Our first 2006 meeting: bios, pockets and more

Tonight we met for the first time at The Writer's Workshop, our home-studio in Northwest Austin. Four of us gathered around the brand-new writer's table, built by hand from birch, pine and Douglas fir, stained and just coated the day before our group meeting. We had our light supper together at that table, with the ceiling fans spinning to bring the balmy springtime air into the studio through our screened door.

We began by writing a seven-minute biography of ourselves, longhand on the notebooks everyone had brought to the class. Cynthia had forgotten to bring her reading glasses; I turned up a spare set for her. (We also have notebooks and pens on hand, so people can really just turn up. But the first meeting we pass out our Rotring Core pens, included as part of the tuition.) I'd given the group our set of AWA guidelines before we began to write: Everything is treated as fiction, it's all confidential inside the group, and we always refer to the narrator or the speaker when we respond to the writing. It's all designed to honor the safety of the group. "We leave the judge outside," I said. People can learn how to write better by focusing on what's working in their early drafts.

That seven-minute bio needed to contain one lie. A few of us got past three guesses with our lie, but others didn't. It proves that all writing really is fiction, when you can't tell the difference just by listening or reading.

Later we wrote about things we might discover in the pockets of a loved one. Maybe somebody who has died, and we're going through their clothes before giving the garments away. Or a partner of ours whose laundry we're doing. Looking at each item in the pockets, then writing about that person, using those items. Great writing emerged out of that one.

Then there were my brownies, using the recipe from Chris DeLorenzo of the Laguna Writers Group in San Francisco. He was one of our instructors at the Amherst Writers and Artists training last fall. I've made those brownies three times now — an AWA group tradition — but every time I need to head to Chris's Web page to look up the recipe. I always mislay the printed paper. Now that we're in a 10-week session, I bet I get the recipe down without the cheat sheet.

Afterward we wrote from postcard prompts, going deep into our imaginations or recalling sharp memories. Every exercise gave us a chance to praise the work for what was memorable, vivid, alive or notable. We talked about psychic distance during one set of responses. More on that tomorrow.

A good Shepard for writing

This spring the Iowa Writer's Workshop announced its new director for the world-famous writing program, a person who will have to follow in the legendary shoes of Frank Conroy. Conroy died last year after 18 years of leading Iowa. Samantha Chang will become the first female director of the program, one of the most prestigious writing schools in the country. Much has been said already about Chang, who as a 1993 grad of the program will be one of the youngest writing teachers to hold the post.

Iowa has the cache of Harvard among graduate writing programs. It celebrates its 70th year this year. "Students are always interested in finding a place and a group of people that allows them to pursue a writer's true work, which is thinking," Chang said this month in an interview. Indeed, a group of people is essential to the writing life.

I thought of the one of the other director candidates to make the short list, Jim Shepard, who was invited to give a public reading, lead a workshop and get interviewed by students and faculty at Iowa City. It was the intersection of a couple of summertime stops in my writing training. I'd taken a seminar from Shepard at the first Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and earlier in that same trip, stayed in Iowa City while at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

Not to take anything away from Chang, but Shepard would have been a good choice, too. In looking over my notes from his classes, I found a day when we examined narration within a story. In using dialogue inside narration, you can

• Minimize the dialogue's importance
• Move things along quicker
• Show the reader that you're hurrying

Shepard also told us — by way of teaching from the balls of his feet as we took apart a manuscript to see what make it work — that narrators are more sympathetic when they treat themselves with a brusque manner, "rather than those who piss and moan."

Shepard was like that: funny in a tough way, but never meanspirited about his advice and counsel. I consider myself lucky to have learned from him for a week. For a great book on the Iowa Writer's Workshop, I recommend The Workshop, edited by Iowa grad Tom Grimes. It's full of rememberances of the community in the workshop, as well as great stories from its graduates. To find a bit of Conroy's legacy, dig up and enjoy The Eleventh Draft, a series of essays Conroy assigned to Iowa graduates like who'd studied under him like T.C Boyle, about the craft of writing.

Rewrite in a row, right away

Here's an exercise I prodded myself to do on Tuesday night. It's the usual evening that I've met with my friend Mike, who's also working on a novel. Together we have trod the path of the writing exercise, many months before I took my Amherst Writers & Artists training to lead next week's workshop.

Borders on Great Hills has been the meeting place on these Tuesdays for Mike and I. The bookshop stands in the shadow of a much larger Barnes and Noble across the intersection, but Borders has got a much better cafe — quieter, with more seats and decent sized tables. We've met there for more than a year of Tuesdays, sitting in the hard-backed chairs, chatting and then writing longhand, then reading aloud to each other.

Enough of the color. Here's the exercise:

Write a simple scene, a straightforward event. A character looks for a table in a crowded cafe, trips and manages to keep her food from spilling, gets embarrassed as she looks around, sees a smiling person at an otherwise empty table.

The work is to write it five completely different ways — consider changes of style, tone, sentence structure, voice, psychic distance. Make the styles radically different, with the same story. That's the point: to make them very different. Keep each version short, up to eight sentences. Pick a single kind of narration and stick to it. Don't fiddle with perspective. Fiddle with style.

Keep the total number of words to 350 or so.

Fiction is thought stylized, according to Brian Kitely, who included the above exercise in his fine book The 3 AM Epiphany. If he's right, then style is essential to good writing. Rewriting through five different styles, one right in a row, sure gives you alternative ideas on how to express that thought.

Even Stephen struggled, and still does

Stephen King gets held up all the time as the penultimate successful writer, the multimillionaire never impoverished by a lack of words that would sell. But he’s struggled in his writing life, both at the beginning in the 1970s and much more recently, when he said he’d dried up as an artist.

The struggle in the beginning is more relevant to most of us who are still in pursuit of that first good book. In his confessional On Writing, he reports that when he started Carrie, “I wasn’t having much success with my own writing, either. Horror, science fiction, and crime stories in the men’s magazines [King wrote for what he calls “tittie books” in the 70s] were being replaced by increasingly graphic tales of sex. That was part of the trouble, but not all of it. The bigger part was that, for the first time in my life, writing was hard.”

King was teaching grade-school English to pay the rent, and “by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I’d spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain . If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then.” That was after King had earned $500 for a short story he figured would never sell, a munificent sum for a story both then, in the early 70s, as well as now.

But at the close of his book, he claims nearly all of his writing has never been for the money. “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends,” he says. “It’s about enriching the the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.”

Go to press, skip the paper — be heard

If you write, then you want your voice to be heard. There are new avenues to send your words down, thanks to the Internet and digital readers. These can be a straightforward as your PC or Mac, or as boutique as this spring’s forthcoming Sony Reader.

Our advice for today is not to consider how your story will be published. By the time you’ve finished polishing it up, something new is likely to emerge that can get it, and your voice, out to readers.

In a bit of irony, the mainstream paper press is noticing these digital alternatives. This week’s issue of BusinessWeek ran a story titled “Digital Books Start a New Chapter.” It talks about Amazon’s electronic delivery of things like short stories and essays for 49 cents each. A writer needs to have a book in print through Amazon to qualify for this program, so it’s not entirely an alternative. But it’s a start.

Amazon already holds a lot of useful information in digital format, like the ability to search many of its books for a phrase or word, then read the match right online. Amazon also puts sample chapters online for your free consumption. Today Amazon recommended The Writer’s Voice to me, and was glad to serve up the free first chapter, Finding a Voice — a quest we undertake each time we meet at my Writer’s Workshop groups. The chapter compares the digital world’s delivery of information with the pleasures of writing for readers of literature. Stories speak to us with a voice, A. Alvarez says.

“Imaginative literature is about listening to a voice,” he says. “When you read a novel the voice is telling you a story; when you read a poem it’s usually talking about what its owner is feeling, but neither the medium nor the message is the point. The point is that the voice is unlike any other voice you have ever heard and it is speaking directly to you, communing with you in private, right in your ear, and in its own distinctive way.”

Poynting to the problem of -ing words

One of my favorite Web sites for writing advice is the one at the Poynter Institute. Yes, it contains wisdom and training for journalists both green and experienced — but the lessons are often just about good writing. Especially when Dr. Peter Clark holds class online.

Across 2004 and 2005, Clark filled up a Writer’s Toolbox with more than 50 techniques, each about 750 words in length. Every one of them is followed by exercises you can apply to learn what he’d taught. Just at random, I found his entry on words that end in -ing. He says, “Let me offer reasons why 'ing' might weaken a verb.

“1. When I add an 'ing,' I add a syllable to the word. This does not happen, in most cases, when I add an 's' or an 'ed.' Let's take the verb "to trick." First, I'll add an 's,' giving me 'tricks'; next, I'll try an 'ed,' giving me 'tricked.' Neither move alters the root effect of the verb. But 'tricking,' with its extra syllable, seems like a different word.

“2. Verbs with 'ing' begin to resemble each other. Walking and running and cycling and swimming are all good forms of exercise, but I prefer to point out that Kelly likes to walk, run, cycle, and swim.”

So while -ing is a natural part of English, and maybe a significant part of your true voice, it is gentle, not powerful. Clark has another column about some of the best advice he got on writing strong. He calls it, “Branch to the right.” It means get your subject and verb as close to the beginning of the sentence as you can, then follow them with your subordinate clauses. “Even a long, long sentence can be clear and powerful when the subject and verb make meaning early,” he says.

Clark made “Branch to the right” his first of more than 50 tools. The advice feels fundamental. There’s plenty of it in his complete Toolbox series, which he says he is adapting into a book.

Old-school tools: Index cards

Plot is the enemy of character. At least that’s the advice you can find throughout the writing world, usually delivered by authors and instructors who have whipped a plot into shape so they could finish a novel.

The trouble with this advice: while plot might be the enemy, we still long for something interesting to happen in a story. Yes, you can can find novels, some a bit successful, where not much happens throughout 300 or more pages. But the best tales give your well-crafted characters something notable to do, experience or endure. It might be as simple as losing a dog. It might be as epic as discovering a secret government plot to experiment on virus victims.

You are at the right moment to craft such plot points once you know your characters well. But after you know your people, shuffling their story about can take place on, well, index cards. It’s well into the 21st Century, but these are still tools that the pros use, in some form or another.

Above you see my plot cards for Viral Times, my novel about a government plot during a pandemic. They are the second generation of the plot, standing on the shoulders of a simple Word file written in outline mode. Each color represents a Point of View, a chapter or simply a scene. After I write the action, I note a goal for the scene or chapter. They have changed in order, expanded and some have even been scrapped.

There are good tools out there for plotting with the index card. Up on the Web site 43 Folders I’ve found an insightful discussion of using index cards. Blake Snyder, a teacher of screenwriting, offers up an Excel spreadsheet that mimics index cards, set up for the classic three-act structure found in so many screenplays. Then there’s Synder’s Save the Cat, a new and popular screenwriting book that loves index cards as a plot tool. Have a look at a good Web page that waxes eloquent about how to use your cards. Go ahead, visit Office Depot and make your writing more clear. Use Post-Its in colors instead of cards, if you like, but go old-school to plot.

A local press that impresses

Let me stand up and praise an Austin business that can be important to having your voice heard. Morgan Printing has been an essential part of the health of the small press and beginning writer in Texas for a long time. We got to know these folks 10 years ago while we searched for a newsletter printer. Though our monthly tech newsletter is not a big client, we feel as if we’re treated like one.

All along the shelves of Morgan’s offices stand thousands of books, self-published or printed on behalf of tiny publishers. Our forthcoming journal for The Writer’s Workshop authors, Quillpen, will come off the presses at Morgan. No matter how big or small your press run, these folks do a great job. They deliver the goods every month for Writer’s League of Texas subscribers with the printing of Scribe, the Writer's League newsletter. Ask for Terry or Mark at Morgan, and get a good ally in your quest to break into print.