First-thing writing might work

If you are looking for the time in your day to write, let me suggest first thing in the morning. And I do mean first thing. I'm working through the Robert Olen Butler book From Where You Dream, a guide on how to create sensitive, meaningful writing full of yearning. Butler is big on a dream state as the place you can sit and write from — plenty of other writing teachers believe in dreams as the engine for good tales, too.

I've been working with this for a week, and I like what's appearing on my pages so far.

In Butler's book — which is really a series of his lectures, transcribed and edited by the queen of fiction teachers Janet Burroway — he suggests you get to your notebook or laptop while you're half-awake. He says of this writing time, when you might have a cup of coffee at your side but nothing else:

It's a funny state. It's not as if you're falling asleep at your computer, but neither are you brainstorming. You are dreamstorming, inviting the images of moment-to-moment experience through your unconscious.

Butler says a state of communion with your unconscious is absolutely essential to writing well in the art form of fiction. That's why reading non-fiction when you first rise chases the dream state away. "You go to your fiction writing without letting any conceptual writing into your head," he says. He also suggests going to a different place to write your fiction than the other place in your home where you write analytical pieces, use logic, solve problems with your writing. Use a different font on your computer, if you compose on the keyboard. Change the color of your screen or desktop.

Signal yourself, with these differences, that you're going to focus on how your characters experience emotion. More on that next week.

Speaking out on doing dialogue better

As I organized the library for The Writer's Workshop, I found resources I'd forgotten I had. I recently signed up to be an exhibitor at this summer's Agents & Editor's conference here in Austin, so I gathered my notes from the 2004 conference. Greg Garrett gave a craft session on dialogue. The author of Cycling, the fine-crafted novel about life and love in Waco, Texas, Garrett had lots of good notes on how to write good dialogue.

He believes in its power. "If you write really bad dialogue," he said, "it doesn't matter what else you do well." He made reference immediately to scene and summary (see Tuesday's entry), saying great dialogue has to be written out — it can't be summarized. Summary gets you from scene to scene, he said, and it doesn't have to be written. Dialogue is the essential part of your story.

Great dialogue has subtexts and underlying tensions. There's more going on than the obvious. It doesn't put all of its cards on the table, and it saves the best for last.

Great dialogue builds to a point. There's the exchange, then growing tension.

Great dialogue sounds like real people talking, sure — but it isn't. It's more interesting, dramatically, but with the flavor of authenticity.

In tiny bits and pieces, dialogue can do some of the work of exposition. But it does not carry more than its own weight in that regard, if it's good. Don't make your characters explain the plot to one another in dialogue.

Finally, great dialogue keeps you in the scene, but it does this by illustrating action and reaction. Dialogue is only part of a good scene. Observations and reactions also keep readers in the scene. Dialogue and music have a similarity, Garrett said, and here I can agree from my experience acting — from low melodrama to Shakespeare, you have to find the meter in the spoken words of your characters. Try having someone else read your dialogue out loud. Write down the lines you overhear that stand out, are memorable.

He said that Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses) and Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) practice the craft with great elegance and economy. Garrett does a good job of it himself.

A Chance to See Illumination's Creator

I learned today that Jonathan Safran Foer is going to be reading from his new novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in Austin on April 17, a Monday night at the Barnes & Noble store not 10 minutes from The Writer's Workshop. It's just too fascinating to pass up. Novelists read aloud at bookstores to sell their books, but I have a feeling this author might give us the kind of performance that stands up to a David Sedaris level of theatre. At least I'd believe so after reading his Everything Is Illuminated, a book that doesn't want to behave like many others but is full of quirky brilliance.

Foer reads upstairs at 7 PM at the Arboretum branch, at the end of Jollyville Road (our workshop studio is just three blocks off Jollyville on the road's other end), and if you're curious, you might want to get there early. It's not a large space up there, but it might be big enough for a writer who doesn't want to work inside everybody else's boundaries.

Seeing the scene, waiting for sequel

Tonight in The Writer's Workshop group, we responded to writing which first promised and then delivered. A scene's setting suggested the details which the story returned to later. The writing was not a long passage, but it managed to return to a subject so smoothly as to remind me of Scene and Sequel. They're a pair used (often exclusively) in modern novels to give structure and pace to stories.

Every reader or moviegoer understands scenes. But a story needs more than just scenes; they're good enough for movies, but writing demands some deeper thought in the characters, emotional revelations, internal monologue. These things make books so rich that movies struggle to deliver the same impact. As good as Lonesome Dove was as a miniseries, it's hard to find a Larry McMurtry fan who loved the film as much as the novel which sparked it.

Sequel is the engine to deliver that emotional wallop, the glue "that holds scenes together and helps you get from one to the next," says Jack Bickham in Scene & Structure:

Sequel is a flexible structural component, and it provides you with all the tools you need for in-depth characterization, analysis of motivation, explanation of character planning, etc.

After the trouble (the scene of conflict) that is essential to any interesting story, there are four compartments in the sequel that will lead to the next bit of trouble:

1. Emotion
2. Thought
3. Decision
4. Action

A scene is characterized by conflict. A sequel is characterized by feeling and logic. Bickham notes:

Little about the sequel structure is hard-and-fast, except that the sequence of the parts must always be imagined by the writer in the order which human behavior dictates — emotion first, then later thought, then the reaching of a decision, then a new, goal-oriented action.

Where to find your first agent

It's the agent of change you seek first, if you're working on getting your first book into print. That means finishing what you start before you start the process of publishing.

Although an agent is likely to ask for only your first few chapters, they are just as likely to ask for the rest of the book right away if they like what they see at first. They will often ask on a meeting, if you get one, "is the book finished?" As a writer who's got no books yet, you have to sell them on your ability to finish, as much as they try to sell you on their ability to place the material.

I addressed this in some more depth in "The first step that is vital to publishing"

Some common wisdom says it's harder to get an agent than to get a book accepted without one. Big publishers sometimes love material which doesn't have an agent. But it usually comes from a connected source of some kind, like a writer who's already being published at the house forwarding a friend's book.

You will have a more clear vision of your story, as well as your characters, as you write it through. The only thing that teaches a writer more than reading is the writing. You teach yourself through your challenges, falling short, and then meeting them.

Joyce Carol Oates has a new book out on writing. The accomplished novelists and short story writers have written these guides and confessionals to good effect; Stephen King and Ray Bradbury have fine entries in this category, too. Oates offers this inspiration to "young writers" (that's all of us without a finished novel, regardless of age).

Write your heart out.

Never be ashamed of your subject, and your passion for your subject.

Your "forbidden" passions are likely to be the fuel for your writing.

Acknowledgements to agents in books you admire can also give you a good line on finding an agent.

Have fun, and keep pumping out your story. The marketing and business usually follows the craft, in the majority of cases.

Nothing wrong with having a tilt at immortality, though. This June in Austin, there's a fun weekend conference called Agents & Editors, put on by the Writer's League of Texas. Both publishing types attend, and conference attendees can sign up to pitch a book in 10 minutes to an agent. Before you take your 10 minutes, though, you will want to put much more time into the pages you pitch.

The trials of testifying in first person

Awhile back I took a seminar with Robert Flynn, a novelist teaching a Writer's League of Texas course on writing fiction. One rich portion of his instruction: Point Of View and how to decide which one to use. Whether it's first person told with the "I" or third person that unreels the story with "he" and "she," all POVs have some downsides to observe.

(I'd include second person, you rascally innovators, you. But those novels and stories are still rare out there, and for a reason: It's difficult to get close to this kind of POV, in spite of the imperative tone. One of our workshop's members wrote a full scene in the imperative last week, on his own. I applaud his tenacity. It's not easy to stick with, according to Flynn.)

Most first novels come to the publisher in first person. Flynn says a first person character needs to be someone you can confide in. Some other character will need to tell your first person narrator's part of the story. It's difficult to get "objective reality" out of a first person POV. You are less likely to see revelations about the narrator appear in a first person story.

• Sometimes first person is too intimate to be comfortable
• People will believe the central character is the author
• If the narrator sees himself or herself as someone other than they really are, it can get complicated. (Without giving too much away, a certain Chuck Palahniuk novel pulls this off well.)
• First person POV relies a lot on supposing, and "it seems"
• A narrator, not involved in the story, can lend objectivity. But we'll want to know as readers why this person is telling the story, if they're not involved.
• There's a loss of suspense in first person, at least for any story that wants to behave by the tradition of telling a tale from a living person's POV. There's some difficulty in reporting one's own death.
• First person narration relies on word choices that grow out of the character. While that's a great way to get to know a character, it does have the potential for limiting the vocabulary in the story.

Oh, that 2004 book's title above about tie-fast roping says a lot about Flynn's level of Texana savvy. Texas used to be tie-fast country, until competitive roping came along. The other brand of ropers are called dally-ropers, who loop their ropes to their saddle horns.

Pry open your characters with sex

Sex is an essential element in any character, although it sometimes doesn't earn a place in the events of a story. Knowing how a character has sex, with whom, or why they don't, gives insight that can be useful in other aspects of the story.

At this year's AWP conference in Austin, a panelist on the Sexing the Story roundtable suggested that knowing why people have sex the way they do offers a peek into their most intimate nature. Writing about sex can be intimidating, or liberating. But it's perfect early-draft material, the subject matter that often gets cut in a rewrite.

Steve Almond sat on the panel and offered a 12-step program on how write better sex scenes.

1. Never compare a woman's nipples to pits, cherries, or erasers. No bullshit comparisons
2. Never use the words penis or vagina
3. No euphemisms: tunnel of love, man-root. You get the idea.
4. Sometimes sex is funny — don't be afraid to describe these comic aspects
5. Real people do not speak in porn film cliches
6. Don't obsess over the rude parts; give us the indentations on the small of a back, a trembling lip.
7. It takes a long time to make a woman come.
8. Fluid is fun. Sex is sticky, so if you want to represent the truth, pay homage to the wetness.
9. Arouse yourself, to arouse the reader. This is pretty much required.
10. People think during sex; what do your characters think about it?
11. If you don't feel comfortable writing about sex, then don't.
12. Don't forget the foreplay. Don't make the traditional porno mistake. Tease your readers.

Always include emotion. We already have a name for sex without emotion: pornography.

Stop having sex. It really improves the intensity of your writing about it.

Steer clear of announcing orgasms at all. People do a lot of tossing about during an orgasm; it's your job to describe the tossing

The panelists also all agreed that The Song of Songs in the Bible is among the best examples of elegant prose about passions.

No MFA, you say? Not so, Dr. Magnuson

Last month the director of the Michener Center for Writers, James Magnuson, spoke to members of the Writer's League of Texas. Magnuson began with a bit of errant information, a fact that suited his talk, "Graduate Writing Programs: Worthwhile Or Waste Of Money?"

"Did you know," he asked, "that no Nobel Prize winner in Literature ever has come from an MFA program?" He went on to add that he wasn't even sure if a graduate writing program had ever produced a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Well, the Pulitzer part was easy. I reminded Magnuson from my front-row seat that the Pulitzer Prize has gone to Michael Chabon, who wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay for the 2001 award. Today I was researching a novel from the syllabus for the Novelist's Tools seminar on my schedule at Iowa this summer. The 12 of us in the class been assigned The Bluest Eye, the first novel from Pulitzer Prize winner and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, who's been through an MFA program. Morrison won her Nobel Prize in 1993, 38 years after she took her MFA from Cornell.

There's bound to be other MFA prize winners, but Magnuson was making a larger point with his errant report. An MFA will not ensure your critical acclaim or commercial success. Writers who judge themselves ready for the rigors of an MFA program sometimes look for such confirmation, usually as a result of what they learn about their writing. They also seek a secure place in life with a teaching position. But the advice from the Writer's League audience assured us that even an MFA doesn't automatically lead to a teaching job. "You really need a book as well," offered one of the Michener grads in attendance.

So the MFA is only one means to the end: writing the book. And Magnuson said that an MFA program had better give you time to write that book, or you'll be better served by avoiding the massive loans and years out of your life. "If you really have a life, there's a question of whether you should take the time out of it" for graduate writing, he said. "If the program demands 20 hours a week teaching writing, plus three classes, there's a question about whether it's better to work for the post office and get up early every morning to write."

He added that there's a good alternative in learning from your peers, by sharing books. "There's too much emphasis placed on the MFA in the culture," he said. "We teach, but only to a degree," he said — meaning not only that the MFA's object is the degree alone, but also that much of what makes a writer succeed can't be taught in a classroom.

A language lover's blog

The longer you practice writing, the more you'll come to enjoy the play in wordplay. You can subscribe to a Word of the Day e-mail from the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. Details on how to do this, for free, are at the OED site.

To enjoy a good daily slip of language love, take a look at the Language Log blog: www.languagelog.org. Yesterday's Language Log entry took note of a new Elmore Leonard blog, a Web site that includes Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing. The top rule is: "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go." Leonard is big on sound and rhythm in writing, good guides to stay close to an authentic voice.

Language Log also includes links to some other fine blogs by linguists and lovers of words. Among those is another of my favorites, Geoffrey Nunberg. In addition to his essays in print, he does radio versions for the NPR show, Fresh Aire. Nunberg has a good radio voice, as well as being a good writer. A nice complement, since knowing your voice is so essential to good writing.

Teachers write to teach writing

In Writing Alone and With Others, Pat Schneider says that teachers need to feel confidence in their own writing. It's the best way to assure success in leading students in writing, Schneider says:

If you are a teacher, the most important preparation for your teaching is the liberation of your own writing voice. If you know how to feel reasonably confident and safe when you do your own writing, you will be most able to help your students. If yoiu know in the privacy of your own mind tthat wirting brings up fear for you, use that knowledge as you teach. Talk about that fear with your students and admit that it still plagues you. What a liberating thing for a student to hear. Let writing time be the one place in the school experience where teacher and student are "in this together."

Teachers can come into class with what Schneider calls "a solid suit of armor." Those are the defenses acquired in a tough writing class, no matter how long ago. A teacher who's still afraid of writing "unconsciously teaches that fear to their students."

This is why positive response teaches more than what is good about a writer's work. The method at the heart of Schneider's Amherst Writers & Artists method instills the feeling of freedom, the willingness to experiment. Do you feel more like writing after being in a workshop or writing group, or less like writing? That's the best test of a class. "You should never be made to feel embarrassment or shame in the classroom," she says in her book. "If that happens, there is something wrong with the way the writing is being taught."

Positive response reinforces what a writer does well. Before long, the writer notices what's working, and why it works. A teacher lets the students be the stars. And that is easier to do when a teacher is confident about their own voice on the page.

The first step that is vital to publishing

You have a chance of publishing a book. A real chance, and it's not like it's a lottery, either. The brutal realism you're likely to read by the tough-love agents and editors won't inspire you much. I don't recommend it as bedtime reading, or in-between-revising-scenes reading.

The odds can be long. Stephen King's first book was rejected by more than 20 publishers. Yeah, Carrie was a loser, as far as the editors could see. Didn't matter to King, or later on to his wife Tabitha, who rescued the manuscript from the trashcan where he chucked it. It didn't matter, because that was a book that was finished.

Plenty of books get published that are unworthy of the paper or ink. The only thing that's certain to keep your book from getting into print is not finishing it.

In an issue of The Writer, novelist Katrina Kittle says her writing got better by writing:

My writing improved the most after I had finished a full draft of the whole novel. There's a great Isaac Asimov quote that says, "It's the writing that teaches you." Once you have a story actually on paper, you can then begin to edit and revise and learn from it. As long as you're talking about a story as an abstract idea, you've got nothing.

Finish the book. Even a raw first draft is better than one stalled in its tracks, but with a brilliant beginning. That raw draft is closer to being a finished manuscript.

How to get unstuck? Have a chat with your characters. I interviewed Angela Consoli, the heroine of my novel Viral Times, to get past a tough little stretch where I had to describe her dodgy background. Turned out she had reasons for getting involved with the wrong people.

Do a mind map. You can have fun with your colored pencils on this one, writing down major concepts, characters and settings, letting them feed off one another. Free associate. Don't be serious.

You also need to check if you've retained your enthusiasm for the project. A creative community is one way to keep that fire stoked. Not to talk about the project endlessly; that saps the writing. But to have people in your life who care about your progress toward a goal — that's a tool which belongs in every writer's workshop.

Winners of writing advice and exercise

At last week's AWP Conference, the Writer's Workshop gave writers a chance to win a copy of Pat Schneider's essential writing group book, Writing Alone and With Others. We're happy to announce the winners:

Ken Hanson
Sonya Feher
Usha Akella

We met plenty of fine folks on the floor of the AWP bookfair, some from right here in Austin and others from as far away as the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. I felt lucky to have such a great event right in our hometown, especially as we launch the Workshop's first season of groups. There's nothing like a waiting audience of several thousand writers and teachers to help you focus your message about writing resources.

We're going back onto the conference circuit in June, taking a booth at the ever-expanding Agents & Editors Conference hosted by the Writer's League of Texas. If you haven't signed up for this meeting, I recommend it, even if your book isn't quite ready for agent submission yet. One fun afternoon we all line up and pitch our book to a dozen agents in a row. Nothing like a waiting audience of agents to help you sharpen your pitch. In one AWP workshop last week, the publisher of CoffeeHouse Press explained that each book gets about 45 seconds of sales time when the publisher's rep sells to a bookstore.

Of course, it helps if your book is finished when you pitch. More on the relative value of that advice tomorrow.

Being objective to observe

A writer who wants prose to sing needs to bring details to the effort. A favorite article from my files points out that this objectivity is just the sort of thing you can refine and practice from work in journalism.

I'm a practicing journalist of more than 25 years, starting with student paper reporting and editing, then on to small town papers and beyond. All that time spent staying detached from the story helps to teach you how to observe without judgement.

That favorite article comes from an 18-year-old issue of the magazine The Writer. Russell Working, the youngest winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, wrote this piece while he was working as a reporter on a daily paper.

Storytelling demands detail. The image, not the idea, is supreme. Great writers have the ability to focus their powers of observation, and to describe the images that contribute symbolically or aesthetically to the whole of their work.

Working goes on to cite the details in Hemingway's classic story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." That's a famous writer who cut his teeth on journalism. Working's article sums up by praising the practice of detachment:

Such writing requires a kind of objectivity, an ability to detach yourself from your subject and simply observe. Writers are sometimes content to slog about in abstractions on character, rather than offering telling detail.

Working has gone on to publish plenty of nonfiction, but he's still crafting short stories, too. Check out the beginning of his story "The Irish Martyr" in a 2003 issue of Zoetrope All-Story.
It's part of his just-published collection that won the Richard Sullivan Prize for Short Fiction.

What's behind that writing?

Tonight in our meeting of the Writer's Workshop, one of our group members wanted to ask another member what was behind the fresh writing that had just been read. The sample was a detailed piece, full of visuals that were already rich on the page. Reading it aloud made it even more alive — but then, that's what our process can do for brand-new writing.

It also makes for questions in the listener's mind. How did you do that? That's the question most often asked, in one form or another, by a writer who wants to polish their craft through practice. In this case, our group member knew the writer had visited a place similar to the one described in the writing. Did the visit influence the writing?

"Can I answer that?" As a rule we don't invite these kinds of questions, because they connect the writer so directly to what's written that it makes it harder to treat it as fiction. The passage was clearly fiction, so the question didn't pose much risk. We're all about safety, so we can write about painful stuff with courage.

The answer to the question may have passed between these two members at our Brownie Break. But my general answer to any question like this is: Everything is influenced by what we see and experience, either first-hand or told in story. The first-hand experience, however, provides a mammoth charge to the writing: sensuality.

By sensuality I'm not talking about erotic writing, or stories with sex. I mean sensations, like how something tastes, feels to the touch, looks or sounds. These are the details that draw in a reader to the world of your story, no matter if it's fiction or nonfiction. A life of a novelist, I heard over the weekend at the AWP conference, should be a sensual experience. A writer brings those sensations into the work, selecting those that illuminate character — the character of a person, or of a place. By having been there, you can take the reader back to a similar spot.

Encouragement at first, in a book's first month

At the AWP conference here in Austin, the bookfair rolled out a handsome carpet of new printed word. The University of Nebraska, building a fine reputation as a fine forge for new writers, brought its latest as well as its best-known author's book to the fair: Writing Brave & Free, Encouraging Words for People Who Want to Start Writing. The book was just out, selling for 20 percent below list price, a great reason to come to the bookfair.

The book is co-written by Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser, the country's Poet Laureate, and Steve Cox, editor emeritus of the University of Arizona Press. From the back jacket:

"The focus here is the the work itself: how to get started and how to keep going, and never is heard a discouraging word such as "no," "not," or "never."

Kooser and Cox remind me of the advice we give in The Writer's Workshop using the Amherst Writers & Artists methods. "The goal and the fruit of a true discipline is completion. Completion of a work of art." What's more, the AWA way says that a huge part of leading a disciplined writing life is having other people in your life who care about your writing. People who encourage it, believe in it. Kooser is one of those, the first Poet Laureate to have a newspaper column printed across America, American Life in Poetry.

In Austin, associating writers with programs

Today was the first day of the 2006 conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP, in a curious editing of an acronym.) It's being held in Austin, my home town, quite a break for the near-broke writers in this town who couldn't afford to jet to Vancouver last year. (That would be me, lacking travel funds in 2005.)

This year, the mountain of paper that is part of AWP came to Mohammed, lined up in many tidy rows inside the Austin Convention center. In contrast to the daunting exhibits being assembled next door for the SXSW jamboree, few AWP bookfair spaces stood taller than a simple, six-foot long tabletop. Across the South Expo Hall, stacks of printed literary journals, short-run books and a blizzard of leaflets and flyers lay waiting to be claimed. One thick journal, published once a year, had a hand-lettered sign in front of its stack:

$2. C'mon...

It was a glorious collection of dead trees, ink of many colors, and hope for an audience. Across the hall folks like me prowled, looking for deals and discounts, then hawking our new services. One fellow was running a book review and journal link service. $95 per year for a small press logo on his Web site, plus a review staff to look over the press's books and review them. "But we don't do POD (Print on Demand) or self-published books," he added. "We tried, but most of them were just so bad..." And here he looked at me, to see if the comment applied to what I was proposing.

It was a distinction also drawn by the Author's Guild, which didn't want your membership if your book's publication involved any of your own money, or if your journalism was not distributed from a newsstand. Mind you, the stories of published authors hiring their own publicists are legion in this business, along with tales of books printed rather than published (which would include sales effort and after-marketing.) But to be published, whatever that means, entitles the winners of that lottery some extra regard. There's always some gatekeeping to be done in the world of writing, it seems. Meanwhile, a self-published book like Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife sells ten times as many copies, self-published, than a gaggle of university press titles or literary journals out on that floor — selling for, c'mon, $2. Or not selling.

The Writer's Workshop shared a table with the Texas Poetry Journal at the conference, right up near the front of the hall. I gave away flyers, self-published off a color laser copiers just yesterday. I took entries for the first book giveaway, a copy of the seminal Writing Alone and With Others.

I also learned a few things in a handful of sessions. The talks were scheduled nearly back to back, mostly in the Hilton across the street, with no break in the action to give the bookfair exhibitors their shot at attendees. One bit of wisdom:

Showy writing comes from a lack of faith in the story being told. It's a lack of why in the story, which needs a closer examination of plot, character, theme and motivation.

And to get to better characters? You simply write anything you can think about one in your story. When you return to the character within the story, your work on this background will seep through in dialogue, motivation, even description.

Even more on that which is conversational

Following up on our entry from yesterday, I poked a bit deeper into our library here at The Writer's Workshop to look up more wisdom on that and which. Today I discovered, in John Trimble's fine Writing With Style, this entry, under Readability:

Generally, prefer that to which. The one is conversational; the other, slightly more bookish. I like to save "which" for after a comma, to introduce a nonrestrictive clause: "The bike, which she rode just yesterday, has a flat."

Trimble, a legendary professor of English at my University of Texas alma mater, goes on to explain that a nonrestrictive clause "functions like a parenthesis, and could be cut with little damage." And later: "When in doubt, I'll read the sentence aloud, testing it on my ear."

Trimble's book follows the practices we use in The Writer's Workshop, reading aloud what we have just written to test it with our ears. The method is part of the Amherst Writers & Artists practices. Your ears, which are a writing organ often overlooked, are a true path to the voice inside you — one that you can learn to use as regularly as any pen.

Going which hunting

Tonight in our workshop group meeting we talked about the use of that and which, a couple of pronouns which can baffle many a writer, regardless of their experience.

A trip to the redoubtable The Elements of Style shows that the word that often stands in for which. When we talked about this, the subject drew one pun after another, making both words sound as if they were the right choices. As you can see from the cover above, this book has been an essential through many generations of writers.

"The use of which for that is common in written and spoken language," Strunk and White say in their book. "The careful writer, watchful for small conveniences, goes which-hunting, removes the defining whiches, and by so doing improves his work."

That is a defining pronoun: "The lawn mower that is broken is in the garage" tells us which mower.

In contrast, "The lawn mower, which is broken, is in the garage," adds a fact about the only mower in question.

To put it another way, make the whiches in your writing prove their existence. Much of the time, that will serve nicely. It's a choice which is more conversational in tone, too — and that might be closer to your native voice.

Make a note to keep writing

I was reading Joan Didion's fine, stately memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. The phrase jumped out at me from the page. Didion's husband (the writer John Gregory Dunne) had died suddenly on her, right after dinner. What she recalled later on was that he couldn't remember his notecards as they were leaving for the restaurant. He reminded her to take her notebook along, so someone would have something to write a note that came to them.

It's a habit lots of good writers have — to take down the sudden note, the idea that just comes to you. It's a habit to practice, for good reason. "Had he not warned me that the ability to make a note when something came to mind was the difference between being able to write and not being able to write?" She examines whether her husband sensed he was about to die.

Notes can be the difference, indeed. These phrases or snippets or ideas come from your right brain, the side that doesn't keep good notes, but has great ideas or associations. If you need a simple tool to write with on the go, check out the Cross Ion pen. We've got a picture and a link about it on the Writer's Workshop Tools page. As for the notecards above, they're dead simple and easy to carry. Order yours online at Levenger.com, or look for them in the local office supply store. The eight bucks could be worth a fortune later, when you're looking at a blank page.

Exercise your faith in the power of practice

"Success has ruined more writers than failure," said Frank Conroy, the late director of the Iowa Writer's Workshop." If you want to proceed toward either of these outcomes, however, you must practice your writing. Exercises give you the chance to practice, a slight shove toward some specific direction. Your mind quiets when it's given a task in an exercise; it stops interrupting the flow of words.

Exercises are everywhere, especially on the Web. My mentor in Amherst Writing and Artists training Patricia Lee Lewis has a raft of great exercises at her Web site, Patchwork Farm. She has compiled this fun list of exercises over the past three years. She also points out a link to another site, The Writer's Resource Center, which has even more exercises.

At the Resource Center's site, John Hewitt explains that writing imperfectly is good for your practice. Exercises let you write without any expectation of publication, at least at first:

One of the great benefits of private writing exercises is that you can free yourself of fear and perfectionism. To grow as a writer, it is important to sometimes write without the expectation of publication. Don’t be afraid to be imperfect. That is what practice is for. What you write for any of these exercises may not be your best work, but it is practice for when you will need to write your best work.

Let me offer a couple of exercises from these teachers for you to try today. From Patricia:

Make a list of ten verbs. Add "ing" to each verb. Before each verb, add "not." Write whatever comes for 25 minutes.

From the Writer's Resource site:

Remember an old argument you had with another person. Write about the argument from the point of view of the other person. Remember that the idea is to see the argument from their perspective, no your own. This is an exercise in voice, not in proving yourself right or wrong.

Setting a time limit for yourself makes exercises work hard for your practice. It also keeps you from getting spooked about getting started writing — you can be sure the effort will be over in awhile!

Building a pyramid of the right words

We all want our writing to sound original, a unique expression of our voice. But for most writers, the elementary step is to be understood. The late Frank Conroy, director of the Iowa Writer's Workshop for many years, wrote a book called Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Rolls On, in which he described a useful roadmap to get the writer closer to the reader:


You write toward the Zone, where the Reader expends energy to meet you. But to do this, you must first write through three stages, from left to right:


So to master the first step, Conroy says in his book, "the writer's words must mean what they say. Obese, fat, chubby, heavy and stout all have different meanings... Errors of meaning are quite common in lax prose, and there are more ways of making them than I can list here."

Well, Conroy was a stern, tough writing teacher. In The Daily Iowan the headline on his obituary read "Tough love is gone." Conroy was "a wordsmith whose 'tough love' teaching style and leadership helped lift the UI's premier creative-writing program to new heights."

We don't specialize in tough love at The Writer's Workshop, but we believe in the power of the pyramid at the top of this entry. So you can audition your words, once you are revising your exercises, to find the right player for each meaning. Judy Reeves' Creative Writer's Kit includes an exercise on this concept. Just know there's a word out there that may improve your meaning — and let you move across the meaning-sense-clarity fundamentals, and on up the writing pyramid.

Avoiding mistakes with psychics

Last night in our workshop we spoke about psychic distance while we talked about a first draft. The term means "the distance the reader feels between himself and the events in the story," according to John Gardner's essential craft book The Art of Fiction.

(The subtitle of the book is "Notes on craft for young writers," but Gardner is not talking about age. He's talking about experience, how much you've practiced. It reminds me of the Thomas Jefferson quote about his horticultural skills, "Although I am an old man, I am but a young gardener."

He gives an example of five levels of distance, from the greatest to a non-existent level inside a character's shoes:

1. It was the winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
2. Henry J. Warburton had never cared much for snowstorms.
3. Henry hated snowstorms.
4. God how he hated those damn snowstorms.
5. Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul.

Gardner warns that "careless shifts in psychic distance can be distracting." It's as if the camera is dollying in, he explains. You would find a movie scene where the same character is framed further back, then in close up, then at a medium distance, plenty jarring. It's the same way with writing. "The point is that psychic distance, whether or not it is used conventionally, must be controlled," he says.

Then Gardner shows an example of writing that would drive the reader away, because of its jarring psychic shifts, all within one paragraph (levels for each in parenthesis).

"Mary Borden hated woodpeckers. (3) Lord, she thought, they'll drive me crazy! (4) The young woman had never known any personally, (2) but Mary knew what she liked. (3)"

Become aware of your own voice's natural psychic distance, through exercises and rewriting — and you can learn to be aware of how slowly to dolly in and out of the scenes that you film for your stories.