Telling through showing

In their fine book Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Renni Browne and Dave King share their experiences editing other writers' novels. Early in their book the authors take on an old chestnut: Show, don't tell. But they do that bromide more justice by describing how it helps illuminate characters.

The telling, Browne and King explain, should be like seasoning in a recipe: used carefully, in small amounts to improve the taste of the main ingredient: showing.

There are going to be times when telling will create more engagement than showing. In an example from The Great Gatsby, the line "A thrill passed over all of us" inside a scene is clearly telling. And yet this line, coming so close on the rumor that Gatsby may have killed a man, gives a flavor of cheap gossip to the scene that heightens its effect.

Browne and King add that "Even within descriptions that have nothing to do with character emotion, there are ways you can show rather than tell." Showing a character's actions that would match up with the condition of a car or house permits lets readers draw their own conclusions.

Be generous with your readers. Give them a role to play in making the entertainment of your stories. Let them meet your writing halfway, a place to look at what you are showing them, so their observations bring your story into their imaginations.

10 Publishing Questions, Poets & Writers' Answers

Publishing is the step beyond writing, but at some point you will feel like the rest of the world needs to see your stories, non-fiction, novel or play. Concise answers and realistic experience is what a writer wants who's new to publishing.
Poets & Writers magazine has a good set of Web pages to explain how their editors believe the system works. Anything is possible, of course; how else to explain how 27-year-old Jonathan Franzen published The Corrections, his searing novel about a wacky, dysfunctional family?

But nearly all of us are not as talented and lucky as Jonathan. The P&W Top 10 Questions Writers Ask has little to do with the craft of writing, aside from an entry or two on writer's colonies (a tough place to get a space) and the need for MFA degrees from universities (an even tougher place). But check it out; the advice covers all but the exceptions:

Major publishing houses do not accept unsolicited poetry manuscripts and rarely look at unagented or unsolicited fiction or creative nonfiction. Editors at major houses are more interested in writers who have already published a book or those whose work has already appeared in large-circulation trade magazines such as the New Yorker or Harper’s.

We suggest you begin your search for a book publisher by looking at small presses and university presses, which are often open to the work of unknown authors and do not always require writers to contact them through an agent. Although they do not have the resources of larger publishing houses and offer smaller advances, they are usually more willing to help you develop as an author even if your books aren’t immediately profitable, and they are open to a wider range of writing.

The P&W Web pages also have this to say about groups like The Writer's Workshop, or the Iowa Summer Writing Festival:

Workshops provide writers with an opportunity to receive critical feedback from peers and from an instructor. They also give writers a chance to learn what other writers are working on. Many universities and community colleges offer writing workshops that do not require enrollment in a degree program. Some well-known workshops operate annually for a concentrated period of time, a week or two, in order to provide intensive instruction and dialogue about work in progress.

A lively dictionary

Sometimes words can suggest a story, and other times you'd just like to have a good definition. In The 3 A.M. Epiphany, Brian Kitely recommends yourdictionary.com, a portal for definition, translation and tracking of most popular words.

The popularity list can suggest some exercises. Try crafting a story using the top five words from the 2005 list:

1. Refugee: Though the word was considered politically incorrect in the US, 'refugees' were often considered the lucky ones in streaming away from a series of global catastrophes unmatched in recent memory.

2. Tsunami: From the Japanese tsu nami for 'harbor wave', few recognized the word before disaster struck on Christmas Day, 2004, but the word subsequently flooded with unprecedented (and sustained) media coverage.

3. Poppa/Papa/Pope: (Italian, Portuguese, English, many others). The death of beloved Pope John Paul II kept the words on the lips of the faithful around the world.

4. Chinglish: The new second language of China from the Chinglish formation: CHINese + EngLISH.

5. H5N1: A looming global pandemic that could dwarf the Bubonic Plague of the Middle Ages (and AIDS) boggles the comtemporary imagination.

Check out this Web site for a great series of glossaries. Yourdictionary has links to detailed glossaries of things like genetics. One favorite of mine, for Viral Times: The National Human Genome Research Institute genetic glossary, which has brief recorded explanations of its terms by scientists

Find inspiration in an extinct publication

The literary magazine business is tough, hard as a winter sandstorm in Iraq. Lit mags come and go, and most of them survive on the grants and support of patrons, universities, philanthropy.

There are commercial exceptions, but not many. One of my favorites for many years was Story, the quarterly published by the F&W Publications juggernaut which makes a tidy business out of teaching writers and artists, on the pages of Writer's Digest and the like.

Story didn't survive, but F&W did its best. The lit mag printed 50,000 copies an issue for more than 10 years. That's a bonus for a writer to dig up. Story focused on short stories, written by authors both famous, emerging and brand-new.

It had a long history and was revived several times. Story first went to press in 1931, publishing Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Joseph Heller, J. D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams. Then it went dark in the late 1960s, but came back with broader circulation than ever. From the files of Princeton, where the Story archives reside:

After a twenty-year hiatus, Story was revived as a quarterly magazine by publisher Richard Rosenthal and editor Lois Rosenthal, a husband and wife team. Story was a five-time finalist and two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for fiction, and had a circulation of over 40,000 subscribers.

The Rosenthals carried on the Story tradition of publishing a mix of well-known authors, such as Andrea Barrett, Barry Lopez, Joyce Carol Oates, and Carol Shields, and new authors, such as Junot Díaz, Elizabeth Graver, and Abraham Rodriguez. In late 1999, owing to the impending sale of F & W Publications, the Rosenthals made the decision to end their stewardship of Story with the publication of a final Winter 2000 issue.

I subscribed to Story for years until it became extinct again. Then I went out to the used bookstores looking for copies of that 10-year run that I didn't already have. They're out there, with numbers like Spring 1997 featuring a six-page piece by Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Choke) called "Survivor." Fun to see Palahniuk in the short form.

Aside from inspiration, Story can help research writing seminars, too. Autumn 1997 includes a story from Emily Carter, an instructor at this summer's Writer's League of Texas Summer Writing Academy in Alpine.

Carter is teaching five days of Inside You - Outside Them; A Myers-Briggs Approach To Writing. I wanted to read her writing as a way of deciding whether to enroll in her class, or another offered at the WLT event. Sure enough, there was the copy of Story up on my shelf, with her story.

You can hunt down your own copies if your neighborhood or town has a decent used bookstore. That's the benefit of printing a 200,000 lit mag issues every year for a decade: there's maybe a million of them still out there, ready to teach.

Freeing up your body of writing

In Writing from the Body, John Lee talks about the things that hold people back from writing. Sometimes it's the fear of disapproval of family. Lee talks about writing The Flying Boy, his memoir of growing up in a less-than-happy household. He wrote the book after telling his father that he would write it, but John was afraid that the book would set father and son apart for the rest of their lives.

Truthful writing, at the core of who we are and told with all the terror and error of our lives, is what we're after in The Writer's Workshop. You don't need to be an accomplished writer to create true writing. You can do it with safety around you, a community that will support your courage and tell you what parts of that true story were memorable, vivid, alive and authentic.

Lee, who created Writing from the Body with Ceci Miller-Kritsberg, explains that the fear of offending parents determines the strength of our shadow selves:

The Child's rationale is this: "If my own parents will leave me if I offend them, than anyone will leave. I don't want to be alone, so I'll pretend." Until you face this fear, the Shadow will drive the truth out of your life and writing. You can't write walking on eggshells. Writing from the body cannot take place in a stiff pose. In fear's tense grip, creativity withers.

Surrounded by fellow writers who respond to your new writing at The Writer's Workshop, you can relax your pose, walk wherever your heart leads you. That's why we call it a place "to spark art from the heart."

Lifting stories off a floor plan

Here's an exercise designed to get a writer thinking about history, daring prose and point of view. Draw out the floor plan for a house in your life. Simple, not complex drawing, but include every room you can recall.

Now that you have your floor plan, take 20 minutes to write a story about an event that took place in that house. Positive, negative, scary, surprising. Something significant that happened in that floor plan.

Write the story from the point of view of the house. Let the house speak as if it knows what's happening only from what it can hear the occupants say, or see what they do.

If this is a house from your childhood, so much the better. The writing has a chance to be more daring, truthful. Don't worry about what your parents or your siblings will say about your writing. Everything that has happened in your life is your story to tell. Your version is just as truthful as anyone else's.

In the safe environment we create in The Writer's Workshop, following the AWA methods, you can push down into the deepest part of your memories, the writing that is not therapy, but theraputic. It can begin with a sketch of a building, one that has stories to tell over many years. The exercise is a way of making the old adage come alive: If these walls could talk...

Read wide to set your bar high

During our Writer's Workshop meetings I sometimes wear a t-shirt from The Gettysburg Review. On the shirt's reverse is this Washington Post quote about the lit mag:

Carrying literary elitism to new, and annoying, heights

I picked up the shirt at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in March, a bonus for subscribing to the mag. It's kind of a talisman, a way to hope some of my striving toward quality will rub off onto my notebook. But elitism, as I mentioned yesterday in my entry here, is something that makes me angry. Elitism can also deliver beauty and power, even if the walls of access are well up around elite creators.

This morning I enjoyed the lead short story in the Summer issue of the Review. Actually, enjoyed is a weak description of my response. Catherine Ryan Hyde wrote a masterful two-character short story, Chasing Elinor. It was direct and sensory and shifted points of view with elegance. Its language was not elite. Its emotions were accessible.

That Hyde should write such a gem was only a surprise to me. She's the author of the novel Pay It Forward, which not only became a movie but launched a foundation, headed up by Hyde. Its grants "encourage and empower our youth to believe in themselves and their individual and collective abilities to shape the future." (20 years ago Hyde was saved from a car fire by strangers. She never found out who they were, but determined to pay the service forward.)

How does this relate to the life of a writer? I used to think of lit mags like The Gettysburg Review as snobby, self-satisfied, full up. That's not my view any more. They serve a purpose: to inspire with their elitism, so somebody who will muster and maintain the passion to keep working, improving, learning their craft might earn a place on those pages.

So read widely, in the little, less-elite lit mags, as well as places like the Review. (On its inside front cover they reprint the Post quote, headlined with "Still Committed to Our Mission.") You can learn from the elite, even if you're not ready to become one of them just yet.

First off, find out what to write about

Journals can act as a good tool for writers, keeping your pen moving like lifting weights in the gym. The best kind of journaling, according to Robert Ohlen Butler, is a description of the sensations during an emotional moment of your day before you sit down to write. First thing in the morning, if you can.

This kind of prep writing is vital to knowing what makes your writing's heart beat. This morning I practiced a journaling exercise from Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. She says that the essential thing to writing is to write about something you really care about. How to know? Make some lists.

Pick big emotions, according to playwright Claudia Johnson, who Burroway quotes in the chapter "Whatever Works" (Permit me to share my answers)

What makes you angry? Bullying, elitism, being shut out, cruel criticism, injustice.

What are you afraid of? Being abandoned, becoming irrelevant, loss of my mental and physical faculties, heights.

What do you want? Love and acceptance of who I am, supportive relationships with friends, peace and beauty from nature, the reward of service, unexpected joy, to lead, teach and nurture

What hurts? Being excluded, dashed expectations, disrespect for my aspirations, watching someone I love endure pain, being distrusted

What really changed you? My Army service, Dad's suicide, drugs and then arrest, becoming a father, divorce from Lisa, then leaving my son's home when he was 6, finding a partner for the rest of my life.

Who really changed you? Jim Lindsey, my first real community newspaper editor. Shawn Hare, an actor in the Melodrama Theatre. My son Nick. John Wilson, magazine owner. Jim Hoadley, my counsellor and "provisional governor." My wife Abby.

If all this sounds theraputic, confessional, intimate, it should. "Those will be areas to look to for stories, whether or not the stories are autobiographical," Burroway says. Some time back I wrote a short story called "Two Guys," about partners in a New York City hot dog cart business. They were breaking up. Underneath the drama and the characters was the reality of seeing my collaboration with my wife in business start to unravel. I wanted a literary journal. She wanted yoga. I never ran a hot dog cart, but the emotions of a dissolving partnership felt the same.

Burroway reminds us that novelist Ron Carlson says

"I always write from my own experiences, whether I've had them or not."

Stunt-riding your success

In novelist Bret Lott's memoir about writing, Before We Get Started, he examines a central question every writer must answer, if they are to keep on writing. Why do we write? The answer is different for everyone, each of us with our own story. But continuing to write is the best, the primary habit of a successful practice. Persistence is the essential element in accomplishment. Talent is great, but those who persist have a better batting average than those with talent but not enough drive.

Lott quotes a thicket of great writers in the chapter called Why Write, Anyway? He invokes the words of John Gardner, author of The Art of Fiction:

A writer's successes bring him more than praise, publication or money; they also help him toward confidence. With each success, writers, like stunt riders and ballet dancers, learn to dare more.

We work to build that confidence in The Writer's Workshop, where our group members hear what has succeeded in their new writing, almost as soon as they are done writing it. It's one level of success that can lead to others — revision, submission, publication. Taking the saddle of success leaves you ready to spur yourself onward, to keep riding, writing.

How valuable is the idea?

Tonight over a few brews after a bike ride, a friend asked me about ideas and writing. I mentioned that I'm heading back to Iowa for the Summer Writing Festival, and described the workshop process up there. Manuscripts get shared among those classes, we comment and mark up the writing, then tell the writer how we felt as readers while consuming the story.

My friend asked, "Aren't you worried about people stealing your ideas?"

It's a question I've heard before, so I had a ready answer. "Not at all. The idea is not the most important part of my creative writing."

Why? For me, it might come from my years in the theatre, creating roles. We worked from the character outward, reading every line we had been given, looking at the relationship between our character and the others in the play. We were hungry for details of description, habits, beliefs, age, blind spots. All the things that make up a memorable, vivid character. We made up what we didn't read, found motivation and meaning in costume and voice.

So I've learned to build my creative writing from that foundation. Who is it that reader's seeing and hearing on the page? What does that character want more than anything? Answer those questions for everybody in the story, and you'll have an idea that flows from character. I've never been one to start from plot, the heartland of ideas.

The fellow who wrote screenplays like Mr. Holland's Opus, Pat Duncan, schooled us on the relative value of ideas during the Heart of Texas Screenwriter's Festival in Austin. He said he's got a file cabinet full of ideas. Duncan said "Start with a character with a problem, or a situation or a place you want to explore."

Stealing? Sure it goes on, and artists quip that "if you're going to steal, steal from the best, the masters." But what they mean is to steal technique, style, or structure; the substructure of story that is almost impossible to duplicate exactly. Start with the same idea, two writers might. By the time they finish, get through rewrites of their own, or from agents and editors, and they won't have the same book.

Forget those copious copyright notices on your manuscripts. Make your characters vivid and original and give them tough problems. That's where the ideas come from, and the ideas are like water in the sea. It's the fish that draw our interest.

Found objects, remembered city

Over the weekend at The Writer's Workshop we held the second Saturday Sampler, a meeting long enough to provide time for many more exercises than the average weekly group meeting. A Sampler doesn't have a manuscript response session, so it's more than five hours of writing and reading.

Oh, and there's brunch and lunch, too.

On Saturday we had time to dip into our basket of found objects, items like ancient measurement rulers, Dr. Pepper original bottles and chalkboard erasers. A single matchbox from a New Orleans hotel, the St. Ann, unlocked a little scene for me of two newlywed characters from Viral Times. The scene was post-Katrina, in a New New Orleans trying to make it back to destination status.

Objects led all of us to good, surprising writing. It's like having a focal point to study while you practice a balance pose in yoga. Your conscious mind is given an object to build writing around, and you roll up your windowshades to let the imagination spill out of you.

Homicide helps your humanities

At the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, students can attend a public lecture called The Elevenses, each day at 11. I filed notes today from the 2003 lineup of the Elevenses. The first talk in the first week of July was "Move Along Folks, Nothing to See Here. The Fiction Writer as Darling Killer."

The advice comes from Marcos McPeek Villatoro, who cut a wide swath with his white Panama hat and panache throughout the week I was there. He's transparent about his personal life, too, as evidenced by his compelling radio essays on NPR. Villatoro is a novelist who advised us all to find those things we love the most about our writing, our darlings, and do them in.

He admits it's not novel advice. "Flannery O'Connor said it long ago: Kill your darlings." He goes on to describe the homicide that he believes improves the caliber of his work in the humanities:

Believe me, friends, I have taken whole chunks of my writings out back and after careful consideration, rumination, discussion with myself and others, I've taken a blade across those little darlings' necks and oh, how the blood flows! Chop chop. Here's one tale: the agent told me, "Wonderful book, I love it, you're brilliant... and you've got to cut 50-100 pages." So. Out to the woodshed, where I macheted 82 pages from the manuscript. That's the book that will be out this fall."

Murder must have been on Marcos' mind at the time. The book was Minos, about "Nashville cop Romilia Chacon, who has been searching for six years for "the Whisperer," the serial killer who murdered her older sister, Catalina," according to Publisher's Weekly, which added in a starred review, "Scintillating, densely plotted."

Murder can make for good reading, and good writing. Have a look at what survived the axe in this excerpt (about halfway down the page) up on Amazon.

Listen to a Verb with Verve

Deep at the heart of our Writer's Workshop practices lies reading. Out loud, so you can hear your writing voice and feel what you meant while putting those words on paper. Readings are a significant part of being a writer. The ability to perform a work can make it stand out. Bringing it to the level you want involves reading it, at least for yourself.

If you enjoy reading of written work, I can recommend Selected Shorts, the public radio icon that puts stories from the likes of Kate Chopin, James Thurber and Raymond Carver in the mouths of seasoned actors. But for a more genuine experience, have a listen at Verb, voted by the Library Journal as one of the best magazines of 2005.

Verb.org is also a very different kind of magazine. It arrives on a CD, since it's an aural take on stories. Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer winner, reads from one of his novels in Verb's first issue. You can have a listen to that and other excerpts for free at the Verb podcast Web page, www.verb.org/podcast.html

A pleasing path through punctuation

Writing relies on grammar, and grammar relies on punctuation. A new book by Noah T. Lukeman, A Dash of Style, breaks down the use of all those marks that offer so many options we use to give our writing its clarity.

From clarity we get to sense, from sense we get to meaning. We go onward to mood, tone and voice, once we can establish meaning. This is the pyramid of language, the way to express ideas, sensations and feelings to readers. It all relies on punctuation, which is worth some practice.

Before you invest the $15 in the book, you can look over some excerpts of Lukeman's writing about using quote marks at The Writer's Store, a Web outlet that sells writing texts, software such as Dramatica and Final Draft, and much more. Lukeman calls quotes "the trumpets of writing" because they ride above the words.

That 10 percent that matters to you

In Narrative Design, Madison Smartt Bell discusses the dilemma of workshop writing classes. He also talks about their antidote, the writing group where the inner creativity process becomes the focus of the meeting. That's a lot like the work in our Writer's Workshop: the majority of what we do together is generative work, reinforced by positive response. You create things while you are at our table, on the couches, out under the fans in the cabana.

Bell has respect for the classic workshops like those led in Iowa and other capitals of critique. But he said that after watching the group-think pull so many stories into mediocrity on subsequent drafts,

I opened my second-semester workshop at Iowa with remarks along these lines: Assume that when your work is being discussed, about 90 percent of what you hear will be useless to you and irrelevant to what you have done. Learn to listen carefully and to discriminate what's useful to you from what's not. Remember the relevant part and ignore the rest. If even one person understands what you intended to be understood, then you can say you have succeeded.

Don't try to please the group. Don't try to please the leader of the group, or the teacher. The person you have to please is yourself. Your job is to become the best judge of your own work. If you do become a professional writer at some point, you'll need that skill more than ever before.

Exercise: Three things done, and done no more

A few weeks back at The Writer's Workshop we wrote for 20 minutes on things we do. Or don't do any longer.

My list of three things I used to do all the time, but don't do any more:

1. Go to the gym
2. Help build Habitat Houses
3. Act onstage

And the three things I now do all the time:

1. Write in blogs
2. Watch basketball on TV
3. Ride my bike

From there, the writer can choose whatever structure they want. Write about one. Write about them all. Write why you don't do those things you used to do all the time. I chose to contrast these things. You can read my first draft entry at ronseybold.com, in the essays section.

Timing writing versus the story

In a session at the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, I learned about the different ways to handle time in a story. Jim Shepard called this the "rate of revelation," but there's an even more elaborate way to look at how much to tell, and how quickly.

A story can be either unfolding or infolding. Some stories have both kinds of writing in them. Unfolding stories have actions, events; plot. Infolding stories have little of significance happening, but deliver insights and rely on beautiful language.

In a story's time, summary pace is when the time spent in the scene is greater than the discourse time. When a story's event time is smaller than the discourse time, you are stretching, slowing down, moving toward slow motion.

Finally, when the story event time progresses, and the discourse time is zero, that's a scene break.

With all of this definition, you might wonder what to do, which pace to follow. There's a note at the end of page in my Molskine notebook:

If you can pull it off, you can do anything you want in writing. Successful enterprise is an indefeasible strategy.

Deciding how long your chapters run

While I first worked on Viral Times I began to wonder about the right length for the book's chapters. At first it was easy — less than the page limit for the groups where I was workshopping the early writing.

But along the way I read many novels with much shorter chapters. Those in All the King's Men are among the thickest I've hacked my way through. (Worth the effort, by the way, if you can get past the first 50 pages. Soon to be a remake of the 1948 classic movie, too.)

Orson Scott Card, Hugo-winning science fiction novelist and short story writer, has weighed in on chapter length. At his Uncle Orson's Writing Class, he's given us novelists a blank check to do whatever we want with our chapter lengths:

There are no rules. Just remember that each chapter break provides benefits — a sense of closure, of progress, of movement through the book — and imposes costs — a detachment from the story, a place where the book can be set down, an interruption in the onward flow. So you decide for yourself what rhythm and pace you want to establish, and when the costs of a chapter break are worth the benefits.

By the way, there are also "parts" and "volumes," which are longer than chapters and include them. These are used only when needed — they impose an even deeper division and greater cost, but imply a much stronger shift in time, place, or viewpoint, so sometimes these, too, are worth it.

Viral Times has three parts, as I've plotted it out now. It's a big story, so it better be good.

Page-turners like The DaVinci Code use tiny chapters to increase the pace of the story. Bigger is not necessarily better for chapters. You write the ends of chapters for a "bounce" to the next part of the story — bouncing like the emotional rush you see ending segments of commercial TV or the close of miniseries parts.

The details, please, to engage me

Writing instructors plead with writers to supply details. They engage the reader in the story, so long as the writer can pick salient ones.

Marla colored her hair orange during the work-week. Weekends and vacations she reserved for shades of auburn.

I offer the above, which I dashed off in a Writer's Workshop session this week, as an example of telling detail: the kind that a movie director might show us early in a film to give us a quick insight in to a character. (I hope it describes how impetuous Marla is about her appearance.)

This week I read a marvelous short story, Raw Material, from an aging copy of The Atlantic Monthly. (April of 2002, back when the magazine used to run short fiction in each issue, rather than an annual Fiction Issue.) In Raw Material, A.S Byatt tells about writing offered by a workshop student, 82-year-old Cicely Fox, who is telling how she cleaned and maintained the family stove in early 20th Century England. Byatt uses sensory writing to pluck his details:

The ovens behind other doors of the range might conceal the puffed, risen shapes of loaves and tea cakes, with that best of all smells, baking yeast dough, or the only slightly less delightful smell of the crust of a hot cake — toasted sugar, milk and egg.

Kooser in your ears

A fellow who follows in the Wallace Stevens tradition of supporting a poetry career with insurance work, Ted Kooser is the first US Poet Laureate from the Great Plains. You can hear the direct voice that drives all his poetry and his prose in an NPR interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Aire:

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4574862

If poetry is not your favorite kind of reading, Kooser's work can change your mind. Being accessible is more important than being complex to Kooser, who explains that many poets try to write poems that will draw the attention of poetry critics. How else to get reviewed, lift your career? Kooser admits what most poets know: Writing poetry, although essential to lifting up the language, won't support a poet. Something like an insurance job or a teaching position is necessary.

A direct poem about a barnyard scene, no matter how beautiful, won't rise to the top of the critics' list. But Kooser won last year's Pulitzer Prize for Delights and Shadows. Complexity captivates critics, but direct language compels readers.

Kooser's creation corner for poets — and writers

Ted Kooser, Poet Laureate of the US, has a wonderful, inspiring book for writers who practice poetry — and many other forms of writing, too. Kooser's The Poetry Home Repair Manual tells us that it's "Practical Advice for Beginning Poets." The book does deliver what it promises; no matter what state your poetry is in, Kooser's advice and inspiration can lift your writing to a new level.

But much of what the Home Repair Manual teaches applies to any creative writing. Kooser has a compelling voice in everything that he writes. He wrote all his life, but only began to work as a full-time writer once he retired from the insurance business. Not your typical resume of a Poet Laureate.

Since he hails from Nebraska, he's got none of the elitist attitude which so many serious writers and poets carry as needless baggage. Reading him is like listening to that favorite uncle or aunt who believes in what you can be, while they give you practical, gentle advice and stories you want to take away like beautiful shells from an ebb tide beach.

As for some of that multi-genre advice, you only need to read to the introduction to find something useful. It's his reason for writing, something you ought to settle soon after you begin to write. He says, in describing his philosophy about writing, he owes a lot to Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Poetry. Kooser explains his faith is based on one of Hyde's ideas. To our Poet Laureate, why he writes has become

... a belief that people who have an ability to write have an obligation to offer something of use to their chosen readers. Those who are gifted should give something back.

You get better at giving, better at writing, through practice. He's as adept at prose narrative as he is deft with poetry: straightforward, unassuming language is his hallmark. On the merits of practice, he tells a story that appears both in his memoir Local Wonders and in the Repair Manual. He related a story about a three-state horseshoe pitching champion out in the "Bohemian Alps," his term for the part of Nebraska where he lives. The champ, when asked how he got so good, said "Son, you got to pitch a hundred horseshoes a day." Kooser adds

That's the kind of advice beginning writers should listen to: Keep pitching them horseshoes. You need to be there writing and waiting, as a hunter might say, for that hour when at last the ducks come flying in.