is something else—the world and its discontents that the protagonist is about to deal with. Avoid the star-crossed lovers context, however. Been there, so done that. Whether set in Verona, the West Side, LA, or Hawaii, the opposite-tracks theme is so overdone that it will actually make your love story even more hackneyed. Keep both lovers from the same side.

Another, maybe easier way is to put an embarrassing sex scene in the middle of your story. Another problem with the bare-bones love story is how little recognition sex receives as a factor. Of course all love stories are ultimately about sex. Yet, the badly written coming-of-age story is so invested in romance that it often bypasses the question of sex altogether. The realization or epiphany involved in the resolution is something emotional, like realizing the ultimate boyfriend is also ultimately a cheat. We can pick up this kind of entry-level wisdom from watching Lifetime, however—hardly a coming-of-age. Sex, on the other hand, is rarely accurately depicted in art, and can really push the coming-of-age story to the next level if done well. The uninitiated rarely understand how catastrophic sex can be, and a great sexual catastrophe in the middle of your love story can inject realism and even a little bit of humor—always welcome—into an otherwise vapid story. One of my favorites is in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Protagonist Esther Greenwood hemorrhages violently after her first sexual experience. Great! Another favorite is Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Protagonist Connie is all about the fuzzy romance she hears in songs, leading to a truly frightening encounter with Arnold Friend, a Big-Bad-Wolf type who blows her little romantic house in.

Yes.

Another great example of this theme is Little Darlings. Fifteen-year-olds at summer camp take bets to see which of the two protagonists loses her virginity first. As their targets, one girl picks a sexy, older counselor, and the other a boy from the camp across the lake. Of course, the girl who picks the counselor has no shot at winning, yet she pretends to have sex with him and wins the bet when the other girl—who, of course, did have sex—pretends not to. It’s a wonderful, wonderful coming-of-age story, because both girls start out equally innocent and the one who actually loses her virginity also loses her ability to talk about it.

Yes.

From more or less the same time period comes The Last American Virgin, a schizo little teen sex flick that nevertheless presents a really interesting look at teen boy sexuality. It’s schizo because it’s trying really hard to be Porky’s, but the heart of the plot is solid. Gary and his friends are all dying to have sex, but Gary is the only one interested in love, particularly Karen’s love. He also wants to fit in, however, and winds up losing his virginity to a streetwalker he and his friends pool funds to hire. The scene is so disgusting, however, that it really shocks you into the realization that all these sexcapades are crass and horrible, and have nothing to do with the kind of feelings Gary has for Karen, who winds up preferring his best friend anyway, even after he knocks her up and refuses to help her deal with it. It’s a brutal awakening, which is the best kind.

Recognize the role of sex in the coming-of-age love story, and it’ll at least take it out of the romance rut. Make it graphic. Lose the erection, ejaculate prematurely on her thigh, fart accidentally. Anything bodily will do—anything that goes against the moonlight and roses garbage. Anything except the broken condom, which is also a cliché. Condom drama is not very good a) because it’s overdone and b) because then we can always blame the condom for screwing things up, when what you really want is the people screwing up, showing their humanity in its full bodily horror.

No.

My apologies, by the way, for all the dated examples. I was pretty innocent myself when I read and watched the stories I’ve mentioned here, and one thing that happens after you actually come of age is that you’re not really drawn to this type of story anymore. I need a lot of convincing at this point before I can be talked into giving my precious time to a novel or a film that I think is going to be predictable. What’s the point? Last time I caved it was to No Strings Attached, a Natalie Portman, Ashton Kutcher abomination. Hm. Yes, these sex-starved youths agree it’s best to get together just to have the good sex they crave, and nothing more. Lo and behold, they wind up falling in love! Like, duh. Man, I saw that whole movie in the second it took to read the title. What was the point of devoting two whole hours to seeing it play out? Kutcher’s not that cute. Apparently there’s another one called Friends with Benefits, and surely 1,000 more. Maybe one of these is a more current example of an old story told with a good twist, but I’m not willing to sit through the other 999 just to be able to provide fresher examples for you people. I was ten when I first saw The Last American Virgin. I was titillated by the title; being a virgin myself, I was curious to see anything that could inform me about this great mystery. Lucky for me, I wound up seeing a great film that I couldn’t really understand at the time. The first time I saw it as an adult I thought, wow. Were it in the theaters now, however, I would probably dismiss it as another stupid sex comedy.

See where I’m going with this? You don’t want that to happen to your story. You want to stand out from the pack. I hope I’ve given you two good ways to do that with your love story: create a strong social setting for which the love story becomes a frontispiece, and recognize the role of sex, in all its gross bodily reality, in the romance plot. And tune in next post for the next circle of Hell.

Scene vs. Summary

2012-02-07T16:28:00.002-05:00

To get the most out of this post, you might want to read Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” here first.

One of the most difficult aspects of writing for beginners to master is the art of balancing scene and summary. At its most basic, the distinction between these is not that complicated. Summary, by definition, encompasses a large amount of information in a condensed form. A scene, on the other hand, is a place or a vista, something we experience in its fullness, first-hand. Thus, it should be pretty easy to distinguish these in a narrative. A scene would be a discrete event retold in the fullness of time and place, and a summary or exposition would be a condensed narrative covering perhaps many events in just a few sentences using sparse details. Simple? Not quite. What are we to make of a paragraph such as this, for example:

Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn't much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. "Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you're so pretty?" she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie.

Is this a “scene”? Or is this summary? This opening paragraph of Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” has some of the markings of a scene. We seem to have specific action and detail: “she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right.” We even have dialogue. But we do not have a scene. This is summary.

A scene is a single, specific setting. What Oates writes above is representative of several scenes: many times in her life, Connie cranes her neck to glance into mirrors, perhaps at the mall, walking by the open bathroom door, or in the rearview mirror of the car. Oates is not telling us, in this paragraph, about any one of these moments; she is telling us about all of them, summarizing them into what she calls Connie’s habit. Notice also the many uses of “always” and “would.” The dialogue that we have is not being said at one particular moment, it is something Connie’s mother “always would” say. She may have said it several times, and Oates is summarizing all those times into this one representative comment. Notice how Oates shifts into a scene in the paragraph below:

Sometimes they did go shopping or to a movie, but sometimes they went across the highway, ducking fast across the busy road, to a drive-in restaurant where older kids hung out. The restaurant was shaped like a big bottle, though squatter than a real bottle, and on its cap was a revolving figure of a grinning boy holding a hamburger aloft. One night in midsummer they ran across, breathless with daring, and right away someone leaned out a car window and invited them over, but it was just a boy from high school they didn't like. It made them feel good to be able to ignore him. . . .

The beginning of this paragraph is still summary: “Sometimes they did go shopping or to a movie, but sometimes they went across the highway . . . .” Sometimes. These are representative, recurring actions. Connie and her friend go to these places several times, and, at first, Oates is telling us about the habit, not any one particular moment. She shifts to scene, however, when she says “one night.” Suddenly, we are not hearing about many nights together; we are watching one particular night in midsummer. Only on this night, and no other, did a boy from high school lean out the car window and invite them over right away. Oates goes on to tell us of the first time Connie meets Arnold Friend in this short scene, and goes back to summary mode in just four paragraphs. Three more paragraphs of summary and she begins the last scene of the story, the climax in which Arnold Friend comes over to Connie’s house. She sustains this scene to the end of the story, turning what amounts to maybe less than half an hour of action into the longest chunk of the story: 5,364 words out of 6,925. Excluding the first, shorter scene at the drive-in, the remaining 1008 words of summary encompass that entire summer of Connie’s life.

A scene, in other words, slows down the pace of story to real time or slower. Notice how slow the pace of the following scene is, from the climax of the story, when Connie realizes Arnold Friend has her trapped and she has nowhere to turn to for help:

She turned and bumped against a chair or something, hurting her leg, but she ran into the back room and picked up the telephone. Something roared in her ear, a tiny roaring, and she was so sick with fear that she could do nothing but listen to it—the telephone was clammy and very heavy and her fingers groped down to the dial but were too weak to touch it. She began to scream into the phone, into the roaring. She cried out, she cried for her mother, she felt her breath start jerking back and forth in her lungs as if it were something Arnold Friend was stabbing her with again and again with no tenderness. A noisy sorrowful wailing rose all about her and she was locked inside it the way she was locked inside this house.

This is slower than real time. In real time, this action might not take more than a minute, maybe two. But Oates slows the pace down deliberately, telling us not only what Connie does or what she hears, but what she’s thinking and feeling. It’s a wonderful way of heightening the tension of the moment—we must wait to find out what she’s going to do next, what’s going to happen to her. We are with her in this moment, watching her ourselves rather than being told, second-hand, what she is like.

That’s the value of a scene, and why you should avoid summary as much as possible. Summary is functional, and the more plot you are trying to cram into a story, the more necessary it might become. It is also useful for going over information that we need to know but is not interesting, such as the ten years Character X spent in prison. If all he did while he was there was read crime novels and avoid dropping the soap, perhaps it’s best to skip quickly to the part where he gets out and seeks his revenge or whatever. Most times, however, the beginning writer overuses summary, tries to cram too much story into too little space. And while you can have a great story that is all scene and no summary, the reverse is not true. I can tell you all of “Where Are You Going” in just a few words: “There once was a girl named Connie who was really pretty and knew it and loved the feeling of being admired by boys and thought nothing was wrong with that. She failed to see the danger of adult sexuality and was easily manipulated by a grown man who didn’t see a single special thing about her.” There you go. 56 words to Oates’s 6,925.

We’re not just talking word count, however. Look at all that’s lost in summary: specific detail, action, setting, dialogue. All the drama is gone. Think of scenes as those cheesy commercial dramatizations: it’s one thing to tell you that this alarm system can save your family from a burglar, and a whole ‘nother to hire some actors to run from a guy in a ski mask. You see the family being threatened by the burglar, you fear the same thing happening to yours. You go get an alarm. It’s the difference between being told about the horrible car accident and watching it happen before your own eyes. You may be able to imagine how horrible it was if someone tells you about it, but when you see it first-hand you never forget it. Scenes are the ultimate way to “show, don’t tell.”

So, how do you create a scene? For one thing, slow down! Don’t cram ten years into one paragraph. Pick a single moment in your story to tell at a time, and relegate whatever information we need to know that happens before or after to the background. The story about the day the house got broken into does not begin in the morning, eighteen hours before the burglar got there, with sentences such as “Daisy went to work that day just like any other day.” No; the story begins with “Daisy heard the creak of the front door opening and put her book down. There was no one else in the house.” Spend two pages on the four minutes it takes Daisy to sneak down her dark hallway and peek around the potted fern at the front door. Describe the feel of the cold floor under her bare feet. Tell me that she’s wishing she had bought that alarm system. Real time, or slower.

It helps to think of your writing cinematically. Pretend someone has bought the rights to turn your story into a film, and asked for your help. Where is your opening scene? Where is Daisy reading when she hears the creak of the front door? In bed? There’s your location. It might help to study how scriptwriters make this conversion. Oates’s story has been filmed a couple of times, but the most widely available version is the 1985 adaptation starring Laura Dern as Connie, Smooth Talk. Tom Cole did a really good job of turning a two-scene story into a ninety-two minute film. He took some of Oates’s “representative” moments and turned them into full scenes, such as when Connie and her pals romp through the mall. All Oates gives us in the story is a quick symbolic impression of what the girls “must have been” like, but in the film the scene has them walking in and out of stores, talking, and generally making teens of themselves for a good chunk of time. Conversely, the final scene goes by much faster: that paragraph where Connie grabs the phone I quoted above is just a brief moment, the fullness of Connie’s horror more quickly conveyed by the simultaneity of visual, auditory, and spatial detail possible in film.

Ultimately, however, the case may be that beginning writers think too cinematically. Many of the excessively summarized stories I read from students feel a lot like being told about a movie: “ . . . and then Connie stayed home one day and the guy from the drive-in comes by and . . . .” All the details of the scene are in the writer’s head, but she is unable to put them on the page. If that’s the case with you, just remember that it’s not just the plot that makes the film good. A quick overview of the action is not able to convey the awesomeness of all that surrounds it: the looks on the actors’ faces, the exact tone of their voices, the incredible sets on which they are standing. These are what create a scene in both print and film, not just actions and dialogue. Take the time to notice these in film as well as print: the sets, the costumes, the background noises. If you want to write about your yearly trip to the beach, isolate just one morning of one year you took that trip, and bring us with you.

Teaching “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Thinking about the Susan G. Komen Controversy

2012-02-05T16:25:00.000-05:00

It’s been another busy week, and I just finished preparing tomorrow’s lecture on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s mostly autobiographical 1892 short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” It’s a story I’ve taught many times, but now it seems more relevant than ever.

This time, I’m not teaching it as a creative writing model; I’m teaching it as part of a unit on motherhood and depression in my introduction to literature course. The course is populated almost exclusively by nursing majors, whose tight schedules demand that a special section of this universally required course be reserved for them. Not coincidentally at all, all but one of the nursing students are women. Thus, I not only design the course to try to appeal to their scientific sensibilities, combining texts that deal with illness, such as Gilman’s story, with articles in the sciences that serve to contextualize the literature, but also I try to squeeze in something about women’s social history. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the centerpiece of a unit that will go through Brooke Shield’s defense of her right to take medication for her post-partum depression against Tom Cruise’s public condemnation and wind up discussing how the women of Sex and the City 2 deal with marriage, motherhood, and menopause. I am hoping my students will come to understand how controversial the relationship of women is to the medical establishment, how inextricable sexual politics are from their mental and physical health issues.

Little did I know, as I was preparing the syllabus over the summer, how insanely relevant this discussion would become. The recent Susan G. Komen Foundation’s decision to pull support from Planned Parenthood in order to avoid funding abortions exploded into a controversy the likes of which I had not seen for a long time. The consensus was largely that the much-beloved, wildly successful “pink ribbon” organization had cruelly betrayed women. So vast was the outcry, that the Komen Foundation promptly reversed its decision, and many top officials resigned.

By far my favorite analysis of the controversy so far has been Amy Schiller’s wonderful article for The Nation. In it, Schiller argues that the controversy should serve to remind us of the impossibility of depoliticizing women’s issues. She writes:

The past decades have seen the rise of a nominally apolitical marketing campaign masquerading as feminism, with Komen merely the most visible symbol. Komen aligns perfectly with what Linda Hirshman labeled “choice feminism”—a moral-relativist approach to feminism that tries to scrub the movement of politics and value judgments in favor of uncritical affirmation of all women’s choices.

The innocuous pink ribbon has done much to bring much-needed attention to the fight against breast cancer, but it is emblematic of the kind of feminist politics we have preferred since the turn of the century, what Schiller calls “’you go girl’ sloganeering.” In other words, let’s not fight over issues like abortion anymore, or nasty problems like the wage gap, child care, sexual harassment, or sexual exploitation. Let’s not focus on how our women politicians are reduced to fashion statements, let’s just rejoice that they exist. Let’s turn a blind eye to poverty, rape, and unemployment, and rally behind something we all can agree on, like fighting cancer.

And so, I have a classroom full of young women, born after the Third Wave, who have never questioned why all the nursing majors seem to be girls, or why they’ve been advised by teachers and parents to choose nursing instead of medicine because “it’s a good career for women,” while their brothers and boyfriends have not received similar advice.

Not much has changed since the last turn of the century, when Gilman went to the doctor:

This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to "live as domestic a life as far as possible," to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again" as long as I lived. This was in 1887.

What motivated the famous Dr. Mitchell to come up with such a treatment? Was it science? Or politics? The answer, of course, is both, and Gilman knew this fact we have forgotten since. She wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” deliberately to voice her protest against a misguided and prejudiced practice:

Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.
The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has, to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate--so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.
But the best result is this. Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.
It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

And that, my dears, is the value of literature, and in particular of literature by women. My nursing students often chafe against this requirement to pass even a cursory introductory course in literature. Many new schools, in the race to provide fast, specialized degrees, bypass any kind of liberal arts conventions and do away with requirements in the humanities for science students. That is just as ignorant, however, as walking around pretending that fighting breast cancer is an apolitical endeavor. When we crank out doctors, nurses, lawyers, politicians, scientists, and economists who live in the delusion that science is abstract from the subjective, messy world of politics, we risk creating a society just as narrow-minded as Columbus’s or Copernicus’s, in which “scientific truth” had become so unquestioned that to contradict it was heresy. My nursing students are not likely to take another course in which they question the sociopolitical implications of the standard practices of their chosen field.

Too racy?

Does no one remember that “the personal is political”? Apparently not, and one reason why we might have forgotten is how little we look to the past for the answers to the present, and future. Not only are we constantly called upon to defend the continued teaching of the arts, to explain their “usefulness,” but also when we do teach them, we often teach feel-good, uplifting works devoid of politics and conflict. “No one seems to even have read The Great Gatsby in high school anymore,” my husband, my fellow crusader, was complaining the other day. “Too much booze and sex and cars,” I kidded. But I wasn’t really kidding. How often do we back down from teaching something that could potentially be objectionable?

The result is that we have produced a couple of generations now of extremely naïve young people, people who have never seriously thought about sexism, racism, violence, or similar subjects on adult terms. People to whom activism is defined as choosing what color ribbon to wear or brand of yogurt to eat.

The Komen controversy proves that not only can we not keep politics out of activism, but also that taking a political stand has officially become suicidal. Right after they reversed the decision to split with Planned Parenthood, rumors surfaced that the Komen Foundation planned to produce a pink handgun for a new campaign. They denied the rumors, but the fact that they cropped up in the first place is an indication of how serious a blow they have taken to their image. The fact that they went back on their decision hardly seems to matter. The next time some public organization is confronted with the option of taking a stand on either side of an issue, the Komen controversy will serve as an example of how foolish that is.

It’s a pity. Issues don’t go away just because we ignore them. Silencing of any sort is wrong; that’s what’s killed feminism, this pressure to shut up on all but the most banal of you-go-girl statements. Meantime, I’m teaching “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Maybe, when one of my students has a baby, and someone tells her that her inability to sleep and her paralyzing anxiety are “all in her head,” she might remember that stupid class she was forced to take, and question where this advice is coming from.

Cooking with Celia: Orzo-Stuffed Tomatoes

2012-01-29T15:54:00.000-05:00

Given the popularity of my Black-Eyed Peas & Quinoa Salad post and my general lack of inspiration this week having to do with writing matters, I've decided a late-weekend "Cooking with Celia" post is better than no post at all. Ergo, I present to you my Orzo-Stuffed Tomatoes. I make these with veggie chicken strips and vegan mayo, but I assume it would work as well with a dead animal and something made out of an embryo. Any stuffed tomato recipe is only as good as the tomatoes, of course, so do try to get your hands on actual tomatoes. Try organic, vine-ripened. Also, be careful with the orzo: note that it nearly doubles in size as it cooks, so 1 cup cooked is just about 1/2 - 1/3 cup raw. As to the apple, any kind will do, but I prefer a nice, tart green one.

Ingredients

6 large tomatoes
1 cup cooked orzo
1 cup chopped cooked chicken
3/4 cup each of chopped celery, carrot, and apple
3/4 cup thawed peas
3/4 cup chopped curly parsley
1 tsp. finely chopped garlic (about 1 clove)
3/4 cup mayo
1 tbsp. Dijon mustard
1 tbsp. lemon juice
2 tbsp. black pepper
2 tsp. salt
Romaine leaves for garnish

1. Prepare the tomatoes. I prefer to leave the peel on, because it helps to keep the tomatoes sturdy. If it freaks you out, however, lightly score a cross at the bottom of each tomato. Dip them in boiling water for 30 seconds to a minute, until the scored part shrinks slightly. Transfer immediately to a bowl of ice water, or they will cook. When they are cool enough to handle, the peel should come off easily. Otherwise, just cut the top off to form a bowl. You can be fancy if you like and make a cute pattern, like scallops or a zigzag. You can throw away the tops or use them later as a garnish. Also remove a small sliver from the bottom so the tomato will sit up when stuffed. Scoop out the insides with a small spoon, gently. You can save these for a soup or sauce.

2. In a large bowl, mix together the orzo, chicken, celery, carrot, apple, peas, parsley, and garlic.

3. In a small bowl, whisk together the mayo, mustard, lemon juice, pepper, and salt until well mixed. Fold into orzo salad.

4. Using a spoon, stuff orzo salad into the tomatoes. Don't worry if there's leftover salad, you can use it for garnish.

5. Serve over romaine leaves. Place any leftover salad around the tomato. Garnish with tomato tops, celery stalks, or parsley. Serve immediately or refrigerate, covered, overnight.

Unheimlich Maneuvers

2012-01-20T12:41:00.000-05:00

In the strong belief that one of the major steps a beginning writer has to take in order to progress is to learn to create a strong, effective settings, I have begun my creative writing class this semester with a discussion of setting, why it’s important, and how to create one. For their first exercise, I’ve asked my students to write a two-page description of setting, or a one-page poem.

The exercise looks simple, but it’s not. Apart from a few students who had recently taken a vacation, most of them complained that they found the exercise extremely difficult. “I didn’t know what to write about,” was the most general complaint, of course. That’s why setting is a struggle for the beginner; we don’t see the places we inhabit. We take them for granted, and so, when we write, we skip them.

This is bad, of course, because, as the old saying goes, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. A story or a poem with an absent or weak setting will feel “thin” even though the reader may not notice exactly what is missing. But how can you do a good job at recreating (or simply creating) something that you have trouble seeing yourself? The answer is that you must somehow learn to see again. You must perform, if you will, an unheimlich maneuver, learn to make the familiar unfamiliar. The Freudian concept of the unheimlich or “the uncanny” is extremely useful in creating setting. Basically, it refers to something that is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, and therefore creeps you out. Think of those dreams where you’re in your house, only it’s not your house somehow. Something’s off, you can’t pin it down. You become obsessed with it; you notice every detail in the attempt to figure it out.

While you don’t want to make all your settings creepy, you do need that unheimlich ability to notice what you normally don’t. When we are constantly surrounded by familiar settings, our brains go on autopilot. You stop seeing the colors on the walls, you stop smelling the air freshener, you don’t hear the constant drone of the air conditioner. You only notice what is different—when something’s burning in the kitchen, for example. This is our brain’s way of conserving energy. Imagine noticing everything all the time—you’d be so overwhelmed with sensory information, you wouldn’t be able to do much.

What is good for our peace and productivity, however, is bad for our writing. We think there’s nothing to describe about our daily settings. Most of us live very dull lives. Home. School. Work. The gym. The mall. The same five or six settings, week after week after week. Every city has the same Target, the same CVS, the same broad avenue leading to a supermarket parking lot. Our worlds become invisible. When I actually make it to the beach, I feel like I’m on another planet. That’s why those students who had recently been on a vacation fared a little better, and why, when given the assignment to write about setting, we often reach for the latest unfamiliar experience like the latest vacation.

You can’t keep your characters on vacation all the time, however. In truth, our stories belong in our daily lives, in those five or six settings that are, well, boring. So, what to do? How can we create realistic settings and rich worlds without truly seeing them or boring the reader? About boring the reader, never you mind. We all have a strong voyeuristic impulse. Your house may be boring to you, but it’s super interesting to anyone else. Just think of the last time you were at a new friend’s house. You know you scanned the bookshelves and the music rack, the paintings and pictures. You peeked inside the medicine cabinet and behind the shower curtain when you went to the bathroom. All the mundane details of your new friend’s daily life—things that she or he probably hasn’t noticed for years—were of extreme interest to you.

So then only one problem remains: your ability to effectively write about something you have trouble seeing. Take a lesson from the makers of air fresheners and candles. Those air fresheners or candles that “cycle” between two fragrances know that the trick to putting your brain back in notice mode is change.

One good way to do this is to keep a journal in which you describe your daily settings daily. The proposition might seem boring, but you’d be surprised what the expectation of having to describe something will make you notice.

Some classic moves involve pretending to describe the place to an alien or a blind person. These don’t work very well, I think. The alien viewpoint makes everything seem, well, alien, and that’s not what you’d be going for in a regular realistic piece. The trick to a rich realistic setting, ironically, is to make it disappear. It’s holding everything together like a great pair of Spanx, but it’s not jumping out at you and overwhelming other aspects of the story. The alien viewpoint will do that. The blind guide viewpoint is a little better, because at least it’s human. The problem with the blind guide, however, is selection. The only way setting becomes boring is if it’s unnecessary, too much. Your blind pal might need to know the location of every piece of furniture in your living room in order to successfully navigate it, but your reader can’t really do anything with the fact that the sofa is at twelve o’clock and the armchair at three.

Additionally, the blind guide viewpoint makes you focus too much on visual detail, which is already a danger given that vision is our dominant sense. Same thing goes for the paint-your-setting idea. What you want is a selection of meaningful sensory detail.

The sensory part is easy. We’ve got five: sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste. Noticing these is a simple listing task. Sit in the place you want to describe (or close your eyes and imagine it), and spend a fixed amount of time on each sense, listing what you notice on a piece of paper. The result will be a meaningless collection of detail, but isolating each sense will help you notice what you need to.

The next step is to select and arrange the details on your list. First, determine the dominant impression you want to make. For example, if you want to convey a sense of tension, you might want to skip the smell of baking cookies that you genuinely noticed but doesn’t go with your goal. Cross out some things, add others.

These two preliminary steps are mostly mechanical, however, and won’t get you all the way to fantastic. The only way to get there is to step outside yourself and get to know the reader. You must be aware of the reader’s expectations, and play with that. These are the right “stranger’s eyes,” not the alien’s or the blind pal’s. Begin by asking yourself, what does the reader already know about this place? What doesn’t she?

One of the most difficult places to write about is the Caribbean, because people have so many expectations of it. Say so much as the word and immediately it conjures up palm trees, sandy beaches, and clear blue waters: clichés. One of the pieces I make my students read early is “The Caribbean, By a Nose,” a wonderful short piece by Jerry V. Haines. Haines does a good job of recognizing the reader’s expectations about palm trees and the like, and arranges his piece around unexpected details like trash fires and jitney exhaust. It’s a good lesson in “I bet you didn’t know” writing.

Ultimately, however, the best way to get to know the reader is to become one yourself. Reading about the Caribbean or Miami is a real hoot for me sometimes. I love it how Miami, for example, is always somehow Miami Beach. The pastel art deco hotels of Ocean Drive, the Miami Vice vision of the city, so predominate the global imagination that it’s as if the rest of the city doesn’t exist. In truth, Miami Beach is a separate city, and a small one at that. Reading about it, however, creates a really productive impulse in me to tell you what it’s really like, and that corrective desire can be awakening.

Research the places you intend to write about. For example, one intriguing piece I got from my students was a recollection of a visit to Portugal. She describes—quite well!—the delicious taste of samosas. To me, samosas are Indian food, and I’m dying to know about that colonial relationship, and how Indian culture is part of Portuguese culture these days. You may not know these things off the top of your head even if you’re Portuguese, but a little background history can really enrich your sense of a place, and ours.

Places, in other words, are not just sensory landscapes. The beginner forgets sometimes that places are an equation: land + people / time. Just like we are so used to our daily settings that we don’t see them, we often live in places so familiar to us that we don’t see or perhaps don’t know the historical changes that have made them. A great example of how knowing a place’s history can enrich your ability to write about it is Joan Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem (yes, I’m stealing the example from William Zinsser’s On Writing Well). This is a great example of how to write about a place. Not only does Didion describe the physical landscape, but also she knows how the history of the place has shaped the lives of the people who live in it. Suddenly finding out that the city you’ve been living in for the past ten years was founded by mobsters can really make you see it with new eyes. There is always something interesting about places if you dig long enough.

But what if you’re writing about a completely made up place, or just one small room? Even galaxies far, far away have elements of the real in them, so knowing how real places work can help you build fake ones. As far as tiny rooms go, they too have tiny histories. How you decided to paint every wall a different color despite having only twenty square feet of living space, for example, because you couldn’t bear the thought of living with white walls. Conversely, the white walls that came with the apartment and that you never bothered to paint because you always thought you’d be moving “soon.” There’s no such thing as “nothing to write about” when it comes to setting. We don’t live in vacuums. We are always somewhere, even when we close our eyes, even in a sensory deprivation tank. Create a sense of attentiveness—learn to make the familiar new—and you will be surprised at how much you’ve been missing.

Top Mistakes Beginning Writers Make, Part II

2012-01-12T17:46:00.001-05:00

Welcome back! It’s all about second acts in this second year of Writing with Celia, and so my first real post of the new year is a part II. If you missed part I, well, go and read it! Otherwise, proceed below, with the second half of typical beginners’ booboos.

A great book for
learning how to
read critically.

1. Not reading critically. Many of the faux pas committed by beginning writers are directly attributable to poor reading habits. Even if you spend the rest of your life in workshop, you will never learn a single thing about writing if you don’t read voraciously—and well. Here, I’m not going to rant again about the need to read in order to learn to write. I believe I’ve made that point! But I do want to emphasize the need to not only read well, meaning good books written by good writers who can help you grow, but also to read critically. Why is this book so satisfying, but not that? Very often, the beginning writer reads for pleasure, puts the book down with a smile or a grimace, and grabs the next. Both books you enjoyed and those you didn’t can help you grow as a writer if you learn to analyze your reactions and how they came about. In order to do this easily and well, it helps to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of literary criticism. That’s why the best writing programs are those that have a strong literature studies program attached to them. You can reproduce this effect on your own, however. Buy a typical college reader and study on your own, for example. A book club can also help you analyze why good books are good and bad ones bad by forcing you to not only analyze your own reactions, but discuss them with others. Just make sure your book club has good readers in it who will also be capable of analysis. Finally, keeping a reading journal is also an excellent way of paying attention to the nuts and bolts. Every time you read, grab your journal and explain to yourself why you enjoyed / didn’t enjoy what you just read.

2. No sense of experimentation. Only the bravest of beginning writers are willing to go out on a limb, but usually even those people can’t quite figure out what it means to do that, and so beginners’ writing is usually very safe (read: dull). You grow, however, by taking risks. You don’t always have to tell the story in past tense, third person omniscient, or first-person point of view that sounds like third-person omniscient for all the voice it has. You don’t have to tell it chronologically. Try it in present tense, try it from the point of view of the parrot, try it backwards. Try it a couple of different ways. Get freaky with it.

3. Narcissistic point of view. The beginning writer often fails to realize that just because something is interesting to him or her, it doesn’t make it interesting to someone else. The drawn-out tale of the first breakup, for example, may make you weep as you write it, but it makes us gag or giggle, neither of which you meant for us to do. Why? You forgot about us. You were writing about yourself and for yourself, which is fine as long as you can make some kind of empathetic leap, as long as you can convey what is representative, human, and eternal about yourself. The moment you forget about us readers, however, you shut down your inner critic, and that makes for bad writing. There’s a school of writing instruction, a good one, that insists one writes what ones knows, and one of course knows oneself. But often this advice is taken to the extreme, and the writer becomes unable to discern the difference between writing for others and writing for therapy. This happens to be how so many beginners’ workshops are full of stories written from the point of view of children, which is so incredibly difficult to do well that it’s hardly a task for the beginner. But the writer is trying to work something out, like a parents’ divorce, or is so young that “writing about yourself” literally means writing from the point of view of a child. These stories are usually very predictable and boring, and, though they are attempts at “coming of age” narratives, they are not good ones, because there is no critical space between the narrated experience and its writing. “Writing for yourself” is okay only insofar as you think of yourself as an other, a critical doppelganger who shares your interests and experiences, but who is still someone else.

4. Purposely derivative elements. This one’s baffling to me, but I see it all the time. Workshopping these pieces is a hoot: the workshop usually consists of a string of comments such as “this character reminds me of X” and “that part reminded me of Y” or “this story reminds me of . . . “—in short, the piece is nothing but a quilt of other people’s writing. The workshop always crumbles when someone brings up the obvious: are you enjoying this story, or the ones it’s reminding you of? It’s a devastating problem for the writer, who usually conceived of the elements purposely drawing them from other texts she or he has enjoyed. “I wanted to make this character sort of like X in Y,” she or he will say. Only, “sort of” is more like “exactly.” There’s nothing wrong with retelling stories, but you must make them yours in some way.

And now, some typical hurdles more specific to the poet:

5. Excessive simple rhymes. Often, the beginning poet doesn’t quite know what poetry is apart from rhymed words, and so reaches for too many bad ones, paying no attention or too little to everything else that makes a poem a poem. The problem comes from unfamiliarity with anything remotely contemporary or literary when it comes to poetry. Song lyrics, children’s rhymes, and light verse (such as that found in greeting cards) all rely heavily on simple rhymes, but contemporary literary poetry is a completely different animal. Though rhyme exists is both formal and free verse, it must be controlled and fresh. You can’t Dr. Seuss your way into a poem, but, if the last time you actually read a poem was when you were seven years old, you’ll probably try to.

6. Writing about feelings. The beginning poet confuses poetry with emotion. This is some kind of conspiracy perpetrated by Hallmark, no doubt. Outpourings of abstract emotion are no more poetry than your high school diary was. Even Dr. Seuss knows that poetry is about green eggs and ham: about stuff. Your poem must have things in it that we can see, hear, taste, smell, etc. If these things conjure up feelings in us, you’ve done your job. But telling us about the feelings you’ve had instead of the things that elicited them from you is like chewing our food for us, which is gross. Maxine Kumin, whom I once had the pleasure of studying with, always said poems are like rooms. We must fill them with furniture, and the reader will live in them. You can’t sit on love and rest your coffee cup on despair.

7. Writing exclusively about love. The beginning poet also often thinks of poetry as exclusively love poetry, which is only a small subset of the whole thing. Poetry can be about anything, and some of my favorite poems are about dead animals and chapatti fried in ghee. Love poems, like stories told from the point of view of children, are actually extremely difficult to write well, and not for beginners. In fact, the beginner shouldn’t think of the poem as being “about” any particular emotion at all. Make it about something concrete, like the fence or the tomatoes or the sweaty socks.

Not sure if it's a
cliché? Look it
up!

8. No awareness of cliché. Another problem that comes from not enough reading. The beginner actually thinks of the cliché as good. The lips are always like roses or cherries, the eyes always blue as the sky. If something hits them, it always does so like a ton of bricks. Cliché is the most insidious, disgusting weed in the garden of writing. Let just one in, and, like rabbits or tribbles, they’ll multiply and take over your writing until every sentence has one or more. The beginner’s problem is that she or he doesn’t recognize them as evil. They are familiar little easy phrases that are easy to grab. Learning to spot clichés and weed them out takes time and effort, like all good things do.

9. No awareness of contemporary poetry. Kind of goes without saying at this point, but the problem of not reading is even worse when it comes to poetry. Decent enough prose will come at you sideways sometimes—a great script, a great article you read in the doctor’s office. Contemporary poetry exists in an alternate universe, however, and you will never bump into it accidentally. If you don’t make the effort to learn who is writing today, and how, and why, all you’ll know of poetry is nursery rhymes and light verse, and the occasional classic or uplifting poem some poor teacher included in the syllabus one day when she was feeling hopeful. The range and dynamism of contemporary poetry is amazing. There are lyrical poets, confessional poets, experimental poets, formalists, spoken word artists. So much, all of it different. If you want to have fun at the party, you have to first find out where it is, and what it takes to get invited.

An excellent guide
to the elements of
contemporary poetry.

10. No awareness of form. Apart from simple rhyme schemes, the beginning poet doesn’t know much about what kinds of decisions go into the way a poem looks. Beyond not being acquainted with traditional forms such as the sonnet or villanelle, the beginner often has no notion of the function of form in free verse. Why are some lines long, and others short? Why are some poems arranged into stanzas, and some not? What is the purpose of counting syllables? What the heck is scansion? These are all “mysteries” to the beginner, but bread and butter to the initiated. Form is what makes a poem a poem, not rhyme. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy thing to study, but that’s no excuse to ignore it. A poem isn’t a poem until the arrangement of words has a specific function.

Well, there you have it. I’m sure there’s more, but these are the issues that I encounter most frequently in my beginning courses. Seeing them all laid out like this is pretty daunting, but I find comfort in order, in cataloguing. Know thy enemy! It takes many, many years to move from these early problems to the next set, and many times even very experienced writers would do well to think in these basic ways once more. Start with one or two issues, practice, and move on to the next.

It's Our First Anniversary!

2012-01-11T14:30:00.000-05:00

Just wanted to polish off a quick post to celebrate the first anniversary of this blog, and I'll return to the discussion of beginners' problems in the regular post. It's been an interesting endeavor, keeping this blog. I've said a lot about setting goals and keeping them, and this blog is an example of how that works. I said I'd have a weekly post, and, minus the summer, I pretty much did that, so that feels good.

Some posts got a lot of feedback, some not so much. By far for me the two most exciting were my interviews with Chad Parmenter and Lesley Wheeler. They were both immensely kind to take time out to answer my questions, and I'm beyond tickled to think that, via my blog, someone out there might have discovered their work for the very first time! I've also gotten lots of great feedback on the craft posts, and it's another source of great pleasure to think I might have motivated someone to improve their writing. In a surprising twist, one of the most popular posts turns out to have been the Black-Eyed Peas & Quinoa Salad recipe! I have to try to post some more recipes, I guess.

So, what have you liked? Not liked? Please tell! I would love to hear what you'd like to see more or less of, and will try to please and come up with new ways of getting to the second year.

Thanks to all of you for reading!

Top Mistakes Beginning Writers Make, Part I

2012-01-03T14:18:00.000-05:00

It’s time to spruce up the syllabus for the new semester, and that means lots of thinking about the kind of students I’ll be teaching and what they need to learn. I teach an introductory course, so that means truly raw beginners—students who may never have attempted to write creatively before. Over the years, one comes to notice repeating struggles, and, since I’m into counting lately, I thought I’d compile a list of the top mistakes beginning writers make. At first I thought I’d distinguish between prose and poetry, but, as I compiled the list, I soon realized that there’s so much overlap that such a distinction would be misleading. So, what follows applies to all kind of writing, except for the few isolated only for poetry, and those only marginally.

1. Too much dialogue. Perhaps it’s the fact that we watch more movies than read books these days, and movies, as drama, rely on dialogue more than the short story or novel do, or at least seem to do so. In truth, movies that are too “talky” often bore people. My husband hated Before Sunrise, for example, because all Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy did was talk. I still love that movie, and even the sequel, Before Sunset. Great freaking dialogue, but also great characters and a great story, which is the point: the problem isn’t too much dialogue, but, rather, misusing dialogue to tell the story that would be better told through exposition, summary, or action. The beginning writer doesn’t quite know how to manipulate other elements of storytelling, and so relies on dialogue because it’s familiar; we all know how to talk, how to tell a story, and so you wind up with long passages of characters explaining things to one another, or—evil of all evils!—to him or herself. Page after page of dialogue is boring and weird, and makes for skimpy storytelling. Characters should speak only when they have something to say.

2. Not paying attention to pacing. An offshoot of the pages of dialogue problem, pacing is the secret forté of the professional and the bane of the beginner. The beginner starts at the beginning and continues to the end, usually without too much consideration for what deserves attention and what should be skipped over quickly or even entirely. The balancing act between scene (a detailed account of a particular moment) and summary (an express recap of long periods of time) can be one of the hardest writing skills to master, but it’s the secret between boring and exciting reading. Get to the good part, and, when you get there, take it slow.

3, No patience with the story (no development). Also related to pacing is the problem of scanty development. Beginning writers want to tell the story as quickly as possible, and, while there’s a place in this world for flash fiction, even for micro fiction, the question of good development has little to do with word count. You have to learn to give the story the room it needs to be told well, and, too often, the beginning writer tries to shove a novel into a postcard. Writing is a slow, complex process, and, if the only reason why your story is two pages long is because you “just wanted to get it over with,” you’re in the wrong business.

4. Flat characters. Characters are often the first to fall prey to the scanty development bug. This one is good, that one is bad, and we really don’t know why. “She’s a typical ‘hooker with the heart of gold,’” the beginner will say, as if that’s a good thing. Flat characters are clichés (hooker with the heart of gold) or circumstances (the boss), not people. You have to provide motivations for your characters. We need to know why the do the things they do, say the things they say, and think and feel the way they do. Not only does this take time and space, but thought. You can’t just grab a character off the shelf—you must create one.

5. Naïve understanding of life. Part of the problem of the beginning writer is that usually he or she is young. Scientists have actually studied the adolescent and post-adolescent brain and its capacity for complex moral development, and found that young people tend to think in absolutes—good versus evil, for example. A sign of maturity is the ability to see shades of gray. Thus, the beginning writer tends to punish the bad guy at the end of the story while rewarding the good guy, as in fairy tales. No one is either wholly good or wholly bad, of course, but experience must teach you this. Students rankle when I bring this up. Being in college is all about becoming an adult, and it hurts to be reminded in any way how new you are at that, especially when you feel so secretly inadequate in the first place. Some students also argue that they’ve “been through more” in their short lives than “most people have been through at forty” (meaning me, of course!). True. Some people have unfortunate beginnings—poverty, abuse, illness, and death affect people of all ages. The way we process these events, however, changes with time. About one out every three introductory course stories involves someone’s death, for example. As we grow older, however, we come to realize that death is not only natural and common, but, quite frankly, nothing to write about. Most young writers have difficulty understanding how little drama there is to death, illness, even abuse. They may be part of a good story, but not de facto a good story by themselves.

6. No sense of interior conflict. This list is coming out ike a braid; recognizing the role of interior conflict is the next step after realizing that “the death of X” is not de facto a good story. It’s how Y reacts to the death of X that can—maybe—make for a good story. The beginning writer’s world is all about exteriority. Planes crash, bags of money are found, lovers are unfaithful: things happen to the characters, but the characters don’t change in any way, just their exterior circumstances. The good guy may lose his business, be crippled in a car accident, and have his dog stolen by his ex-wife, but, in the end, he’s the same good guy he was at the beginning of the story! Watch any soap opera and observe. Most times, characters weep frantically, scream at one another, and tear things up (notice that these are all also exterior manifestations of interior turmoil) when things happen to them. However, they remain either good or evil despite these circumstances. Learning to write about our interior lives, those inner struggles under apparently normal circumstances that we all experience and that define us more than our exterior circumstances do, is one of the first breakthroughs a beginning writer can have.

7. Senseless plotting. The lack of interior conflict in the beginner’s story often means that there’s a lot going on outside, and some of it just doesn’t make sense. You need to end your story, for example, but, because all you’ve got is a series of circumstances with no connection to fully developed character psyches, your only recourse is some story-ending event. The wedding. The graduation. The death. Even worse, the winning lotto ticket, the alien abduction, or the meteor apocalypse. That’s one kind of senseless plotting, the traditional deus ex machina that ends the story by ending the world or other exterior circumstances. It’s senseless because we all know that weddings, graduations, deaths, jackpots, aliens, and meteors aren’t real endings, just arbitrary ones (well, maybe meteors . . .). A wedding, for example, may or may not be a satisfying ending, depending on the conflict that lead up to it. If the conflict was whether or not the fiancé is the right person, the wedding itself is hardly going to answer this question, since most likely we won’t know for a long time afterwards. Yet, many superficially plotted stories end this way, as if the ceremony could wipe out all previous conflicts (no doubt this is also the reason why there are so many divorces, but I digress).

But that relies on you having identified a conflict to begin with, and the problem with many beginners’ stories is that there is no clear conflict. Characters are just walking around, attending a party, for example, and there’s nothing at stake. There’s no tension moving you from one moment to the next, no quest. You don’t know how to end the story because you don’t know what the story is. We’re peeping in on some people doing some stuff, but there’s no theme, nothing. That’s not a story, that’s an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

8. Misidentifying the drama / Wasting time on bad material. All of which leads to perhaps the most common beginner’s problem, not recognizing where the story is. You write up to the death of X, the devasting breakup, or the big wedding, giving often meticulous attention to all the little events leading up to The Big Event. The first cough that should have sent X running to the doctor but didn’t, the first spat over dinner that foreshadows (beginners love foreshadowing—they learned it in AP English) The Divorce, the meeting of the lovers as they caught each other’s eyes across a crowded room (the room must always be crowded). To make things worse, the beginning writer begins the story with “The day my [or his/her] life changed forever began with . . . .” Zzzzzzzzzz. Not only is no one surprised by these familiar trajectories, but also there’s very little drama before any big event. This is very, very difficult for the beginning writer to accept, that a Big Event on down the line somewhere does not create automatic anticipation. In truth, the more interesting stories happen after: after the death, the breakup, the wedding. How do the characters adapt to their lives after a change? The Big Event might mark some exterior spot on the characters’ lives, but the real story is where the interior conflict is, and that can be anywhere in relation to an exterior event. The beginner writes over and over about garden weddings and rainy funerals, but there’s just nothing there. The story is elsewhere.

9. Vacuum settings. Related to the problem of excessive dialogue, stories set in a vacuum are extremely common. Beginning writers are impatient with setting, and so you have characters running around generic high schools or clubs or whatever, or, sometimes, nowhere at all. Before you roll your eyes and claim that descriptions of setting are boring, consider how interested you’d be in a radio play. Though there are some fantastic radio plays, the form was overshadowed by television for just one reason: we could see the people in the play. The only way for us to be able to see the people in your writing is if you put them somewhere. If you only describe what they look like without telling us where they are, all we’ve got is paper dolls. Put them in cars that drive down streets in specific cities, or on horses galloping down a beach, or, WTF, in the vacuum of space, as long as they’re in a spacesuit tethered to a spaceship full of buttons and light and the smell of the spacetoilet. Characters interact with their settings, and are a product of them. A girl and a boy on a date in LA will not behave the same as a girl and a boy on a date in NY. One couple will ride around in a car, the other take the subway. And that’s just a minor difference. Beginning writers don’t “see” very well, or smell, taste, and feel, for that matter. They have an overdeveloped sense of hearing—people talki ng, phones ringing, music playing, shots being fired, tires screeching. Imagine you are writing instructions to a filmmaker. What should the set look like? Where should the actors be?

10. No idea how to revise. Beyond making a few grammatical corrections, the impatience of the beginning writer is nowhere more evident than in the revision process. The beginning writer often believes that the best writing is spontaneously produced, if you have any talent, that is. That’s the first stumble right there, equating revision with lack of talent. The beginning writer also has a hard time realizing that writing is work. The word “creative” is no help, either. Creative things are supposed to be fun, aren’t they? So, if you have to “work” at something, you’re not good at it, either, not talented. So, the beginner is stuck in an endless stream of first drafts. Even when he or she begins to accept that revision may—after all—be somewhat normal and acceptable, the beginner has no idea how to go about it, how to a) identify the flaws in the writing, and b) address them successfully. The beginning writer is essentially lazy, and would rather ride the adrenaline rush of the first draft than plod through the swamp of revision.

Ah, the beginning writer, that fragile, enthusiastic puppy! You break my heart. Tune in next week for the second half of this post, where I’ll finish with the general psychology and take a look at that other mysterious creature, the Beginning Poet. Till then, wish me luck in syllabusland.

10 Resolutions That Will Make You a Better Writer in 2012

2011-12-29T17:23:00.000-05:00

It’s resolution time, and, hokey as they may be, they can actually work—you have the support of the whole world, who is also trying to start fresh. If you’re reading this blog, you should be considering some writing-oriented resolutions. Below are 10 relatively easy steps you can resolve to take right now to make yourself a better writer in 2012. Now is the time!

10. Take a class. Hold your horses. Before you start complaining that you have neither the time nor the money to take writing classes, let me offer you some ideas. You don’t have to commit to some kind of degree, first of all. A single class can reinvigorate your writing, and you’d be surprised how cheaply you can find one. As far as time goes, there are one-day seminars that absolutely everyone can squeeze in. If you can, however, squeeze in more—a weekend retreat, a minimester, a full semester. The decision to take writing classes can mean anything from a couple of hours to a couple of years, so investigate what is possible for you. As with all goals, don’t trick yourself into not even trying because you set too impossible a goal. Just because you can’t do a two-year program doesn’t mean you can’t sign up for a weekend class. As to cost, a university class or a ritzy private seminar is not the only option. Community colleges are way cheaper, and sometimes even high schools have night classes even cheaper than that. Ask at the library, as well, to see if there are independently taught classes being offered. If not, there’s always Google! For the price of a week’s entertainment, you can have a class.

9. Join a group. Words must circulate. You can be a loner if you want, but it’s much easier to gauge how good your writing is when you hear back from others. You can also learn much from others’ triumphs and mistakes. Other writers provide not only feedback and experience, but support when you need encouragement or just a deadline to meet. Check your universities and libraries for existing groups, and if you can’t find one, start one! The ideal group size is about six people. Anything larger, and you can disappear, which is not what you want. But you can have a group of two or three just as well. Ideally, you can meet face-to-face, so you can see one another and go back and forth in discussion. Quite frankly, you can do about as well on Skype. In other words, there’s no excuse for you Emily Dickinsoning yourself.

A more in-depth guide to
this issue.

8. Carve out a writing space. This is a tricky issue. For one thing, don’t you dare use lack of space as an excuse for not writing. Shame on you! You can write anywhere. The only two things you need for sure are your brain and some kind of tool. If you’re not writing as much as you want because you don’t have “a room of your own,” or a desk, or a fancy computer, you’re just kidding yourself. First of all, what Virginia Woolf was talking about, more than a physical room, was psychic space. I’m not even going to get into that in this post, because that kind of trauma is something a little beyond quickie resolutions, and, moreover, beyond my expertise. If I ever figure out the social and individual psychology of writing, I’ll let you know. Meantime, these resolutions can get you a little of that psychic wellbeing you need to write better. What you don’t need, to get back to the point, is anything fancy. Basically, if you feel like you need specific space at all, anything will do. There are only two kinds of people: Starbucks people and Emily Dickinson. Starbucks people write at Starbucks. I don’t really like them or understand them, so suffice it to say that, if you’re one of them, resolve to spend X amount of time there, writing. You can also try your library, a park, or whatever public space works. You don’t need a laptop if you can’t afford one. The good thing about the library (as opposed to Starbucks) is that you can use their computers. However, good ole paper and pen will do. You don’t need Wi-Fi, either. Just figure out what you need, and get it.

The tools you'll need for
writing . . . .

But what if you’re an Emily Dickinson? If you’re blessed with a room, good for you. Don’t have a desk? Get one. Get a chair. This is not difficult. Your “writing room” is full of crap? Get a big blue bin and put the crap in it if the mess bothers you, or swipe it off the desk and let it fester on the floor if that’s your thing. The point is to write. Don’t have a room? Write in bed, like I do, on a laptop. Bad for your posture, but, have you ever met a writer with good posture? I do understand, especially if you live with others, the need to signal that you’re working and can’t be disturbed. Believe, me, I know. But if you can’t learn to deal with distractions, you have to find a way to carve that space or risk waiting for the perfect room to materialize the rest of your life. Throw out the skinny jeans that are never going to fit again and turn the closet into a writing room. Flush a wig down the toilet, tell everybody you can’t afford a plumber, and turn the bathroom into a writing room. Get an outdoor shed or some patio furniture and turn your outdoor space into a writing room. If all else fails, go write in your car. Trade it in for a van if you want more space.

Wondering how writers
use journals? Read this.

7. Keep a journal. Confronting your life regularly can do wonders for your writing. You don’t have to write very long entries, or every day (at least once a week, however). The important thing is that you take the time to write down, to literally explain to yourself, what you are doing. It’s really hard to say “I didn’t have time to write today,” for example, when you write down what you actually did: spent two hours watching a movie, fifteen minutes commenting on your friends’ drunken pictures on Facebook, and half an hour doing the dishes. Ditch the movies, ditch your friends, and get some paper plates or a dishwasher. You can do these things, but only if you realize where your time actually goes. A journal can help you keep track of the hours. If you didn’t meet your writing goal for a certain day or a certain week, explain. Confront your own psychology, and resolve to do better. Also, a journal keeps the writing muscle supple. Writing leads to more writing. A journal entry can be a very early draft of a poem or a story, if you write down things you thought or saw but “didn’t have time to write about.” On a day when you’re out of ideas, you can go back through your journal and find inspiration—and material.

6. Work on specific writing goals. Most of these resolutions can have the effect of helping you identify what you need to work on for your writing. Perhaps the class you take will teach you some new skill you need to perfect, or the writing group keeps pointing out that your poems lack form. Perhaps, in your journal, you notice that you’re constantly complaining that your dialogue sucks. You get the idea. Identify a set of writing goals—specific craft issues like dialogue, or maybe prosody or grammar—that you need to work on, and resolve to address them one by one. Take a class, read a how-to book, do exercises, or just practice, practice, practice. But don’t avoid your writing gaps any longer—identify them and conquer them.

A great book on prosody.

5. Read craft books or essays. Whether you’ve taken dozens of classes or none, one way in which writers can improve their craft is to read about it. There are bazillions of books, journals, and websites dedicated to the art and craft of writing. Resolve to incorporate these into your reading schedule in any way you think might work, as long as it’s regularly, so that you don’t “mean to do it at some point.” Designate a day of the week, for example, as craft day. Ideally, target your reading to your writing goals (#6). Troubled by the fact that you have no idea what “prosody” means? Read about it, dummy.

4. Read good stuff regularly. A writer who doesn’t read is most likely a poser. You can’t love writing and not read. My only caveat here is that you read good things. For example, spending half an hour reading the news on AOL is reading, but it’s functional reading, not good reading. Good reading means something that is well-written and will sink into your bones and make you a better writer yourself. It doesn’t mean you have to read in the same genre that you write. A prose writer can learn from poetry and vice versa. What it means is that you must create a symbiotic relationship between your reading and your writing, so that they feed each other. You must read actively and critically, noticing what you like and why. Incorporate your reading activity into your journaling—write about what you’re reading and why you like or dislike it.

Moreover, read regularly. Ideally, you should be reading for hours every day, but, if you really can’t, just fifteen minutes a day can start you off on the right track. Maybe you can’t read every day, but set aside a couple of days a week to do so. If a week goes by and you haven’t gotten to your book (or whatever), something’s wrong with either you or the book. Maybe your book sucks. Get rid of it! A good book is good in the first 20 pages, or it’s gone, baby! Not liking it but it’s highly recommended by a trustworthy source (not “Crazy Dude from the Liquor Store”)? Maybe you suck. Get a reading guide, read reviews, ask somebody. Give it another 50 pages to figure out what you’re missing. If, after 50 pages, it still sucks (to you), make a decision. Continue reading so as to figure out how never to write like this yourself, or chuck it. You’re dying, every minute. There’s no time to waste on a bad book when so many good ones are out there and you’ll never live long enough to read them all. Or, perhaps what’s wrong has nothing to do with the book at all. Are you watching movies and playing 52 Pickup again instead of reading? Check your journal if you’re not sure.

3. Set aside a specific time for submitting. “Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing,” Sylvia Plath once said, and this from a woman married to a philanderer. Don’t let this happen to you. Anything remotely finished should be out at all times. Don’t worry if it’s not “perfect” yet—if it isn’t, it’ll be rejected, and you can spruce it up when it comes back. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sent something out just because I’m so sick of it it’s either send it out or delete it forever, and, dontcha know, it gets picked up! Doesn’t mean you send out your garbage. Don’t embarrass yourself. But oftentimes, the quest for the perfect draft ends in a stinking pile of unpublished writing. Another reason writers often slack on the submitting is that it’s tedious. That’s why you must commit to a schedule. I had a really good streak of publications when I practiced “Submission Fridays.” No, it wasn’t some S&M thing—I simply committed to seeking out venues and preparing submissions every Friday, and it worked. Maybe a weekly schedule is too much for you, but at least once a month is a good goal. Something must leave the house at least once a month, or else you’ll have that stinking pile.

2. Set aside a specific time for revising. Often, a writer can get stuck in FDM (First Draft Mode). You get all excited, you write a first draft, and then you get all excited about something else, and write a first draft of that, and so forth. Nothing ever gets to publishable level. Commit to revising regularly, a time when drafting new material is simply not allowed. It can be fifteen minutes at the end of your writing time, or a certain day of the week—whatever works. But, even if you’re rather recursive in your method—you draft, revise, and edit all at once—you can benefit from a revision-only moment. Ideally, this should be a couple of days to a couple of weeks after the first draft, when the material has “sat” for a little while and you’ve lost the familiarity with it that can blind you to a good revision effort. Also ideally, you can have your forced revision time right before your forced submission time—that way, you revise, and out it goes!

1. Set aside a specific time for writing. C’mon, you knew that’d be number one! Duh. Again, it can be just fifteen minutes a day, or a couple of days a week—the more the better. It’s a job, and, if you have no other, you’d be remiss to put in less than 40 hours a week. Be a workaholic about you’re writing. Do more, always more. But don’t let the fact that you can’t do it full time stop you from doing it at all. A little writing is better than none, and, if you resolve to be regular about it—not “when you can” or “when I’m inspired” (ew), but Tuesdays and Fridays, 6-8 pm—you’ll write more. Remember, a writer writes.

The Greatest Stories Ever Retold

2011-12-19T17:08:00.005-05:00

Christmas is a time for retelling stories—from the story of Jesus’ birth, to the countless viewings of It’s a Wonderful Life, to the retelling of family stories of past years, we never seem to tire of old stories, which is really weird in a culture otherwise obsessed with the new and disposable. Why are some stories worth retelling, and not others? And why are some retellings better than others?

The story of the nativity might seem like an exception, because retelling it is an act of faith. Nevertheless, it offers some explanation for why it bears so much repeating even to those outside the faith. Without getting too academic, one can still say that it’s one of those archetypal stories that tap into our most basic drives. The mythical birth, the rise of a common individual to the rank of God, the saving of the world through an act of sacrifice—all these are themes that recur in culture after culture in the most popular of stories. Think of the parallel to Star Wars: another mysterious birth (the twins birthed by the queen hidden away separately), another simple boy who saves the day and restores good. The sacrificial element might not be as condensed as it is in the Passion, but it’s there from the moment Luke has to do his chores instead of going into Tosche Station to the moment he sets fire to the body of Vader, who dies in the attempt to save his son.

So why are some retellings of the same story so much better than others? My husband makes fun of me because of my penchant for issuing edicts. I have two edicts relevant to this discussion: no more retellings of A Christmas Carol, and no more vampire stories. My edicts are very useful, I think, because they stop me from wasting my valuable time that I could be spending on Facebook or writing this blog. I’m always very tempted to cave in to retellings of A Christmas Carol or vampire stories, and the edicts help me to resist, even if Scrooge is recast as Fidel Castro or the vampires are robotic. Somehow, these two stories, though archetypally appealing (the change of heart, the pros and cons of immortality), always fail to impress me in the retelling.

The reason is pretty simple, I think, and it requires that we clarify what we mean by retelling. Putting on a production of a play is not the same as retelling a story in print form. Let’s take another one of those often retold stories, Romeo and Juliet. Whether you’re attempting to be faithful to Shakespeare’s original or recasting the leads as a vampire and a klutzy teenager, if you’re performing the play your success will in some measure be dictated by the quality of the performances, or other production factors like staging, direction, etcetera. Ergo, you can have the same faithful rendition of the original performed by two different sets of actors, and one will be good but the other suck. This situation cannot be duplicated in print, since it would hardly make sense to rewrite the original as-is. Perhaps the most you could do is work on a new translation. To wit: a production is not the same as a retelling.

So, what about the vampire version? Are you guaranteed a good retelling (as opposed to a production) if you turn classic characters into vampires? Of course not, and herein lies my problem with the countless retellings of A Christmas Carol featuring Scrooge as Castro or Mickey Mouse or, what the heck, a vampire. You get all excited by the switcharoo, and then it falls flat. Nothing happens. The retelling fails.

Why? Because, when you retell a story, you still have to tell it well. You can’t just piggyback on an old story to carry yours. You still have to have all those elements of good storytelling in place to make it work: great characters, a complex plot, rich setting, and, of course, good language and a complex theme. If Scrooge-as-Castro is exactly like Scrooge-as-Scrooge, with the same actions and feelings, then what’s the point of resetting the whole story in Cuba? Therein lies the heart of the retelling problem: there must be a point to your retelling, and so many of the quirky versions of these popular stories seem to have none. What happens if we trade Scrooge in for a communist dictator is not a matter of what he would wear or what language he would speak. Such matters are simple exercises in replacement, not in creativity.

I’m currently reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a novel about historical figure Thomas Cromwell. It’s a shame that I’m reading it as I am, here and there, this waiting room, these fifteen minutes before I fall asleep. It’s riveting, which is amazing, given that it’s a true story and one that has not only been told countless times before, but also read by me countless times. I’m a sucker for the Tudors, and I must have read a thousand stories about Henry VIII. I’m glad I don’t have an edict, however, because it would have kept me from reading this wonderful book. What’s so wonderful about it? It’s not just that she chose a comparatively minor figure (hardly minor, really, but most people go for the king himself or Anne Boleyn), although that does help. It certainly worked for Philippa Gregory, who also told this story very well in The Other Boleyn Girl, told from the point of view of Anne’s sister, Mary. More than the choice of focus, however, what makes Mantel’s novel so enjoyable is just the fine writing. She really humanizes Cromwell, who is usually seen as just a conniving figure, by giving him a family and complex feelings that have nothing to do with being “good” or “bad.” She also tells the story in present tense, in sparse, clear language that is immediate and gripping. She could write about her dog taking a crap and make it compelling.

So tell and retell all the stories that you want. Tell them straight, or tell them slant, but tell them well. Don’t delude yourself into believing that, just because you’ve turned all the usual characters into robotic vampires from space, you’ve got yourself an original take on an old story. Originality is not a matter of circumstance, but of thought. Mantel apparently spent five years researching the historical circumstances of Cromwell’s story, and didn’t turn a single character into a robot space alien, and yet this umpteenth retelling of Henry VIII’s shenanigans is the freshest thing I’ve read in years. In the end, there’s no such thing as a good story. When we hear a story, watch a movie, or read a book over and over, it’s not the story we’re enjoying, it’s the way it’s told.

Writerly Gifts

2011-12-16T15:10:00.002-05:00

Well, what else did you think I was going to blog about this week? You’ve got one week left before Christmas, and those freaky writer-types on your list. Before you pull a Tribbiani and get them the 100^th fancy pen they’ve received in their lives, let me help you out. For one thing, you should think about the fact that just because someone is a writer or loves reading, it doesn’t mean that they don’t enjoy receiving the usual presents, like pretty scarves or fruitcake. But, if you want to get someone a gift that connects to their love of words, I have some ideas for you, all of which I’ve linked to Amazon. Just click on any of the pictures. Ain’t I helpful?

The obvious go-to gift this year (again) is an e-reader. The Kindle Fire is the hot one this year, I suppose, but the terrible thing about the e-reader idea is . . . . Well, there’s a few bad things. For one, make sure the person is receptive to the whole idea of e-books. Some people just aren’t. For example, although I love the idea of space-saving (you don’t know clutter until you marry two writer-academics and stick them in a one-bedroom), most of the books I want to read aren’t available as e-books, at least not yet. Poetry, for example, is not as well-represented in the e-market as prose, and a lot of the prose is also bestselling and/or genre fiction. Some little obscure book that I got in my head to read isn’t necessarily going to be available as an e-book. Moreover, if your writerly pal is receptive to e-books, it’s likely he or she already has an e-reader, or, if not, then someone else in their lives is going to get them one, or they’ve already gotten one for themselves. In other words, investigate.

A really great choice for
the general book lover.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s discuss old-fashioned books. First tip: when giving a book as a gift, get a nice edition. Splurge for the hardcover, the first edition, or the anniversary or other fancy edition if it’s a classic. A signed edition is especially valuable. It’s a gift, remember? I can get the paperback edition at the drugstore myself, thank you very much. Second tip: unless the book is rare and you want to preserve its value, take the time to write an inscription. Unlike an author signature, a gift inscription simply tells the person you are giving the book to something about why you’re giving it, and reminds them, later, whom they received the gift from. It’s an old-fashioned practice that not many people know about anymore, but I think it’s wonderful and adds a personal touch to the gift. Etiquette varies, so anywhere on the first page is fair game. For wonderful examples, check out The Book Inscriptions Project.

A book about bookplates.

While we’re on the subject of inscriptions, a great book gift that is not a book (and can also be cheap, although fancy, personalized ones exist) is bookplates. There are many kinds of bookplates, but what you need to know, basically, is that they exist! Lots of people have never seen one of these, but they are basically a means of putting your name in your book. Far from being simply a way to get your book back if someone borrows it or you lose it, bookplates can be an art form. Some are self-stick, some aren’t; do some exploring and find one you like.

Really cool bookplates.

But what about books themselves? Hold your horses. First, know that giving someone a book is very personal, just like clothes, movies, or music. Don’t give someone too specific a book unless you know them well, in which case you probably don’t need my help. If you want some general suggestions, here’s a few.

Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. Anyone who enjoys reading and writing will appreciate this classic. It’s perfectly okay to have a working copy, like I do, and a nice edition, like the illustrated one.
A Freaking Awesome Dictionary. While MS Word comes with a dictionary and there are many excellent dictionaries online, someone who’s really into words will appreciate a good, comprehensive dictionary, especially one that is not for general use, like a usage dictionary, for example, or a latest edition that has the most recent changes to the language.

A Great Edition of a Classic Work. While a new book is a little risky if you don’t know someone’s tastes very well, there are a few books most people appreciate. For example, Shakespeare. While a comprehensive Shakes is a bit much for the average person, a nice edition of a single work—the favorite play, or, for the romantic interest, the complete sonnets—can make for a beautiful gift. Speaking of sonnets, if you really want to give a classic romantic gift, EBB’s Sonnets from the Portuguese is a real panty-dropper. Or, if you happen to know the person’s favorite author, go for it.

A Great Edition of a Children’s Classic. Okay, so I’m stealing the idea from Friends, but this is a really cool idea! I received a copy of Oh, the Places You’ll Go! when I was in college, and it was really romantic! The idea can also work for children, of course, or even new parents. You could even tweak it a little and get a revamped version of a classic, but the nostalgic swoon won’t be the same. Think Nancy Drew, Little Women, Heidi, Little House on the Prairie, or a nice Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

A Cross-Medium or Unusual Choice. Like the favorite author idea, but don’t want to give yet another copy of the novel or collection of poems you’re sure the person already has? Go the unusual route—art by the poet, a biography, a study, a work inspired by the favorite—in other words, something about the favorite writer rather than by him or her. Please note that the fan of Jane Austen may not necessarily enjoy a zombie version of her work.

A Beautiful Cookbook. People who love books are art lovers in general, and cooking is an art many writers love. Think about it: like writing, cooking is both art and craft, and something you do at home. Moreover, many cookbooks are way beyond a collection of recipes, and have a narrative and artistic component. If you want to give a book and the person cooks, a cookbook may be a fun gift, especially is you pair it with a great bottle of wine (something else writers are notoriously fond of).

Words & Music. Another thing word lovers love is music. Everyone is buzzing about the new Springsteen book, for example, which is a) a book, b) about music, c) a photography book, and d) a memoir. Springsteen is one of those musicians readers and writers love—excellent lyrics. Music is perhaps an even more personal choice than books, but if you happen to know a person’s musical tastes, I bet you can find a great book to go with it.

Art. From paintings to photography, some of the most beautiful book gifts are art books. Again, personal tastes make this choice difficult, but, if you happen to know what kind of art the person likes, a great art book is a wonderful choice, or an art print. A friend who knew I had written a Christopher Columbus poem recently gave me a beautiful print of Columbus before the Council of Salamanca. I thought that was awesome! Framed or unframed, if you can make a connection like that, you’re guaranteed a memorable gift.

A Book Related to the Person or an Upcoming Event. This takes a little more finesse, but a little thinking can land you the right choice without getting too risky. Is the person planning a trip soon? A great travel guide, dictionary, or historical book about the country can make for a great gift. Pregnant? A classic like Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care. Any teachers on your list might enjoy The Mindset Lists of American History: From Typewriters to Text Messages, What Ten Generations of Americans Think Is Normal, from the Beloit Mindset List writers, which lots of educators like to read to see “what the kids are up to.”

People don’t often think of books as gifts, but they can be wonderful: cheap, readily available, easy to wrap. The problem is that not everyone enjoys books, and that those who do can be intimidating and mysterious. You don’t have to guess at whether someone will like the book you choose, however, if you put a little thought into it. It’s no different from getting someone a shirt, really. And you never have to worry about sizing!

Complicated Musings on a Sad Anniversary, or Has Poetry Lost Its Audience?

2011-12-08T16:46:00.000-05:00

A couple of days ago, December 4, to be exact, marked the fifth anniversary of the publication of my first chapbook of poems, Shapeshifting. Unfortunately, Spire Press, who published it, didn’t make it to the anniversary, dying just a few months short. My beautiful, weird-looking, neon-green chapbook is no more. It has ceased to be. Ex-Spired and gone to meet its maker, who is me—I have a handful of leftover copies, there’s one still on Amazon, and some more floating around the new and used marketplace corners of the Internet. And that’s all, folks.

It’s a headshot, but not a stray bullet. I’ve been evading becoming a casualty in this war for a while, and I guess it was my turn. If you believe in coincidence, synergy, The Matrix, morphic resonance, Jung, chaos theory, God—whatever you choose to call the way in which the universe organizes itself—I should have seen it coming. Some months ago I had been helping a friend of mine research how to start a small press. I warned him and warned him about how difficult it was to make a success of this thing, but he was adamant. I compared it to starting—and keeping—a successful restaurant in New York. Nobody wants to buy poetry anymore, I said.

And then there was the long discussion on Wom-po (the Women’s Poetry Listserv) about the popularization of reading fees for standard submissions, which started a discussion about poetry and the market, who gets paid, who doesn’t, who should. As a rule, only a tiny handful of magazines and journals pay poets (and other writers) money for their work. This tiny handful is usually the most elite and well-established of publications, and a few crusaders from the small-press brigades. The standard payment when you publish in a print venue is two contributor’s copies, or the honor of being published if it’s an online venue. Even this form of payment is decreasing, however. Sometimes you get just one copy, sometimes a discount on however many you’d like to purchase. Sometimes nothing. And now the move is to charge reading fees—the poet pays a small amount per poem or submission to be considered for publication. Why? To ensure that the publication can continue, since not enough revenue is generated from sales and subscriptions. As I said, nobody wants to buy poetry anymore.

The next sign was the raging bitch fight between Helen Vendler and Rita Dove over The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Vendler wrote a really nasty review totally dissing Dove, who edited, for her choices. Too much of this, too little of that. Dove supplied an enumerated response defending her choices. Vendler didn’t care to reply (or to stoop). The whole thing is political; accusations flew, sides were taken. My interest in this discussion is not the content of the disagreement, but its subtext. Why such passion over just one anthology?

The reason is simple. This anthology wields some big power. It is one of a tiny number of anthologies that will be taught in the schools, and, for many, may wind up being the only poems they ever read. Thus, Dove’s decisions are disproportionately enormous. I’m not defending Vendler’s nastiness, but I do see where part of her passion is coming from (and am rather pleased with it). If there were more anthologies out there getting bought, taught, and read, Dove would be just one voice, just one opinion. Moreover, if there were more poetry of all kinds being bought, taught, and read, anthologies in general would carry less weight. You didn’t get enough Wallace Stevens in your anthology? Big deal. There he is on the shelf in the local bookstore, there he is on your daughter’s nightstand, there he is in the magazine at the dentist’s. But the sheer panic of Vendler’s attack is that there he is not; it’s not completely psychotic to assume, in a culture where so little poetry is circulating, that not enough representation in one influential anthology can eventually mean the disappearance of a whole poet. You could put out an army of alternative anthologies, but who would buy them? Nobody wants to buy poetry anymore.

Well, why the hell not? Don’t give me any bullshit about the economy. I just got back from Christmas shopping, and people are shelling out beaucoup bucks for all sorts of crap. $75 for a blouse from Lauren Conrad. $600 for an iPad. $400 for Jennifer Lopez sheets. $65 for the Naked 2 palette from Urban Decay. Compared to that, $15-$25 for a collection of poetry, $10-$25 for a subscription to a journal, or $50-$100 for a thousand-page anthology seems like a bargain.

So, if it’s not the money, what it is? I could spend the rest of my life citing people who discuss how American poetry, at least, has lost its connection to the public, become too academic or self-absorbed. Where’s the love poem you can recite to the honey? Where’s the patriotic poem you can read at the Fourth of July celebration? Perhaps that is why the only poetry that sells and gets taught in the schools was written over 100 years ago, with the exception of statement poetry of the kind Maya Angelou writes, which can be uplifting.

That is a really shortsighted argument, however, one that has at its heart the same panicked issue that is fueling the Vendler Vs. Dove smackdown: the mad scramble for the few poetry readers left. If there’s only two of them, let’s give them what they want, and if that happens to be rhymed loved poetry about sexy vampires, then so be it.

And that, my faithful reader, is what I propose is the problem. Not the lack of money to pay for poetry, but the incongruity of marketplace values with the thing itself. In a perfect world, there should be room and readers for all kinds of poetry—formal and free, uplifting and depressing, corny and serious, long and short, you name it. That simply can’t happen in a marketplace, however, because you can’t just “buy” poetry. Oh, you can purchase it, but you can’t enjoy it with the mere act of owning it. You have to be able to understand it and appreciate it in ways that have nothing to do with money, which is something that as a culture we have forgotten how to do. Something is “good” if you paid a lot of money for it, or if it’s a bargain, which means it originally cost a lot of money and you are so smart and clever for having gotten it for less. All our value systems operate on the concept of monetary worth, and poetry is circulating elsewhere. You don’t pay for poetry because, unlike a Whopper or a pair of flashy shoes, it doesn’t bring you automatic pleasure the very moment you buy it.

Gee, I hope you weren’t reading expecting me to come up with a solution. I’m just a poet, not an economist.

Bat & Poet: A Conversation with Chad Parmenter

2011-12-02T14:09:00.003-05:00

Chad Parmenter received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri, and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Luther College in Iowa. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, and Kenyon Review, as well as being featured on Verse Daily. His debut chapbook, Bat & Man: A Sonnet Comic Book (Finishing Line Press, 2012), is a collection of poems based on the DC Comics superhero.

I first “met” Chad Parmenter in 2009. While preparing a class on contemporary formal verse, I came across Tony Barnstone’s wonderful article in The Cortland Review, “A Manifesto on the Contemporary Sonnet: A Personal Aesthetics.” Barnstone included Chad’s wonderful “A Holy Sonnet for His New Movie” in his article, and spoke of a collection called Batsonnets. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight had come out just the year before, so you can imagine my delight. Most of my students were batcrazy—what a wonderful way to do what Barnstone was suggesting to make the old form new. In particular, I had one student who was a rabid fan, and I wanted him to read not just the poem in Barnstone’s article, but the whole collection. I searched and searched for it everywhere, but could not find it. Finally, I found Chad Parmenter on Facebook, and eventually discovered the collection was still in the manuscript stage. Chad sent my student an autographed copy of the manuscript for his birthday. Holy batkindness!

Imagine my delight again when, just over a week ago, Chad contacted me via Facebook to let me know the collection had found a home, with none other than my old friend, Finishing Line Press. The collection, due out February 2012, is now available for special preorder from FLP’s website, and features the wonderful artwork of Mark Cudd. Being a superhero addict myself, I immediately asked Chad if he would agree to talk about the collection for this blog.

Q: Talk about your subject matter—what say you to the claim that poetry and comics don’t mix? Do you worry about labels like “serious” when it comes to poetry?

A: For me, growing up, reading comics was a serious thing--it gave me an escape that I absolutely needed, being a shy kid with thick glasses and little to no idea of how to talk to people. Batman, in particular, appealed to me because of his ability to turn completely from one person into another by putting his mask on. Poetry provided me with some of the same things, and has since then—serious play, maybe.

Q: A related question: Many critics believe that American poetry has drifted away from the American public. How do you see your work in relation to the public’s tastes? Did you have a specific audience in mind as you crafted these poems?

A: Good questions! I'm still not really sure who I write for; I do it because I enjoy it a ton, and writing a bunch of poems about Batman appealed to me as a fun kind of challenge. My favorite audience is whoever wants to read the poems, and the idea that it's not a lot of people kind of appeals to me somehow—I grew up with poetry as something that not a lot of people read, and that gave it an indy sort of feeling that I think is still with me.

Q: Why Batman?

A: Batman popped into my head one day as a topic to aim at, and most of me instantly said, "don't do that, it's off the map of what you've been reading and there's no way you can get a bunch of poems out of it that will be any good." So part of my brain seems to have taken that as a dare, and run with it, and kept running. In the process, I found a lot about both Batman and the scared kid I was when reading him that still really draws me—persona, how to deal with loss, and how to negotiate darknesses of different kinds.

Q: Why sonnets?

A: I've written a number of free verse poems about Batman, but the sonnet seems like a form that really fits with him, and maybe the superhero as a subject (Bryan Dietrich starts his book, Krypton Nights, with a sonnet crown that really helped me to read). Superheroes, and superhero narratives, follow strict rules, and tend to follow them mostly the same way no matter what; life gets inserted into that formula, and it changes the formula a little bit, but the formula wins out. I love that!

Q: How is your Batman different from other representations?

A: D.A. Powell wrote a poem involving Batman, and Bryan Dietrich did, too; there may be other Batman poems out there that I'm not aware of, but both of those poets have helped me by treating Batman as a malleable character, and one to be taken seriously, not just as a kind of campy figure. I'm pretty much following their leads, and using Batman as a kind of malleable figure, if that makes sense.

Q: What advice would you give to others who are interested in writing about similar themes?

A: Kevin Young, when I asked him that question, said, "Get obsessed," and that worked for me! I devoured Batman media of different forms, and tried to write about it from a bunch of different angles, until something seemed to click.

Q: What’s next for you, now that the book is coming out?

A: Thanks; I have a full length Batman collection that I'm shopping around, and a couple of other manuscripts that are also each explorations of a single topic—"my America," about photographer Edward Weston, and "Vivienne's Recovery," an homage to T.S. Eliot's wife, Vivien Eliot.

Q: Whom are you reading?

A: Right now, I'm reading Shakespeare, Ovid, a little bit of Heidegger, a bazillion different contemporary poets including Meghan O'Rourke and Rodney Jones, and, if this counts as reading, playing Batman: Arkham City on Xbox 360.

Well, that explains a lot. Talk about a postmodern aesthetic. That is what appealed to me about Chad’s poetry in the first place, and it’s a common thread through all the works of artists who engage with pop culture: fluidity. There is nothing worse for art than codification. Art dies when artists stop pushing at the limits of how it is defined. It takes an agile mind to see the perfect fit between the sonnet form and the comic hero the way Chad explains it above. Thanks, Chad!

Read some of Chad's sonnets at Diagram, and check out more of Mark Cudd's beautiful work here.

Top Ten Things I Am Grateful for This Thanksgiving

2011-11-23T17:12:00.000-05:00

In the spirit of David Letterman, and taking full advantage of my new blog mission, I present the top ten reasons I am grateful this Thanksgiving, which has nothing—and everything—to do with writing:

10. Good students. They exist. I know I gripe a lot about the bad ones, but, without the good ones, I’d probably kill myself. It’s hard to be an adjunct, to get paid so little, to be so marginal. When on top of that you think sometimes that you might as well have just popped in a movie for all the attention the students pay to class, it really becomes impossible to drag yourself to work. And then, it happens: the great essay, the great comment in class, the rare compliment. Someone who gets it. Someone who makes you feel like you’re a distinguished professor at Harvard. To the good ones, thanks.

9. The Internet. Been around now long enough for people to take it for granted, but I remember a time without it pretty good, when looking something up meant a trip to the library and it could take weeks for you to get a book in the mail. Thanks to the Internet, I read amazing things every day from all over the world, right in my pajamas, and mostly for free. Thanks to Facebook, I have reconnected with old friends and distant family. I can see their pictures and read about what they’re doing and what they care about, and they can learn the same from me. I can connect with people I’ve never met and would have never even heard of without the Internet, people like you reading this right now. Who are you? I don’t even know, but there you are, reading my words. I don’t have to wait for a publisher to find what I have to say interesting; I can publish it right here on my very own free blog. I can also, through the Internet, submit my work to those very publishers I don’t need for this blog, and they can respond to me via email, without having to use stamps or a trip to the post office. I can learn about new journals and presses without having to special-order trade books or scour libraries. The Internet may be a superficial place, but it’s not meant to replace reality—just to enhance it. For its endless stream of information, good and bad, thanks.

8. Being a vegetarian. The more I learn about food, the happier I am to be one. My only regret is that I can’t seem to commit to strict veganism—dairy sneaks in anywhere, and I still cave in to cheese. But this mouth has not touched meat for 18 years, and I am grateful, so grateful! Grateful to the original Ms. Alvarez, the English teacher who was a vegetarian and laid the psychological groundwork to make me one, although I wouldn’t succeed at it until I met my husband many years later. If not for her coolness, I might have not considered it. The biggest thanks goes to my husband, who taught me the skills I needed to succeed at it—what is tofu and where to buy it, and the horrors of factory farming that he used to teach every year in his first-year comp class. Thanks too to my mom, who tagged along at the ripe old age of 64, when many people—especially meat-loving Cubans—would have balked at such radical change. But she not only became a vegetarian herself, but learned to cook all over again for us, and to this day tells anybody who will listen about the horror of meat and shares her recipes with strangers at the supermarket. Now that everyone is obese, diabetic, and freaking out at all the hot documentaries like Supersize Me, Food, Inc., and Forks over Knives, I am grateful, so grateful.

7. My education. This cubanita can outtalk, outwrite, and outthink almost everyone she knows, and she has an urban public school, a Catholic school, and a football school to thank for it. Education is what you make of it, my little grasshoppers, and my family taught me to make the most of mine, and I did not find it lacking. What a joy it is to be able to read and understand anything I want, in two languages! (Maybe more, if you give me some extra time, a dictionary, and some leeway when it comes to clarity.) I see grown people every day who can’t read through a simple sentence, either through lack of vocabulary or through lack of sufficient background knowledge. In this increasingly complex world, I pity them. I pity them when they are sick, and they have to trust a bevy of overstressed doctors to prescribe a pill from a company that took them out to dinner. I pity them at the supermarket, when their decisions are based on advertising. I pity them at the mall, when they don’t understand how they are being manipulated. I pity them when they’re bored because “there’s nothing on TV.” Somehow, I was spared living an unexamined life, and, however unfit it has made me to enjoy the wonders of reality television and Black Friday, I am grateful, so grateful.

6. My wealth. I am rich, so rich. I have a house, and although it’s cramped and cracking, it’s secure, and it shelters me and mine. We have air conditioning and Netflix. There are three cars in the driveway, and I can use any at any time. They may not be sexy, but they’re reliable, and all paid for. I have clothes to wear whether it’s hot or cold, and some are even kinda stylish. I have never been hungry, ever, for lack of money to buy food. If my dog gets sick, I can take her to the vet and pay for it, even to her fancy specialist. We have no trouble making copayments for our human doctors. It’s been a struggle for this feminist to accept that this wealth comes from her husband, but I am grateful for every time the bills come and I can pay them without scrambling anymore. This is an enormous blessing. God has given us enough money to live well but not so much to let us forget what it means to lack it, and He has given us this amazing gift of being able to see that it isn’t iPads and Manolo Blahnik shoes that make us happy.

5. My freedom. Yes, yes, I have a love-hate relationship with this country. Being an immigrant is kind of like being the fat cousin someone showed up with to the cool kids’ party—they let you in because they don’t want to be rude, but they would have preferred it if you’d stayed home. But, despite its problems, this continues to be one of the best countries in the world to live in. You pay your taxes and are pretty much free to do what you want after that, and you have a fair shot at a school and a job and a decent life. That’s not equally true for everyone, unfortunately, but, compared to some other countries, the USA is still better. Better than Cuba, anyway. If my parents had not taken the leap, first of all, I might not have even been born, since my mother had so little to eat and was so stressed she couldn’t carry a child to term until she left. Had we gotten around that, I’d probably be an engineer of some kind, but I’d be whoring myself out to the tourists on el Malecón for money to buy food on the black market. I couldn’t keep this blog or do all that wonderful e-living (see #9). My house would belong to the state, and they could take it away whenever they wanted (see #6). Plus it wouldn’t have air conditioning. Or three cars in the driveway. Or a fancy vet. You get the picture. For the USA, I’m grateful.

4. My health. So the flu knocked me out for a couple of weeks. Big deal! I’m almost forty and I’ve never been hospitalized, never even broken a bone. I take not one prescription drug. Man, I’m so healthy. I can eat what I want, I can run up three flights of stairs—in heels. I am freakishly, wonderfully, incredibly healthy. Without even trying. I smoked, I still drink, I eat rather badly (vegetarian does not equal healthy—consider that Funyuns and beer are both vegetarian). I totally gave up on that stupid treadmill. I haven’t been to a doctor in over ten years. I am so ridiculously healthy, and I’m grateful.

3. My friends. Don’t have many of them, and don’t treat them well—I neglect them for months, even years. Yet, some hang on. God only knows why. Thanks.

2. My family. They tax me, they heap me, but they are my greatest blessing, my clearest mission, from my immediate family to the extended network of hundreds, it seems, I can call blood. I love my stupid dog, whom I tried to give away when I found her on the street because I had too many pets already and who needed a little annoying mutt. Now that she’s the one and only, I shudder when I remember how close I came to giving her away. She’s next to me right now, working hard to keep me warm, make me happy. And I love my stupid husband, who stumbled into my life and stayed, and who wakes up every morning and goes to sleep at night with the single-minded mission of making me happy and taking care of me. And I love my crazy mother and her vegetarian concoctions and her big Benjamin Franklin head. I love my father, who only knows how to work and did it for me and my mother and does it still at 78, waking up at five in the morning to go to work and coming home to demand that we play dominoes even though we suck at it and he ends every game by saying he will never play with us again. I love my uncle, who, at 91, still plans on going to the beach in the summer. And every cousin and every in-law I haven’t seen for too long who still, somehow, is connected to me in ways no Facebook application can possibly understand. I am grateful for them all, and for the ones who are now dead who watch over me and are waiting.

1. My faith. Somehow, a feminist academic has been able to not only hang on to her faith, but have it grow. True, I might have faltered there for a while in my questioning twenties, but it came back to me and has stayed. There’s much about it that I can’t understand, but faith is believing without understanding, and I do. I wouldn’t find meaning in anything if not for God. If we were just a collection of biochemistry and nothing more, I’d see no reason not to toss the Petri dish into the garbage. The secure knowledge that this broken plane isn’t all there is to my existence is the only thing that makes me able to keep going. So what if things go wrong here? Of course they do. This place is busted. You get through it. You keep your eye on the prize. When I get to heaven, God will explain all the things even the Internet can’t (see #9). What I am most grateful for this Thanksgiving is that I know to Whom I’m grateful. It’s kind of baffling that people have come to see this as a secular holiday. I understand that people gather to be with family and celebrate togetherness, but saying thanks implies an audience. Thank you, _____? No comprendo (despite #7). And I’m so freaking grateful that I’m not going to wake up at 3 am to go pitch a tent in front of a store. You might think that has nothing to do with religion, but I’m pretty sure that kind of fevered consumerism is a sign of a serious deprivation of meaning and self-worth. I’m grateful, so grateful, that I do my worshipping at St. Dominic’s, and not Best Buy!

An Unexpected Birthday Present & a New Blog Mission

2011-11-17T14:39:00.000-05:00

This blog is dying. This is my first post in almost two months! It’s time to make some changes, and what better time than a birthday to start over? Birthdays, like New Year’s, are a time for reevaluation, and significant birthdays that much more so—I’m going to be 39! No, it’s not the big 4-0, but it’s in a weird way even more of a milestone: the last of the birthdays beginning with 3. Goodbye, thirties. I feel that compared to 39, 40 will be some kind of arrival, some kind of welcome arrival. Didn’t much enjoy my thirties, for all that they’re supposed to be “the new twenties.” Maybe my forties will be what my thirties were supposed to have been, maybe once I’m there I’ll be able to reinvent myself, or at least this blog.

The issue that I’m having is staying true to the blog’s description, “A blog for beginning writers about the basics of writing creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.” As you can see above, I’m adding “and other musings about teaching, writing, and living with words.” Less specific, perhaps, but that’s the point. The main reason why I haven’t been posting regularly is simply the lack of time, but there are also other thoughts where writing about writing should be. I only get to teach creative writing in the spring, and when I’m busy I do much less writing of my own, which means that I have much less to say about writing. On the other hand, there are lots of topics I would like to have a chance to write about that don’t fit the original blog description. For a while, I contemplated starting another, more personal blog, but that just seems irrational—if I don’t have time to keep one blog going, what’s the logic in starting another? Besides, according to fellow poet-blogger Ann E. Michael, this blog has always, apparently, been about more than I thought. According to her, my “posts include cultural commentary, books, movies, education, feminism, and tips on writing.” Sometimes it takes someone else to point out the obvious!

So, expect to see more posts about all that other stuff, as well as the usual posts on craft, which continues to be the main emphasis of this blog as I see it. Hopefully a little more wiggle room in terms of what I allow myself to write about will give me the necessary push to save Writing with Celia.

Meantime, check this out: they’re celebrating MY BIRTHDAY in New York! Oh, this is sweeeeeet! My jaw dropped when I got the Google alert. What a nice thing to do. My thanks go out to Roxanne Hoffman of Poets Wear Prada, who is hosting the event, in which five local poets, David Joel Friedman, author of The Welcome (National Poetry Series, University of Illinois Press. 2006), Erik La Prade (Chelsea), George Held (Greenwich Village), Maria Lisella (Astoria), and Juanita Torrence-Thompson (Flushing), will be reading from their own work and that of the November birthday poets, Stephen Crane (11/1), Marianne Moore (11/15), J.P. Dancing Bear (11/17), Sharon Olds (11/19), Paul Celan (11/20), William Blake (11/28), and myself. My thanks too to Left Bank Books, and to Andrew Christ, who included me in his November poet birthdays list, and, of course, hugs and kisses to the participating poets. If you are anywhere near NY tomorrow night, please go to this event, and comment below! The reading will take place tomorrow, Friday, November 18, 2011, at 8:00 p.m. Left Bank Books is located in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan between Bank and West 12th Streets at No. 17 8th Avenue, New York, NY 10014. For more information, see the Poet’s Wear Prada post on this event.

I can’t tell you how mind-blowing it is to know that my poems are in a city I’ve never been in, in the hands of people I’ve never met. I feel just like Sally Field, who was doing pretty well when she was 39:

99 Writing Problems, but a Bitch Ain’t One

2011-09-28T22:50:00.000-04:00

People who don’t know me very well are often surprised to hear that I’m one foul-mouthed . . . woman. Perhaps no one expects a 5’4” female poet-professor to have the talent to make Yosemite Sam blush. Whatever. I’m very proud of my ability to drop F-bombs not just between words, but between syllables. It just feels good. However, it makes teaching hard. One must keep things professional. There are two words I do allow myself to use in class: bullshit and bitch.

Listen: I’m a freaking poet. That means I will use the best word for the job, and if it offends you, go run and complain to whom you will. Bullshit is an excellent word. You can spend half an hour explaining to a student that her answer to a question “lacks authority” or “is verbose” or “illogical,” or you can say “you’re just bullshitting here” and get your point across immediately. I choose the latter approach.

Similarly, feminist politics be damned, nothing conveys my maximum-security-prison approach to writing skills better that the word bitch. You need to make words your bitches. Moreover, and here I finally get to the point of this post, if you’re going to walk around calling yourself a writer, you need to make MS Word and other tools your bitches.

Johnny, why have you chosen to capitalize the first word of all the lines in your poem? That seems like a rather traditional choice. Are you making a statement about traditional poetry here vis-à-vis your contemporary urban subject matter?

Nah. I typed them lower case, and the computer just did that. I dunno why.

Johnny needs to learn how to make that computer his bitch. Usually, especially in contexts such as this blog, when one says “writing skills,” the assumption is one is referring to rhetorical or even grammatical skills. But we must remember the most essential meaning of the verb to write: to put words down on a legible surface via some sort of tool.

I came to computer skills late in life, even for a Generation Xer. I didn’t get my first computer, a Tandy 1000 RL, until I was a junior in college, in the early ‘90s. It didn’t even have a mouse or Windows. It had its own operating system, something called Deskmate. It came without a hard drive (later I installed one myself, thank you very freaking much). To switch between programs, you had to switch floppy disks. Before my Tandy, whom I affectionately called Keifer, I didn’t even have an electric typewriter. I had a mechanical Smith Corona.

Mind you, I love that typewriter (I still have it, somewhere). Something about the physicality of it is really appealing, the tapping noise of the keys and the zip-ping! when you got to the end of the line. I forget where, but somewhere I recently read (heard?) that when you press down on the keys of a typewriter, something pushes back. That’s pretty cool. Am I going to go back to writing on a typewriter? Hell no.

When I first got Keifer, I would still compose longhand, and then use the word processing application basically as a typewriter. This worked well from the point of view of revision—I made many changes as I typed. However, I soon abandoned this double process. Working on a computer was extremely liberating—I could go backwards and forwards, and make innumerable adjustments without confusion or extra work. Even as I write this, I have ideas I want to get to jotted down in my own gibberish above, below, and within paragraphs I have already drafted. True, these could just as easily be scribbled on a sheet of paper, but I couldn’t move them around as quickly.

The only drawback to writing on the computer is how easy it is to lose drafts. If you fiddle with, say, a poem too much, and want to go back to an earlier draft, it has been overwritten, unless you are carefully creating separate documents, or maybe printing drafts as you go along. But this is a minor inconvenience, easily overcome by more careful saving of your work.

The truth is you are lost as a writer in 2011 if you don’t have at least some basic computer skills. I’ve never even spoken to an editor. All of my publishing has been done through email. If you intend to work with small, independent publishers, be ready to format your own manuscript for publication—you need the ability to make not just MS Word but also Adobe or other PDF software your bitches.

I’m no tekkie. I’m not running to go plunk down my vast adjunct wages for an iPad, for example. I played around with one at the store, and I’m not impressed by the keyboard function. Though it’s responsive, it’s not as responsive as a physical one, and I need to write. I can’t be checking to see if every third keystroke registered. True technological literacy is not about fluttering from one latest gadget to the other, but about knowing how to use the best tools to maximize your productivity, or creativity, as the case may be.

I have ranted before about the need to have good grammar and punctuation skills to be a good writer. That is also a form of literacy. The writer’s skills, however, don’t stop there. In the same way that you’re not going to find an editor willing to plod through your bad grammar, you’re not going to find someone to type for you or figure out how to number your pages for you. Well, you might, but get ready to pay for it with money or sex. There’s always at least one bitch in every situation. Don’t let it be you.

Goodbye, Summer

2011-09-06T15:51:00.000-04:00

Labor Day was yesterday and another summer has curled up at the edges and dissipated into smoke. I didn’t write the novel, didn’t put together the manuscript, or do much writing at all. I didn’t fix up the house or lose the weight. I didn’t even do some of the things that used to define summer for me during other years when the hopeful to-do list was gobbled up by mornings laying out in the sun or floating in the water and afternoons reading in bed. Where did the summer go?

Last thing I remember, I was watching 84 Charing Cross Road, and hating it. I suppose I should have read the book instead. I don’t remember making the decision to watch the film first—I usually go the other way around, but there it was in the mail, auto-delivered in a bright red Netflix envelope from a queue I long ago lost control over, and there we were, exhausted from the usual end-of-summer syllabus scramble. Someone had recommended it to me, someone who thinks of me as a bibliophile, which I suppose I might be. Don’t remember who that was either, but I absolutely hated the film, based on the true story of writer Helene Hanff’s decades-long relationship with a London bookstore. All I could think of was how wonderful it is that hardly anyone will have to go to such lengths again to get a book. Pretty much any book you can think of is readily available online, and you can either download it instantaneously or have it delivered to your door in just a few days.

The whole “good books” attitude seems snooty to me, smells of The Canon, of Dead White Men and beliefs that exclude little brown women like me. Hanff was not just a bibliophile but an Anglophile, and anyone who acts like the sun should have never set on the British Empire is highly suspect in my book. I’ve met people like this, people who believe nothing good has been written in the past hundred years, which happens to coincide with the diversification of postcolonial literature. People who refer to women’s literature as “minor.” I don’t like these people. The death of the canon, of the leather-bound Good Book only a few of the initiated are capable of appreciating, is good news to the likes of me. One wonderful thing about the proliferation of alternative publishing venues is the democratization of literature, or at least the promise of it.

What I can’t bring myself to embrace, however, is the lack of a physical future for literature. I can download anything I want into my fancy ereader my husband got me for Christmas, but I can’t go to the Main Bookshop anymore. The Main Bookshop, like so many independent bookstores and even more than a few big-box stores, is closed for good, done in by a fire a few years ago but in reality in trouble long before then. Summer for me meant the beach, yes, but it also meant the Main Bookshop, a huge remainder bookstore that once stood in downtown Sarasota. At its height, the Main Bookshop had two floors, three if you counted the even deeper discount books, records, and prints you could find on the third floor. The place was messy, cluttered. It smelled funky. It was full of ancient tables and chairs, ratty armchairs, and even rattier sofas. When the rain kept you off the beach, you could spend hours there, reading. No fancy coffee or cakes. Just books and classical music or instrumental jazz piping in through the speakers. Every year my husband and I would bring home dozens of books, sometimes for as little as two dollars each. I had a favorite chair, I knew where the key to the bathroom was. I knew the cats—everyone did. It was home. Home the way my local library branch—now basically a hallway of computer terminals—used to be when I was little, when Saturdays meant getting free air conditioning at the library and reading and napping with books. I can browse online, I can “look inside this book” on Amazon, but I’m still here, in front of this screen, my world ever smaller as the need to leave this bright rectangle in front of me for pretty much anything lessens more with every passing day.

View from the second floor of the Main Bookshop. Photo courtesy of jennadeleo.com

Byron, one of the Main Bookshop cats.
Photo courtesy of jennadeleo.com

The bathroom door. Photo courtesy
of jennadeleo.com

Reading is an activity of the mind, but I also have a body, and this body longs for books that occupy more than digital space. The thing that rankles me about the so-called bibliophiles is that often books seem like just keys to some clique they wish to belong to—some coffee-drinking, fake-glasses wearing club that just looks better holding a book. I’d hate to think that such hypocrisy is what, at heart, makes me still prefer paper, and, much as I once longed to wear a hoopskirt, I have no illusions about the Great Past When Good Books Were Written. Maybe wanting to sit on the floor of the Main Bookshop in front of the Women’s Studies section with a stack of books and a cat again is no different from wanting to fit into the bikini or boogie board all the way to shore—one of those summer joys I long to feel again.

I AM A FEMINIST POET

2011-08-19T17:50:00.002-04:00

Wanna make something of it?

A bestseller. Ever
heard of it?

“America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash–and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the ‘Lamplighter,’ and other books neither better nor worse?–worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the 100,000.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1855

"I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."
—VS Naipaul, 2011

There’s a post that’s been stuck in my craw for some time now—ever since the VIDA count came out last year, the statistics that proved an alarming disparity when it comes to which gender gets published in the major journals. I felt that griping about the status of women writers was off-topic for this blog, which I had started exclusively as a venue for discussing ideas pertinent to beginning writers. I went so far as to ask Lesley Wheeler about it, but I passed on the topic more than once since then.

I was wrong. It’s a very pertinent topic, especially if you’re a beginning writer who happens to be a woman. Here’s the thing: whether you want it to or not, the issue is going to affect you. You can no more not write as a woman than you can not write as a Latina or a black or an Asian, but that’s another post.

What finally threw me over the edge was Anis Shivani’s post about Philip Levine being chosen as the next poet laureate. To be incensed by Shivani is to be duped—he sets out to shock you, and so of course was bound to poop on Levine’s parade. I’d no more be upset by that than by Madonna (I show my age—Lady Gaga?). It’s the way he went about it that really upset me. Shivani has taken Levine’s appointment as an opportunity to blame all that is supposedly wrong with modern American poetry on women.

To be fair, Shivani’s rant is not original—people have been condemning modern American poetry for its depoliticized self-absorption for a while now. Billy Collins, he whose great poetic oeuvre is the ode to osso bucco, has made a career out of not being self-aggrandizing (it’s no surprise that Shivani mentions him in his rant). It’s also nothing new to blame the contemporary confessional poets for this so-called bankruptcy. After all, you can only be depressed for so long before people start telling you to shut up and get over yourself, and after the initial voyeuristic thrill of the first confessional poets, those who came after were bound to bear this criticism. It’s also not Shivani’s fault that most of the major second-generation confessional poets happen to be women: Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham, Louise Glück. All this being said, however, Shivani’s rant shows too much glee. What a wonderful opportunity, via the thinly disguised excuse of Levine’s appointment, to totally diss the top women writers of our day. Everything that’s wrong with contemporary American poetry is directly attributable to women’s obsession with the personal and domestic. They are outside of history, their dramas of no interest to the world: “Whereas Robert Lowell had a secure sense of himself as a conductor in the vast orchestral schema called History, for Olds and the post-feminist writers of our era womanhood as it exists is an unfathomable conspiracy, a calumny against some ideal nature that must nevertheless be embraced.”

Yikes. Olds writes in “flat language, unimpressive diction, predictable rhythms, and barely passable metaphors, lumped together in herky-jerky fashion across intentionally unclean line breaks.” Graham is “unreadable.” For Glück, “from 1968 until now nothing in the real world seems to have impinged on Glück's domestic melodrama.” He must complain about Levine, or the ruse collapses, yet of him Shivani says, “unlike Olds, Graham, and Glück, Levine does possess some measure of genuine skill.”

WTF? Glück, in particular, gets a lot of hate. Not many people liked her last book, A Village Life. Admittedly, it’s not her best (although it doesn’t suck, either). But read William Logan’s New York Times review and you’ll get a whiff of that same old stench. Glück’s “pinch-mouthed poems have long represented the logical outcome of a certain strain of confessional verse — starved of adjectives, thinned to a nervous set of verbs, intense almost past bearing.” She is unable to strike out successfully in a new direction, unlike “Eliot, Lowell and Geoffrey Hill, who have convincingly changed their styles midcareer.” All the groundbreakers—except for Plath—are men, and women who follow them, like Glück, cheap imitations. Apart from Eliot, Lowell, and Hill, Logan compares Glück’s work to the bible, Edgar Lee Masters, even M. Night Shyamalan. Nowhere and no one is too bizarre an original from which Glück copies. Even Plath doesn’t get credit: “Glück learned much from Plath about how to make a case of nerves central to poetry,” Logan says, but “both poets owe a shadowy debt to Eliot”!

A new semester is beginning. I have to be careful, because on Rate My Professor someone has warned my new students that “SHE iS SUCH A fEMiNiST! EXtREMELY RUdE iF Y0U d0Nt AGREE WiTH HER ViEWs! i LEARNEd AL0t Ab0Ut W0MENs RiGHTs! bUt ALL t0GEtHER SHEs N0t tHE BESt PR0f!!”

So be it.

One of the greatest tragedies I have witnessed—yes, I mean it: one of the greatest—in the last two tragedy-filled decades is the demise of feminist discourse. Somewhere between Buffy and Bella, “feminist” became an archaic term, something like “abacus.” To be a feminist not only marked you as some old warrior fighting a remote battle belonging to some long-forgotten war, but as a man-hater, baby-hater, fat-ugly-hairy nuisance.

WTF? I’m not going to claim some sort of media conspiracy is to blame for the death of feminism—I don’t believe the world is that organized. True, the word became too rigid at some point, and it became difficult to be a feminist while at the same time being heterosexual or Catholic or—worst of all—pretty. But these multiple identities were present in feminist thought since its inception. What really happened, I think, is that we just gave up. Exhausted by the effort, by the glacial pace of it all, it was much easier to say yippee, we won, than to continue fighting.

Perhaps what makes me “rude” is my refusal to play along. Look at Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, the freshmen will say (remember when we made the effort to refer to them as “first-year” students?). Go ahead, look at them. Clinton had to pretend not to be fazed by people telling her to “stop running for President and make me a sandwich.” Palin had to stand being referred to as “Caribou Barbie.”

Two of the most critically acclaimed American films of the last two decades are American Beauty and Revolutionary Road. Both were directed by Sam Mendes. Both screenplays were written by men, and the novel on which Revolutionary Road is based was also written by a man. How are these not domestic dramas? No; they are biting social commentary, meditations on the collapse of the American Dream. They would only be petty, self-absorbed domestic melodramas if they were written by women.

I am a feminist poet. I have to be. If you are not only a beginning writer, but a woman, I suggest you figure out how you feel about this issue, before someone else figures it out for you. Define your feminism or lack thereof any way you want to, but define it. Because you will never be a writer—you will always be a woman writer.

Are You Writing About It, Celia?

2011-07-29T13:47:00.000-04:00

What Judy has
been up to.

On Suffering, Inspiration, and Writer’s Block

Despite working together at STU, my pal Judy Bachay and I rarely bump into each other. When we do, it becomes a quick catch-up conversation. What have you been up to, she always asks, and I abbreviate the major events. Whenever these include some kind of trauma, like a death or an illness, or some kind of emotionally laden story, she always asks me the same thing: Are you writing about it, Celia?

Judy’s assumption is common. Most people believe that suffering is de facto inspiration, and that, moreover, writing about something traumatic is therapeutic, both for the writer and the eventual readers. But writing doesn’t work for everyone this way; it certainly doesn’t for me, and Judy’s question always leaves me stumped. I’m never “writing about it.” When I’m in the middle of some personal crisis, I can’t write. Don’t get me wrong—I want to be this sort of writer. It seems to me that, as my friend Steve likes to remind me, quoting of course that wonderful film, Throw Momma from the Train, “a writer writes, always.” It makes me question whether I’m a writer at all when I spend long stretches of time without writing. Shouldn’t the impulse overcome me, shouldn’t writing be the primary means through which I digest my life? Shouldn’t I be able to write at the funeral, the hospital, in the middle of the storm, if I am really a writer?

"On Impoverishment"
and other collected
essays.

Glück’s first four
books are now
collected in one
volume.

Perhaps not. One of the most heartening essays on this subject is Louise Glück’s “On Impoverishment,” a characteristically depressing baccalaureate address she gave at Williams College in 1993. I have read it over many times and could spend the rest of this post quoting it at length—every sentence is so resonant for me. In it, she analyzes a two-year period of her life between Firstborn and The House on Marshland, her first and second books. She spent these two years without writing. Not on purpose, not as some bizarre exercise. She simply wasn’t capable of it, and assumed the gift of writing had left her. She was, of course, still able to write, and then some. But during this time she lay, in essence, fallow. What she came to realize later was that she was processing—achieving a change in her life that would result in a change in her writing. She explains:

To teach myself hope, I began, thirty years ago, to chart periods of silence in the same way that I dated poems. And I have repeatedly seen long silence end in speech. Moreover, the speech, the writing that begins after such a siege, differs always from what went before, and in ways I couldn't through act of will accomplish. And this happens even when outward circumstances don't change at all. Some work is done through suffering, through impoverishment, through the involuntary relinquishing of a self.

Despair in our culture tends to produce wild activity: change the job, change the partner, replace the faltering ambition instantly. We fear passivity and prize action, meaning the action we initiate. But the self cannot be willed back. And flight from despair forfeits whatever benefit may arise in the encounter with despair.

I have found this in my own life to be true. One of the most traumatic experiences of my life happened in 2002. My mother, 73 years old yet seemingly in perfect health, went from a simple cold to a lung collapse in the course of just a few days. On Christmas Eve she was chatting with my mother-in-law about how lucky she was to be so old and yet not have to take even one pill, and the day after Christmas we were rushing her to the hospital. We still don’t know quite what happened. Obviously, she wasn’t as well as we thought. She was self-medicating for her asthma, and back then all of us smoked. She spent a week on a ventilator. At one point I thought they would ask me to sign the papers that would turn it off. Miraculously, she came out of it, but so weak she remained an invalid for months.

How I got through my
impoverishment.

Back then I was still “working on my dissertation.” We had no money for a nurse, and so I called in and asked for a semester off. I thought I could surely continue writing while I nursed my mother. Without teaching, I’d have all this free time. And I did. Nursing my mother and keeping house took time, but not all day. Yet, I didn’t write one word of that blasted thing, or of anything else. I spent my free time maniacally collecting fish and insects on Animal Crossing.

Why couldn’t I write, with all that free time? Because, of course, I had none. While I was lying in bed next to my mother, controller in hand, chasing a virtual butterfly, it may have been the case that I was “doing nothing” on the outside, but inside, whether I chose to acknowledge it or not, my mind was racing. Would my mother die? If she stumbled on the way to the bathroom, could I stop her from falling?

Could I stop her from dying?

I couldn’t face these thoughts, much less write about them. That’s why I was putting all my energy into the mindless task of virtual fishing. Moreover, I couldn’t “make” myself confront these thoughts in an attempt to force the movement from despair to whatever state follows. In our action-driven world, Glück observes, it’s difficult to accept the function of surrender:

Unfortunately, it doesn't follow that, since despair can sponsor deep change, capitulation should be immediate and absolute. The condition demands resistance at the outset; to treat impoverishment as a prerequisite to wealth, to turn it into a kind of fraternity hazing, is to deny the experience. It must be feared and resisted; it must exhaust all available resources, since its essence is defeat.

The alternative? A life made entirely of will and ultimately dominated by fear. Such a life expresses itself in too prompt, too superficial adjustments of what can, in the external environment, be manipulated, or in a cautious clinging to those habits and forms which, because they are not crucial, cannot, in being lost, do much damage. The deft skirting of despair is a life lived on the surface, intimidated by depth, a life that refuses to be used by time, which it tries instead to dominate or evade. It is all abrupt movement or anxious cleaving; it does not understand that random action is also a kind of stasis. In its horror of passivity, it forgets that passivity over time is, by definition, active. There exists, in other words, a form of action felt as helplessness, a form of will that exhibits, on the surface, none of the familiar dynamic properties of will. Fortitude is will.

Which is not, of course, to say that you shouldn’t put up a fight. The fight is part of the process, and even Glück acknowledges that surrender can go too far. There are a few actions you can take that help you through impoverishment.

Keep Reading

During her period of impoverishment, Glück says that “nothing I read, nothing I saw or heard provoked response. And in the absence of response to the world, the act of writing, which had been, which is, the center of my life, the act or dream that suffuses the life with meaning, had virtually stopped.” But she kept reading, or else she wouldn’t have known that it wasn’t working. Even if everything you read seems dead to you, just read it. Think about why it’s dead. Keep looking until one day she comes back to you, the muse that lives so often in the work of others.

Keep a Journal

You may not be able to write formally, but the act of keeping a journal will keep the machine oiled and help you sort your feelings. Don’t worry about it making sense. Be simple and mechanical—record, rather than interpret, what you have done, seen, eaten, said. Though these mere facts may seem meaningless at the moment, later they might supply the details of your journey back.

Carve Physical and Psychic Spaces for Your Writing

Virginia Woolf’s famous desire for a room is more than physical, and whether you’re writing or not, some people need “room”—both physical and emotional—more than others. Some people can write at Starbucks, and some need the attic. Figure out what works for you and make it happen or die trying. Not many of us have the material means to have the dream room, but even if it’s a small corner of the closet, having a physical space that has the specific purpose of writing can have immense symbolic value. But you also need psychic space, and that can be even more difficult to get. Fight for it. Be rude. Tell people you are writing and that you need to concentrate. Put the phone away, drug the kids if you must. Give yourself the designated space and wait for it to be filled. Much like the new bookcase you just bought, writing space has a tendency to fill itself.

Set Goals and Deadlines

When I started this blog, I promised myself a post a week, and for months I was able to keep it up. It wasn’t always easy. Some weeks I had to postpone or cancel activities that certainly were more important than a stupid blog post, like exercising or paying the bills. But I had a goal. When did I falter? When I said to myself, it’s summer, I’ve already proven that I can do the weekly post, what’s the point in continuing. Call it a goal, call it a promise, call it a vow—call it whatever you want as long as it’s binding. Whether it’s a poem a day or a story this weekend, create a goal and meet it. Make the goal realistic. Underestimate yourself—it’s much more motivating to exceed your goal than to fall short. If you can’t do a poem a day, do one a week, or a month. But do it by the time you said you would, even if it means doing it badly. Doesn’t matter if it came out good—you did it, and one day it will be good even if it wasn’t this last time.

When You Can’t Write, Revise

I’ve been milking the work I did in my late teens and early twenties for years. Back then, I was eager to write and wrote a lot—I couldn’t be bothered to revise, much less to put things together into manuscripts and go through the drudgery of submitting. Now it’s the reverse—I rarely get those spurts of creativity, but yet I’m able to edit more critically and find the mindless paperwork of submitting soothing and reassuring. I may not be “writing,” as in composing, but I’m tending to my writing, and that’s part of the process.

Get Help

Don’t confuse normal life events and writerly impoverishment with illness. Addiction and depression are not writing problems, they’re medical emergencies. If you’re doing more than just not writing—if you’re drinking or sleeping (or not sleeping) excessively, if you’re alienated from others, if you’ve lost interest not just in words but in living, you’ve got bigger problems than writer’s block. People glamorize the addictions and depressions of artists to such an extent that many people believe destructive behavior is linked to creativity, but that’s bullshit. Ask Amy Winehouse.

It’s nice that today is the feast of St. Martha. St. Martha was the sister of Mary and Lazarus. In Luke 10:38-42, we’re told that she got upset with Mary during one of Jesus’ visits. Busy with the mundane details of hospitality, Martha gets upset with Mary, who’s just sitting by Jesus, listening to him speak, instead of helping Martha with their guests. Martha asks Jesus to chastise Mary for her laziness, but Jesus surprises us by telling Martha to stop fussing and let Mary enjoy the better part. When Martha looked at Mary, she thought Mary was “doing nothing,” especially in comparison to all her own “purposeful” activity. Imagine that—thinking of listening to Jesus as less worthwhile than putting together a platter of crudités or whatever the heck it was people laid out for their guests back then!

So, yes, sometimes writers write. But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they think, or listen to Jesus, or play videogames. It’s all good.

There you go, Judy. I wrote about it.

Choosing an MFA Program: 10 Ideal Considerations

2011-06-29T15:58:00.000-04:00

I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding advice on how to choose an MFA program in creative writing, but it always strikes me as funny (in a sad kind of way!) how people who are in the process of selecting an MFA program often stop at two considerations: Can I afford it? and Can I get in? While these are certainly valid considerations, ideally you should not stop at these. MFA programs vary widely and choosing the right one can make a huge difference in how happy you are with the outcome. Below are some more things to think about.

1. Don’t automatically discount the more expensive programs just because you think you can’t afford them. Too many people these days only think of two ways of paying for their education: up front, or with loans. Student loans are particularly scary, especially when used to pay for a degree not often seen as “lucrative,” like an MFA. Who wants to graduate with thousands of dollars in debt, only to face iffy job possibilities?

Loans are only one option, however. Take the time to investigate if you qualify for other types of aid, like scholarships, fellowships, grants, and assistantships. If you belong to any kind of minority at all, milk it for all it’s worth! There are lots of awards that are not need or merit based, should you belong to that marginal income bracket where you can’t afford school but are not “poor enough” to qualify for aid, or if your grades or test scores aren’t the best. By far, the best kind of financial assistance is a teaching assistantship. Let’s face it: while you’re working on your GAM (Great American Novel), you’re probably going to do some teaching to pay the bills, and the sooner you start racking up experience in front of a classroom, the better.

What you will be able to buy
with your stipend.

The irony is that it's usually the more expensive schools that offer options other than loans. Cheaper schools don’t often have the resources to provide their grad students with assistantships, so you’re forced to take out loans to go to a school you see as “cheaper,” when you could have gotten a better deal from a more expensive school. Assistantships usually come with tuition remission and a stipend, so not only are you getting teaching experience, but you’re going to school for free and making a small profit. Of course the first thing on your mind is being able to afford your education, but informing yourself on different options can make a huge difference in your possibilities even if cost is your first priority.

2. Lots of people begin their search by looking at rankings, such as the Poets& Writers yearly list. True, there is a benefit to going to a prestigious school. People will be impressed, people who might have a role in publishing you and/or employing you. However, at the end of the day, it’s your writing that will make the impression, not where you graduated from, and, if you and that top school aren’t a good fit, all that prestige (and the big bucks that usually go with it) will go to waste. I’m not saying to ignore the issue of reputation; what I’m saying is, not to let it cloud your judgment to such a degree that you pass over a less prestigious school where you might have learned more. Schools have philosophies, and environments, faculty, all sorts of things that influence your success. I discuss what these are in greater detail below, but at this moment my point is this: choose the program that fits your needs first, whether or not it’s “top-ranked.”

3. One of the first of these other-than-prestige factors you should consider is the program’s dominant genre. Most MFA programs offer classes in the three major genres: fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Though they will claim that each has the same weight, it’s kind of clear that there’s usually one genre that becomes centric, if only for a couple of years. It gets the most students, the best faculty, the “buzz.” Nothing sucks more than being stuck in a program where there’s a poetry reading every week packed to the proverbial rafters with groupies, while you and “the other fiction students” huddle in the back trying to see if anyone would be interested in starting a protest. Get a feel for what the predominant genre might be by looking at the faculty and their publications, and at the classes offered. Which classes usually fill up fastest?

4. Speaking of faculty. It’s incredible how often people overlook taking the faculty under consideration in their choice. Faculty is everything. If your only experience of being a student is a large, impersonal undergraduate course, you have no idea how crucial your relationship to the faculty will be in an MFA program. These people will become your gurus, your Yodas. Failure to “click” with the faculty will kill your MFA experience.

Your thesis advisor, I
will be.

First, look for faculty whose writing you want to mimic. I know, I know, you want to be original and all that. Fine. But you are going to school to learn how the faculty writes. What they value, their process, their experience is the sole object of study. No, they probably won’t teach any of their own books. But what they will see in other’s writing, in your writing, is what they see in their own. Pr. A. is famous for her snappy dialogue, for example. In her workshop, you can bet that’s going to take center stage. Sure, you will discuss other elements of writing, like setting and characterization, but you will learn most about snappy dialogue. If you think snappy dialogue is the hallmark of the hack and you would rather die than be known for your snappy dialogue, this relationship is not going to work.

There are genres within genres. If the fiction faculty is dominated by realists and your dream is to write some post-postmodern novel with pages inserted backwards and a chapter in pictograms, you should go to a school where most of the fiction faculty agrees. If you are a lyric poet, don’t go to a school where all the poets are Language poets.

If possible, sit in on a class or at least try to meet the profs to get a feel for their personalities. A professor might be a great writer, but, if meeting him sends shivers down your spine—the wrong kind of shivers—you don’t want to work with him on your thesis, do you? Writing workshops are every much tiny cults of personality. Even when a professor does his best to decenter authority, it just can’t be helped. You should like the professor’s writing, and the professor’s persona. Often, these two are so intimately linked that, if you can’t do a campus visit, you can substitute reading the faculty’s work. Don’t like it? For all that is holy, do not go to that school. Conversely, if there is an author whose work you particularly admire, consider picking the program based on where she teaches. The AWP Official Guide to Writing Programs allows you to search for a program by faculty name.

5. Which brings me to my next point: consider faculty size. The smaller the faculty, the more classes you will have to take with the same professor, and the more claustrophobic the relationship will be. This can be good if you get a great match—a true mentorship situation. But a small faculty has its drawbacks. No range, for one thing. Even if you pick one or two professors as your mentors, you really want to get a couple more perspectives. If you are considering a small school, do ask if they regularly have visiting professors. Visiting professors may not stay long enough to become mentors, but at least you’ll get a new voice in the choir.

6. Also look at the literature and theory faculty. Lots of people overlook this point, but it’s actually quite important. Most MFA programs—some more than others—require you to take courses outside creative writing in literature, theory, and another language. You are, after all, getting a graduate degree. If the non-creative writing faculty is a real dud, they can quickly make your MFA experience truly miserable. Too often, I hear creative writing students complain about required courses. This seems pretty immature and narcissistic to me—writers should love reading and studying the work of others. Your literature and theory courses should not be some kind of chore you have to put up with to get your MFA. They should be an opportunity to enrich your experience as a reader. Look for a charismatic lit and theory faculty that offers courses you might be interested in taking just as much as your workshops.

7. Also look for quality in the students. One of the advantages of going to a prestigious program is that they are harder to get into, so your chances of being surrounded by other good writers are better. However, it’s no guarantee, and unfortunately it’s difficult to gauge the quality of students without a campus visit in which you can sit in on some classes. Ask about recent grads, and, if possible, read some of their work.

A good workshop experience is not solely based on the quality of the students’ writing, however, but on their enthusiasm and critical expertise. The best workshop leader in the world can’t salvage a workshop if the other members are duds. Perhaps the students are self-centered, and shut down when others’ work is being discussed. Perhaps they are such bad writers that they have nothing to contribute as critics.

Look for a lively, active student body. Are there frequent campus readings? What’s the graduation ratio? Is there . . . a “vibe”?

8. Speaking of vibes—do look for diversity, especially if you are a woman or a minority. Unfortunately, discrimination exists, and nothing will kill your writing spirit more than having to deal with it. Both the faculty and the students in the program should reflect the diversity level you are comfortable with. Even if there is no blatant prejudice à la V.S. Naipaul, do you really want to be the only woman, the only Latina, or the only anything in the program? You might think it’ll be good preparation for the post-graduation “real world,” but a program in which you are surrounded by diversity can help you to grow as yourself, and not just as some kind of exception to an unstated norm. Fight discrimination later—first, learn to write.

9. A program that has a journal attached can be of invaluable experience to those who wish to go into publishing as well as writing later. If you think you might want to do that, look for a program that offers its grad students opportunities to work on their journal.

10. Finally, consider nontraditional MFA options, like low-residency programs and doctoral programs. The low-residency option is ideal for people who are tied up elsewhere. I don’t think that’s a good idea if you can help it, however. It’s hard for me to believe you can get the same experience long-distance. Part of the joy of grad school is how it isolates you and allows you to hyperfocus on your work while being surrounded by others just as obsessed with this one thing as you are. But it might be better to do a low-residency MFA with a great program somewhere you can’t get to than to settle for a so-so program where you are.

The PhD option is really catching fire. More and more programs now offer it. If you’re torn between two lovers—writing and academia—it’s perfect. Many programs are also now offering a generalized writing MA without the strict purpose of creative writing. If your other lover is journalism, advertising, or some other related field, these might be an interesting compromise.

The ultimate trick, of course, is taking your time. Begin your selection process at least a year before you plan on going, ideally two or even three. As with any degree, you’re not just choosing one program—you should have plenty of backup selections, so you can further select, from among those that actually accept you, the program that offers you the best deal not only in funding, but also in those other things you should consider, like housing and your own personal albatrosses such as family and hatred of snow. And, of course, remember that no decision is ever final. So you messed up. You hate everyone in your program, and they hate you back. Just transfer, baby. It’s an MFA, not a prison sentence!

Publish or Perish? Some Quick Thoughts on Submitting Your Work

2011-06-17T17:41:00.000-04:00

I’ve had a couple of interesting conversations with other writers over the years about publishing. For a while, I felt like I had a great advantage over writers who are obliged to promote an academic career or an established reputation with a big-name publisher: I could choose to publish “wherever I wanted.” They, on the other hand, had to make distinctions that seemed to me impossible, among them the always tricky and ever-changing decision between print and online venues.

In just a few short years, the criteria for such a distinction have changed radically. Hardly any writers would toss down the blanket judgment of just a few years ago, i.e., that no online journal was “worth” being published in. Three simultaneous developments have made that once clear line between print and online journals nearly disappear. First, many once print-only journals have transitioned to online content. There is no such thing as a major journal that doesn’t at least have a website, and many very good journals have quite a bit of online only content while still maintaining a regular print issue. Second, there are also many journals—very good ones—that exist exclusively online, either because they started that way or because they abandoned the print format in favor of going digital. Finally, and this is the point that I don’t see enough people making, printing a very good looking paper journal has now become so easy and affordable that many people out there are doing it in vast, unregulated numbers. The guarantees hardcore print enthusiasts once associated with paper are no longer valid. A paper issue doesn’t necessarily mean you have the backing of a university, an established editorial board, or even a small press. It also doesn’t mean that you have a guaranteed readership—in fact, your work will probably be read by many more readers if you publish it online. A print issue can mean all these things, but it can also simply mean that someone has a good computer and has been visiting blurb.com.

So how do you decide where to send your work? Depends. If you have some kind of reputation you want to build or protect, you probably know how to answer this question better than I do. If you’re like me, however, you’re going to need some criteria, so here goes:

1. Forget the print/online distinction. It is no longer valid. There’s good and bad on both sides of the great divide.

2. Look at the number of issues. While it might be more challenging to get into an established journal, understand that a fledging one is a risk. Sadly, the market for readers is poor, and largely swallowed up by the big publishing houses. There’s little money to be made in keeping a journal going, and many of them go under in less than a year. If the journal is less than five years old, it’s a risk.

3. Look at the title. If the journal doesn’t take itself seriously, why should you? Many times, you hear about a CFS (Call for Submissions) from a new journal or one you haven’t heard about. If it’s called Uncle Bob’s Dear Johnnies, that’s a joke, not a journal.

4. Look at the editorial board. The better the journal, the more people will be involved. Usually there is an Editor in Chief, and separate editors for separate genres (Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction Editor), followed by one or more Assistant Editors. Sometimes there’s one or more Guest Editors. Don’t recognize any names? That’s what Google is for. Someone who has fewer publications than you is not likely to make a good editor.

5. Evaluate any university connection. Sometimes it’s a good thing—a university connection means a reputation is at stake, and there’s financial backing, which together make for good work and possible longevity, especially if there is a creative writing program attached. However, be wary of those pop-up schools you’ve never heard of. These here today, gone tomorrow phlebotomist factories have nothing to do with academia and everything to do with commerce, so they’re not likely to put out a journal with good intentions. Luckily, these places don’t often do so. But there are also university-affiliated journals whose main focus is undergraduate work. Unless you’re an undergraduate yourself, you probably want to keep looking.

6. The deal breaker is just like it was in high school. How did you decide whether to go to a party in high school? You remember. Your first question was, who else is going? Read the last issue of the journal you intend to submit to. If the writing is subpar in any way, don’t submit. You really want to be caught at the party full of geeks and dweebs? I don’t think so.

What I’m talking about here is respect. Respect your work, or no one else will. Sometimes, we’re so freaking desperate to get published that we feel it’s “publish or perish” even if no one else is breathing down our necks but us. Cave in to this desire, however, and you just might find yourself doing the literary equivalent of getting caught making out with the flute player at band camp. What’s the value of being published in a venue that no one will read and no one will appreciate? You might as well hand your writing out at the stop light along with the flyers for quick lube jobs and cheap divorces.

Speaking of respect. I don’t know about you, but I’m also not into submitting to places that are going to treat me like dirt, even if they are reputable (it does happen). I don’t expect to be paid—crappy as that situation is, I accept it as a problem with the market. But I do expect to be told if my work is rejected in a timely fashion. If I send some work out to a journal and six months go by with no reply, they’re dead to me. I don’t care how good they think they are—they have no right to keep me hanging on that long, even if I’m some nobody from the slush pile. There are many things editors can do, including closing submissions, if they’re swamped. Treating the writers who make up the pages of their journal like dirt is never an option.

I’ve written here exclusively about journals, but these thoughts could just as well apply to any venue for your writing. Submissions to anthologies and publishers are similar. Don’t send your work to a contest called “Uncle Bob’s Belly Picks.” You may stand a good chance of winning, but would you want to?

Choose the places you submit to carefully. If you’re not willing to read an entire issue, no one else will be.

Poetry Revision 101, Lesson Four: Do I Sound Fat in This Poem?

2011-06-10T08:01:00.000-04:00

This post is dedicated to Dinkinish, who writes with an airbrush.

The wild roses are very red,
and the violets are dark blue,
while the sugar is extremely sweet,
as sweet as you.

Eh? Bizarre. Forgive me for using the same old rhyme to elucidate, but the familiarity of the way this is supposed to go should help you see how unnecessary words and phrases can make your poem fat.

We all know fat is the enemy. According to Market Research News, the global weightloss market will be worth 586.3 billion in US dollars by 2014. We spend money on pills, on treadmills and trainers, on diets and gurus, all trying to lose the fat. Meanwhile, your poetry might be fatter than your thighs, and much easier to fix.

There are eight parts of speech: verbs, nouns, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. To the poet, however, these are not all equally useful (prose writers—really good ones—are equally biased, by the way). Lean writing, writing that is super-concentrated and packs a wallop of nutrition, is verb and noun based. All other parts of speech should be used only when absolutely necessary. Think of them as the carbs and fats of writing.

The opening revision is a good example. The first thing I did to plump up the rhyme was add “The wild” to “roses.” Instead of just a noun, a nice, simple noun, now we have two adjectives and a noun (articles—a, an, the—are a kind of adjective, in case you forget). Three words doing the job formerly done by one. Is the poem any better for it? No. Articles are one of the most useless of all words in poems. They clutter up your line, and have a tendency to fall at the beginning of the line, as above, which is a coveted spot. The opening word of a line has particular emphasis, and to waste it on an article is tragic. “Wild” also adds nothing here, although it might somewhere else. The result? The line is weaker, watered down. “Roses are red,” is simple, to the point. Clear. “The wild roses are very red” is unnecessarily burdened with extra fat.

Focusing on verbs—the leanest, meanest, best of words—is a good way to put your poetry on a diet. A strong, well-chosen verb can instantly drive home meaning. Consider:

I felt the blackness closing in on me

and made my way to the nearest chair,
where I sat down heavily and tried
to regain my breath. (27 words)

I wilted and collapsed

into a chair, panting. (8 words)

Which lines grab you more? The first four lines are wordy, fat. The last two are immediate, striking. “Felt the blackness closing in on me” is not only a cliché, it’s imprecise. The one word—wilted—immediately conveys the sensation in a fresher way. “Made my way to the nearest chair, where I sat down heavily” is especially flabby. Why do people “make their way” anywhere, anyway? Don’t they just “go”? Better yet, skip to what’s important, and just get there. Does it matter that it’s the “nearest” chair? “Sat down heavily” is weak verb + adverb + adverb. You mean collapsed, which is the best kind of verb, an action verb. “Sat” is also an action verb, but it’s plain. “Collapsed” combines both the action and the description of the action—heavily—into one effective verb. Not all verbs are equal. “Felt,” for example, is not a great verb. I felt sick or I was sick is not as great as I barfed. Don’t “feel” sick or “think you might be” sick or “suspect you are” sick. Barf. Retch. Vomit.

A phalanx of tulips.

Nouns also need to be precise to be effective. “The flowers bloom” is not as great as “the roses bloom.” Better yet, have the “tulips salute.” You expect flowers to bloom. Having them salute is better because it’s a fresh way of thinking of tulips, with their erect heads and stiff stems.

Overuse of adjectives and adverbs can be combated by better noun and verb choices, but some of these other parts of speech are necessary for clarity. The good thing about poetry as opposed to prose, however, is that you can accomplish much through placement. Consider:

I went to the market and picked up some chicken, which I put into the oven with potatoes and rosemary I had just picked.

Blech. Lotsa fat here. If I were to take out every junky word, it might look like this:

I went to market and bought chicken, roasted with potatoes and fresh-picked rosemary.

Some of the revision is good. “Picked up some chicken” is now just “bought chicken,” which is leaner. “Put into the oven” is simply “roasted.””Rosemary I had just picked” becomes “fresh-picked rosemary” (which might be even better as just rosemary). But “went to market” sounds British, so I think we need “the market” here in the US. Eliminating the “which” has also altered the meaning of the sentence. Did I roast the chicken myself, or did I buy it roasted already?

Here we have two conundrums. First, don’t eliminate so many junk words that the lines go from lean to stiff or unnatural. If you don’t say “go to market” or “to hospital” in your country, leave in the article. Think about style as well. Are you a minimalist? If not, you might want to retain some of the natural feel of your syntax for the sake of preserving a certain tone. Beyond that, however, note that the placement of your words on the line in poetry can accomplish some of the grammatical exigencies of prepositions, conjunctions, and other “service” words necessary in prose:

Went to the market

bought chicken
roasted with potatoes
fresh-picked rosemary.

You get it, don’t you? Because your brain is in poetry mode, it supplies the missing conjunctions. Meanwhile, the line is not watered down with tiny globs of fat—cellulite.

Trimming the fat is one of the best ways to revise your poetry, and something you should consider even when you’re pretty satisfied with your draft. You can always put back some of the words you take out later if you don’t like what it does to your style. Most times, however, you will, and you’ll be surprised by how good the same words can look when they’re not surrounded by clutter. Editors don’t like clutter either. Overwriting is the mark of the insecure—you think more is better, and so you pile on the adjectives and adverbs. You think you are clarifying, but really you’re blithering. Clarity, if you’ll allow me a heinous cliché, is not a matter of quantity, but of quality. The best words in the best order, as Coleridge so wisely said.

Poetry Revision 101, Lesson Three: Arranging the Words on the Page

2011-06-03T16:26:00.000-04:00

One of the surest markers of amateur poetry is a series of centered lines. Though I’m sure a clever poet could find a way of making such an arrangement meaningful (perhaps sarcastically?), most likely such poems are written by people whose only experience of poetry is Hallmark cards.

Before you get all cocky because you abandoned the centered lines format in your early teens, consider this: perfect iambic pentameter and/or perfectly symmetrical (not to mention left-justified) quatrains, tercets, or couplets can be just as inappropriate. That’s because the true mark of amateur poetry is not any one particular amateur format, but, rather, an inattention to format. The unskilled poet arbitrarily decides on an arrangement that seems “poetic” but does nothing else to present the content in a meaningful way.

On the other hand, the experienced poet agonizes over the arrangement of words on the page. Each poem has its own set of demands. Some poems work with short lines, some with long. Some with regular stanzas, some irregular, some with no stanza breaks at all. Some poems are left justified, some right, some even centered, and some have all types of margins. Some have metered lines, specific syllable counts, and some don’t. Some have rhyme, and some don’t. Some have punctuation, and some don’t. Some have wacky symbols, and some don’t. In some, all the lines are capitalized, and in some, none. Or all.

The careful poet makes informed choices about all of these options with each poem she writes. Understand that poetry has a visual as well as an auditory and cognitive component. Most poetry, excepting that which you hear at a reading, enters first through your eyes. Before you read each individual word, you perceive the poem as a figure on the page. The visual arrangement of words is the first impression you get of the poem, and, like all first impressions, it sets the tone for how you will interact with that poem. For example, if you see a poem arranged in symmetrical quatrains on the page, you are likely to bring a whole series of expectations to its reading associated with that classic format. The careful poet knows this and uses these expectations to create a desired effect, not a random one. If the poem, like the presentation, is traditional, the form is likely to blend in with the content and purpose of the poem, and if that is what the poet wants (for the sake of uniformity, of tradition, for whatever reason), then that is an informed choice. Another way to go with it is to use the expectations against the reader—the poem looks like a traditional sonnet, for example, but it’s really a wacky, anti-traditional poem that challenges the reader’s expectations of what formal poetry should be, like Billy Collins’s “Sonnet,” which you can read here.

Similarly, if the poem has a ragged, confusing appearance on the page, it also sets up expectations. Compare Collins’s sonnet to Adam Strauss’s “True Love,” which you can read here (Fence is freaking great—they specialize in wacky, risk-taking poetry that really works the space—a wonderful place to learn all about this issue!). What are we to make of Strauss’s odd gaps in this poem? Immediately, you read the poem with a questioning stance—you want to “figure it out.” Ironically, the subject of this poem is the traditional subject of the sonnet, i.e., love. But Strauss is asking us to think about being in love in the realistic sense of not being able to make sense of it, of feeling disoriented, overwhelmed, confused. He gets us on the way to this thought before we even read the first word of the poem, however, by disorienting us visually, confounding our expectations of what a poem looks like.

Moreover, lineation, stanza breaks, and any other use of white space affect not only our initial visual impression of a poem, but also its emotional climate. The spaces in Strauss’s poem disturb our traditional reading of the fairly grammatically arranged words. The sentence “John Donne probably wouldn't like me were we to meet” is fairly straightforward, but the way Strauss has arranged it on the page makes us hesitate to make sense of it in a way that a traditional arrangement would not. We feel confused, pensive, which is what Strauss wants. The sentence itself is rather ordinary, but Strauss accomplishes with placement what he can’t with words. The empty spaces—between words, between lines, between stanzas—become words themselves, invisible words packed with meaning and emotional charge. This is really cool!

A must-read for anyone
working on lineation.

What Strauss is doing is called annotating the line. To annotate something is to explain it. Normally, we read words in preestablished ways. If we pause in a sequence of words, we usually also do it in preestablished ways, such as at a punctuation mark like a comma or period, or between grammatical units like phrases and subordinate clauses or between subjects and verbs. A poem that follows these preexisting pauses is said to have parsing lines. For example:

Roses are red,

violets are blue,

sugar is sweet,
and so are you.

These lines are parsed, broken into grammatical units of subject, verb, and predicate adjective. Moreover, the commas would make you pause at the same spot the line break does—there is no conflict. The lack of conflict has a specific effect—it propels the poem forward. You don’t pause much at all; you are moved to continue reading until you get to the last line. You are also moved to do this by enjambment. The sentence does not end at the end of the line, but continues to the next line, so you keep reading, searching for the end of the thought. You could slow down the pace of this poem simply by switching out the punctuation so that each line would be end-stopped:

Roses are red.

Violets are blue.
Sugar is sweet.
So are you.

Look at what happens to the poem when you annotate the line, or work against the grammar and punctuation:

Roses are red. Violets
are blue, sugar is
sweet, and so
are
you.

This is a pretty extreme, silly example, but it makes the point. The irregular breaking of the line changes the tenor of the poem entirely. You can’t read it fast—you are forced to stop at the breaks, against your will, even. In addition, the superindenting of the last line puts a new emphasis on the word “you.” It sets it apart, highlights it like a sculpture on a pedestal. You don’t just read the word, you arrive at it.

Of course, you want to pay attention to what it is you are emphasizing with such tricks. For example, the rearrangement above doesn’t work because the highlighted words are pretty silly. What’s the point of “arriving” at the totally expected and meaningless pronoun, you? Here is where you have to learn that tricky dance between content and style, so that when you create an arrival, the destination is worth it.

These choices also work best when you can merge the visual and the auditory. The way you hear a poem in your head is very likely to reflect the emotional tone you are trying to create visually, the questioning stance or the galloping pace. How disappointing is it when someone else reads your poem aloud and it sounds nothing like it did in your head? You can manipulate the way a poem is read by manipulating space. Usually, the more white space you incorporate into the poem, the slower it will be read.

I don’t really pay attention to form when I’m drafting. In fact, I often draft quickly, in long lines or even paragraphs. My first concern is getting down the content, the words and images I want. One way to move from first draft to second (or at whichever draft the issue of form comes into play) is to record yourself reading the poem. Print out the poem, double spaced, in a big font, with no line breaks. Read and record. Then, take your printout and a pen, and mark the pauses where you hear them. This is your first draft of the lineation.

In subsequent drafts, notice any patterns that emerge, and either intensify or erase them, depending on what you want. For example, if after your reading draft, you notice that most of the lines of your poem are a certain length (either visually, syllabically, or metrically), any lines that are irregular will have more emphasis. If this is what you want, then keep the irregular lines. But if these irregular lines have no special meaning, you need to trim or fatten them, as the case may be, to erase that accidental emphasis. Any time you deviate from a pattern, you create emphasis. Emphasis must always be intentional.

Always consider stanza breaks. A poem with no stanza breaks, even a short one, reads fast. Stanzas, like paragraphs, create units of thought. You can have the content dictate the length of the stanzas, or you can try to have regular stanzas, all of the same length. Try the same poem a couple of different ways, and see what effect the differences create. Show it to a couple of good readers, too, and notice the different ways they react to different arrangements.

While you’re at it, have them read the poem aloud to you once you’ve decided on the final arrangement. Make sure your guinea pig is a good reader, however. Hardly anyone knows how to read anymore, period, much less poetry, so make sure any problems you hear are the poem’s and not the reader’s before you make any changes. Test your readers with a finished poem, yours or someone else’s. If you find someone who reads like he’s supposed to, do anything to keep him as a friend, but still test your poem with at least two readers before you edit. Have you arranged your words effectively enough that someone else reads the poem just like it sounds in your head? Adjust as necessary.

Arrangement is one of the most difficult aspects of poetic composition, but it’s what separates the merely competent from the truly gifted. It may take several drafts to get it right, so you can’t rush it, and you must be willing to experiment with several different ways of arranging the same poem so you can see the effects produced, and control them. To focus on content and word choice alone is to miss the point of poetry, which is a language not just of words, but of silences.