On Days You Are Feeling "Small"

Some wonderful writing advice from writer Sean Ferrell for those times you are convinced you can't carry on writing any longer.

When You Are Struggling to Stay in a Writing Routine

The other day a good friend and former student (thanks, Jessika) emailed asking for the name of a classmate who had a writing process she had always remembered.  I came up with the name almost immediately (something nothing short of astonishing given my poor recall for names).  I remembered likely because this classmate's writing ritual is one I shared frequently with other classes through the years.  I tended to rely on this story when students were full of complaints about writing blocks, or when they simply weren't producing.  Call it motivation; call it embarrassment; call it what you will.  They tended to remember her story, as I have, all through these years.

She remains an inspiration to me.  Her name is Leslie.  When Leslie was my student, she had returned to college a couple of years before after taking some time off having nearly failed college once before.  In the intervening years she had served her country in the military, she'd married, had become a mother.  When I knew her she volunteered an extraordinary number of hours at a local middle school on top of her own courses.  She worked evenings delivering pizzas.  She raised children.  Several times a week she drove one son over an hour to the nearest city with a good children's hospital for leukemia treatments.  She was a remarkable student and a remarkable woman.  She was serious about school and she was serious about her writing.

Taking me at my word about the need for consistent work habits as a writer, that year she set her alarm to go off early in the morning.  I mean early.  Like 4:00 or 4:30 such that she could get some writing time in before the rest of the house woke up and she had to start making breakfast and kid's lunches and get ready for her own long days.  One of her sons caught on to her quickly and soon tried to join his mom in the early morning dark and quiet, brought with him his own pen and pad and wanted to join her in writing.  She insisted that he needed his sleep.  And since the plan for alone time to think and to write hadn't panned out, she left the house.  She started writing in the play fort her husband had constructed at the top of the slide for the kids.  This was Colorado in the winter.  It can get cold in a Colorado winter.  Her methodology:  for every page she wrote, she rewarded herself with another blanket.

And how she wrote.  Before the semester was done, not only was her growth as a writer with each piece she submitted to the class, she sold a piece to a national magazine.

My charge to future students was simple:  if Leslie could find a way to write, they could.

On the bad days, I remember her lesson for myself.  I have time now.  I have a warm place, indeed a room dedicated to nothing but writing.  I don't have a child battling cancer.  If Leslie can write, I can find a way to write today.

bioStories Call for Submissions

bioStories, the on-line nonfiction literary magazine I edit has placed a new call for submissions that appears in the October 1st New Pages classified:
http://www.newpages.com/classifieds/calls/.  Please consider submitting.

Visit bioStories at http://www.biostories.com/

Artwork to the left appears on the site and is by my daughter, Jennifer Leichliter.

NewPages Blog: New Lit on the Block :: bioStories

NewPages Blog: New Lit on the Block :: bioStories: "bioStories is a new online literary web publication edited by Mark Leichliter, writer and freelance editor who publishes fiction, poetry, a..."

Jennifer Egan Interview/Chat Session at Goodreads

For members of Goodreads, Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan graciously took reader questions in a video chatroom session on August 2nd 2011: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/video_chat/9

Reaction to the Debt Ceiling "Compromise" Deal

This Pat Oliphant cartoon from Tuesday, August 2nd about says all that needs to be said about what transpired within our "representative" government in the last number of days:

Book Recommendation: Volt by Alan Heathcock

Volt, Alan Heathcock's debut collection of stories is one of those books that makes you celebrate the continued existence of small presses.  Volt is a 2011 release from Graywolf Press, and sadly, as a debut collection, it is one of those books likely passed over by the large houses, and as a result, unnoticed by most readers despite outstanding reviews.  That Mr. Heathcock will not benefit from a larger marketing budget and greater distribution is a shame, for it is a collection that should be on every one's "best of" lists for 2011.  Graywolf has a long history of championing such fine writers, and they've got a winner here.  It is a stunning collection of stories linked by a common setting and frequently featuring common characters.  The collections are a study in realism done right.  All may not want to face that characters who so often demonstrate such profound loss and sadness such as these, but we would be missing a glimpse at our own towns and our own lives if we turned from such realism.

Heathcock is masterful at offering more plot than many contemporary literary writers without sacrificing anything in depth of character or lyricism of language.  We may turn away in our own lives from characters such as those who people Volt, but we will be wiser and more compassionate if we face them.  It is a fairly thin collection with only seven stories, and you will be tempted to read the book straight through in one sitting, but you will fight that urge only because you want to savor each story.  Indeed the stories are likely to haunt your dreams.  Heathcock writes beautifully.  He  develops realistic characters who offer complexity and depth.  He is the sort of writer who other writers will be copying sentences from in journals just to study craft, and yet you would hardly know it, for the pace of the stories keeps the reader bolting through them and the grip of the narrative carries such truth that most readers will have to stop once and again to remember how beautifully Heathcock writes.



Alan Heathcock

 Heathcock also reveals himself as one of the first and certainly the most dexterous writers to begin and face the homecoming realities for some veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.  Largely those lives have been ignored, not just in our newspapers but in our novels.  It is not exactly a pretty picture of these lives as painted here, but I suspect, at least for many, it is an accurate one.  Such lives are not the focus of the collection but they seem to inform it throughout and certainly they echo its themes of morality and mortality, of guilt and shame, of bravery and persistence.  Heathcock's deftness in managing such complicated themes with understatement and his ability to rescue lives that we might dismiss is reminiscent of another debut writer I have championed--Josh Weil (The New Valley) and both writers will rightfully earn comparisons to the early novels of Cormac McCarthy and to Andre Dubus (both II and III).

Support a debut writer while supporting a small press and buy Volt.  While you are at it, buy one or two more copies for friends.  They will thank you.  And you will thank yourself for helping make possible more books from this fine writer in the future.

Stone Masonry and Writing

From my good friend Wilmer Frey, writer (and occasional obsessive stone mason). When not writing, parenting, or farmining, he is building a 140' x 8' dry stack retaining wall on his wall in New Hampshire. Always wise, in an email Will reminds me : "Have I mentioned before that stone work is kinfolk to writing? One stone, one word, each of them one after another, over and time, one line/row at a time. Sometime they fit, more often they do not. But when they do...lordy. That celebrated stay against confusion."

On Writing

So we think we cannot write.  We don't have enough time.  Our lives are too stressful.  We are "blocked."  The words are coming too slowly.  We can't get the language right.  The images in our head have become a chaos.  The lines we compose in our head when we think we are not writing disappear and never reappear...

I don't know how many times I have said such things, aloud or within my mind.  How often have I complained about the "struggle" I am having with writing?  And then there's this little reminder:  Jean-Dominique Bauby dictated the entire text of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by blinking his left eye.  Paralyzed by a massive stroke, he composed the book in his head at night from his hospital bed and then dictated the book using a process called "partner assisted scanning" where the person taking dictation recited the French alphabet slowly over and over and Bauby blinked when the right letter was reached.  The average word took nearly two minutes to spell out.  He died within days of the books publication.

I think we can find our way to words.

The Gatsby House Goes Down, And Three Allegories Rise

Few books have marked my literary life more deeply than The Great Gatsby. I learned several courses worth of instruction from reading and re-reading and scrutinizing Fitzgerald's promise. That I could read the novel as an indictment of the modern American ruling class (even if Fitzgerald could not), speaks to my proletarian core. The Gatsby house is no more apparently: The Gatsby House Goes Down, And Three Allegories Rise. I suspect a new McMansion, one of grander scale and equally empty rooms, will soon no doubt take its place.

Sontag on Writing

"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove


or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about

paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with

others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."

~ Susan Sontag, from a lecture about writing at Vassar College

A Matter of Perspective

Last night my wife and I watched the wonderful HBO biography film "Temple Grandin."  I've followed Grandin's work in the past and have heard several interviews with her and have long been fascinated by her.  An autistic, Grandin has revolutionized the cattle industry by designing cattle-friendly apparatus that help move the animals from feedlot through to slaughter in a humane manner that focuses on keeping the animals calm.  A repeated line from the film is "Nature is cruel but we don't have to be."  She developed radical new ways of managing cattle by close study from their perspective, literally by dropping to all fours and moving through pens and chutes and by watching the patterns of milling cattle.  An autistic who thinks entirely in images, she is capable, in essence, of seeing like a cow.  Put plainly, she thinks differently from most of us.  She offers an entirely different perspective.  Indeed early in the film Grandin is depicted (in a stunning performance throughout I might add, by Claire Danes) in her first year at boarding school when a sympathetic teacher watches and listens closely enough to begin to recognize some of the patterns of her thinking process and then challenges her with a science experiment to explain how an optical illusion that shifts perspective can make two identical objects look of different sizes.

There are valuable lessons in the film about accepting people who are different from ourselves, about challenging our own patterns of thinking, about how we define intelligence, about how we should support the efforts of our children and how we meet their needs, about how we see our food sources...the list could go on.  But what does this have to do with writing?  Everything.  So much of writing, both in fiction and in nonfiction, is about trying on other skins, as one of my poet friends likes to say.  To succeed in portraying with authenticity the desires, thoughts, goals, worries, and philosophies (to name but a few qualities) of other people, be they fictional or real, we must come as close as possible to understanding how they think, just as good teachers must recognize that in any given classroom they have any number of individuals who will access the material that one is attempting to teach in radically different ways.  We can't get all the way inside some one's skin no matter how hard we try, but try we must to enter an other's mind, to enter their very thinking processes if we wish to portray in them in a manner that feels authentic and believable and if we truly wish to access their interior lives.

And still there are other applications to be learned here as well.  Among them is this:  it is inevitable in a writing life that we will encounter problems within manuscripts that will seem insurmountable obstacles.  Very often the only real way across those obstacles is to think about them in entirely new patterns, literally to change our perspective.  Sometimes this means reconsidering the cause of the problem.  The problem that may seem linguistic in nature may have its real roots in character psychology.  The problem that may seem a matter of ill-defined character may actually be one of structure.  The thematic flaw may prove simply mishandled within the language used to express it.  The solution that is revealed when you think you're at the copy-editing stage may be one with its true roots all the way back to a needing a different narrative point of view.  The point is we must be open to re-imaging text at times.  We must see it from new perspectives.  A universal need in all revision for writers of every type of material is a kind of perspective-based optical illusion--the need to step outside the writer's vision and achieve success in reading the material as a reader will do.  Failure to do this will always result in a failed text.

(And a postscript--the film "Temple Grandin" can prove instructive to the writer as well, for its creators had to imagine ways to convey Grandin's perspective and did so with innovations that are clean, artistic, effective, and entirely transferable to the writer producing text.)

Editing--"Skipping the Door"

This is the opening paragraph to Sherman Alexie's short story "Breaking and Entering" as it appears in his book War Dances:

"Back in college, when I was first learning how to edit film--how to construct a scene--my professor, Mr. Baron, said to me, 'You don't have to show people using a door to walk into a room.  If people are already in the room, the audience will understand they didn't crawl through a window or drop from the ceiling or just materialize.  The audience uderstands that a door has been used--the eyes and mind will make the connection--so you can just skip the door.'

...'Skip the door' is a good piece of advice--a maxim, if you will--that I've applied to my entire editorial career, if not my entire life.  To state it in less poetic terms, one would say, 'An editor must omit all unnecessary information.'"

I read this after a long day during which many of my hours were spent editing other people's work and encouraging still others to consider undertaking substantial editing on their own.  If only we all had this text in common and I could have typed "Skip the door," and they all would have known precisely what I meant, and thereby I could have edited a good deal of myself.  Of course such shorthand rarely exists, at least not outside the context of contained classroom, one where the good students will, after years have passed, find themselves writing extraneous material when suddenly they remember a teacher telling them to "Skip the door," perhaps even skipping as (s)he says the phrase like Alexie's character does, and they'll begin the necessary and satisfying task of striking through sentence after sentence, watching language curl and skrink like bacon in a frying pan.

Recommended Reading: Townie Andre Dubus III

Townie, the recently released memoir by Andre Dubus III is a must read if you fit any of the following (and a damn good read even if you don't):

• You are a fan of either Andre Dubus III or of his father, famed short story and novella writer Andre Dubus.  Townie forces you to see both men in a new light and a new context.  Personally, I've long struggled separating my literary heroes as I imagine them via reading their work from the living people they were/are.  I've met a few; the page and the skin don't always match up.  This memoir is a good reminder of that danger and a reminder of the frailty of all humans.  I've long been guilty of nearly worshipping Andre Dubus's stories.  It is good to remember he was a man, but my god those stories.  And a good reminder that his son has written  work every bit as compelling for our time as his father did for his.

• If you grew up in the 70s.  I have seldom read work that better conveys a 70s childhood--that time that was scary for many of his simply because the world had gone a bit quiet after Vietnam and the tumult of the 60's and we turned inward more than we should have, turned away from the shame of a war we should not have fought, a failed presidency, an uncertain but foreboding Cold War--turned instead within the very real and very sad daily life of dying towns and dying industries and a widening gap between rich and poor.
• You were a boy who were bullied or bullied others.  You would be hard pressed to find a book more capable of focusing on the everyday violence that rises out of this culture or one better at presenting a man who learns to curb his own desire to find power (and to right wrongs) with his fists.

Townie is a book that will stay with you.  Even if you feel you have no connection to the 70s, to either Dubus, to hardscrabble New England towns filled with thugs and drunks and complacent acceptance of failure, the book can touch you and make you think about the culture we have created and our propensity for violence (and maybe its opposite).

Ten Rules for Writing: Anne Enright

Anne Enright  (from The Guardian)
1 The first 12 years are the worst.
2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
6 Try to be accurate about stuff.
7 Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
8 You can also do all that with whiskey.
9 Have fun.
10 Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not ­counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.

‘Visit From Goon Squad’ Wins Critics Award - NYTimes.com

‘Visit From Goon Squad’ Wins Critics Award - NYTimes.com Yeah!!! I love this book. I've become its champion. Egan is simply brilliant, as GOON SQUAD and her earlier novels abundantly prove.

Convertible Bison

I know you thought this couple has to be from Wyoming, but in fact it is more evidence that Canadians may be crazier than Wyomingites.

Roddy Doyle: 10 Rules for Writing

Roddy Doyle (from The Guardian)

1 Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

2 Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph.

3 Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it's the job.

4 Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.

5 Do restrict your browsing to a few websites a day. Don't go near the online bookies – unless it's research.

6 Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said".

7 Do, occasionally, give in to temptation. Wash the kitchen floor, hang out the washing. It's research.

8 Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments.

9 Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven't written yet.

10 Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog – "He divides his time between Kabul and Tierra del Fuego." But then get back to work.

Rembering the Wisdom of a Mentor

Working on revision today, slugging through fat manuscripts and trying to find their zits and scars and blemishes, I'm reminded of a story a mentor, Don Murray, used to tell about how he could walk into an unfamiliar newsroom, observe reporters at work for the span of walking to the editor's office, and then boast to the editor that he could identify for him who the best writers in the room were.  Editors, shocked at Murray's accuracy asked him how he knew.  "I watched them while they wrote," he said.  "With the good ones, their lips move as they read their work."

I don't always know if my work is good or not, but I know this morning that my lips are moving.

Vonnegut Writing Rules

In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Kurt Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

• Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

• Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

• Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

• Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

• Start as close to the end as possible.

• Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

• Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

• Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Is This the Culture We Want?

A random compendium from a string of news stories in the cycle today:  a London opera about the life of Anna Nicole Smith, a lock of Justin Bieber's hair is auctioned for $40,000 (albeit for charity), a Detroit official has proposed one means of meeting budget needs is to cut funding for HALF of the city's schools, Fox News releases two likely Republican presidential candidates from its payroll (but continues to employ three others, two with their own weekly shows--no platform there, and clearly unbiased news gathering), oh, and yeah, don't forget Libya is bombing its own people for wanting democracy.

Let's hope the Libyan protesters succeed and win their freedom, and let's hope they form a democratic society to a bit higher standards than much of the west has done.  The Tunisians, now helping feed and house tens of thousands of fleeing Libyans seem to have set the real standard even in their fledgling days as newly freed people.  Should we have high hopes for Libyan futures?  Not if Iraq and Afghanistan are our measurements, or if by those examples, certainly not so if the west remains involved in the "nation-building" that follows, which essentially amounts to funding corruption in all corners.  I know we are more than the stuff that wants operas on big-breasted nude models and memorabilia from plastic-molded teenagers, but you have to wonder, is this any culture to aspire to?

Borders Bankruptcy

As industry experts have been suggesting for months, Borders recently filled for bankruptcy.  How this goes, we'll have to wait and see, but part of their initial reorganization is to close a number of stores.  Having been back to our last hometown in Colorado last week, one begins to imagine the scenario, for there they have already announced that store's closing.  In this instance, it will leave a town of something like 75,000 people without a retail store aside from a small independent primarily devoted to textbook sales near a college campus.  I'm a great believer in independent book stores, and this one received a great deal of my business when I lived there, but it attracts a small and focused customer base at best.  The real result will be a continued movement towards on-line purchase and ebook purchases.  The only brick and mortar option will be a Barnes and Noble (aside from a B & N on campus where almost no one but students venture) some twenty miles away.  I know this is the inevitable movement of the industry, and I've voiced my qualms of chain book stores before, however, will we all want to move towards electronic books all the time or the environmental expense of warehouse to doorstep delivery as we support one behemoth on-line retailer.  I want a world back with options, one with quirky, independent retailers who know their books and know their community.  Somehow the likely failure of Borders is likely to make my wants more remote rather than more possible.  With every retail collapse, be it a giant or an independent, how many readers does the market lose?

Beam Me Up

Beam Me Up
Originally uploaded by theWORDwright

From a recent trip to AZ. Perhaps the vortex has become visible?

Small Bookstores Struggle for Niche in Shifting Times - NYTimes.com

Small Bookstores Struggle for Niche in Shifting Times - NYTimes.com

Your Own Worst Enemy

There will be days (weeks?) when you will hate everything that you write.  The only real solution I have found to this inevitability is to write some more.

NewPages Blog: Literature Rewards Patience

There are rewards for slowing down. This post from "New Letters" echoes something that a writer friend and I have been talking about a great deal lately--the need for deep reflection in an age where most everything happens at lightning speed. NewPages Blog: Literature Rewards Patience

Solitude vs. The Hermit Who Forgets to Shower

I've been having something of an ongoing conversation with two writer friends lately.  It's a serious conversation that has important impact on our writing, although we toss in lots of jokes to take the edge off and because we tend to know ourselves and our writerly depressive tendencies well enough to be suspicious of ourselves.  We tend to know that we're capable of never leaving the house, of forgetting to shower and forgetting to breath when the world seems suddenly and surprisingly either a) extraordinarily clear or b) baffling in its complexity.  The conversation is about a writer's need for solitude--that tremendous gift of personal space for long thoughts (which often suggests either neglecting other parts of our lives, failing abjectly at "normalcy," either having money or not caring about money, and generally swimming against the "see me now" tide of the larger culture).  I can only speak for myself, of course.  But I need quiet and time alone to write.  I'm a slow thinker and I need a certain amount of space and time to allow thoughts to form fully.  I need contemplation.  Without it, I'm sunk--both mentally in general and certainly as a writer who (don't say it!) values serious ideas.  I'm painfully aware that the surrounding world is a cacophony of noise (much of it meaningless) and this cacophonous climate that too often can seem intoxicating.  It is a surrounding world that wants action to happen fast, that moves from one thing to the next as quickly as synapses fire, a world that demands attention--all traits that lean against the flimsy framework required by writers asking hard questions about how humans think and work and view themselves and others.

This focus on the need for solitude is an old topic among writers, one perhaps best articulated by Virginia Woolf.  I, at least, need a room of my own to work.  It's the balance point that becomes difficult if one has a lifestyle that allows certain room for contemplative time, for in my experience, with such time and space it is easy to fall entirely into the work, to become swallowed by the book you are writing and largely loose touch with the remainder of the world.  It's easy as well to become to caught inside the mind and all those shouting voices, those contradictions and chaotic arguments.  It's important to resurface.  The most important writers must also be full participants in the actual world if they are to write effectively about the human condition.  We have to participate in community.  Real community.  Increasingly, because nearly all of marketing now falls back upon the writer individually, there must be participation in that larger, less real community of the marketplace as well.  These are competing forces, the need for quiet and solitude and the need for interaction and stimulation, and they are forces that shouldn't be taken lightly.  Finding balance between them isn't as easy to accomplish as the outsider might think.

I am a great believer in balance in all aspects of my life.  We are a culture full of people who too easily get knocked off balance, a culture that tends to go to extremes, for better or for worse.  I've always preferred finding the middle path.  And in this instance, finding a balance point between participating in a culture and contemplating that culture is a requirement for my personal approach to craft.  Part of the trick becomes finding working mechanisms that help me maintain such a balance, tricks that usually come down to little, common sense things like staying on a firm writing schedule, putting writing first before listening to the cacophony of noise out there, taking the long view with writing by working everyday within the immediate, choosing writing projects that can I can remain passionate about throughout, saying thanks each day for the people in my life who believe in me and allow me space to pursue this maddness called writing.