Make up a character notebook

One of the simple pleasures of my work on my novel, "Viral Times?" Adding details in a character notebook. Go out and find a nice journal, or just buy a low-cost, 79-cent spiral notebook. Leave a few pages in the front blank, as a table of contents. Devote a page to each character, but don't get too crazy about how to organize it. Just let whatever character in your story seems to float to your writing mind take a page a day.

After awhile, you'll have a great collection of the nuances in your characters. Like the fact that Jake Domain finished high school early, before he went on found his synthetic emotions corporation. You might be surprised, like I was, that scenes can emerge from thinking about what your characters yearn for, want more than anything else.

What you want out of this work is to know these people, as if you've been their friend, boss, or lover for a long time. The further you get into this work, the more your characters talk to you as you write. Put them in a situation, and what they're likely to do and say becomes more obvious.

A free university teaches news

I've talked before about Poynter.org, the wonderful Web and training resource for journalists, writers and reporters of non-fiction. (It's got a lot to offer fiction writers, too.) Now Poynter has a free university with online courses on things like interviewing, copy editing and rewriting. Many of these skills cut across all kinds of writing. But if your forte is non-fiction, you can hardly go wrong by enrolling in NewsU.

Yeah, it's free, somehow. Registering doesn't leave the flotsam of spam flowing through in your mailbox, either. You register, look over courses, sign up and take it through your browser. (It needs Flash, but most browsers and PCs are already set up to run Flash animations.)

I'll give it a try this weekend and report back next week, after my Hill Country Ride for AIDS cycling event on Saturday. The 50-mile ride should provide some good non-fiction material.

Accepting advice on rejection

The Web site rejectioncollection.com puts submission in perspective. There are writers who work hard to dig deep on first draft (something we nurture at the Writer's Workshop), and those who polish up what they create. But then there are those writers who submit work to publications, editors and agents. They all get rejected. But they persist.

How to keep your chin up and not take it personally? There's a lot of advice at rejectioncollection. According to an interview with Elayne Savage, Ph.D, there are ways to tell if you're hypersensitive to rejection:

Avoidance is one way to gauge it. Do you find yourself avoiding rejection at any cost — by not showing your work to others, or finding excuses not to submit that manuscript, or arriving too late at a tryout or networking function?

Savage's book Don’t Take It Personally! was rejected 14 times before it sold. She had her own trials in getting past the rejection. "I knew I needed to be cushioned from all the rejection letters I expected to get, so I asked my agent not to send me any of them until after the book had been sold," she says in the interview.

It's good to share the pain, though, and rejectioncollection provides a forum for that. You get to read others' letters, too. Some put the process in a new light:

We regret to inform you that, for whatever reason, your manuscript was not selected for publication.

Please note that this does not reflect upon you, as a writer, but upon we, as a publication.

It's all practice, this craft

Above one of the bookcases in my writing room, a whiteboard reminds me of this message from Gail Sher's One Continuous Mistake:

The Four Noble Truths for Writers

1. Writers write
2. Writing is a process
3. I don't know what my writing will be until the end of the process
4. If writing is my practice, the only way to fail is not to write

Sher's book has a central spirit in common with Natalie Goldberg's books and methods. Writing practice, as Goldberg defined it, emerged from Writing Down the Bones, published the same year as the Amherst Writers & Artists methods flowed from Pat Schneider's work. Sher, and Schneider as well, codify the practice methods more rigorously than Goldberg does. In Writing Down the Bones, Goldberg says

Writing practice embraces your whole life and doesn't demand any logical form. It's a place you can come to wild and unbridled... It's our wild forest where we gather energy before going to prune our garden, write our fine books and novels.

What we do in our workshops is create a safety net for sharing the deep writing with each other. We are invited to read our work aloud. We honor the writer by listening carefully. We respond only with what we like, what stays with us, what moves us.

Yes, it's all practice. But the safe, confidential space where a writer receives affirmation and echoes of their success on a first draft — that's what sets AWA practice apart. Those Bones do "Free the writer within," as the well-thumbed copy of the book in my library says. With freedom can come danger to new writing, easily damaged by negative judgements. Practice starts with an "unmissable writing period," according to Sher. Weekly is good to begin with, but daily is better. Knowing that your writing matters to other writers can help extend a weekly three-hour writing group to a daily practice.

Cameron again: A birthday present to start from scratch

Today I turn 49, an age where a lot of people want to stop counting the years. Not me; I'm proud of the fact that this my 27th year of writing for publication and pushing out the prose. Still, some days I feel like a beginner. Thomas Jefferson's maxim about his horticulture was "Although I am an old man, I am but a young gardener." Using that guide, I am a young man indeed, compared to some.

My wife Abby gave me a swell birthday present this morning before I even got out of bed. Julia Cameron has a new book out on the writing process, The Sound of Paper. Its subtitle is "Starting from Scratch." She says in the brief introduction, "Think of this book as a summer's hike through the New Mexico wilderness. You will gradually build stamina and savvy. One essay at a time, one task at a time, you will become more and more familiar with your creative strengths."

Cameron's heartland is the canyons and vistas of New Mexico, and she also hails from the uncharted land of inspiring new writers. We're all new at something, no matter how long we've been writing. It may be craft, it may be the diligence of discipline, or it may be just a new character or a fresh plot. Cameron still hews to the morning pages, three pages written in longhand at the start of each day. Westerners, she says, are hyperactive types. (She means those of us from the Occidental world, the Western Hemisphere, not those in the Old West.) Because we have a hard time meditating, morning pages can help us "awaken our intuition."

I'm off to wake up a bit and enjoy Cameron's latest. Her seminal book is The Artist's Way. I took a nine-week seminar in the Artists Way method in 1994. The method laid down a start for more serious, dedicated work on my fiction.

New resources for researching

The Internet makes it easier than ever for the writer to research a subject. Back in the day, we had to get good with the phone, or write letters, to learn about a subject. I used to keep very wooly magazine files, or trod down to the library to learn about subjects like genetics, viruses and AIDS (all part of my Viral Times novel project.)

Now your instinct would be to tap a series of keywords into the Google search box. Google's great, but not perfect. If it frustrates you after a few minutes, let me pass along a few other research start points, courtesy of the Poynter.org journalism Web site.

At Poynter, cyberjournalist.net publisher Jonathan Dube recommends Accoona.com (the name comes from "Hakuna Matata," which means "Don't Worry, Be Happy" in Swahili).

The site's news and business search engines are built on artificial intelligence algorithms, which enable the search engine to return not just results containing your search term, but also any stories the artificial intelligence thinks are associated with the search term.

Dube's column also points out Huckabuck.com, a site that

searches Google, Yahoo!, and MSN simultaneously and delivers results from all three. A neat feature that differentiates this from other metasearch sites is that you can weight search engine results using the "Search Tuner button" so that, for example, Google's results are given more weight than MSN's (but MSN's are still included).

You can get lost in research, and forget about writing your dreamstorms and drafts. But a story also needs accurate details. Having several search tools is better than just the obvious one.

Let contests lead your writing outside

Writing contests are a fine way to send your work into the world. Most of them charge a nominal fee; $10-15 is pretty average. Even if you don't win, you experience the thrill of thinking your story might be chosen, because you've done the work to polish it up and submit it in MS format.

(That's double-spaced, one-inch margins, page numbers with your name included. Pick a simple font like Times.)

A few contests have nearby deadlines, if you have a story ready. The first is a fiction contest, the other a much broader one with multiple categories. There's a fine summary of even more in Poets & Writers magazine.

The $1,100 E.M. Koeppel 2006 Short Fiction Award has an April 30 postmark deadline. It's an award for unpublished fiction in any style, any theme Awards: First place - $1,100. Editors' Choices - $100 each. Maximum Length - 3,000 words. Stories must be unpublished.

Winning story and Editors' Choices will be published on the literary Web site www.writecorner.com. After publication, writer retains all rights. Any number of unpublished stories may be entered by any writer. $15 fee for one story, $10 for each additional story. Mail submissions to Writecorner Press, PO Box 140310, Gainesville, FL 32614.

Writecorner has complete guidelines and winning stories from previous years at writecorner.com/award.html

Writer's Digest has a much bigger competition, with lots more entries expected, that has a May 15 deadline. It's the competition's 75th year, and giving giving away more than $30,000 in cash and prizes! You enter at their Web site.

Grand Prize is $3,000 cash and an all-expense paid trip to New York City. The magazine flies you and a guest to The Big Apple, where you'll share your winning work with four editors or agents. 1,001 winners will be chosen. If you're one of them, great. If not, well, at least you got that writing out there. And it's now ready to be submitted to the journals and literary mags that are just looking for good writing — and don't charge an entry fee.

Make an art of editing

Back in 2003 I spent a week at the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, where they plied us with fancy wine, late-night movies and even the literary magazine's signature martinis. (I always liked what the founders said about the magazine's artful attention to design: "A literary journal doesn't have to look like a communist manifesto.") During the days of that summertime week we'd work, either in workshop examining manuscripts or in seminars. One of the latter was led by Susan Bell, who promised us a book would appear from her in-progress notes from The Artful Edit.

While you can't buy The Artful Edit just yet, the notes from the New School's faculty bio on Bell promise the book is forthcoming "in 2006" from W.W. Norton. I still put her seminar handouts up on my Editor's Desk from Levenger. Bell talks about doing a macro edit, along with the more traditional micro edit, on your own work. The notes stand up as useful when looking at a manuscript, like our Wednesday night workshop is doing this week before responding as readers.

You can read for intention: the overarching aim of a work that guides both writer and reader. It is the central idea, the mind's highway that runs clear and wide from first to last page — while circuitous, pebbbly paths lace around it. Check to see if the writer has created a magnificent forest, but no road into it. The intention needs work if that's so.

You can read for motive: What do the characters want more than anything?

You can read for rhythm and tension: Does the writer develop a crisis, to draw you into the story? Does the path to the drama feel too short (schematic and false) or too long (which can kill the impact)?

You can read for structure: order and proportions of scenes. Are the scenes which reveal coming too early? Or is scene coming too late, after the you needed information to understand a character?

You can read for theme: something possible to determine even from a few chapters. Bell calls it a leitmotif, a recurrent theme throughout a composition, associated with a particular person, idea, or situation.

Finally, you can read for continuity: coherence of tone, characters that feel consistent, an authority to the writing that flows from playing on a single field.

Making the writing your own with idiom

Tonight in our Writer's Workshop meeting we came upon a use of idiom in writing, an exercise where we were invited to use three words in a 10 minutes of writing about a secret. I managed to use a couple of them in an idiomatic sense. They didn't mean exactly what we'd consider their most common definitions.

Idiomatic writing can be a nice bridge into style, or trap door into cliche. When a character hits the wall on something — like mine did in my writing — we're getting close to cliche. ("Hit the wall" doesn't have an entry in The Dictionary of Cliches, but it might in a future edition). You can, however, use wall as a way of describing something sheer, vertical, encompassing — anything other than a part of a room or a building.

Idiom's root tells us a lot about the power of "a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words." The word comes from the Greek idiousthai, to "make one's own."

What kind of workshop is yours?

I have begun my study of Narrative Design, the text from novelist Madison Smartt Bell that teaches a writer how to structure a short story and analyze well-written ones. From the very start of the book, Bell gives us notice that he's not going to shrink from expressing what one of his blurb reviewers calls "candid and idiosyncratic comments."

Candor, sure. I was struck by how writing workshops — the traditional, old-style kind — get skewered candidly by Bell. He explains what he saw while teaching a few semesters in the workshops at Iowa, whose Writer's Workshop is the oldest and biggest graduate MFA writing program in the US. Workshops, as most people understand them, are places to learn what is failing in a piece of writing.

This leaves the old-style workshop in something of a point of failure itself. The leader who runs such a 12-writers-finding-faults kind of seminar may fail the author whose text is being probed and prodded — and fail the writer on a very important point:

The fault-finding force of intertia inherent in all workshops [of this kind] means that it will be hard for the teacher to convince all the other students that the work has succeeded.

Only if the teacher "argues skillfully will he probably manage to convince the author, which is the main thing that matters at the end."

Convincing an author of success, in even the least part of the effort, matters a great deal to me, too, as a leader of an Amherst Writers & Artists workshop. Any writing class, group or workshop that leaves you less motivated to write is the wrong one for you. If being in a tough group that praises only rarely seems like good medicine for you, well, you might be surprised how much you can learn from any other kind, like those that we offer.

List what characters like to bring life

At an author's private consultation today (one benefit of signing up for a weekly Writer's Workshop group) we discussed how to bring characters alive. We examined one character, in particular, the protagonist and narrator of a fabulous set of travelogues-as-culture-studies. As readers in our group, we learned a lot about the world visited by this protagonist — the main character, if you will. The character's observations were so sharp that they sparked a desire to see the character vulnerable, flawed, human and humane.

Not every such character who leads a story needs to be sympathetic. But if you write in first person, early in your career with fiction, you may well discover you want the reader to like your main character. The irony is that the less perfect they appear, the move sympathetic the characters can be perceived. It's easier to accomplish if a reader can see a character's flaws and favorites.

This is a habit I bring from my time on stage. In the theatre we had to build a character from dialogue and situation, and little else. It prompted us to create backstory, preferences, insights and overlooked habits. For a main character in a story, this is work well worth pursuing.

I have a character notebook where I work on this for Viral Times. Just a couple of pages at a time about each of the main players. What's in their fridge most of the time, which TV shows they watched as kids. What the names of their grandparents are. Religion, politics, shoe style preference, sports team allegiance, artist the the greatest number of songs in their collection. The list can go on and on. As the travelogue's author said today, "and it doesn't even have to go into the story."

Precisely. Where it goes is into the writer's head and heart, to make the character alive even when the writing is not happening with pen on page, hands on keyboard. Make a list of what characters like and dislike to bring them to life.

Letting Oxford define your words

The Oxford English Dictionary is well beyond my means as a writer; I use the one in the Austin Public Library when I need to research the root of a word's meaning. The OED is also a very entertaining way to spend time at Borders or Barnes & Noble, when you can find a copy unwrapped.

You can subscribe online to the OED for a sum that might eventually equal the cost of the printed edition. At $295 a year, you could have spent enough in just three years' time to buy a print edition from Amazon, yours forever but not updated like the online version. Or you can just read what the OED editors provide for free on the Web through the Compact OED:

www.askoxford.com

I pawed through it today to find the definition of gubbins, used on a technical mailing list to describe a piece of software. A British writer on the list, Roy Brown, enriched my vocabulary with the little gem:

gubbins (noun): something whose name is either forgotten or not known

syn. dohickey, dojigger, doodad, doohickey, gimmick, hickey, gizmo, gismo, thingamabob, thingumabob, thingmabob, thingamajig, thingumajig, thingmajig, thingummy

Brit. informal 1 treated as sing. or pl. miscellaneous items; paraphernalia. 2 treated as sing. a gadget.

— ORIGIN originally in the sense “fragments”: from obsolete gobbon “piece, slice, gob”, from Old French

What to expect from today's agents and editors

The Columbia Journalism Review covers much more than the state of the printed word in magazines and papers, or what takes up broadcast time and Web space in news outlets. The CJR has published articles as wide-ranging as an essay on the trials of editing gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson to a sobering look at the heavy lifting during the months after your book is accepted.

The Writer's League of Texas has its Agents and Editors Conference coming up, a meeting where The Writer's Workshop will have an exhibitor's table in the Capitol View Terrace at the Capitol Marriott Hotel. To set expectations correctly about winning an agent or editor's attention, I offer this pointer.

A CJR article titled The Education of Stacy Sullivan chronicles the struggle of this first-time fiction author, a reporter for The New York Times who turned her Kosovo war dispatches into a non-fiction book. (80 percent of all books published are non-fiction titles, by the way, accounting for the four-fold increase in published titles just since 1991.) Sullivan signed with an agent who'd read an article she'd written for Mirabella. Esmond Harmsworth got her a book contract with St. Martin's Press, a press that often takes a flyer on small books from first-time book writers.

As that Agents and Editors conference comes closer on my calendar here in Austin, I read the CJR's advice on agents closely:

These days, agents set the bar for entering the world of publishing. There was a time when getting an agent was the easy part, when even without a polished proposal, an agent might be willing to take a risk on a writer who showed promise and to develop an idea with the writer. And although agents such as these might still exist, they, like editors who actually mold a text, are becoming exceedingly rare.

This makes sense. If it is harder to find a publishing house to acquire a serious book, then agents, who depend for their livelihood on selling books to these houses, should be more reluctant to spend their time on tomes that may never find their place next to a Frappuccino at a Barnes & Noble cafe. Harmsworth is not alone when he says, "I don't take on a writer unless we know exactly where the idea is going."

Agents are hired to look out for the business aspects of the writing craft. It's reasonable to expect them to focus on what will sell, and how to package it for a publisher's tastes. The surprise to Sullivan was how little St. Martin's was able to do to help her book become better.

At a celebratory deal-signing lunch, Sullivan told her editor that she was hungry for a lot of editing. The editor said she hoped this would be the first of many lunches. As it turned out, throughout the next three years, Sullivan would see her editor only once more (by chance, as she stopped by St. Martin's to drop off some photographs). For a book like Sullivan's, not a high-priority acquisition, this was not unusual. What it meant, though, was that she was about to enter the solitary cave of book writing without so much as a pocket flashlight.

In this, St. Martin's is hardly alone: Much like the movie business, books have a different life in the hands of independent and university press publishers. Those "producers" have less marketing clout, shorter runs, and less compensation for authors than the "studios" of major presses. But it seems these indie writers won't get left in the dark with their editing, either. The CJR article says that "there is nonetheless an overwhelming trend in publishing of editors who don't really edit. And for the most part this is a function of the increasingly market-driven aspect of the business."

That's something to consider when an agent steers a project toward more money from a bigger publisher, one keen for massive markets. Which might be a good reason to skip the agents who only want to do the big deals — unless you really like being left alone to do your re-writing.

Write without teachers

At the head of the Amherst Writers & Artists classes stands— well, not a teacher. Not in the sense of someone instructing students. Tonight one of our group members asked about the genus of the AWA techniques. It lies in the work of Peter Elbow and his ground-breaking book, Writing Without Teachers.

The book was released in 1976, forming the basis for Pat Schneider's work that started the AWA methods, but Schneider didn't begin to rely on Elbow's work until several years after that. Elbow, who has also written a book of essays entitled Everyone Can Write, says that the "mother tongue" of writers is to be honored and encouraged. He writes in an essay that Schneider quotes in her book, Writing Alone and With Others:

People can't learn to write well unless they write a great deal and with some pleasure, and they can't do that unless they feel writing to be as comfortable as an old shoe — something they can slip into naturally without pinching.

So in an AWA workshop, as guided by Schneider's methods, we are leaders, not teachers. We encourage a sense of comfort by taking risks with our own writing right alongside other group members, even while we guide and facilitate the safety and discussion about "what's working with this writing" which we hear. It's this taking of risks that enables the learning for everyone in an AWA group. People who write easily may find something in the method by using it to write deeper, closer to the truths and pain that makes up a writer's life, and the lives they observe around them.

Elbow has also planted the seeds for the AWA methods that stress safety. He says in an interview that he has been careful to "try to make a big distinction between [the] four levels of audience relationship:

1. Private writing that I don't see and nobody else sees;
2. Writing that people see but they don't respond to it; they just share it for the sake of sharing;
3. Writing that we share with each other (or with me) and there is a response, there is feedback, but it's not negative feedback;
4. Finally, writing that gets criticism.

"I find it helpful to think of these four levels of audience and responses, and I build a classroom in which all four are honored."

Our classroom, if you want to think of an AWA group as having one, is a place where we write and share numbers 2 through 4 — and do all we can to make writing comfortable, so Number 1 happens on the nights we don't gather.

The yoga stretched writing muscles, too

I returned from the 11th annual Texas Yoga and Writing Retreat with new scenes for Viral Times, new writing on subjects close to my heart, and limbered-up posture from several days of yoga. It's a combination I found even more enchanting at the retreat's setting, the Margaret Austin Center outside Chappell Hill, Texas.


Chappell Hill is an unremarkable wide spot in US 290 most of the time, but not in early April. The fields to the right and left of the highway in Washington County were alive with wildflowers, including the beloved bluebonnets. They are so protected it's a state crime to pick them, which deters few citizens but keeps the flower at the top of the flora chain of the state.


The retreat center, nearly two miles down a dirt road off the highway, was quiet, oh so, a quality that sparked some fine writing by the 14 members on the retreat. We broke off into two response groups after the longer, 30-minute exercises. I got to lead one group for several mornings, a pleasant surprise that enriched my retreat. Leading a response group involves subtle moderation and the chance to pass along related pointers on craft. I listened with a pen in hand, to jot down what's memorable, alive and authentic in the writing. There was a lot to laud.

The weekend's writing was led by Patricia Lee Lewis, who first started this yoga-writing combo with Charles MacInerney, an Austin yoga teacher of more than 20 years. Patricia has been leading workshops for more than 15 years. The coupling of so much experience gave me a comfortable weekend of rich fields for my writing.

We also ate well, courtesy of Michel Laib, a master chef who cooked for us before he opens up his Tranquility Mediterranean Dinner Club in Houston this coming weekend. Dessert was Pear Belle Hellene, pears cooked in red wine and covered with chocolate. Dinner one night was Filet of Salmon Mediterranean, grilled with Champagne Creme sauce.

The yoga was as gentle or as challenging as you wanted, depending on experience. We worked on movement and group exercises, too, like two lines of five people facing each other with a tent pole balanced on their index fingers, trying to lower the pole as a group. Fierce concentration, Charles was teaching us. We juggled tiny balls from Guatemala in groups of four, trying to keep five or more balls tossed to one another at once. More concentration.

One of my favorite exercises was outdoors on the lawns of the retreat center. We turned around three times with eyes closed, then stopped. Whatever direction we faced, we then walked, noticing as many things or actions as we could in our field of vision. Those were our words. I came back with anthill, pine cone, periwinkle, post and rail, cow path, bluebonnet and bat house. I poured those into a scene that tries to show why Viral Times' most dangerous character seems to have no remorse about anything he destroys.

A retreat using the AWA method plus yoga is a bonding experience unlike any other writer's gathering I've attended. We came to know one another's voice, trusted the muse, saw each other take more risks with our writing. We take several weeks to build up to this level in our Writer's Workshop groups. I was happy to fill up my cup of possibility from the weekend's beautiful flow in a flowering Texas landscape. I hope to carry some bouquets back to Austin.

The bonfire and dancing were fun, too. It was encouraging and casual all weekend. When your writing leader is on hands and knees on the group table to light a candle, you can be pretty sure the attitude for the retreat won't include any posing. Posing has no part in real writing, either, the kind that tries its best to be true.

Combining writing and yoga

Stretching yourself is a regular benefit of practicing your writing. I live in a house where there is another kind of practice being stretched: yoga. My wife teaches Heartfelt Yoga classes in the studio where The Writer's Workshop meets for its Tuesdays, Wednesdays and its Saturday Samplers.

Today I'm off to a writing and yoga retreat for a few days of stretching in both of these practices. We will interleave AWA writing sessions with master leader Patricia Lee Lewis and yoga guru (to me, anyway) Charles McInerney. It's three days of two things that are good for one writer's insides.

Since it's a retreat, we won't be sharing a tip tomorrow. (No Internet at any genuine retreat.) Check back on Monday to read a report of how we combined these two elements to nurture complementary practices. Pictures, too.

If you'd like to work on these things on your own, I recommend The Journey From the Center to the Page. It's a set of yoga asanas combined with suggested exercises. Powerful stuff. There's also Patricia's retreats to consider, in places much more exotic than the Texas wildflower country.

The problem with critique and review reading

At last month's AWP conference, Robert Olen Butler had an interesting note on reading a story or book for review or critique. He complained about the glut of bad criticism in the arts, prompted by a need to find something to say before the reader is finished listening.

"The problem while reading is that you go into your head," he said, "and you think, 'What am I going to say about this?' Meanwhile, you don't see the work at all. That's why there's so much bad book criticism."

Like many good teachers of writing, Butler insists that his students approach a work for the first time "without a pencil in hand."

Listen to what a writer is trying to say, be patient for their voice, before you start suggesting what might be improved.

What you read feeds what you write

Reading is some of the writer's best instruction on craft, but your taste in stories can also tell you a lot about where your writing passion lies. In choosing a path for fiction, writers can travel the commercial route of genre, with its familiar formulas, or explore the mystery of literary styles.

Janet Burroway explains in her book Writing Fiction: A Narrative Guide to the Craft that how a reader prefers their story endings can offer a clue to what kind of fiction style resonates with a writer:

Literary fiction differs from genre fiction fundamentally in the fact that the former is character-driven, the latter plot driven. There is a strong tendancy... of genre fiction to imply that life is fair, and to let the hero or heroine, after great struggle, win out in the end; and of literary fiction to posit that life is not fair, that triumph is partial, happiness tentative, and that the heroine and hero are subject to mortality.

Put another way, a happy ending fits better with the genre writer and reader. A fine tradition of powerful books come out of the genre fields: science fiction, horror, fantasy, mystery. Tony Hillerman's Joe Leaphorn series of mysteries stand out among my genre reading. On the other end of the scale lie books like Empire Falls by Richard Russo, or The Human Stain, by Phillip Roth. If a bittersweet or ambiguous ending fits your style of story, literary styles might call your muse — more of an indie movie finish than a Hollywood studio ending.

What makes a word dirty?

It's a good question, one that the US government can't seem to answer. At least with much consistency. I rode down to San Marcos today to see my rent house — a vestige of my vainglorious attempt at entering the Texas State MFA writing program — and listened to On the Media en route. A fascinating interview popped up between OTM host Bob Garfield and FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein. Here's a transcript of one segment of the interview; the full transcript is available at the OTM Web site:

BOB GARFIELD: I want to talk to you about the word "bullshit." Now, this is commonly used to convey skepticism. But the Commission found it to be explicitly excretory, and therefore indecent, whereas "dickhead" as an insult is okay. But where I come from, "bullshit" is, you know, pretty much kids' stuff, and "dickhead" is pretty darned insulting. All of which is to finally ask, I guess, how do you go about finding standards on this stuff? It just seems to me so arbitrary.

JONATHAN ADELSTEIN: Well, are you actually going to air that, or are you going to edit that out [LAUGHS] because--

BOB GARFIELD: It depends. Are you on duty? [LAUGHTER]

JONATHAN ADELSTEIN: My colleagues may have an issue with it. To me, it's something that does defy a little bit the imagination. I understand why parents don't want that heard over the airwaves, but our rules require that words that are banned are either sexual or excretory. And I think in common usage that word is not really one that is excretory. So we made quite a stretch to say that it's inherently so, and I think it's something that is probably going to be challenged in court.

What makes a word dirty seems to be in the mind of the reader or listener, with some exceptions. Which? Well, there's the F-bomb (I'm being delicate here, for a reason I'll point out in a minute); also, as they say in the movie Bull Durham, "He called him a certain name that's an absolute no-no with umpires." (Rent the movie to figure that one out.)

I showed some restraint in that paragraph above to make a point I heard from Steven Bochco, creator of NYPD Blue and other cop classics. OTM interviewed him right after the FCC commish, and Bochco said the choice to use a profanity, or nudity, is always just that: a choice, made by an artist or creator. The only time he said he's ever regretted going blue

is simply because, for one reason or another, the execution wasn't good enough. You know, did we contextualize the moment sufficiently to make it appropriate?

My context has been to discuss whether a word can be dirty, not to name the ones which are and express frustration and my character's lack of restraint.

Choosing profanity, profane behavior or anything on that end of the meter titillatinging, lascivious, lewd, obscene, graphic, explicit — that's something between a writer and the muse. Most important, it seems, is to decide how the character will express himself.

And oh yeah, write off the Christian publishers for your novel if the F-bomb is part of your character's arsenal. We're now in the era when the FCC is levying multi-million-dollar fines against prime-time broadcast network TV shows.

Speaking profanity, however, is less powerful than reading it, according to The Gotham Writers' Workshop's Writing Fiction:

Even foul-mouthed characters appear to overuse swear words when they are written down. A couple of well-chosen profanities work much better than a string of four-letter wonders, bringing all the flavor of X-rated speech without overdoing it.