Hooray for Fellow Margin-Scribblers

The other day, there was an essay in THE OREGONIAN by Douglas Yocum decrying the tendency to write in books and insisting people should cease and desist, that it ruined the books for future owners and for sales.  I felt sad when I read it.  I disagreed.  Today, I rejoice because it is clear I was not alone.  Three letters to the editor and two columns in the Sunday book section (one by writer Natalie Berber and the other by teacher-writer Tim Gillespie) all responded to that essay, and all with variations on my own feelings.

Notes in the margins are a way to take part in the great cross-spatial, cross-temporal conversation that is the written word.  When you write and highlight and underline in your books, you are interacting with the text, giving it the kind of life it was meant to have.  For no written text can fully exist without a reader, any more than a play can fully exist without an audience.  The only exception to this “go-ahead-and scribble”, of course, is books that don’t belong to you – school textbooks, library books, books borrowed from a friend.

If someone else wrote in a book I now own, it gives that book life and history.  It widens the conversation.  It connects me, in a mysterious and particular way, to that unseen hand that scribbled the notes or highlighted the words.

I remember in high school coming upon a copy of a small collection of Persian tales that had belonged to my father.  All sorts of notes, reactions and responses were furiously scribbled in the margins and the pages and the inside cover.  It gave me a special kind of insight into my father’s inner world, a gift I wouldn’t trade for a million pristine copies of that same book.

I’ve just begun rereading WUTHERING HEIGHTS.  Some of the earliest clues to the real story of Cathy and Heathcliff are uncovered by the narrator through Cathy’s scribblings inside her books. The narrator’s relationship with Cathy’s old books invites us, the reader, to interact with his tale as well.

I rejoice in knowing that there are so many book lovers like me, folks who understand the literary equivalent of the story of THE VELVETEEN RABBIT.  If I ever manage to get one of my books published, I hope it will be as well-loved as the Skin Horse in that tale, dog-eared, with coffee-stains and bookmarks and scribblings inside.  I must confess, I doubt that digital texts, no matter what their affordability or convenience, will ever receive that same kind of love.

This is a post from the Writer’s Wavelength blog which can be found at writerswavelength.blogspot.com.

Change Over Time Part 2 – Rereading Jane Austen

A while back I wrote about the different lens through which we view stories depending on the time of life in which we read them.  I mentioned rereading OLIVER TWIST at that time and promised to take on Jane Austen next.  Well, as predicted, Ms. Austen’s work makes a lot more sense to me now, at age 45, than it did when I was in high school.  Not exactly a big surprise.

Specifically, I am rereading PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.  Now, I must confess, the beautifully spot-on adaptation featuring Colin Firth, which my husband and I have watched several times, has perhaps enabled me to catch some of the nuances in the book that might still have escaped me even now.  However, I honestly believe the bulk of my increased appreciation of the humor and social commentary in the story comes from the heightened perceptions and insight that only age can provide.

This leads me to wonder why on earth we persist in assigning such books to read when people are too young to really appreciate them.  In fairness, perhaps there are many of you who became ardent admirers of Jane Austen or Thomas Hardy or D.H. Lawrence or Herman Melville at the tender age of 15.  I wonder, however, if that came about after reading them as assignments or after finding them on your own.

Even in college, so much of what I read became a massive swirling mishmash of ideas, whereas the same sorts of classic literature, explored on my own at my own pace with my own personal purposes AFTER college, resulted in deep insights and a lifetime love of those authors.  That is how I fell in love with Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Thomas Hardy, DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, e.e.cummings, and many more.

Are there works of classic literature that, like fine wines, should not be served before their time?

This is a post from the Writer’s Wavelength blog which can be found at writerswavelength.blogspot.com.

A Writer’s Thanksgiving

I am thankful for …

• my supportive husband, who encourages and honors my writing time.
• my terrific critique group, which holds me accountable in productivity and quality.
• friends who read my work and give me honest feedback.
• small independent publishers and booksellers, who are willing to take risks.
• the many incredible authors whose works have inspired, entertained and challenged me throughout the years.
• computers and writing software, because quill pens, typewriters and scotch tape are charmingly old-school but exhausting.
• the new opportunities made possible by e-publishing.
• the many people who will always return to printed books anyway.
• reading the classics on my iPad at the gym.
• print books, which survive falls, beach trips, coffee spills and power outages.
• handprinted notes from another reader in the margins of a used book.
• used book stores. 
• living in a literary town like Portland, Oregon, where a bookstore is a happening place on a Saturday night, a literary lecture series packs the house, literary magazines and writing conferences pop up and thrive, and nationally recognized authors find refuge and inspiration.
• coffee shops that welcome writers to linger and discuss.
• the stories and characters that keep finding their way into my head and onto the page.
• the human capacity to spin tales, which makes life so much more interesting and bearable.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

This is a post from the Writer’s Wavelength blog which can be found at writerswavelength.blogspot.com.

Voices In Your Head: Are Writers Crazy?

I’ve been working with my third and fourth graders on using periods correctly in connected text.  “Listen to the voice in your head,” I said one day.  “If it stops, then you probably need a period.”  Not a rule, but a good guideline when the trickier nuances of grammar elude you.  So, I’m teaching children to listen to the voices inside their heads.

Isn’t that what we writers do all the time?  Listen to the voices in our heads, follow the craziest, darkest impulses and hallucinations, enter waking dreams, talk to ourselves, project alter egos and multiple personalities that take on lives of their own and tell us what to do.  And we can’t seem to stop.  It’s pathological.

Some people even believe that you can’t be a truly gifted writer, or gifted in any creative field, unless you’re mentally ill.  They point to the long, long list of creative geniuses who struggled with mental illness, and, in so many cases, succumbed and committed suicide.  “If they’d had access to prozac, maybe they never would have created such great works.”

People don’t seem to apply quite the same argument to brilliant scientists.  And I can’t think of many examples of great scientists who killed themselves.  Why?  Is the scientific mind less vulnerable to the destructive influence of creativity?  Or is scientific genius simply not viewed with the same mistrust as artistic genius?  Maybe I’m just less aware of the struggles great scientists have had with mental illness.  Perhaps the stigma is greater for a scientist who is insane because their mental illness could discredit their work, while the world may still embrace the works of an artist who is insane.

My husband and I watched the German silent film of FAUST last night.  I was struck by the similarities between Faust and Shakespeare’s Prospero.  Magicians, working strange wonders with their mystical books.  Early alchemists blurred the lines between science and the mystical imagination all the time.  And people feared them, saw them as dabblers in dark magic making deals with the devil, or madmen attempting to play God, as in FRANKENSTEIN and so many similar tales (written by us creative types).

Personally, I like the mystical interpretation of creativity better than the psychological one.  Maybe, after all, every human being, in one way or another, has a link to the divine, to the spiritual world.  For some, it speaks through stories, for others through music, for others through science, for others through their hands or their children.  But I guess when your link to the divine seems alien or strange to the rest of the world, they reinterpret it as demonic or crazy.

Or maybe these are just the delusional ramblings of a madwoman.

This is a post from the Writer’s Wavelength blog which can be found at writerswavelength.blogspot.com.

The Writer’s Role in Social Change

Tonight, one minute after midnight, the city of Portland plans to evict Portland’s component of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, Occupy Portland.  I don’t know if this will happen peacefully or with violence.  Two sides of the 99% – the Portland Police and the protesters – may well end up pitted against one another.

Thinking about this impending event and what it means has lead me to think about the writer’s role in social change movements.  We have a duty to bear witness, to ask difficult questions, to generate conversation, perhaps even controversy.  Sometimes, we come down on one side, sometimes another, but often the writer’s role is to explore the complicated world of the in-between.

John Steinbeck’s GRAPES OF WRATH is a powerful example of the writer bearing witness in an era of social change.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman, with her work THE YELLOW WALLPAPER, gave voice to the earliest frustrations of feminism on the most intimate, personal level.  On the nonfiction side, I think of Howard Zinn’s radical, perspective-altering PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.  Emile Zola, too, comes to mind.  Virginia Woolf’s essay A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN is a stirring call to every woman to fight unceasingly for change.  One could argue that almost any writing has the potential to be a voice of change.  At a minimum, we have a duty to examine whether we are playing that role.

Perhaps the role of the writer in social change is clearest for writers of nonfiction – journalists, for example, or essasyists.  For fiction writers, it may be more complicated.  Sometimes, the writer’s position ends up being unpopular with both sides of the issue, because it is our duty to explore both sides.  The worst of social change literature is that which caricatures one side and therefore fails to speak to anyone but those who already embrace the author’s viewpoint.  The best of social change literature casts light upon the dark corners and spurs action or powerful discussion.

In 1935, writer Archibald Macleish wrote a verse drama about the stock market crash entitled PANIC.  It features a chorus of the unemployed, and a group of bankers, and includes a scene in which angry radicals storm the board room of the bankers.  It gives heartfelt, beautiful poetic voice to the pain of the average person during an economic crisis.  It expresses the revolutionary anger such a crisis can engender.  And it commits the crime of humanizing even the bankers.  It ends with the declaration “Man’s fate is a drum!”  It took me a while to understand this sentence, which seemed to be the culmination of the entire piece.  A drum must be beaten to make noise.  It requires a human hand and human action.  Macleish’s simple statement is a call to action, but the action is left up to us.  Does any of this decades-old piece sound familiar?

Another well-known writer whose work came to mind as I thought about tonight’s impending events and the Occupy Movement?  Dr. Seuss.  Specifically, HORTON HEARS A WHO, the story of a whole world so small the great oafs of the jungle couldn’t, or wouldn’t, recognize its existence until the entire community banded together and shouted “We are here!  We are here!  We are here!  We are here!”  It wasn’t until the last, smallest member of the community spoke up – “because every voice counts” – that their presence became palpable to those in power.

In the wake of whatever happens tonight at Occupy Portland, and whatever happens in the other Occupy sites throughout the country as evictions loom, we writers must ask ourselves, what is our role?  How do we bear witness, spark action, generate discussion?

Postscript on November 19, 2011:  For an insightful and informative up-close perspective on Occupy Portland, check out David Loftus’ series of blogposts at http://www.americancurrents.com/2011/11/occupy-portland-part-7-aftermath-and.html

This is a post from the Writer’s Wavelength blog which can be found at writerswavelength.blogspot.com.

You Can’t Win If You Don’t Play

When it comes to all the schmoozing and self-promotion aspects of writing, I’m a big wimp and colossal whiner.  But at least I’ve learned one cardinal rule since I became a grown-up.  You can’t get published if you don’t put yourself out there.  Overnight success is more myth than reality.  It certainly isn’t the norm.  And if you’re like me and you hate self-promotion, the whole process of building a digital platform can be enough to send you into the fetal position.  So, what do you do?

Okay, there’s no way to avoid self-promotion.  But there is a different way to come at it.  My critique group today pointed out that digital presence is more than just blog stats.  (Yes, my grasp on this stuff really is that simplistic).  It’s all the many ways that you register on the radar, all the little blips, that can pave the way for the time when you push for something bigger.

Write stuff and submit it, over and over.  Doesn’t have to be novels.  Make it whatever you can manage.  Because you can’t win if you don’t play the game, and you can’t get published if you don’t stick your neck out and submit your writing.   

Obvious advice, right?  But I remember a time when the thought of showing ANYONE my writing was beyond terrifying.  Over time, I’ve sent in a script here, a short story there, a novel that wasn’t ready yet, an article, an audio theater piece, a picture book.  These days, while I’m plugging away at the exhausting and protracted process of revising the novels, I’m submitting short stories.  It gets a little less terrifying and a little more run-of-the-mill with each step.  And then I keep writing so I don’t obsess over the waiting game.  I try not to let too much time go by without something being out there in the universe.  Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I slip.  It’s one step at a time.

If you’re feeling discouraged or hiding your work in a drawer somewhere, this post is for you.  Rip the bandaid off.  Show somebody.  Write something small and put it out there – a poem, a short story, a letter to the editor, a skit.  Something, anything.  Write it.  Put it out there.  Write something else.  Put it out there.  In the end, the fact that other people read what you write is what matters the most.

This is a post from the Writer’s Wavelength blog which can be found at writerswavelength.blogspot.com.

Shaking It Up with Short Stories

Whenever I hit a wall on my big projects, THE NOVELS (they demand to be all in capitals), I find myself clearing my palate with a project of a more manageable scope. With my third graders, we take brain and body breaks throughout the day. Maybe this is my creative brain’s version of the same thing. After all, that part of my brain doesn’t like to just turn off. It never goes away (thank goodness). But sometimes, it needs a change of pace.

When I finished what I foolishly thought was the final draft of Novel #2, I was fried. But I wanted to keep up my writing routine. Lucky for me, my husband Sam needed a script for an audio theater project. A complete change of writing muscles – different genre, a deadline, a lighter topic, a veritable sorbet for my brain.

This week, in the throes of parent-teacher conferences at school, I slammed smack into a tangle of structural uncertainties and missing backstory on my revisions of Novel #1 (which I had also, foolishly, thought was finished). But, miraculously, instead of bemoaning my inability to get any writing done, my brain started fiddling with an old short story idea. Next thing I know, I’m playing with point of view and reviving this old piece into something with some real legs on it.

In fact, I have a lot of short stories that came about in much the same way. I wanted to keep my writing going, but I needed to catch my breath on the big stuff.

The moral of the blog? When you’re writing brain gets tired, maybe it just needs a change of pace. Try a new genre. Try something of a more manageable size. Play a little!

This is a post from the Writer’s Wavelength blog which can be found at writerswavelength.blogspot.com.

Endings: Happily Ever After – Or Not

After my weekly writing group today, a couple of us got into a long discussion about the challenge of endings. They seem so elusive. Somehow, you know when it feels wrong or feels right, but you can’t articulate it and, until you hit on it, it seems almost impossible to see how you’ll get there.

Let’s face it. Endings are hard. They can torture you, drive you to drink, send you into endless bouts of insomnia. We put them off. We impose them. We rush them. We drag them out. We want to satisfy the reader and ourselves. We want to get the damn thing finished and we never want to say goodbye, because the ending means leaving behind characters and a world that we’ve grown to know and love.

Lucy Calkins says endings should have important action, memorable images, something that reminds your reader of the heart of your story. Tricky concepts for my 3rd and 4th graders, who are still learning how to move beyond “That’s all I have to say!” or “I hope you like my story.” So, I give them helpful sentence frames as a scaffold: “I will always remember _____.” “I will never forget ________.” “At that moment, I knew ___.” “Now I know ______.” “From that day on ________.” If only it were that simple for grown-up writers!

But maybe it is. Folktales have handed down a collection of stock endings to us. Maybe those stock endings are just the master storytellers giving us scaffolding. We just have to figure out which kind of story we’re telling and what our story’s version of the stock ending would be.

“They lived happily ever after.” Are you setting your reader up for a happy ending? If so, you have to deliver. What would it take to make your protagonist, and therefore your reader, happy and satisfied? Know this and you know how your story must end. Think how furious we would have been if Harry Potter hadn’t defeated Voldemort in the end.

“They were never heard from again.” If your story is a tragedy, you need to leave the reader with a mix of loss and devastation, and the lingering sense that it all might have been prevented, if only … I think I’d put THELMA AND LOUISE in this category.

“You can still hear his voice echoing through the night.” Expand your vision of a horror story to include anything that leaves a haunting image to cap off a cautionary tale. I think of MOBY DICK, whose final image – the boat sinking below the waves with its drowned crew – still lingers in my mind more than 20 years later.

“There goes a mouse!” I’ve always thought of this as the Grimm’s folktale version of my 3rd graders’ “That’s all I have to say” – kind of a cop-out. But really, perhaps it’s more like Bugs Bunny’s “That’s all folks!” The comedic sign-off has it’s place, when delivered with the proper light tone and humorous nonsequitur. Think of MONTY PYTHON’S HOLY GRAIL, perhaps. Or BBETLEJUICE.

What flavor does your story have? Can you think of other classic, stock endings that might point the way in your own struggle to bring your tale to a satisfying conclusion?

This is a post from the Writer’s Wavelength blog which can be found at writerswavelength.blogspot.com.

Give me a Break: Recess is Not Procrastination

My third and fourth graders have an incredible arsenal of work avoidance tactics. Finding a pencil. Sharpening a pencil. Getting a drink of water. Going to the bathroom. Not having the paper, book or other supply they need. Finding the perfect place to sit. Setting up a screen to block out distractions. Taking the long way back to their desk and visiting friends en route. Helping a buddy in need. Working on another assignment first.

Sound familiar? Writers are just as good at these tactics. We call it procrastination. And sometimes that’s exactly what it is. But sometimes, a break is necessary. Sometimes, the brain returns refreshed and renewed. We humans are not designed to work nonstop 8 hours a day.

As a writer, I’m terrified that if I take a break from a piece, I might never finish it. If I deviate from my routine, I might never get back to it. It takes courage to trust myself enough to step away and take a breather. When I do, I often have a breakthrough. I come back with a new perspective. I can see the value in the things I thought were hopeless crap. I can let go of unnecessary scenes to which I clung for old times’ sake. Structural solutions that had been mired in the swamp reveal themselves with absolute clarity.

I took two years away from my current project. I actually never intended to come back to it. I finished a second project and started a third one. Then, I needed a break from that third one and found myself looking back at this piece, THE SPARROW’S SECRET HEART. I saw it with new eyes and realized I didn’t want to let it go and that I could, in fact, fix what I thought was unfixable.

Everybody needs recess. Even writers. Sleep in. Work on a different story. Read a new kind of book. Go for a walk. Work out. Spend time with a friend or loved one. Go to a movie. Take a nap. Step away from the work for 10 minutes, an afternoon, a day, even a week. You may be surprised at what you find when you return.

This is a post from the Writer’s Wavelength blog which can be found at writerswavelength.blogspot.com.

Writing, Day Jobs and Life: The Balancing Act

How do you find the time to write? For any of us who work full-time doing something else, that question is the number one challenge to defining ourselves as writers. If, like me, you have a day job that doesn’t end when you walk out the door, it’s an even greater challenge.

I have a day job that I love. I’m a teacher. Like writing, it’s a passion. When I walk out the door of my classroom, my brain is still buzzing with a million and one school-related things. It’s hard to turn them off. That’s why, for me, writing time has to be in the morning, before school, when I can give myself over to the story. The challenge? I have to be at school at 7:00 AM.

As a teacher, I have the great bonus of summers and other vacation times when I can give myself over to big chunks of writing. But it makes the re-entry into the school year that much harder, when I have to let go of that freedom and limit myself to 20-30 minutes of writing per day. All summer, I can dance between a variety of writing projects, plus engaging in the blogosphere as part of building my digital platform. Then the school year arrives. Something has to be cut back. I feel sad about losing that full immersion in writing.

Finding a balance I can live with is a struggle. I give up the snooze alarm and buy myself an extra 15-30 minutes in the morning to write. I don’t wear make-up. My hair doesn’t always look it’s best. But I get my writing time.

For self-care purposes, I give myself permission to take the occasional day off from writing, as long as it doesn’t become a habit. My weekly critique group helps me stay accountable for a certain level of productivity. I block out some time on the weekend.

I let go of non-essential writing-related activities. While school is in session, building my digital platform will have to wait. I might not be able to attend all those conferences. Writing every day and participating in critique groups may be all I can manage. For me, balance means self-care, sustaining my writing muscles, sustaining forward momentum on my highest priority projects, and maintaining connections with other writers.

If you’re faced with overload and have to cut back, ask yourself what is essential, what is the lifeblood of your writer identity? What can you let go?

This is a post from the Writer’s Wavelength blog which can be found at writerswavelength.blogspot.com.