Life in a Literary City – Portlandia is for Writers

First, confession time. I’ve only watched the TV show PORTLANDIA once or twice. I didn’t care for it. Why? There was no affection for the place they were mocking. I mention this because the overly-quirky, accept-the-fringe, coffee-loving atmosphere PORTLANDIA mocks is the same atmosphere that has fostered an incredibly literary city that I am proud to call home.

When I first moved to Portland, Oregon, I was blown away by two facts. First, something called Portland Arts and Lectures, featuring literary speakers and expensive tickets, was routinely sold out. Second, on a Saturday night in Portland, the Anne Hughes Coffee Shop at Powell’s Books was packed with literary geeks like me until late into the night. “I have found my tribe!” I thought.

Portland has a thriving writer’s community that’s given birth to all sorts of literary events, including Wordstock and the Willamette Writers Conference, not to mention Haystack and the Pacific Northwest Children’s Book Conference. Portland is also home to such literary talents as Ursula LeGuin. And recently, not one, but two Portland-based writers were selected for inclusion in THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES. Other selections were previously published in two nationally-recognized Portland-based magazines, TIN HOUSE and GLIMMER TRAIN.

Maybe its the nine months of rain. What else is there to do but hunker down inside with a good book, or write your own? With all that gray, drizzly weather, we lean on coffee just to keep our spirits up, but maybe that thriving coffee shop culture fuels good literature. Maybe it’s the afore-mentioned quirky, fringe vibe, which leaves so much room for artists of all sorts. Maybe it’s the low cost of living. Yes, we have one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, but it takes less money to get by in Portland, so folks who quit the day job to work on their novel can make it on less money.

Whatever the reason, Portland is a literary city, a city of writers and readers, a city that values words, and I feel lucky to be here.

Where do you call home? Would you say it’s a literary city? Where have you found your community of writers, live or online? What do you think fosters a literary climate? Which cities would you cite as writer-friendly and why?

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

The Muse In the Machine: The Writer’s Relationship with Technology

Thirty-thousand years ago, an early creative artist painted stories on the walls of Chauvet caves in France. The available technology affected the story. With no film or written language, the muse spoke through hand prints, animal paintings, tripled images to evoke movement, and the shape of the cave rock itself. Visual images necessitated the development of metaphor to reach for abstract concepts. Collaboration happened over hundreds, even thousands of years. The risk involved included the threat of maulings by bears or death by rock slides.

As spoken language evolved in complexity, the muse, no longer bound by visual images, could enter more and more abstract terrain. Ballads, epic poems, the shared memories of entire cultures – all became her playground. The oral tradition was a collaboration of the community, ever shifting and changing, and utterly ephemeral. There was no “final copy.” There was rarely an “author.” Intellectual property was a foreign concept. Plots and characters were shared freely from one creative artist to the next, albeit dressed in ever-changing robes. The audience was always a community, rarely if ever a solitary individual, and their reaction – love it or hate it – could be gauged immediately because the writer was the performer.

As civilization advanced, so did the writer’s technology. Human beings could imprint stories onto stone tablets using written language. Lengthy tomes required a commitment we can only imagine. Yet, entire epic poems survived intact from this age. But written language had to be learned and taught. Enter the gatekeepers, determining which stories would survive to be shared with communities not yet born.

In the Middle Ages, the gatekeepers became protectors, guarding the efforts of past writers from the desecration of the small-minded and honoring the sacred side of the muse, copying works in the hope that the audience might grow.

The printing press. BAM!! The muse engages with the masses on a scale unheard of in the past. The power to preserve thought for the future is popularized as never before. The size of audience to be reached explodes. And the gatekeepers become those who own this new and powerful technology, for they can now determine how many copies exist, how soon they are made, what they look like, how much they cost.

And now the digital age. Like an A-list celebrity, the muse is being mobbed from all sides. Anyone and everyone has a forum. The communal creative energy of the oral tradition has combined with the preservative power of the written word and the popularizing capacity of mass production on an unprecedented level. Written, visual and oral storytelling can coexist and commingle in new ways. The role of the gatekeeper is transforming and mutating daily.

What will be the latest progeny in the tempestuous love affair of muse and machine, writer and technology? When everyone has a forum, can the audience hear anymore? When everyone is artist, performer, and gatekeeper, who is left? Will this new age foster interaction and creation or narcissism? What will survive to the future when all is said and done? What will the next age be?

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

Writer’s Wavelength: THE Call

http://cba-ramblings.blogspot.com/2009/04/getting-call.html

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

How You See It and How You Say It

“It’s all in how you see it,” some people say. For writers, that means point of view, which has to be one of the more challenging, complex and, to my mind, fascinating topics of the writer’s craft. Point of view is more than just first person or third person. Point of view is about immediacy and risk. Whenever I learn about or explore point of view, I find myself thinking in cinematic terms. Where is the lens of my reader’s camera located? Where is their microphone located? How tight is the close-up? Does my story need a more panoramic or epic scope?

Even tense can play a role in point of view. I just made the risky move of rewriting the first scene of my latest novel in first person, present tense. It has a level of immediacy, intimacy and high-risk involvement like no other, but it comes with a price. You have to place all sorts of limits on your access to information, since you can only share what your narrator knows at or before the point in time of the action. But I have to say, my pulse is racing and I feel like I’m going for the jugular a lot more in the first person, present tense. It’s almost an adrenaline rush.

How you see it can also drive how you say it. I’m thinking about that elusive quality known as voice. So hard to define. You just know it when you see it. Too often I reread my stuff and am disgusted by how flat it seems, the way it lays there on the page after being run through my critical, analytical, disengaged and dispassionate mill one too many times. Then I’ll write something for a workshop exercise and it just leaps off the page. Voice.

When I shift point of view, it can blow voice wide open. To me, finding the voice when you’re not writing in first person seems so much harder, and when it comes to YA literature, I keep coming back to the first person point of view. No intermediary between the reader and the protagonist.

At a minimum, if you’re struggling to find the voice of your story, I think it’s worth it to rewrite a pivotal scene from a variety of points of view. You may be amazed by what you discover. If you’re lucky, you’ll find the right voice before you’ve finished an entire draft. If you’re like me, you might end up rewriting your whole novel from a different point of view. But the risk is worth the pay-off. At least, that’s how I see it.

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

The Joys and Agonies of Bookstores

It’s a funny thing walking through a bookstore when you’re a writer trying to get published. The part of me that loves stories and books and reading and language breathes it in and gets lost and can’t get enough. The part of me that wants to be published and collects rejection notices and keeps struggling to be better looks at it all and says, “What’s the point?” It can be overwhelming, and that’s just the stuff that’s been published.

This is especially true when I visit Powell’s here in Portland. Powell’s isn’t called “The City of Books” for nothing. It takes up something like a couple of city blocks and at least 3 stories crammed floor to ceiling with every kind of book imaginable – new books, used books, trashy books, classics, books in other languages, rare books – you name it. When I was in my twenties I’d go there and hang out in their coffee shop on a Saturday night and it would be packed with other booklovers like me and I thought to myself, “I have found my people.”

But on my last visit, knowing my own writing was in the hands of agents yet again, and that a rejection notice was most likely in my future, I had a bit of an anxiety attack. So many great books – who reads them all? How does one ever get noticed over the others? What makes me think I have something so worth saying that people will pay money for it?

I know I’m not alone in this two-sided relationship with bookstores. I wonder what other writers do to overcome that feeling.

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

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

Okay, I admit it. The title for this entry is absolutely a cliche. An alternate title might be “Perspective.” (I’ll save the whole subject of titles for another blogging day). I’m talking about the perspective on a piece of writing that can come with time away from that writing. There’s something about being too deeply inside the story that limits your capacity to judge it fairly. I have a piece I thought was an absolutely useless mess. Someone critiqued it and I realized from their comments that I should not, in fact, throw it away and forget about it all together. But I still couldn’t stand to think about it or look at it. I was convinced it would be an impossibly convoluted task to make any sense of it at all.

But it kept tickling at my brain, saying, “Come on. You finished a draft of me. You spent a whole year with me. Come back for a visit.” I have resolutely steered clear of it for a good two years now. But when I finished my last novel, I decided to give it another look, fully believing I would still want nothing to do with it.

Lo and behold! I found myself caught up in the story, where before I thought there was no story to speak of. I discovered it had a lively pace and the main character had some real gumption to her that I had been completely unaware of. The whole thing moved along nicely and kept my interest. Then I looked back at the synopsis and it all started to crystallize. The problem spots offered solutions to themselves and the arc of the plot seemed to shimmer into focus. I guess sometimes you need a two-year break to really appreciate something, and what was exhausting at one time can be inspiring at another.

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

Starting Over

So, I just finished a 300 page YA novel, revised, revised, revised, edited, edited, edited, and submitted. I’m sure I’ll be revisiting it eventually, but for now, it’s done. So, what’s next?

I have a few ideas, all of which have something started already (thank God for my writing notebook). But as I sat down, after a week’s hiatus, to look at them, I had the sensation of standing at the foot of Mount Everest and thinking “Didn’t I just climb this thing?” The work you do at the end of a novel and the work you do at the beginning are so very different. So much more is known and mapped out at the end. So much is shapeless at the beginning. There are, of course, more discoveries to make at the beginning, which is something to look forward to. Still, that first moment, staring up at the mountain, is a daunting one.

I’m a teacher, and I’m also poised on the brink of the new school year just now. I am struck by some similarities. In the classroom, everything goes a little more smoothly once you’ve laid out the routines and procedures and you’ve gotten to know your students. In a novel, everything goes a little more smoothly once you’ve figured out the central conflicts and plot outline and gotten to know your characters. But those first few days of school, all the work to be done can feel overwhelming. In both cases, progress happens one step at a time and requires patience, consistency, routine, passion and commitment.

Most teachers have a collection of “getting to know you” activities as well as creative methods for teaching routines & expectations. I’m betting most authors do, too. I have culled a few from workshops and conferences. Character wheels. Scene sketches. Various excercises – interview your character, walk through their house, write a letter from them to you or vice versa. Distill your idea into a collection of purposeful sentences. Try writing a short-story synopsis first. Outline with index cards or sticky notes.

What do you do to kick-start a new work?

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

Exploring the Gray

In thinking about the thematic elements of my recent writing, I find myself ruminating upon the much-maligned color gray. Dull, medicore, in-between, halfway, the color of compromise – that’s what we usually associate with gray. But I think it’s gotten a bad rap. Gray isn’t just some washed-out, plain, monotone. There are a vast collection of grays – asphalt, concrete, charcoal, pewter, nickels, the edging of clouds on a fine summer day or the heavy fullness of a thunderhead about to break.

Black and white are the colors of two dimensions. Gray gives shading, depth and nuance. Without it, things are flat. Gray provides fullness of shape.

In my writing and in my reading, I find I am drawn to stories that explore the gray – that is, the messy, nuanced, complexities of life. Simplistic, black and white answers rarely ring true or make for interesting and meaningful characters or stories.

So here’s to gray! Go find some!

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

"Now I Am a Real Boy!"

Like most writers, I want my characters to be real. After I spend enough time with them, they seem real to me. They start making decisions without me and taking the story in new, usually quite interesting, directions. When I share chapters with my critique group, the characters become a little more real. “She wouldn’t do that!” they exclaim, as if they were talking about a close friend. That’s when the characters move from existing in my head to existing in some forcefield of space created by the energy of the critique group. But in a way, at that point, my characters are still Pinocchio-the-puppet, or the pre-fever Velveteen Rabbit. They aren’t truly REAL.

I recently gave the “final” copy of my novel to a bunch of friends to read, most of whom knew little or nothing about the story or the characters. The first reader’s comments came in. She talked about the characters like she knew them. She felt things for them, and when one of them died, she cried. As I read her comments, I thought, “Now they are REAL.” What a remarkable feeling!

Like Pinocchio or the Velveteen Rabbit, my characters couldn’t truly become REAL without experiencing love from the person they were created for – the reader.

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

Novel-writing Postpartum

So I’ve revised and rewritten and polished and edited and re-read and tweaked and now I believe my novel is done and ready to be read in full by everyone who matters. Now what? My head says, “Take a little break. Then start on the next one.” I know that’s my plan. But taking a break from this one is hard. I don’t feel like I’ve let go. I don’t feel ready to let go. Am I really planning on sending my characters out into the universe on their own now?

I wonder if completing a novel is like giving birth or is it more like grieving? Maybe it’s both. Right now, I think I am experiencing some level of shock or denial. It doesn’t entirely feel real. I’m not sure what to do with myself. I want to revisit it and at the same time I don’t want to look at it or think about it.

Someone may ask me to go back to it, and when they do, I think I will take it up again gladly, with a sense of purpose. But, for now, the crazy push to finish has ended. I must fill not only my time but my brain with other endeavors.

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