Category Archives: writing

Ravel-Edged Storytelling

Posted on by
forest poetry

(photo: as0.geograph.org.uk)

A walk in the woods of poetry and prose and pleasantly lost in thickets of words.

The current (subscription only) newsletter from AGNI—Boston University’s well-regarded literary magazine—includes an interview with prize-winning poet and nonfiction writer Rosalie Moffett about “Ravel-Edged Storytelling.”

A Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, Moffett says she mostly considers herself a poet, but believes that the two genres—poetry and nonfiction—“share a border, and sometimes I look up to find I’ve crossed it.” A work that started out to be one thing takes an unexpected and serendipitous turn to become the other. In reading this month’s submissions to the writer’s workshop I attend, I encountered one 1200-word short story excerpt that seemed to want to become a poem and might have become one, by just changing the line lengths.

Answering Questions

Moffett says she writes prose and poetry for the same reason: to answer questions and, most of the time, poems “end up being the best arena for my mind to answer them.” This suggests a mind that ranges freely through a forest of possible answers, where the ambiguity of words can be pulled into service of meaning and intent. Strung together in a particular way, they can be the perfect example of the whole being more than the sum of the parts. That phenomenon is is one function of subtext.

dinner table, family

(photo: creative commons generic license)

AGNI online offers Moffett’s essay Sidney, whose story she says absolutely required “the ravel-edged” kind of telling offered by prose. Prose also provided a more valid recreation of how she originally heard—or overheard—the family stories, and the stories about Sidney himself, with all their half-bits of information, inferences, and unanswered questions like loose threads in a bag of knitting ravaged by moths or kittens. Prose “puts our stories together in a way they never had the chance to be before people died, got bitter, or went off their rockers.” I urge you to link to it and start reading; you won’t be able to stop!

And Telling Stories

In the essay about Sidney, she talks about how as a child younger than six visiting her grandparents, she got up late in the evening feigning hunger, so she could camp out in the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal and overhearing the adults’ conversation in the next room: “I remember the music of the stories more than their substance. I sensed their pull and power. I wanted, suddenly, nothing more than to have stories to tell, and to sit at that table and tell them.” “Sidney” shows she absolutely got her wish.

I think I resonated with her responses in the interview largely because of the process in the last two weeks, of writing my blog posts, The Rouge Shadow and Coming to Amerika, based on a longer essay about my father’s immigrant parents. So different from Moffett, who can draw on a deep well of family detail—conversations, rooms she’s spent time in—I know next-to-nothing about my father’s parents. Yet, even from the few stray threads I have, many stories could be woven. To write these essays, I pieced together the backdrop for a plausible narrative from minute clues. Moffett says writing an essay “feels like the hunt for an answer.” And sometimes the answer is that there is none.

Further Reading

Rosalie Moffett’s website includes links to some of her poems, including this one, “Gifts from the 7-11.”

Agni is the ancient Vedic god of fire and guardian of humankind, a messenger to the other gods. You can find out more about this aptly named literary magazine here. And about the god of fire here.

The Art of Subtext, by Charles Baxter– The most eloquent and approachable group of essays on subtext that I’ve found. For only $3.88 used to $10.28 new, you can awaken to new possibilities. Reading it was like seeing, after not seeing.

Related articles

The Soul of Wit

Posted on by
scissors, blood, editing

Editing Done (photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

One of the best career moves I ever made was a freelance gig I designed for myself in which I wrote weekly columns about health policy that I self-syndicated to newspapers. This was back before health issues became a constant drumbeat when few news outlets had a regular health correspondent. I lived in Washington, D.C., I had access to experts and government officials, these topics interested me, and I believed people needed to know more about them. From a content perspective, totally correct; from a business income perspective, hopeless.

I never made much money at it—the largest-circulation paper to pick up the column was the Cleveland Plain-Dealer—but I what I learned was pure gold. Not about health policy. About saying what you have to say in 750 words or less. Medicare, Medicaid, care organization, mental health—these are complicated issues. 750 words (or less). It’s helped my writing every day since. Extra words and long-winded phrases still drive me crazy, and Twitter’s easy.

That makes me the perfect cheerleader for Mandy Wallace’s excellent blog post on “cutting the fluff from your fiction”—though anyone who writes as much as a memo can benefit from at least some of her advice. She links to other helpful resources, and I’d bet you’ll find some pet phrases (I did!) in the appalling catalog of redundant phrases. Interestingly, the first of her “5 powerful techniques” connects to an essay on “Thought” Verbs that definitely will not produce a shorter text, but a more meaningful one, shorter only by elimination of empty words. Another good outcome.

Life is a Riddle and a Mystery

Posted on by

By Linda C. Wisniewski, Guest Blogger

pen and ink, writing, memoir

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

At my Unitarian church, we sing a hymn with the repeating refrain, “Mystery, mystery, life is a riddle and a mystery.” I read lots of mystery novels, and I write and teach memoir. For me, the two genres are not that far apart.

Writing a memoir is a lot like unraveling a mystery. Where you think you are going is often very different from where you find yourself at the end. Good memoir writing, and I mean good for the writer as well as the reader, always involves the process of self-discovery.

Just as all stories begin with the main character’s motivation or desire, the same is true in memoir. The writer wants to discover something about his life, or the characters in his life story. Quite often the process of writing changes the motivation of the memoirist.

In my memoir, Off Kilter, I wrote that “I wanted to understand why my mother couldn’t protect me from my father’s verbal abuse. I wanted to know why she cut me down instead of building me up….She let herself be silenced. She silenced herself. More than anything, I want to understand.”

While writing is not therapy, it can be therapeutic. It wasn’t so much that writing helped me understand my mother, but rather that it helped me accept who she was. I discovered the answer to the mystery of my life: I held in my hands the ability to create my own happiness, as a grown woman, apart from her. After Off Kilter was published, friends suggested more ways I could try to understand my mother. Call relatives, research history, read self-help books. But I was no longer interested. My motivation had changed.

In his memoir, Elsewhere, Richard Russo comes to suspect his mother suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and feels tremendous guilt, seeing himself as her “principal enabler. Because…like other addicts, obsessives can’t do it on their own. As they gradually lose the control they so desperately seek, they have little choice but to ensnare loved ones.” He holds this discovery for the very end, creating a powerful resolution for himself and the reader.

Years ago, I opened my lunchtime talk at a senior citizens center with the rhetorical question, “Why should you write your memoir?”

A tiny woman in the front row piped up so all could hear, “Yeah, why should I?” She made me laugh, but I totally get where she was coming from. I’ll bet her children and grandchildren were always telling her to write down the stories of her life. But she didn’t want to, and I was hard-pressed to convince her otherwise. I listed the mental and physical health benefits of writing about emotionally significant events, but she did not sign up for my class. And she had a very good point. She could see no reason to revisit the past.

Critics complain there are too many “confessional” memoirs, perhaps recalling the confession or romance magazines aimed at working-class women. In the New York Times Book Review Neil Genzlinger wrote a piece called “The Trouble with Memoirs,” in which he asked for a “moment of silence for the lost art of shutting up.” It caused quite a stir, but the conclusion can be drawn that he was complaining about badly written memoirs, of which there are many.

Stephen Elliott wrote in The Rumpus that “…celebrity memoirs are rarely interesting, despite how interesting their lives appear from the outside. The problem is not that they don’t live interesting lives, it’s that they’re not writers.”

Memoir writing is a risky proposition. “I see you in a whole different way now,” said my book club friend after reading Off Kilter. When I started to write seriously, I joined an online group called Risky Writers. We wrote and critiqued short pieces which involved emotional risk when shared. What would others think if they knew we had done these things? We learned to critique the writing, not the life style of the writer.

Despite the temptation to judge the lives of memoir writers, we don’t think of judging fictional characters. “She shouldn’t have done that!” Well, yes, she should have. That’s how she got into trouble, and why we keep turning the page, especially in a well-plotted mystery. Will she get what she wants in the end? Or does she discover something better?

Genzlinger ended his Times Book Review piece like this. “Maybe that’s a good rule of thumb: If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it.” I would add, don’t publish it yet. And don’t give up looking for the mystery.

Linda Wisniewski

Linda Wisniewski (photo: courtesy of the author)

Linda C. Wisniewski lives in Doylestown, Pa., where she teaches memoir workshops and writes for a local newspaper. Her credits include newspapers,  Hippocampus, other literary magazines, and several anthologies. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won first prizes in the Pearl Buck International Short Story Contest as well as the Wild River Review essay contest. Linda’s memoir, Off Kilter: a Woman’s Journey to Peace with Scoliosis, Her Mother, and Her Polish Heritage, was published in 2008 by Pearlsong Press. Visit her at www.lindawis.com.

Thrilling First Sentences

Posted on by
homeless, dog

(photo: shiftfrequency.com)

Thrillerfest—the International Thriller Writers’ annual summer get-together—this year sponsored a first sentence contest, in which seven leading thriller writers looked through a pile of manuscripts submitted for critique and picked their favorite openers. Below is what some of the masters find gets them going. Let’s hope the authors polish up their manuscripts and deliver them into the hands of publishers soon! Watch for them! I marked my favorites—the more stars, the better. Yours?!

Wylde knew it was too early, but when the girl started screaming, he went in anyway. (Judith O’Reilly)

**Death couldn’t part us soon enough. (Katalin Burness)[I like the narrator’s tone already!]

Sophie was late—and naked. (Terry Rodgers)

Quizz Murphy propped himself against the cold facade of an office building and summoned a nearby sparrow to pluck the lice from his beard. (J. E. Fishman)

***I knew what I was doing; I just didn’t know what I was capable of. (Nathaniel Free)[lots of possible places to go after an opener like that. And a semi-colon. Whoa!]

Dad, are you and mom getting a divorce? (Ray Collins)

*Sleeping with a married guy was one thing, telling his wife he was dead was another. (Margaret Carroll)[OK, you got me. She could have borrowed the semi-colon, though.]

Off to a Good Start

Posted on by
cake, Hello Kitty

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

The delicious aspect of reading Chuck Sambuchino’s article in The Write Life article on the worst ways to begin your novel, is that you know these Outrageous Openings have been tried many times. You know that, because the opinions come from literary agents, who every month read hundreds of “first pages,” or maybe only first paragraphs, sentences, or words submitted by hopeful authors. Some of their advice is right up there with one literary agency’s strict warning to writers not to accompany their query letter with baked goods or anything hand-knit. (Your desperation is showing!)

Since, they say, everyone has a book in them, and since nearly everyone who finds out I’m a writer says, “I’ve always wanted to write a book,” there should be a ready audience for this advice.

1. Avoid prologues and lengthy first-chapter descriptions (“scene-setting”) and jump right into the action. (Thankfully, this wasn’t the preference in Dickens’s time, or we would have lost “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .”) Get right to the plot, they say, characters’ backstory “is in their DNA.” It stays with them.

2. Agent Dan Lazar puts it a different way. He dislikes openers where characters are doing “essentially nothing. Washing dishes and thinking, staring out the window and thinking, tying shoes, thinking.” Perhaps such openers are meant to contrast with the many thrillers in which not much thinking is done.

3. Love this one: “The [adjective] [adjective] sun rose in the [adjective] [adjective] sky, shedding its [adjective] light across the [adjective] [adjective] [adjective] land.” Fail.

4. Similarly, “laundry list” character descriptions. I recently read one so long its parts had to be separated with semi-colons, including this bit: “porcelain skin, white as china; pale green eyes.” If only they’d been Wedgwood blue eyes, we’d have a whole place-setting. As writing coach Lauren Davis says, description should tell who your characters are, not just what they look like.

5. Cliché openers. In crime novels, a really bad hangover. In fantasy, a battle or (apparently this is common) herb-gathering. The battle thing seems to go against the advice to start with action, but this agent says the problem is, “I don’t know any of the characters yet so why should I care about this battle?” In romance, waking to find a stranger in the bed. More ill-conceived action.

Finally, one of the agents reveals what she actually likes in an opener—one that makes her curious about your characters and fills her with questions. You have the rest of the book for the who, where, when, and how.

Your Brain Has Priorities

Posted on by
typo, misprint

(photo: David Sim, CC & cropped)

My second novel. 78,000 words. Respectable length, not one that would panic an agent or publisher. (Unless you’re Stephen King or Dona Tartt, forget the 700-page doorstops. ) I’ve read all the advice to new writers: get an editor (I’ve been editing people’s stuff for . . . a long time—skip that step), have it proofread (pfout! I can spot a typo like Annie Oakley nailing the ace of spades). Hit the send button, set the big envelopes on the postage scale, and trundle them out to the mailbox. Done!

Except. Except that every time I look at my perfect manuscript, I find, horrors!, a typo. A word missing. An editing faux pas. Have I blown it? Big time? Nick Stockton’s recent Wired article on why we miss our own mistakes sheds some light on the problem. “Typos suck,” he says. “They are saboteurs, undermining your intent, causing your resume [or the novel you’ve spent two years writing] to land in the ‘pass’ pile.” Spotting other people’s errors, no problem. Like the LinkedIn blurb I saw today for a job-seeker who wrote, “I also have string organizational, self-management and interpersonal skills.”

Our own typos elude us, Stockton says, not “because we’re stupid or careless,” quite the opposite. He quotes psychologist Tom Stafford from the University of Sheffield who says it’s because writing “is a very high level task,” and our brains focus on creating meaning and conveying complex ideas, not dealing with more mundane things. Homonyms and spelling being two. (I’ve noticed my alarming recent tendency to type even the most absurd homonym when I mean something entirely different—the kind of error that makes me howl when I read it in print.) When we read our own stuff, we skip over these mistakes because we know what we mint.

Touch typing was one of the most useful high school courses I took—that and driver’s ed—and I have always made certain errors, typing “d” when I mean “k,” and vice-versa. Or, when I type “Bethesda,” it takes real effort to stop myself from adding a “y” at the end. What I’ve noticed is that those mechanical errors are now so embedded that I make them even when I’m writing longhand. I go through two or three envelopes to get a birthday card out to any of my Bethesday friends.

And let’s not even start talking about numbers. Hopeless. I almost never enter a whole phone number without transposing something. I am a person for whom speed-dial is a godsend. The only thing that prevents matters from being much worse is that, as Stockton reports, “proofreading requires you to trick your brain into pretending that it’s reading the thing for the first time.” That’s where my vanishing attention span is a big plus.

Creativity is UP!

Posted on by
Up, Navy Pilot

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) is a classic study of the way metaphor shapes our understanding of the world. Published in 1980, it dismisses the idea that metaphors are strictly a matter of language, the frosting on the cake of meaning, as argued by various competing philosophical and linguistic traditions. In what I usually read, the search for truth is conducted not by academics, but by a fictional detective, so some of this was heavy going. Where the authors dig into the language, their examples are fascinating.

Lakoff and Johnson are not generally talking about literary metaphors, but rather about the ones so thoroughly absorbed into the language that we no longer notice them as metaphors. One fundamental set of such metaphors reflects “orientation”: up-down, in-out, back-front, and so on. Although some metaphors in this set appear to be more or less universal across languages, others are more culturally determined. In Western culture, many common phrases reflect the metaphor “happy is up” and its opposite, “sad is down.” Examples are:

  • That boosted my spirits.
  • I’m depressed.
  • It gave him a lift.
  • My heart sank.
  • Being up-beat.

Extending this pattern, health and life are up:

  • It’s time to get up.
  • He’s at the pinnacle of health.
  • Lazarus rose from the dead.
  • She sank into a coma.

More is up (this one, we even represent graphically):

  • My income rose last year.
  • The Dow reached a new high.

Having control is up:

  • He’s at the height of his powers.
  • She has control over the situation.

And so on. This metaphor is so pervasive, we don’t notice it. The other orientation pairs are embedded in the language in much the same way, and from the various concepts they signify, they form a coherent way of understanding our world.

Lakoff and Johnson also discuss how we depend on metaphor to help us structure inherently vague concepts, like emotions, in terms of more concrete things we may have directly experienced. Complex emotions, like love or anger, have inspired many overlapping (and sometimes conflicting) metaphors. For example:

  • Love (vague) is a journey (concrete).
  • Anger (vague) is hot (concrete).

The “love is a journey” metaphor underlies statements like: “We’re on the road to romance” (think Sinatra’s: “Nice ‘n’ Easy”); “It’s a rocky road to love.”; “We went in different directions.”; or “This relationship isn’t going anywhere.” The “anger is hot” metaphor leads to: “I was boiling mad”; “Cool it!”; and “in the heat of the moment.” (Icy cold anger is scary perhaps because it’s so counterintuitive.)

I’m trying to understand all this (which is the tip of the tip of the iceberg, you understand) in terms of writing. “We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor,” say Lakoff and Johnson. The orientation metaphors and their many variants perhaps explain why, a writer’s attempts to create a literary metaphor sometimes miss the mark. Perhaps they have violated this coherent, and implicit language system.

A linguistic exploration of the metaphors underlying emotion seems to me like an endorsement of the frequent dictum: “show, don’t tell.” Simply saying that a fictional character feels love or anger or happiness conveys little to the reader, because readers will have different ways—and many competing ways—of interpreting that emotion, depending on the metaphors through which they see the world. The metaphors underlying those feelings must be expressed—and in some fresh way that is consistent with the existing substrate (safer) or totally new, stretching both writer and reader.

Read more at: The Literary Link and, for some juicy literary metaphors, Welcome to the World of Metaphor.

Related articles

Put the Cat Out

Posted on by
Siamese cat, Grant

Shut out again. (photo: author)

Steven King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft focuses on how he became a writer and the process of becoming and many of his observations about being a writer ring true to me. Like most people who dispense advice to the novice, he emphasizes the virtue of “ass-in-the-chair”—writing every day, which is a groove serious writers finally work their way into, despite the distractions of kids, jobs, and grocery-shopping. Right now, for example, my lawn is shaggy as a pony’s winter coat.

He says if he doesn’t write daily, “the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people . . . the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade.” Like many other writers, I hit the keyboard early in the morning, and the excitement King talks about is what gets me out of bed at five to grab a cup of coffee and dive into the work.

He also insists that you shut the office door, “your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business.” Certainly, I shut mine, mostly to keep out Grant, a Siamese cat who thinks sitting in my lap and watching the cursor move across the screen has limited entertainment value and is something to complain about. (I created a monster when I played YouTube cat videos for him.) Eliminate distractions—phones, beeping email alerts, insistent cats—anything that takes you away from the page.

King tries to write 10 pages a day—about 2000 words. That’s his goal, and he thinks every writer should have one, every day. I’m a fan of getting a draft on paper, powering through and getting the story down and fixing all the inevitable issues and lapses and problems in rewrite. After that, I revise, a chapter a day.

Room, door (and the determination to shut it), goal. Adhering to these basics, he believes, makes writing easier over time. The more you do it, the easier it gets. “Don’t wait for the muse to come,” he says, and it’s astonishing how many would-be writers talk to me about their lack of or need for “inspiration,” as if it sprinkles down from the clouds rather than up from the mind’s carefully plowed field. King says, “Your job is make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day.”

Everyone who aspires to write has likely read a lot, too. We’ve listened to lots of TV and movie scripts. Lots of other people’s words, many not very good, have passed into our brains, and our subconscious is filled with the stuff. It’s in there. It wants out. When a phrase or scene comes too easily, almost unconsciously, I’ve learned there’s a problem. It’s canned, it’s derivative, it’s not a genuine product.

So now King gets to the hard part. You have to tell the truth. Your story’s truth. The writer cannot just be a pass-through for others’ words, ideas, conversations. “The job of fiction,” he says, “is to find the truth inside the story’s web of lies.” Even when we love the characters in a book and we really, really don’t want it to end, if the book has told the truth, we can feel satisfied when we turn that last page. If not, a squeaky voice starts up somewhere in our brain, Madeline’s Miss Clavel saying, “Something is not right.” As stunning as most of Gone Girl was—a web of lies if ever there was one—I thought the ending fell unexpectedly flat, and King has put his finger on the reason. In working out her denouement, author Gillian Flynn somehow strayed from the truth of her characters.

By contrast, truth-telling pervades the Pinckney Benedict stories I reviewed this week (on the home page for now; eventually the review will end up in “Reading . . .”). One of the best quotes describing the struggle to find the truth nugget is a favorite of my writing coach, Lauren Davis, and it’s from sports columnist Red Smith, who once said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

While that’s true, King also says that even the worst three hours he ever spent writing “were still pretty damned good.”

Related articles

Mapping the Literary Irish

Posted on by
Ireland

(photo: wikimedia)

A clever new infographic from BuyBooks appeals to both the literary impulse and the traveler’s grail—both central to this website—and maps a notable clutch of Irish literary icons. It’s tough to quarrel with any list of Emerald Isle literary figures that includes Cecil Day-Lewis, father of the incomparable Daniel, but where are G. B. Shaw (“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance”) and Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde? I waited in vain to find Beckett on the list and progenitor of today’s vampire obsession, Bram Stoker.

More currently, the McCorts, Malachy and Frank? Man Booker winner Roddy Doyle? Where’s Thomas Flanagan and The Year of the French—“a masterwork of historical fiction,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer? (Despite its merits, this book did not survive a run through the washing machine that I cannot explain.) For more modern history, where’s Adrian McKinty and his cop’s dilemmas during the Maze prison hunger strikes? Where, or where, is Gerry Conlon?

Wandering a bit into the peat fields here, for riveting Netflix picks, the movie based on Conlon’s book, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Emma Thompson, In the Name of the Father (trailer), is super, as is the biopic, Michael Collins (trailer), with Liam Neeson and an amazing cast—Stephen Rea, Alan Rickman, et al. My weakness for political thrillers is showing.

Possibly Ireland is too full of literary masters to include them all on one map, but BuyBooks could have been braver and more contemporary in its picks. Which favorite authors/books of yours were left out? And here’s a more complete map.

Another Story in Tweets

Posted on by

cloudsA fan of British author David Mitchell—I know, I know, lots of people didn’t like Cloud Atlas—I’m happy he’s experimenting again. This time with a short story, “The Right Sort,” in tweets (read it here, from the bottom up). First tweet: We get off the Number 10 bus at a pub called ‘The Fox and Hounds’. ‘If anyone asks,’ Mum tells me, ‘say we came by taxi.’ The narrator sees the world in staccato bursts—“bite-sized sentences”—because he’s taking his mom’s Valium. I’ve read the story so far, and cannot tell yet whether this device feels like the medium calling attention to itself. Already, though, as in his excellent novel Black Swan Green, Mitchell deftly captures the voice and preoccupations of an early adolescent British male.

Mitchell has tried other innovations: a linked narrative in his first book, Ghostwritten, which takes a while to take shape in the reader’s mind (“we’re all connected”!); Number 9 Dream, where you aren’t exactly sure where the dreams begin and end, though it would make a terrific mixed manga/live-action movie; and, of course, Cloud Atlas, where you work forward in time getting the first half of five semi-linked and intergenerational stories, followed by a whole story set in the future, then step backward through the decades with the latter half of the five. (Amazon includes a reader advisory that this is NOT a misprint!) More a straight novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, was one of my favorite reads of 2012.

“The Right Sort” walks “the tightrope between the fabulous and realism,” Mitchell said in a recent interview in The Guardian, and with his books, he’s proved he’s up for such highwire acts. This outing may soften up the media landscape for a new novel coming out this fall.

Related articles