Conferencing With Yourself – Intentional Writing Practices

The other day, Suzanne LaGrande, one of the members of my weekly critique group, was talking to me about intentional practice – practicing the writing craft the way an athlete practices. If I’m lucky, maybe she’ll do a guest post about this topic.
Athletes don’t just play their sport during practice; they focus on specific elements and skills. I paddle with a dragon boat team (Go, Mighty Women!). Our goal is to finish the race first, or at least to beat our best time. But to accomplish that, we work on our technique.

So, when I sit down to write, my goal might be “to write 1000 words” or “to write for one hour” or “to finish this scene.” But that’s not enough. I need to think about what element of the craft I am working on.

When I conference with my third and fourth grade students, I always start with the question, “What are you working on today as a writer?” At first, they just tell me about their story. Then, I say, “What are you trying to do with that story?” or “What are your goals with that story?” Like so many of us, they often say, “To finish it” or perhaps “To make it really long” or even “To make it really good.” It takes a while, but eventually they learn how to identify what element of craft they are working on. “I’m looking at dialogue.” Or “I’m adding sensory details.” Or “I’m trying to write a great lead.”

Next time you sit down to write, conference with yourself. Move beyond, “I’m going to write this many words or pages or minutes.” Ask yourself, “What are you working on as a writer today?” Identify what aspect of craft you’re focused on for that writing session. Practice with intentionality.

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

How Many Pages Does It Take To Get To The Center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?

I’m about to start racking up overdue fines again. I placed a hold on Adam Levin‘s THE INSTRUCTIONS at the beginning of the summer, back when I would have had time to read all 1,030 pages of teeny-tiny print. But it didn’t arrive at the library for me until 2 weeks ago. School was gearing back up and my time for reading was shrinking. I went to pick up the book and had quite a shock. It was over 3 inches thick. My hand barely reached from the back cover to the front. A brick pile of a book.

I started reading. Great voice, creative use of language, intriguing opening and premise – kind of a unibomber meets CATCHER IN THE RYE. But 1,000 pages? Really? Are you absolutely sure you couldn’t tell this story in less than that? Where was this guy’s editor? How in the world did this get published? Looking at the name of the publisher (McSweeney’s Rectangulars) and Levin’s bio, I’m guessing his short story successes opened the door for publishing THE INSTRUCTIONS. It seems well written (granted, I’m only 20 pages in), but I really don’t believe you need that many pages to tell a good story. Honestly, it’s like a dare to the reader.

Yes, yes, I know. Proust was 3-4,000 pages long, at least, depending on the edition. And there are actually people who’ve read the whole thing. You think he’d get it published today?

I really have no business judging if I don’t finish the book. But returning it after 20 pages isn’t likely to keep me up at nights – because, so far, the book isn’t keeping me up at nights. I think the last book I read that was a similar length was probably MISTS OF AVALON by Marion Zimmer Bradley. It kept me up at night. I’d show up at work bleary-eyed because I couldn’t stop reading. So far, that hasn’t been the case for THE INSTRUCTIONS.

Anyway, I guess I’ll never know if Levin’s massive tome is worth it. Time’s up, late fines are mounting and school’s in session, which means my reading material can no longer include a 1,000 page experiment. I’ll have to take the reviewer’s word for it that this book was a “must-read.” As in, someone has to tell you that you must read it or you’d never crack that huge block of paper.

Anybody else out there read THE INSTRUCTIONS? Am I being too snarky and cynical? Should I try again next summer when I have more time? Did it really need to be that long? Have I simply succumbed to the shortened attention span of the new millenium?

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

Dialogue Tags – Staring At Strangers

Look to the left!
Look to the right!
Stand up!
Sit down!
Fight, fight, fight!

Good dialogue isn’t just about what’s said, because conversation isn’t just about what’s said. It’s about what happens between the words – the nonverbal cues, the tone of voice, the facial expressions, the rhythms, the pauses. Capturing and conveying that effectively in the written word is easier said than done. Dialogue tags do a lot of that work, letting us know not only who is speaking but how.

I keep hearing that “said” and “asked” are invisible dialogue tags and everything else (“she screeched” “he gasped” “they hissed” “I murmured”) draws too much attention to itself. Then I keep hearing that adverbs should be avoided or at least used sparingly (Oops! There goes one, now!). What tools does that leave for creating rhythm and pause in dialogue, identifying speakers, conveying underlying emotion from a non-point-of-view character, and still preventing repetitive injury (he said, she said, he said, she said, ad nauseum)?

Ever since I learned the above pearls of wisdom, I’ve become obsessed with my non-verbal dialogue tags, and woefully conscious of my limited palette in that arena.

“He looked at her. She looked at him. They glanced at eachother. I looked away. We turned to eachother. They eyed one another. He looked down. She stood up. I sat down. We turned away.”

Lord save me! But if I tried to avoid that overused collection, I ran into tortured descriptions like “His lips twisted sidewise” or “Her mouth slanted downward.” My characters were a group of twitching, tortured, spastic puppets.

In desperation, I found myself staring at strangers – in bars, at bus stops, in meetings – anywhere two or more were gathered in the name of human interaction. If I couldn’t hear what they were saying, so much the better. This was an investigation into show-don’t-tell. Could I interpret their non-verbals? How would I describe them?

I started to notice the power of props. As someone with a theater background, a former props mistress in fact, I can’t believe I overlooked this fact. The cigarette, the drinking glass, the strand of hair, the wristwatch, the bracelet, the purse strap, the sleeve cuff, the teddy bear. We humans have an endless array of props through which we express ourselves in conversations. Set a scene somewhere that gives your characters access to a few props and you throw the world of dialogue tags wide open.

I also started thinking about the whole body. Forget eye contact. Get beyond the character’s face. What’s their body doing? Their shoulders, their back, their legs or butt or hips or feet? Sometimes I have to get up out of my chair while I’m writing and physically inhabit the character to figure out what they’re body does in this moment with this emotion. Makes me a pretty amusing sight at the local coffee shop.

What are your favorite overused dialogue tags? How about delightful discoveries you’ve added to your dialogue palette?

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

Three Tricks to Strengthen Your Word Choices

Here are a few nuggets I learned from Wordstock’s Teacher as Writer workshop. You may already know these tricks of line editing and revision, but they raised the bar for me.

Verbs of awareness: “Saw”, “heard”, “thought”, “felt”, “tasted”, and similar words are verbs of awareness. They point out the presence of the protagonist as separate from the reader and thereby distance your reader from the action. They draw attention to the process of noticing. When we see something, we don’t think in our heads, “I see that.” Instead, we register the thing itself. Often, writers use verbs of awareness in order to avoid what many of us see as one of the seven deadly sins of writing – the verb “to be.” Teacher as Writer instructor Joanna Rose radically suggested we should embrace the verb “to be” as a means of removing verbs of awareness and making the sensory experiences of our characters more immediate. For example:

“I saw the monster rise up out of the lake. I heard its horrible groans. As I turned and ran down the path, I felt the brambles scrape my cheeks.”
OR
“The monster rose up out of the lake. It let out a horrible groan. I ran. Brambles scraped my cheeks.”

For those of us who are teachers, verbs of awareness are a great scaffold while we are helping students build their skills at incorporating sensory details. But the language is even stronger when the scaffolding eventually goes away and there’s nothing left between the reader and the sensory experience itself.

Redundancy: Look for places where you state the obvious. For example, if you’ve placed your characters inside a truck, you don’t need to say, “I leaned against the truck window.” “Window” alone will suffice. When you start getting good at the infamous skill of “show don’t tell,” you’ll find redundancies popping up all over the place. If you show us the character speaking in an uncertain manner, for example, you no longer have to tell us they said something “uncertainly.” Once you start looking for these, its amazing how many you’ll find. It helps to have another pair of eyes looking, too.

Latin language vs. Saxon language: This was both the trickiest and most transformative concept for many of us at the workshop. Words with Latin roots, often multi-syllabic words, tend to create emotional distance. When a scene calls for emotional weight and gut-level power, the simple, usually mono-syllabic, punch of saxon-derived words has a stronger impact. For example:

“Humanity imbues astrological bodies with narrative.”
OR
“We tell stories about the stars.”

Feel the difference? For all the juicy fun of high-blown academic language, sometimes simple, blunt words are the strongest.

The distance provided by latinate words can come in handy for humor or irony. The cutting, sardonic tone of writers such as Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton and Jane Austen often comes from the juxtaposition of latinate commentary against ugly, base truth. However, if you find that a scene you’re writing just isn’t having the emotional impact it should, maybe there are some latinate words getting in the way.

These three tricks have given me some new tools for fine-tuning my writing. What are some of your favorite, straight-forward revision or editing strategies that bring out the emotional punch by polishing your writing craft?

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

Breaking Up the Logjam of Mid-story Writer’s Block

In the old days, breaking up a logjam was incredibly tricky and dangerous. Loggers carefully removed one or more “key logs” (a little like reverse jenga, I guess) and if it was a really bad jam, they had to use dynamite. These days, they use a machine to haul out big chunks until the logs start moving.

I’ve been working on revisions for my YA novel, THE SPARROW’S SECRET HEART. It was my first novel, and it’s been through more rewrites than I can count, including a complete point of view shift from third person to first person, but I keep coming back to it because I still love the protagonist and he just won’t let me give up on him.

Recently I hit a logjam. I’m trying to rewrite a pivotal scene that introduces an important character, the protagonist’s Aunt Megan, a complete stranger to him until this moment. My critique group demanded a better description of Aunt Megan and her house, as well as a restructuring of the scene to raise the tension and conflict. I kept coming at the scene and stalling. Over and over and over. Finally, I realized I really didn’t know enough about this aunt of his. So I sat down and started working on the backstory.

Now, I’d worked out a backstory for Aunt Megan before, but it really was surface stuff, more about plot logistics as they affected my protagonist than about Aunt Megan herself. I realized I didn’t even have a clue how to get inside her head yet. So I started with the timeline, her age when certain key events took place. I pieced together the ways those events affected her and her life. Then I wrote my problem scene in first person from Aunt Megan’s point of view. Mind you, I have no plans to rewrite the novel in her point of view. This was an exercise to help me find my way into the scene.

I wish I could say the words flew from my finger tips, but they didn’t. With each key log I thought I’d removed, new ones took its place, new questions about who Aunt Megan was. I wrote scenes that had nothing to do with my protagonist. I followed lines of thought well beyond the necessary conclusion. I got out my sketchpad and drew a complete floor plan of her house. It was a little terrifying to make such a commitment to the interior world of a character who isn’t my protagonist. Why was I spending all this time on stuff that wouldn’t even make it into my final draft?

But it was worth it. Bit by bit, the logs began to break free. Aunt Megan came into focus. Critical motives and subtexts revealed themselves. It’s taken me a good week or so, and a lot of words that won’t end up in the novel itself, but the logs are floating downriver again.

Mine was definitely a case of removing key logs one at a time, gradual and painstaking. But I’ve also had those dynamite situations – just sit down and power through it with some insane, off-the-wall notion. I’ve even used the chunks at a time method – cut this chunk, move this chunk, and soon it makes sense again.

When you’ve faced writer’s block, how did you break up your logjam? Chunk-chomping machine? Key logs? Or dynamite?

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

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.

Following Karen Russell Beyond Swamplandia!

I recently read Karen Russell’s novel SWAMPLANDIA! and I can’t quite stop thinking about it. Much like HUNGER GAMES by Suzanne Collins, it makes me want to re-read it from my writer’s brain. The two books are so different, but both examples of great writing. HUNGER GAMES keeps pulling you forward with in-your-face stakes from the get-go. SWAMPLANDIA! draws you in with its rich, strange images. It keeps growing on me over time. After HUNGER GAMES, I had to read the rest of the trilogy. After SWAMPLANDIA! I wanted to get my hands on Russell’s short story collection, ST. LUCY’S HOME FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES, which I’ve just started reading.

There’s something liberating about Russell’s writing. The places are so fully realized and so wildly other at the same time. It reminds me of the worlds my brain would travel to as a child, though it is not children’s literature. It leaves me believing that, like the protagonist in SWAMPLANDIA!, I can leap off the high-dive into a pit of alligators and swim safely to the other side. It makes me want to take risks in my own writing, to pursue the crazy, out-there images that float through my brain without fear and see where they lead. That’s a trick worth celebrating. So, thank you, Ms. Russell!

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

Notice, Conjure, Give In, Resist – Using Imagery

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with imagery – sensory details and descriptive passages that carry the emotion and mood of a narrative. I used to think description was good if it put my reader physically in the moment – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching what the character did. But descriptive passages and sensory details can and ought to do so much more.

I thought about this a lot as I was reading Karen Russell’s SWAMPLANDIA! At first, the dense, thick, laden descriptions almost seemed too much, slowing down the narrative and making it hard to find my way in. But Russell knows what she’s doing. The descriptions are absolutely essential to creating the semi-magical, otherworldly mood that makes the novel work, drawing us into the world of the Florida swamps and the possible supernatural experiences that lay within. I only accepted the strange pivotal events of the novel because all that mood work brought me so fully into the mindset of the main character – not through her thoughts but through Russell’s descriptions of her environment.

I want to share an example of my own efforts to rewrite description in order to convey emotion. This is a brief excerpt from my novel THE SPARROW’S SECRET HEART, which I am in the process of revising. The scene is the funeral of the protagonist’s mother.

Early draft:
“The funeral home looked like some rich person’s grandmother lived there. It had perfect green grass out front and tall white columns and a big glass door with a brass handle. Inside was a fireplace with candles on top, some fat armchairs, and a tall, polished table all covered in lace with a vase full of fake flowers on it. A big picture of Momma sat next to the vase, and there was a black guest book with a fancy pen so people could write stuff about Momma inside. Some double doors opened on a little room full of chairs with a table at the front and a big wreath of flowers and a wooden stand and a microphone.”

Rewritten draft:
“The funeral home looked like some rich person’s grandmother lived there. It had perfect green grass out front and tall white columns and a big glass door with a brass handle and polished tables with flimsy lace on top. Made me want to stick a wad of chewing gum somewhere. There was a fireplace with no fire in it, candles with no flames on top, and a vase full of flowers with no smell. One fat armchair stood in the hallway facing nothing, like anybody’d want to sit by themselves in a hallway staring at the wall. This long black book with a long black pen was spread open next to the flowers, waiting for somebody to come by and write something. In between the fake flowers and the empty book, Momma’s picture smiled at me, flat and frozen.”

Now, I know I still have work to do on the revised draft, but I think you can see the steps I’ve already taken to make the description carry more emotion and mood.

You can go too far with imagery, pouring it all over everything like Will Farrell ladling maple syrup on spaghetti in the movie ELF. So, how do you approach description without going off the deep end into a binge or tiptoing so carefully you miss opportunities? I think the sensory tango goes something like this:

1. Notice: Notice the world around you. Pay attention to your senses as you move through your own days. Constantly collect those observations and store them up in your mind so you have lots and lots to choose from when the time comes in your writing.

2. Conjure: When you sit down to write a scene, use words to conjure your stored up images. Choose the words carefully. Approach descriptive passages like poems. Wear the character’s mindset and the mood of the scene as filters while you write.

3. Resist: Imagery is seductive. The juicy words and thick wealth of details will seek to pull you in at every moment. Play hard to get sometimes.

4. Give In: Hard-to-get is great, but occasionally you have to let imagery sweep you off your feet and carry you away. You can always dial it back later. A little wild abandon can lead to wonderful discoveries. That tension between resistance and giving in makes me call it a tango.

During the Teacher as Writer course I attended last week through Wordstock, instructor Joanna Rose gave us this exercise, which I believe she credited to author John Gardner:

A farmer has just lost his son in the war. Describe his barn. Without using the words “loss,” “death,” “tragedy,” “son,” or “war,” convey the mood and emotional content of this moment.

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

The Moving Target – Writing Over Time, or Bringing Up Baby

My last post was about how time affects the reader’s view of a work of literature. Back when I wrote it, (a week ago), I was all gung-ho to do a follow-up post about how time affects the writer’s relationship to their own work. I had the post half-written in my mind. I counted on my brief reference in my last post as sufficient to jog any memories that might need jogging with the mere flip of an ipad.

Now, here I am, a week or so later, and already my relationship to the material has changed. Between then and now, things have happened. Not earth-shattering things, just the ebb and flow of living. Still, that ebb and flow is enough to shift the sands. The thought that popped up so vividly then seems distant and foggy now. New blog posts and story ideas have been jostling for a place in line. And this is after little more than 7 days. This is with the succinct, manageable form of a blog post.

How, then, do we writers, changeable humans that we are, manage to sustain our connection to a novel, with its complex storylines and fully-realized characters whose truth and consistency must hold not only across the space of hundreds of pages but across the many years it takes to complete such a longer work? It’s not like we stop changing and growing and evolving during that time. What do we do if we sit down one day and discover that the themes or characters that drove us to create a story in the first place are no longer the themes that resonate for us today?

Perhaps we need to be time travelers in our own minds, imaginative enough to go back and find the emotional truth that drew us to a story. But we’re also responsible for creating characters vivid enough to have life and growth on their own, outside our minds. The skin and tissue of our characters must be consistent and strong, but also fluid, allowing them to grow. In the end, like parents, we must trust them, release them from our own control in the hope that they can stand, walk, run and live on their own.

How? Well, if my own mini-experiment in this blog post is any indicator, when you don’t feel the connection anymore, write your way back in from a new angle. Maybe your story will be richer for it. Or maybe, as in my case, you’ll at least feel you’ve given it the attention it deserved. And if you drop it, ignore it, give up on it? Maybe, like Frankenstein’s monster, it will come to you at night in some terrifyingly powerful form and insist that you own it as yours.

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

Change Over Time – Experiencing Stories at Different Phases of Life

Back in high school, when I took calculus, I remember there was something called “change over time.” I think we represented it with the Greek letter delta. I’ve forgotten an awful lot I learned in calculus, but lately I’ve been thinking about change over time – as it relates to writing, of course.

I’ve been re-reading Charles Dickens’ OLIVER TWIST at the gym lately on my iPad (there’s a sentence I’d never have expected to write). I first read it when I was about 12 or 13 years old. After watching a movie adaptation on Netflix, I found myself wondering how accurate my memories of the story truly were, and how my experience of it might be different at the age of 45 than it was 30 plus years ago. The adult me is infinitely better tuned to Dickens’ wry tone and scathing condemnation of his society than the adolescent me. But beyond that, there were entire sections I had completely forgotten (or perhaps blocked out) and even characters I barely remembered or noticed the first time that stand out much more this time through. My impressions of other characters are completely changed. Fagin and the Artful Dodger, for example, seemed much more complex, almost sympathetic, on my first round, while their villainy and self-interested motives appear obvious now.

I remember my mother had a similar reaction to SILAS MARNER. In high school she thought it was boring and stupid. As an adult, she found it deeply moving. So, now I’m on a mission. The next on my list is Jane Austen, who left me utterly cold when I first read her stuff in high school. We’ll see what I think of Mr. Darcy and the rest this time through.

The words don’t change with time, but we do, and we, the readers, are co-creators with an author. We stage and interpret their work in our mind’s eye, and as our minds change, our experience of the story changes.

Change over time affects us as writers, too, a fact that can prove especially challenging when you work on something over the course of many years. But that’s a story for another blogpost, one I suspect will be entitled THE MOVING TARGET.

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