Musings from the Third Half

On Happiness

2011-06-14T18:57:00.000-07:00

Happiness has been in the news lately. My own town of Somerville, MA is the first city in the USA to include questions about happiness in its local census. One of the research goals is to find out what local factors may be related to a person’s state of well-being. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/us/01happiness.html. In England and France similar questions are being asked.

Gretchen Rubin in her best selling book, The Happiness Project, and a similarly named blog http://www.happiness-project.com/ shares her ten personal commandments for happiness and a slew of articles that translate her abstract principles into the practical.

Last week, in our local paper, Richard Griffin expanded the concept into “Elements for bringing happiness in later life.” http://www.wickedlocal.com/somerville/news/x311054268/Griffin-Apply-Somervilles-happiness-survey-to-later-life#axzz1PImWVPem.

I remember what a sensation Charles M. Schultz’ Happiness is a Warm Puppy (1962) caused. It was a book of sweet aphorisms all beginning with “Happiness is…” (first edition available on Ebay for $130), We all came up with our own versions. It’s natural that satire would also result from this sappy concept. Apparently, the Beatles song, “Happiness is a warm gun,” was inspired by the cover of a gun magazine (probably not satire). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_Is_a_Warm_Gun.

But an interest in happiness is rooted in our own “Declaration of Independence.” We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/freedom/doi/text.html

Is happiness always a desirable state? According a research brief in the June 2011 Monitor (American Psychological Association, http://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/06/inbrief.aspx ), “Happiness may not fend off depression in Asian cultures as it does in Western cultures” because happiness may be seen as a “precursor to jealousy and disharmony with friends and family.”

Research also suggests that genetics plays a part in about half of our ability to be happy. http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/11/the-happiness-i.html. That still leaves the other half.

And then there is spiritual enlightenment. http://www.chopra.com/happinessrx.

I believe I am one of those people who tend more towards happiness, at least in this third halfof my life. I am told I was a very happy baby, I recall a generally happy childhood, followed by a supremely miserable adolescence, and a very up and down early adulthood. My best friend and I even charted our level of contentment from day to day. Our moods were generally a result of how well the boys we had our eye on responded to us. I eventually landed the target of my affection and fell in love (and then out of love); she did not. But she seems very happy now.

As a consequence of my natural disposition and relative good fortune (partly the result of good planning, partly of luck and geneti cs) I don’t find myself thinking about how I could be happier. I gravitate towards things that give me pleasure and meaning and away from things that bore me or irritate me. To some degree I put off the undesirable, from the daunting, such as the need to downsize, to the more mundane and every day, such as doctors’ appointments, housecleaning, and maintaining my email inbox. Spending time with good friends and family gives me great happiness, and those people need not be all sunshine and light themselves as long as they engage in life and take responsibility for their own actions. I am happy when I challenge myself and continue to grow as a person.

Thus, I am embarking on a new stage of my writing career that may take me away from this blog for awhile or severely limit my ability to create new entries. For the next year I will be part of a pilot program for novelists—those of us with a completed draft. We will share and receive critiques from our fellow students and instructors, analyze books already in print, and read about writing, among other activities. There may be times that the stress of reading nine draft novels not of our choosing in 10 weeks (in the summer no less), or hearing harsh words, or having assignments will not induce a state of happiness, especially on top of life’s other duties (such as paid work). I may wonder why I brought this burden on myself. But I do believe that in the end I will be happier for having stretched myself. And I might even find out whether getting a novel published will lead to that ultimate state of American nirvana, known as success.

On Dancing without the Stars

2011-05-30T18:40:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple of months, I’ve taken a semi-hiatus from writing. It hasn’t been a complete separation—more like a vacation where you stay in touch with your colleagues through email. I’ve kept up with my blog, participated in my bi-weekly writers' group, and completed some rough editing on a draft of a novel. But I’ve rediscovered my 80s dancing persona. Actually, it started with folk dancing in college and the years immediately following, with a twice weekly habit the year I lived in London. I even went to Maine Folk Dance Camp, where in my mid-20s, I was one of the younger attendees.

In the late 70s, I saw "Saturday Night Fever" and fell in love with disco. After 30 classes, satin jeans, and practice sessions at Faces, a now decaying club on Route 2, I had to concede that disco had lost its steam, so I switched to swing—-reminiscent of my grade school jitterbug days. And then on it went, through foxtrot, cha-cha, rumba, waltz, meringue, samba, mambo, salsa, all the way through Argentine Tango V. I'm sorry to say that most of that kinesthetic knowledge has faded in the two intervening decades. Other than the basics of ballroom, the only dance that really stuck was swing.

A few years ago, a writing friend introduced me to a local dive frequented by middle-aged patrons listening to middle aged bands at a sensible hour on the weekend. But it was a rocking good time. The ladies and I would get up to dance to the bluesy, r&B, country, honkey-tonk, or doo-wop sounds. Every once in awhile, my husband would come along, and we would trot out the old swing moves-—often the only ones on the floor to do so. Over time, more couples joined us, and we were no longer an anomoly. But I went only every couple of weeks, sometimes skipping weeks in a row.

Until this February when I became the dancing queen. It coincided with my fitness kick—-my weekly butt-killiing sessions with a trainer, my losing five pounds, my cutting out all sugar except for my daily square of chocolate. But the exercise factor became a side benefit of the more central fun factor. And the fun factor was a result of that great epiphany of one’s middle years—that the space between us and death is narrowiing.

So to the Saturday sessions I added the more mellow late Sunday afternoon set (for which you didn’t need earplugs but you definitely needed a glass of wine), the twice monthly Saturday afternoon with an Irish-Cajun band at a long-standing Cambridge pub (where a waltz or a polka is a possibility and a beer, a necessity), and then Wednesdays in the gospel-like atmosphere of the “Church of Fred” in an even tinier bar where the lead singer sashays down the narrow aisle, and we all chant the chorus. The repertoire becomes as familiar as the faces of the other regulars.

Only the first bar has something ressembling a dance floor. In the others, space is at a premium, but we push back a few chairs and make do. Sometimes, there are later night sessions at actual music venues with cover charges, or heaven forbid, the odd foray to a real dance, where everyone knows how to do two-step and zydeco and the dancers flow counter-clockwise around the room. There are casual and surprising opportunities to dance. Two weekends ago my town held a “Porchfest,” with 75 bands playing on front porches to the sidewalk audiences. And just this past weekend we attended a music festival where we danced a marathon eight hours.

All this activity doesn’t leave a lot of time for writing, but oh, the stories I am gathering and the characters I have met, liked the grizzled fellow with a missing tooth and alcoholic breath but some cool dance moves. Although I will always love dancing as long as I am physically able, I suspect that my recent frenzy will die down one day—maybe soon or maybe later. For now, my explanations of how I spend my time in my advancing years elicit surprise, sometimes envy. It makes more sense in these "Dancing with the Stars" days. But to those of you who remain skeptical, pick your venue from the above and join me. You, too, may become a convert. And if not, I can get you home early enough to use your evening in another way.

On the Joys of Texting

2011-05-10T19:29:00.000-07:00

I never thought I would be a convert to texting. Just a couple of months ago I scorned it, not so much as a form of communication, but because of the way it seems to take over some people’s lives. Since when did it become permissable to be in someone else’s physical company and be so absorbed talking to an invisible presence on the other side of cyber space? Since when did my generation become such fuddy-duddies? Remember how our parents rolled their eyes at our transistor radios, at our endless phone conversations?

And then my cell phone stopped working. I decided to replace it with a phone with a keyboard—not a very smart phone, but just one with a little extra functionality. It would be good for making arrangements, I figured. So I paid the extra bucks for a texting plan.

One evening not long after I succumbed, I was in New York on business and decided to eat out in a restaurant I had visited before. It was a one menu, steak-frites French bistro on Lexington frequented mostly by twosomes and threesomes. I noted a lone woman across for me, her face buried in a book. I felt sorry for her. I’d had a demanding day and was content to sit with my glass of house red, waiting for my dinner and eavesdropping on the couple next to me. Then I had the urge to share my experience in an un obtrusive way. Remembering that a colleague/friend had recommended this place to me, I decided to text her, and we had the following conversation.

--I’m sitting in the steak-frites place by myself and thought of you. Tiring day at x, and oh the noise level. Now enjoying my much needed glass of wine. Dinner is served. So goodbye.

--Oh! So glad you are there! Wish I were there, too. Bon appetit!

--I ate a few extra fries and mustard coated steak on your behalf. May consider dessert…

--Yum-I can almost taste. Dreaming of profiteroles.

--Tx for the inspiration. Profiteroles it was. Pure contentment. Stresses of the day all gone! Back to the room for “What not to Wear.”

--That is a perfect evening after a loud day. Enjoy the rest of your trip.

Hardly deep, yet I felt unusually satisfied with the exchange. I felt less alone.

My texting audience is still minimal and consists mainly of a tiny handful of younger friends and friends with grown children whose only mode of speaking to their parents is the text message. I still use it mainly to make or confirm plans, to announce arrival times. But it’s also good for a rant.

While traveling this last week, I had an annoying flight delay of three hours in DC. I texted another friend, who was also away from home.

--Stuck in airport til 10pm. F**k. If u r free at any point, pls phone & entertain me!

Note that I have begun to use some texting shorthand, despite a full keyboard. The message resulted in a voice mail to me due to my being in a temporary dead zone, but I was able to return the call and have a nice chat to fill the time. Later, when my flight was cancelled, I felt an even stronger need to rage to the same friend (who also began texting about the same time as me, despite a phone without a full keyboard.)

--Adventures in flying. While knocking back 2nd scotch, flight cancelled unbeknownst to me. Spent hellish hour rebooking. On plane.

I got some sympathy, too. Short but sweet.

--Ouch!

Today’s messages consisted of advising a family member from London about places to visit on Cape Cod in the rain. Texting on the international number is cheaper than phoning.

Why not phone or email, my non-texting friends would ask? Typing on a tiny keypad seems so inefficient and unnecessary, almost primitive. Is this progress? And that would have been my reaction a few weeks ago. But if you don’t have a smartphone or Blackberry, you don’t have access to your email at all times. Compared to phoning, texting puts less pressure on the person to provide a lengthy response or to give an excuse if it’s not a good time to talk or they just don’t feel like talking. You can look at a text at your leisure, compose your pithy reply. Best of all, you have a written record of what you said, what they said, even if it’s not great literature.

I’ve come to enjoy the the phone’s tuneful announcement that a message awaits me. Although my husband teased me this evening about knocking out a text as we were sitting on the sofa together, I promise that I will not become a set of thumbs walking down the street, oblivious to my environment and the live person strolling next to me. I will not become a slave to the technology, just because it’s there. I promise! But maybe I can persuade my husband to add a text plan to his cell service so we can send each other little notes..

On a Recipe for Sustaining a Long-Term Relationship

2011-04-21T19:13:00.000-07:00

• Be interested in each other’s lives, even the mundane at times.
• Encourage and support each other; sometimes all it takes is listening, sometimes a gentle push.
• Share a common core of enjoyable activities, but maintain or develop your own interests.
• Learn to enjoy a new activity that is important to the other person, even if it’s one you might not have chosen yourself.
• Respect each other’s privacy, need for space, and time alone or with other friends.
• Never go to bed angry.
• Be frequently affectionate with each other—lots of hugging, kissing, hand holding, and snuggling that doesn’t always signal sex, but just genuine caring.
• Amuse, entertain, and playfully tease each other; find ways to make each other laugh. A lot.
• Take an interest in the other person’s opinions—about current events, books read, movies or plays watched. Challenge each other intellectually.
• Go on at least one “date” a week outside the house.
• Find time for each other every day (no multi-tasking!)
• Appreciate each other sincerely—do not take the other person for granted. Tell that person you love them regularly, remind them of their great qualities, compliment them.
• Find a way to work out your financials—not necessariy merging everything into common accounts, especially if starting out later in life. Money should not become a target for argument.
• Discuss your hopes, dreams, and long term visions for your lives together—to keep yourselves on the same page as you get older.
• Figure out which battles are most worth fighting for and leave the rest alone.
• Give and take.
• Be honest, but not unkind.

On Maintaining the Garden of Friendship

2011-04-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

As the weather warms and green shoots poke through the ground, I know it will soon be time to reconsider the garden. Regardless of what I choose to do, the perenniels will reemerge—some in perfection; others, overtaking and crowding out their neighbors; yet others, spindly and dying. I can sit back and see what happens, or I can take charge and decide what will make this a pleasing space. It will take work; I will have to cut back last year’s tangles, mulch, weed, and deadhead.

I can be ruthless and rip out plants that no longer work for me or have lived their useful lifespan, either leaving the space bare or replacing them. At first, I can’t be certain about the new choices. They look pretty enough in the catalogue, but who knows how they will turn out. They, especially, will need nurturing to reach their potential and flourish on their own. It’s a risk. Maybe I shouldn’t have junked the known quantity so quickly—the plant I destroyed. Maybe it was salvagable if I’d treated it differently.

Of course, there are the annuals—they are colorful all summer and bring me joy, but with their shallow roots, they need even more attention if they are to persist even the length of the season. Still, it’s the mix I like, and that’s the price I pay.

My friends are like the plants in my garden. There are those I have known for years and can count on to continue to be there for me (as I will for them). Although I can neglect them for periods of time, I cannot take them for granted.

Other friendships will die a natural death. We no longer have anything meaningful to give each other.

Then there are those I struggle with. These friendships may still have some life, but can I reap from them what I sow? Will I end up resenting them rather than being grateful?

The annuals of friendship are often associated with specific settings and add a sense of fun and belonging, but they can’t be counted on in difficult times. I’ll enjoy these for what they are, not investing much and not expecting much either.

Finally, there are the new friendships—few and far between these days. I think carefully about these and what they will add to my already rich bounty. They will take time from my existing friendships before I know their promise.

As someone who evaluates the merit of programs for a living, I have four simple criteria for considering the worth of my friends in my life. I know there are other characteristics we might expect from long-term friends, but the following can be applied even to newish friends.

Emotional Honesty: Can we be truthful with each other? Are we “real?” That does not mean we share every secret, but it does mean we do not disguise who we are and that we can be comfortable in our skins around each other.

Appreciation/Acknowledgement: Do we say nice, but sincere things to each other? Do we acknowledge the importance of the friendship?

Responsiveness: Is there a give and take to our communications? Do we listen and react to the other person and not keep the show focused on ourselves? Do we take an interest in each others’ lives?

Enthusiasm: Are we excited to hear from or see each other?

I look forward to cultivating both of my gardens, and by the end of May, I hope to invite friends—both old and new—to bear witness to the results.

On Remembering Beth: A Conversation between Belle and Pippa

2011-03-16T20:11:00.001-07:00

March 16 was the eighth anniversary of the death of Beth Brett, sister to Belle and mother to Pippa. To commemorate this occasion Belle (who lives in Boston)and Pippa (a resident of Edinburgh, Scotland) held a conversation about Beth and the influences she had on each of them. Like Belle, Pippa is also a writer www.pippagoldschmidt.co.uk. The conversation took place at the Franconia Inn in Franconia, New Hampshire, where the family spent Christmas of 2000, the year before Beth was diagnosed with cancer. We all remember it as a happy time.

Which of Beth's qualities do you most admire and remember her for?

Belle: I would say her exuberance for life.

Pippa: Her determined and clear vision about what she wanted to do. It wasn't easy but she worked hard to run a creative business and make a living while still maintaining control.

Belle: She was an excellent model for running her own business. Another quality I admire her for is her prodigious creativity. She turned out sketch after sketch. Her output really hit home when we went through her archives after her death.

Pippa: Yes, part of my growing up was to be surrounded by sketches.

Belle: How did that example make you think about your own needs and capacilties?

Pippa: You need to be determined and work hard to shape vague ideas into something real and concrete. It also made me realize you can follow your own ideas and don't have to be subsumed into something else, and also that other people will find that interesting. If you work hard at shaping a vision, whether clothes or writing—it takes a lot of work to shape something that is uniquely yours.

What was the most influential thing?

Pippa: Seeing her work at it—the cost and effort. That has its own rewards and efforts—the doing of the thing. When I relate it back to my own work, the doing of the writing gets more and more interesting as I learn more about how to do it.

Belle: I would say a third quality I admire was Beth's capacity to be a really good friend. She could listen, but she was also interesting and funny. She had a natural spontaneous wit and was good with wordplay. She actually had the skill to be a writer. She fed off of others. Her stories about the ragtrade were hilarious. I would have been interested to see her memoir.

Pippa: She loved reading. We would quote chunks of Catcher in the Rye together.

Belle: What appealed to her about Catcher?

Pippa: The wordplay, the expressions. It was an honest, truthful portrayal about fitting into the outside world. It showed me the world of New York City in the fifties.

Belle: That book showed me I wsasn't repressed! So many of my female classmates thought it was disgusting, and I found it funny. It is difficult to achieve that kind of a distinct voice.

Pippa: We shared a lot of books. One book I read first was Jane Gardam's A Long Way from Verona about a young girl growing up in wartime. It is another book with a strong voice. Another book we all read was Frost in May by Antonio White. Dad brought it home. On the surface it was just a school story, but it's about trying to work out one's personal morality. It's beautifully written.

Any other qualities Beth had that stand out for you and serve as influences?

Pippa: Another quality she had was determination. She would stick with something in face of difficulties. Even when she had bad selling seasons she wouldn't give up on it. She had huge tenacity.

Belle: That's something I have trouble with as a writer. All that rejection.

Pippa: It's a mistake to see external rejection as failure. It has nothing to do with you as a writer. You have to look within yourself for success or failure.
Mum appreciated her own talent. That allows you to fare in times of difficulty. It was damn annoying and upsetting at times. But she never got stuck in a rut. She always found new ways be to be inventive. It's easy to feel comfortable with what you are doing and then become loathe to get away from your style. She was very alert to different ways of making a living.

Belle: You've had the advantage of already getting some external recognition as a writer, through being published and your in-house writing residency at the University of Edinburgh.

Pippa: I was surprised that people found my fiction writing related to science was the most interesting part of my writing. It did give me a niche, and the writer in residency consolidated that.

What was your trajectory as a writer?

Belle: I started creating stories as a child--they were more like graphic novels, which I drew. I just never wrote the words down, but spoke them out loud. And then in high school my two favorite assignments had to do with creative writing, but it took me a long while before I figured out that was something I wanted to do. I envied Beth because from a very young age she knew she wanted to be a fashion designer. In contrast, I was such a dilletante until recently.

Pippa: I tried to write as a student, but I didn't have the time or ability. At age 25, I did evening classes and wrote my first complete story at about 28. Then I began to do a lot of writing and at age 30 went on my first residential course/retreat. After Mum died, I stopped for awhile, but got back to it within a year. I was trying to work on a novel. I wrote sad stories.

Belle: After Beth passed away, my creativity dried up for a couple of years. Then I realized that life is short, there is no Godot, and I had to stop making excuses for myself.

Pippa: Mum expanded her own horizons until she couldn't do it anymore. She wrung every bit from life. When I was young and would say I was bored, Mum railed at me--do something! You have so many things! I would sit under her ironing board while she was working.

Belle: Why did you choose science?

Pippa: I think I wanted to differentiate myself from parents. It helps to avoid comparisons.

Belle: And the writing?

Pippa: Writing was a deep-seated passion. But you need such solitude for it. You also need experience doing different things in different ways before settling down.

Beth--Thanks for all you gave us. RIP.

On Writing What You Know

2011-03-06T19:18:00.000-08:00

CN Nevets in a February 3 blog post talks about the concept of “writing what you know.” He concludes that “writing what you know or writing authentically means knowing enough about what you’re writing that even if you’ve never experieneced it yourself before, your readers will feel as if they have through your story.” He suggests that this kind of authenticity can come through understanding the emotions being conveyed, not being over confident with the details you pick up from your research, and knowing when facts or details may not be important or relevant.

In thinking about my own writing, I realized that I use the concept of “writing what you know” in slightly different ways.

Writing characters you know: In life, we meet people who are so distinctive that they were just born to be in novels. Their style of speech, their mannerisms, the roles they play offer us jumping off points for imagination. My novel set in Japan is populated with distinctive, secondary characters based on people I met while working there many years ago. However, neither the protagonist nor the antagonist, who occupy center stage, are based on real people.

Writing places you know: Many a writer makes his or her living setting much of their work in their hometowns or other familiar places. Think Anne Tyler and Baltimore, or Robert Parker and Boston in the Spencer for Hire series. In these books, place often becomes a character. I am most comfortable setting my work in places I have lived or visited, but because my knowledge may extend back to another era, I frequently find myself needing to do research to get the details right, such not having a character visit a place that didn’t yet exist.

Writing time periods you know: If you write stories set only in the current time, you still need to understand how the history of characters who are older or younger than you will have an impact on their world view. Those of us with any life experience know people of different ages and can generally try to represent those views. However, when writing about an earlier time in one’s life, the challenges are greater. Coupled with some good research, we may be able to capture the essence and even some of the details of those times, but it is easy to misremember our own pasts and how we acted or felt, and perhaps even harder to present characters not of our generation.

Writing about experiences you’ve had: As the basis for a whole story, writing from real life has its pitfalls because of the tendency to want to tell a story as it was (in which case, write a memoir!) Real experiences don’t always have the necessary plot or arc to maintain reader interest. Thus, the writer may need to veer off substantially from the way things actually happened. And just because something happened doesn’t make it believable. Real experiences can be used in a variety of ways in telling a story, and for me always serve as a trigger for my writing. In a recent short story, I used something I’d witnessed as the inciting incident of the plot. My Japan novel is liberally sprinkled with things that I actually experienced that give the story its texture, but they do not provide the spine of the story. In contrast, in my young adult novel, real events provide a structure on which to hang the plot although the plot is entirely fictional. Finally, in my novel about the adventures of two women in midlife, real experiences inspired many key plot points.

Writing emotions you know or understand. Building on Nevets point, above all else, I believe that the success of a story that is character driven rests on the authenticity of the emotions of those characters. Simply put, do we buy it, even if the story takes place in an unfamiliar world and time?

On the Medium Is the Message

2011-02-28T19:24:00.000-08:00

I wonder what Marshall MacLuen would have said about today’s variety of ways for people to connect interactively with each other. Would he label some methods as hot and some as cool? Of course, his observation that “the medium is the message” referred to passive communication, such as watching television or reading.

As a writer, I am intrigued about how we express ourselves differently in different forms, and what these form allow us to convey about ourselves both in terms of content and personality. I am particularly considering four modes of communicating, several the courtesy of social networking, but each of which requires a response (as opposed to blogging or tweeting, which invite responses but do not require them.)

This week I had a chance to explore through a sample of two (researcher that I am) how my theory played out. In one case, I “chatted,” had a lengthy phone conversation (not through Skype, which does add a new dimension to talking on the phone, but still, I maintain, is not the same as talking in person), and exchanged messages with an old friend I hadn’t seen in years, but with whom I had always had a great connection. The other case was someone with whom I was establishing a new friendship. We had seen each other informally but not talked much, exchanged a few emails/messages previously; then we “chatted” and finally talked by phone.

Here are my thoughts about the pros and cons of each of these:

Email/messages through Facebook: Provides an opportunity for organizing thoughts, error free if so desired. Emails/messages allow the writer to expand on an idea, if so desired, without interruption. It works when no immediate response is required. It’s easy to miscommunicate tone, thus sometimes requiring the use of emoticons or excessive numbers of exclamation points. Although emails/messages can be informal, they are more distancing than other modes because of the passage of time between interactions. (Sometimes, emails/Facebook messages can be traded back and forth quickly, acting more like texting or chatting, but because there are no expectations about an immediate reply, they are not the same.) And sometimes no reply ever comes. Did the message get lost in cyberspace, end up by mistake in the recipient’s “trash,” or glossed over because other messages came in later.

Texting/chatting through Facebook: These two media require an immediate reaction. The quickness and short length of responses invite writers to exchange clever repartee. There is potential for playfulness. Because of the feeling of confidentiality and also because chatting is detached from face and voice, writers may be more at ease to be personally revealing than they might in a phone call. Or they may be more superficial. In addition, one can take a little time to formulate a response. Unlike in a phone call (unless one adopts the practice of taking notes!), one can keep track of thread of the conversation. It reminds me of exchanging notes in study hall.

Phone(calls of substance, not making arrangements: For introverts, phone calls can be stressful, but with good friends, they can be delightful and energizing. My sister, who was very extroverted, used to talk about those who “gave good phone.” As an introvert myself, I do envy people with quick wit. I suffer more from “l’esprit d’escalier “ (the spirit of the staircase), when I think of all the fun things I could have said after I hung up. But phone calls can take many different tones, depending on the reasons for the call (catching up, discussing one another’s issues, gossipping). The pace and flow of the conversation is sometimes determined by one party, more than another. Silence is deadly. But you can multi-task.

But none of these is a replacement for in person communication. Body language. Gesture. Facial expression. Tone. You get the whole package. Permissible silences in which you can fill space with actions like taking a sip of a drink or just smiling. Sometimes the other methods will have to do, but this is the real deal. Hot and cool.

On How Do You Know When the Story is Done?

2011-02-12T09:28:00.000-08:00

You know when the roast is ready when the internal temperature reaches 165 degrees; the quiche, when the knife comes out clean. The pasta and veggies are cooked when sampling indicates they are appropriately chewy or crisp, respectively.

But how do you know when your story is ready for submission?

Your critique group has given you multiple suggestions. One person tells you to “dwell” a little more when the protagonist meets the stranger for the first time; another doesn’t like the blonde you introduced on page 8. Someone else feels you should begin the story in a different place. You’ve been given ideas for extraneous words to delete. You revise and revise again, following some suggestions, ignoring others. As you are doing so, you get a couple of “aha” moments, which lead to some restructuring. All of a sudden, one of the ideas you had rejected now makes sense. You wonder what else you’ve missed.

You give it to a couple of other people to read. They like it, offer a few additional thoughts, maybe more minor this time. They find a few typos. You feel like you may be closing in. You search for those submission guidelines and find that your story is 500 words over the accepted limit. Time to tighten. You can’t believe how many long-winded phrases you manage to find, how you’ve inserted an unnecessary character who never appears again (but no one else mentioned), how the ending now seems too obvious. You manage to shave off 600 words. Is it enough? Of course, now you notice a mass of typos because of all the changes you’ve made. Although your husband is a great editor and proof reader, you are hesitant to give him your story in case he hates it. You like it, but you feel you’ve lost all objectivity.

So you save it in the folder on “works in progress,” and go back to the novel you were working on. No danger of that being finished to your satisfaction any time soon.

Then one day you casually mention to someone you have just met that you “write.” “Oh,” he says. “Have you published anything?” “Yes, one story,” you admit. Almost four years ago. One lousy story. Now you feel embarassed, ashamed that you even brought up the topic, even though you’ve been writing like a fiend during this time. You aren’t a dabbler. And it’s not because you’ve had rejection after rejection; it’s because you rarely sumbit work. On those few occasions when you scrambled to meet the deadline for a writing contest, your work did not receive any acknowledgement, and you allowed yourself to get discouraged. You rationalize that it takes time to find the right places, and for now you want to concentrate on perfecting your writing, on producing a substantial body of work.

You are reminded of your young English cousin who didn’t say a word until he was three, and then the first sentence he uttered upon seeing a freshly painted door was, “By jove, what a smashing green door.” A fully formed grammatical sentence. It caused a bit of a sensation. Perhaps you are hoping that when your horse leaves the gate (to change the metaphor), it will win its first race. A debut wonder. A best seller. But really, how many agents will consider you if you haven’t proven yourself in the marketplace? It doesn’t matter if you have a couple of dozen stories and three novels in the bottom drawer.

One published story is a good start. It was a decent journal. It means you’ve got some literary chops. At some point, you just have to trust yourself to say, “This is done enough,” and take the time to find the appropriate venues or get help in doing so. Submitting isn’t writing, but it is all part of the process, isn’t it? And let’s face it, you’re no spring chicken with a whole life ahead of you. After you’re gone, your bottom drawer, all your hard work, may be someone else’s recycling.Then you're really cooked.

On the Pros and Cons of My Kindle

2011-01-23T12:08:00.000-08:00

Like many thousands (millions?) of others, I recently received (at my request) a Kindle during this last holiday season. When it comes to technology, I am generally not an early adopter. I like to wait until the kinks and bumps are worked out, and mostly I like to wait until the price comes down. I never envisioned this little piece of hardware as replacing my book collection, but I could see its advantages. I was ready.

Having just completed my first Kindle book, I pass along my initial observations—the pros and cons, as I see them, compared to reading a “real” book. I should confess that I haven’t yet explored all the Kindle’s capabilities. Note that I am not comparing the Kindle to other e-reading devices (can it show things in color)or even considering it’s other uses, such as reading magazines or newspapers. This is Kindle Pros and Cons 101.

The Basic Pros

Size and weight—the new Kindle, even with a hard cover to protect it, weighs about the same as the average paperback but is smaller in dimension. It can fit easily into a small purse.

Capacity—there is no contest here. The Kindle can hold thousands of books. When it comes to travelling, I know which one I will take with me.

Instant ordering—No longer do I have to go into a store to purchase a book or order online and wait. The book I want is mine with a few keystrokes (as long as I have a wi-fi connection for which I don’t have to pay extra). The process of purchasing a book was unbelievably easy, even the first time I tried it. (Possible con—danger of over-ordering.)

Ability to change typesize—I hadn’t thought about this one before, but as my eyes age, the ability to change the size of the type is a Godsend, especially in low light conditions. The type is no longer blurry, reminding me that I might be ready for reading glasses.

Durability—The hard cover that my family so thoughtfully purchased with my Kindle acts as a shell to protect it from wear and tear. When I carry paperbacks around, the inevitably become dog-eared.

Ease of turning pages—A minimal amount of energy is require to turn pages forward or back—just as well since with the larger typeface, I need to turn pages every few seconds.

Keeping your place—When I reboot the Kindle, it always remembers where I last left off. For some reason, I am lazy about bookmarks and often forget where I am in book.

The Basic Cons

Lack of ease of browsing—Not having that great a memory, I like to refer back to people and incidents more than a few pages back. Although the Kindle allows for specific searches, provides a highlighter option, and no doubt other mechanisms that could help, it doesn’t allow for an organic search.

Lack of page numbers—The pages of a Kindle book do not correspond to the pages of the paper version. Instead, the Kindle informs you what percent of the book you have completed. Percents are all very well, but 10% of a 100 page book is very different from 10% of a 1000 page book. I want a sense of how long this book is going to occupy me. A little research onto the Amazon.com website will let me see the book’s actual page length, but it’s another piece of research.

Lack of a unique cover—Silly, maybe, but I like the distinctiveness of each book’s cover that keeps me rooted in what I am reading. In my first Kindle adventure, I was not familiar with the author, and it wasn’t until I finished the book that I read about her. I still can’t remember her name because the book isn’t sitting on my coffee table reminding me.

Battery operated—In its favor, the Kindle is a battery powerhouse. I read a whole book without any suggestion that the battery was low, but I was nevertheless aware that it could run out at an inconvenient moment. Of course, the solution is to keep it charged up for those long trips. But still, it’s one more thing to think about.

The effect of a lit screen on sleep—My unscientific observation is that the Kindle might disturb my ability to get to sleep. I have learned that I cannot work at my computer within an hour and a half of lights out. The week I read my Kindle novel, I had a hard time getting to sleep. Was that the excitement of the particular novel I was reading that got my juices flowing, or was it the electronic screen? Or was something else going on in my constitution? I wil need to try out my theory out with a less engrossing book.

The expense of loss—No one likes to lose a book, but losing a Kindle (or having it stolen) would be quite heartbreaking.

Lack of permanence—Despite the Kindle’s prodigious capacity, at some point I will want to eliminate titles. Maybe this act will be no worse than giving away or selling books, but there is something sad about blowing a book into cyberspace where no one else can enjoy it.

Despite my equal number of pros and cons, the pros definitely carry more weight, with capacity and typeface control winning the day. As with any new gadget, over time I will see how indispensable my Kindle will become and whether there will come a day when I cannot imagine my life without it. For now my immediate challenge is to decide what to order next for my upcoming trip. But while at home, I think I need to spend the next few years catching up with all the unread books on my shelves.

On 10 Lessons Learned (Maybe) and (Possible) Guiding Principles

2011-01-07T18:54:00.000-08:00

Most people don’t keep their New Year’s resolutions. So making them invites the possibility of feeling like a failure. I realized after reviewing my year as a writer (see my 1/1/11 blog entry) that while I hadn’t accomplished many of the “reso-goals” I set last January, I could credit myself with a number of other equally ambitious and valuable achievements.

January 1 is somewhat of an arbitrary time to set a course, especially for those of us whose schedule revolves more around the academic year. But because it marks the beginning of a new tax year, it represents a chance to clean out the files (both actual and mental) and consider one’s direction.

This year rather than setting specific and immutable writing-related goals, I am going to apply the analytical skills I use in my paid work and construct a list of lessons learned with some accompanying principles or recommendations in no particular order. Many of these may seem obvious (such as the value of reading for writers), but we often overlook the obvious, and one person’s obvious may be another’s aha moment. As I review my list, I am surprised at how many are inter-related.

1. Keeping a detailed record of my writing-related activities provides me with a sense of accomplishment and keeps me honest in a positive way. Even when I feel I haven’t been doing much to further my writing, all I have to do is review the diary. Good for me for doing this. Recommendation: Add a weekly tally of pages revised or written. Add reading about writing, such as articles, blogs on writing.

2. I thrive on variety. I am constitutionally unable to stay with just one project until it is finished before starting another one. There is nothing wrong with this as long as I don’t leave a string of abandoned projects because I am afraid to finish them and get them out there. Recommendation: Go with the flow. The point is to keep writing and to enjoy it. If this means flitting between projects, so be it.

3. Reading both for the pleasure of it and for learning about writing is a critical part of a writer’s education. I love to read and wish I weren’t so slow. I learn so much from reading good books (and the occasional bad one that has a terrific plot.) Recommendation: Keep the Kindle loaded up and take it everywhere. Keep TV viewing and magazine reading limited.

4. Workshops, conferences, readings and gatherings all provide a periodic inspirational shot in the arm. I no longer have an interest in committing to a ten-week course. I have my writers’ group, and I am a very self-motivated person, but it is helpful to focus on a specific writing issue occasionally and/or to be around others who also write, to learn from them, to be inspired by them. Recommendation: Try to find and attend at least one such event each month. It’s probably less important what it is than just to go to something.

5. Immersing myself in writing, especially in a location away from home, increases my productivity. Occasionally, while on vacation I have had the opportunity to write every day without the distraction of work and in a new environment. I may only write a couple of hours each day, but the consistency allows me to stay revved up and enthusiastic. In addition, it is a luxury to be able to write in the daytime while I am fresher. Recommendation: Build a writing-oriented vacation into my schedule at least once or twice a year, even if only for a few days at a time. Look into going on a writers’ retreat in some nice place.

6. Feedback is essential to becoming a better writer. I knew someone who wrote four novels but made little headway in getting any published. Later I found out that this person never asked anyone to critique his writing. Few people can be objective enough about their work to know whether or not something is working. Recommendation: Continue to seek out critique, not just from my writers’ group, which looks at 5 pages at a time, but from others who may be willing to read larger chunks at one go.

7. If I write after about 10:30 at night I have trouble sleeping. This one is tough because most evenings, the earliest I can really begin is 8:30, and sometimes the juices don’t really get going until 10pm. Recommendation: Start earlier and write regularly, so that even if I don’t spend more than an hour at it, the momentum is there. (See #5.) When possible, consider devoting some afternoon time in addition to the weekend, even when not on vacation.

8. I need to step away from my work for awhile to successfully revise. See #2. Because I have number of irons in the fire, I often leave one alone for awhile. The distance allows me to more critical of what I’ve done. Recommendation: Build in a DNA spiral of revision, even if it takes longer to complete a project. If possible, try to get through a full revision before moving on.

9. Blogging forces me to reflect in more depth about something I have been thinking about. I began blogging to create more of an external presence in my writer’s persona. But I have found it to be a useful personal forum for sorting out and capturing my thoughts. I know from a point of view of going after a readership, I need to do it more often, but that isn’t my primary goal at the moment. Maybe at some future date. Recommendation: I stuck with my goal of two a month last year, and I think that is a reasonable goal for this year.

10. They were right. Sometimes you just have to sit down and say I only have to write for 15 minutes. The key is sitting down, turning on the computer. When I haven’t had an opportunity to write, lack of confidence and doubt sets in. It’s the continuity that counts. Inevitably the 15 minutes turns into an hour (but see #7 for maximum end time in the evening.) Recommendation: As the Nike folks said, just do it!

My 2010 Writer's Year in Review

2011-01-01T19:24:00.000-08:00

How can I resist publishing something on 1/1/11!

I officially proclaim my activities in writing for 2010. Including my fourth quarter,as a writer, I:
• Participated in 24 sessions of my bi-weekly writer’s group, taking in pages every single time.
• Wrote 24 blog entries, not counting my check-ins.
• Attended 6 evening workshops, 2 full day writing conferences with multiple sessions, 4 writer’s party/networking type events, 4 readings.
• Wrote three flash fiction stories, which I submitted to contests (didn’t win), and completed one other short story.
• Completed 9th draft of one novel, involving some substantial revision to the opening, and had someone critique that version (almost final!!!) It had been critiqued as a whole previously by 5 people. Wrote a new query letter.
• Completed 3rd draft of another novel, and had three people critique whole novel (writers’ group has regularly been critiquing pages). Wrote a synopsis and revised chapter outline. Did some initial editing after the critique, especially to opening chapters to make characters more sympathetic. Needs cutting.
• Made substantial revisions to first four chapters (out of a 10 chapter novel) young adult novel begun many years ago.
• Not counting writing my blog entries, I wrote on 25% of days; adding in blogs, writers’ group, writing events, I did something related to writing on about 46% of days. Not bad given I had one of my hardest work years since I’ve been self-employed.

Here is what I said I would do last January (my reso-goals), and how well I did these things (or why I didn’t.)

1. Complete revisions of my novel on the travails of two women in their middle years (by March 1), obtain further critique from three trusted reviewers (by April 15), make final revisions, prepare manuscript to send out to agents by June 1. What happened: Completed revision (by mid-July) and obtained critique of three people. Because one of the critiquers was involved with me in development of the screenplay on which the novel is based, the timeline has been changed to suit her schedule better. Will have draft 4 ready by summer.
2. Write short synopsis and query letter to be reviewed by six people each. What happened: See above—not quite ready for prime time.
3. Research appropriate agents and send to 5 a month once manuscript is ready, for a total of 30, if needed by end of year. What happened: See above. But should have bit the bullet and done this with the first novel.
4. Write on average two blog entries a month (can cheat and make at least four of these primarily photographic in nature). What happened: SUCCESS!!! And I didn’t even cheat!
5. Write six new short stories for Maine collection (average length-4000 words), or approximately one every two months. What happened: Completed only one additional story in the series, but DID write three flash fictions, revise first novel, and make substantial progress in revising young adult novel (which was not part of the plan.)
6. Read on average one good novel a month (slow reader…)—already in my possession, used, or borrowed. Only buy new if attending a book signing. What happened: Pretty much met this goal. Maybe bought a couple more books than I said I would….
7. Spend at least 20 days in Maine to get inspired for #5. What happened: Spent 22 nights in Maine (over 8 trips) and went to the Maine Diner at least once on most of these trips (for inspiration!)
8. Skim through all magazines, reading only what really interests me (vague, I know—sometimes you have to go with your gut), and complete by end of month in which they arrive, in order to make time for 1-7. What happened: Better at this, but not quite there. Tend not to finish magazines if I am in the middle of a good book.

Biggest disappointment: Didn’t write that much fresh material this past year—most of it was revision. Also, only work submitted was the three flash fictions.

Biggest accomplishments: Believe that novel #1 is just days away from being ready for submission. Made a real breakthrough in presenting the protagonist in a more sympathetic light. Also, feel good about my discipline in writing my blogs regularly. Now to work on getting more of a readership!

On Creativity (or Lack of It) and the Common Cold

2010-12-26T14:19:00.000-08:00

Your throat thickens and then becomes scatchy, your nose begins to drip, your eyes water. You suck a zinc lozenge and sip a hot honey-lemon, hoping to stave it off. But then the cough comes. A mucousy cough that makes you want to constantly clear your throat. You heard somewhere that was bad for you, but you can’t help it. At night you sleep half propped up to allow your lungs to drain (or so you think), and the unnatural posture throws your back out. Your cough is now dry and unproductive. Sometimes you hack so much you can hardly catch your breath. You’re grateful that your stomach feels okay, but you have no interest in doing much. You struggle through a few hours of work, your eyes blurry. In the middle of the afternoon you give yourself permission to take a nap. When you finally feel well enough to emerge into public a few days later, you hear tales of other people’s illnesses. Two weeks. Three weeks. (You consider yourself lucky—you are only on day 8. But later you become hoarse and the cough worsens.) It seems everyone has had it. A powerful germ, this one. Welcome to the common winter cold.

Maybe it was the convergence with the holidays and all the other demands on my time, but this cold really knocked the creative stuffing out of me. I couldn’t bring myself to do anything but stare vacantly at the TV. As someone who doesn’t get sick very often, I am not a patient patient. I felt guilty that I wasn’t using my time productively, especially as I wasn’t going out in the evening. But you can’t force the muse. I haven’t always been a mush brain when I’m ill. I remember a week during my the final month of my senior year of high school when I had some mysterious ailment involving lots of sneezing (it turned out to be a new allergy). I spent my time out in the sunny garden on a lounge chair writing poetry—not something I’d done before or have done since in quite the same way. I remember another time when, despite a bad cough, I produced pages of a novel . Unfortunately, when you’re self-employed, especially with a home-based office, those delicious absences from work, like snow days from school, just don’t happen. I still spent my requisite number of hours at my desk, with little to show for them.

Maybe it’s an end-of-year malady. The creative juices have been depleted and need to be topped up like washer fluid in one’s car. Or recharged like a battery, or completely replaced. Out with the old. Start anew come January 1st, all healthy with a fresh resolve, a sparkling set of goals and a whole year in which to meet them.

There are still a few days left to 2010. A few days in which the phone is unlikely to ring very much. The holidays are behind me now—no more shopping or card preparation, no more guests or visits to friends. TV is all reruns, and I don’t need anything from the winter sales. I am well now. There are no more excuses. The month is still redeemable. I just need to sit in front of the screen, reread what I last wrote, and re-enter that world I’ve created and inhabited in my mind’s eye for so long. It’s not such a big step once I leap across my mental chasm. When I am there, I know I will be hooked again, and that is a good feeling. So, readers, this will be my final post for 2010. I have attained my goal of two a month for this year. Now I need to plunge into my out-of-control fictional world of 1963. Wish me luck!

And happy new year to you (2011, not 1964...)

On Mosaics as an Antidote to Writing

2010-12-13T12:27:00.000-08:00

The chilly and sometimes damp days of early winter attract me to colors, textures, and shapes rather than words, characters, and plots. I spent the last two weeks putting together my annual photo card, a manual task that can be completed in front of the television: open pac kages of Strathmore creative cards with deckle edges, stamp the inside with a dove and the word “Peace,” place four photo mounts in the corner of each photo, remove backing of mounts, gently place on the center of the front of the card, label with name, date, and place; then address and affix correct postage to envelope, write a few cheery words, seal up with a wet sponge applicator, choose and apply decorative labels to keep envelope shut. 140 times.

It requires little in the way of intellectual input—occasionally I have to locate an errant address by emailing someone or write a longer message to people with whom I’ve had no contact in the last year. My holiday photo cards are small artworks of which I am proud, and people seem to like them. Months and sometimes years later, I find them still propped up on friends’ mantles; a few have framed them. A concrete legacy of my time on this planet.

It’s easy for me to feel inadquate when I write. In contrast, when I create something visual, I am much less critical of myself. My process is more spontaneous, less deliberate, more childlike, I suppose. The product of an artist mother, I’ve dabbled in numerous arts and crafts over the years in addition to photography (the most ongoing on my artistic pursuits)—watercolor, bookbinding, printmaking, pottery, batik, Chinese brush painting, collage to name a few. The latest is mosaics. Texture, color, shapes, and only a few rules (keep the spaces between your pieces small, put contrasting colors next to each other to make them pop, let the glue dry for 24 hours before you grout). The results are so satisfying.

As with writing, I start with an idea. The idea can be a visual image or a feeling I want to invoke (such as being at the seaside), or it can come from the material itself (such as a piece of pottery). I confess that as a writer, I don’t always plan out my writing. Sometimes, depending on the length of the piece, I see where my characters take me. But with novels, it’s difficult to do that and not end up with a mess.

For me, the mosaic emerges. I don’t draw what I want in advance. I sort through a box of pieces or look at the shelf of colors and choose those that appeal to me. I locate or cut pieces to fit together, like a puzzle, except that I am the creator of the puzzle. I don’t know how it will turn out until it’s done. Getting those last pieces into place can be a fiddly but a doable challenge with limited options. Another surprise in mosaics is what happens when you grout your work. A dark grout creates a completely different look than a light grout.

But here is what I really like about mosaics as compared to writing. You know you’re finished when you wipe off that last glob of stray grout and polish it up a bit. It can’t be altered (I suppose it could, but who would want to?) You either like it or you don’t. How many times have you read over something that you were satisfied with yesterday only to feel that it’s all wrong today? Or one of your writing partners makes a comment, and you see that something you thought was okay is not working. So it’s back to the computer for another revision. Only in publishing--that elusive holy grail--can you feel that the writing is finished.

And even better as far as I’m concerned is the abbreviated time commitment. I can take a satisfying photo in a few seconds, or complete a small mosaic in a few hours. Even a flash fiction takes longer than that. So, to keep my sanity as a writer, to feel like I am not on an endless treadmill, to see the fruits of my labor, I’ll continue to find my antidote in the visual arts. And if you are a friend of mine, I’m not likely to write you a story, but I might send you the results of one of my latest creative detours.

So why bother writing? That, my friends, is a topic for another musing.

On Black Friday, Bargain-shopping, and Possessions

2010-11-27T13:24:00.000-08:00

I woke up yesterday morning, coupons all organized, ready to hit the post-Thanksgiving craziness known as Black Friday. And then I read the an op ed in the Boston Globe—"Alice’s Adventures in Retail Land" by Joan Wickersham. In this piece, Ms. Wickersham describes through her fictional Alice several ploys used by retailers to sucker us into buying more. There I saw one of my recent retail pilgrimages described—buy $100 worth and we’ll give you an x% discount (or buy $100, and we’ll take $25 off your bill.)

My first foray into one of my favorite women’s clothing stores, I actually resisted because I couldn’t find anything I wanted to bring my $80 full price purchase up to $100 (and I was already getting a discount). But the more I thought about the things I tried on that day, the more I wanted them. When I returned home to no-tax-on-clothing Massachusetts, I succumbed to bargain #2. In this case, it was spend $150 and we’ll give you $50 off. Sounds like a 33% discount-not bad, especially if the goods have already been marked down—but that is if you buy exactly $150 worth. Otherwise, the percent discount goes down. However, for another $20, I could now enter the rarefied realm of a “special customer” (having shopped in this store previously over several years and racked up a certain number of points), and forever after would always get at least a 5% discount. Of course, the item I wanted and eventually chose was more than $20. At this point, without a calculator, it was difficult to figure out whether or not I obtained a better deal. But I was hooked, with no chance of being tossed back into the river.

The point is that this kind of bait (and I avoid using the word “scam” here because the conditions are all up front) lures us into spending more than we intended. Not that I wasn’t aware of what was happening at the time. But sitting in the comfort of my kitchen, away from the huge adrenaline rush of making the perfect purchase, I could see that braving the Black Friday crowds was essentially pointless, especially as I really didn’t need anything and had given up most gift giving a couple of years ago. The true bargains are few and available only to those ready to wait in line with 1000’s of others at 4am. There will be other sales, and some of them may be better. They will certainly involve fewer crowds. Of course, I knew that the editorial would prompt only a brief moment of sanity, not a sea change in my behavior.

Some people abhor shopping. Although I am not a shopaholic, I do not hate shopping. It’s genetic, I suppose. My mother, who successfully managed to downsize at age 60 for a move across the ocean, managed in the next 30 years to fill up her closets again. When she moved into a nursing home the last year of her life, we realized she had never given or thrown away a single item of clothing in all that time, including several hideous polyester pants and vest sets, from the 1970s, when she was a good 20 pounds heavier than her later in life weight. And these, kept by a person, who deeply cared about appearing fashionable until she was 90. When she could no longer shop in stores, she hit the mail order catalogues, and if she were alive today, no doubt she would enjoy the ease of on-line shopping.

As one of the people involved in cleaning out my mother’s apartment, I was inspired sufficiently to come home and clean out my own closets on a regular basis. But I fear there is still more incoming than outgoing. Staying away from sources of temptation is more difficult than it once was. The daily deluge of coupons in my email inbox can be deleted with the click of a button, but it’s not always that easy. What if this is the week I decide to buy that new computer, or the scarf to go with odd color winter coat I bought? I am capable of some rational thinking. Because my office is at home, and I have fewer meetings these days, I no longer allow myself to look at suits. (My last suit purchase a couple of years ago was a huge mistake. I went into another one of my favorite women’s clothing stores to buy a pair of pants in a particular color, and there happened to be a matching jacket—both were substantially reduced. I have worn the pants a number of times, but never the jacket. A bargain you never use is not a bargain.)

My husband, who is not much of a shopper, has come up with the perfect 21st century invention for today’s consumer, who may be concerned that they have run out of space for their purchases—rental storage rooms, like the U-Haul ones where we store our junk, except you can take your new purchases there immediately. Why waste time driving them home?

I hope it never comes to that. But old habits are hard to change. I think about a former colleague of mine, who each year would give away her small wardrobe and replace it with new items, each of which became well used over the course of that year. I admire that. I envy that. But as much as I long to rid myself of things, I can’t bring myself to behave that way. There is something thrilling about excavating through one’s belongings and finding a long forgotten item. Maybe one day ten years from now I will unearth one of those items I bought in my recent expedition, and it will feel fresh and new. And as much as I still dine out on the story of my mother’s 30 bags of clothes we gave to charity, I was delighted that she had kept her beautiful outfits circa 1960, both vintage and fashionable, thanks to the success of “Mad Men.”

I hope I can find some happy medium, where the incoming purchases are reserved for the needed or the special (regardless of whether or not they are bargains), where the outgoing starts to surpass the incoming, where my increasingly precious time and money are spent on activities that are ultimately more satisfying, and where Black Friday is just a day of rest after a large meal.

On Random Thoughts about Flying

2010-11-17T18:35:00.000-08:00

The Third Half Muse is on route to a conference and is not thinking about her novels. Once, long ago flying used to be an adventure, in the good sense. So to make the best of a situation, she makes a few observations. Feel free to add or disagree.

• Luggage without wheels has become the exception, even for big, burly guys.
• You can get a lot of exercise walking from one gate to another, BUT
• Airline “snacks” (the kind you pay for) are designed to increase waistlines (caramel popcorn, chips, etc.).
• To get through security, you practically need to undress.
• Airports provide a good cross section of humanity.
• How many jobs were lost when airlines stopped serving meals to coach class?
• What ever happened to butter rum Lifesavers?
• Jeans are the pant of choice for non-business passengers.
• The people strolling through Atlanta Aiprot seem less weighty overall than statistics would suggest
• If you used TV or the movies as your guidepost, you'd think that adult women always wear heels when travelling—this number seems closer to one in ten.
• On automatic flush toilets, to quote Ellen Degeneres, “I'll decide when I'm ready.”
• How much longer will the bank of entirely unused payphones exist?
• Baggage costs discriminate against the elderly, the small (me) and other less than abled passengers. They should charge people for trying to cram oversize bags in the overheads.
• Whatever happened to loading a plane from the back—wasn't that more efficient than the “zone” system?
• I miss non-stops, half full flights, bargain airfares; it's small compensation being able to print your boarding pass at home and check your flight status without phoning the airport.
• As bad as it can be, I also miss in flight meals. If your stomach rules you (as does mine), you really have to plan ahead.
• Planes are one of the few places where complete strangers feel comfortable revealing their life stories.
• Cats do not like being confined to tiny crates for hours.
• There are no atheists during air turbulence. (Who said that?}
• Flying is tedious.
• Flying makes me drowsy.
• Flying drains me of all creativity, BUT
• Flying is a rare opportunity for downtime.
• Flying still feels like a miracle. Forget the science, how do planes stay up in the air?
• Looking down on a scenic vista is still a thrill.
• We put up with all of it because it gets us where we want to go.

On Revisiting Old Writing

2010-10-31T12:45:00.001-07:00

For the last couple of months, I’ve been immersed in revising a young adult novel I started longer ago than I care to reveal. It’s been an interesting journey that has revealed something about my evolution as a writer and about the staying power of an idea. It’s been like visiting old friends that one hasn’t seen in ages—the core personalities are the same, but some of the rough edges are worn away. (Have I used this phrase before? It has a déjà vu quality to it…)

It wasn’t always a young adult novel. In fact, I had no idea what it was when I first began it. That summer I was working on my “qualifying paper” for my doctoral dissertation, and the urge to write something completely different came over me. It was sort of a “busman’s holiday” (nice English expression), but I found it very cathartic. Inspired by a dream I had when I was 16, the story is based on some experiences from high school. Maybe there was something about reaching the last stages of my doctoral degree (at a somewhat advanced age) that took me back to my school days. Maybe I needed to get past something. Maybe I wanted to rewrite some of my history.

I came late to writing fiction, unless you count the hours and hours I spent as a child concocting and illustrating tales. A novel was an ambitious place to start my fiction career, but I had no desire to write short stories. I never finished the novel that first time round. Life took over (in particular, the dissertation itself, and then a new career, post dissertation). But five years later I came back to it, tweaking it, fleshing it out a little more. Then I took another turn with my writing and began a screenplay with a friend on a whole other subject. Meanwhile, I began to study story structure while learning about screenplay writing. I also learned about revealing character through dialogue since interior monologue generally doesn’t work well in film.

But I still didn’t couldn’t let go of that original idea. A few years after starting the screenplay, I took my first fiction class. Through that I reshaped the first four chapters of the novel and received feedback. Then more life happened that interfered with my ability to be creative, and more years passed. Finally, I embarked on what has now been a steady period of writing for the past five years. It began by revisiting the YA novel, which I abandoned for the fourth time to pursue something that an editor told me was more “marketable.”

Two large writing projects (and a number of shorter stories) later, I’ve come full circle but with three significant differences. 1) I know a lot more about writing now. 2) Young adult fiction changed, and now what might have been risque when started it has become acceptable. 3) I have a writers’ group and other sources of support, so that I have company along the way.

What I wrote all those years ago isn’t appalling, but it needs a lot of tender loving care. I should probably have started over, as the revision is taking me far longer than writing something new would have. All the little voices in my head from all the classes I’ve taken and the critiques I have received speak to me as I write—urging me to show not tell, inviting me to provide a significant detail, asking me to slow down or speed up. Sometimes it’s hard to discard the original narrative.

Here’s one example of changes made between the original version and the most recent. This is the opening of the story, which is set in the early 1960s.

Original: Amelia Wade, or Amy as she insisted on being called, walked up the stairs to school, with a mixture of excitement and dread. Both had found their way to her stomach. The first day of school once again. It couldn't be worse than last year. Though she feared the condition might be permanent, a small shred of optimism told her she had reached her depths as a sophomore, and it was only up from here on in. Anyway, eleventh grade felt like the beginning of the end of school. Next year she would be applying to college. College would save her from all of this.

2010:
Amy Wade exited the Number 24 bus in front of the crimson and white sign that read in clean, bold letters, “Friends Day School, established in 1864,” the bus driver said, "Cheer up. It can't be that bad."

How did he know? Strangers did that to her all the time. "Smile", they would say as she was walking down the street. What if she had just broken up with her boyfriend? Not that she ever had one. Or failed an exam? Not that she ever did. But it really annoyed her. People should mind their own business.

Both versions reveal something about character and about Amy’s state of mind this first day of school. In the first one, we learn sooner about Amy’s age and her goal of just wanting this stage of her life to be over. The second is more rooted in place and has more detail. She is reacting to something specific (in this case, the bus driver).

The above represents some small struggles I’ve had. Some changes involved more major restructuring. I added a third voice in the last iteration (there were two originally). I’ve kept that configuration, but I know that two of the voices aren’t as clear as the other. In particular, I need to create a credible voice for my somewhat wounded male adolescent. I also removed some extraneous characters and had some significant events happen to the main and major secondary characters rather than to characters we don’t care about. I’ve ratcheted up the tension between the happenings of the external world (civil rights, in particular) and the internal world of the school and class. A big challenge is to make the story and characters seem both universal and timeless and of its time. I know how I want it to end, but there are gaping holes to be filled (the murky middle).

What I love about writing novels is trying to make all the pieces of the puzzle work together, and it is also what is demanding and sometimes frustrating. Every change creates a possible rupture somewhere else. Maybe I should have learned to master (if one can use that word with a straight face) shorter forms of fiction first. But I love living with my characters, helping to solve their dilemmas and mine as a writer at the same time. And one day, I hope that we will all be ready to move on. But sometimes I wonder if years from now when my memory is fading, I will be convinced that this story I spent so many years on will seem as real to me as any of my life experiences and the frienships as genuine. Will the truth even matter if that’s what makes me happy?

On Musings about the Boston Book Festival

2010-10-17T17:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I attended the second annual Boston Book Festival. Actually, technically this is the second year of the new Boston book festival. For many years, Boston had one sponsored by the Boston Globe. It was a windy and chilly, but bright autumnal day, and the organizers should feel proud of what they accomplished in a relatively short space of time. The five events I attended went off with only minor hitches (usually related to microphones), the time-keeping was impeccable, the breadth and number of offerings was generous and thoughtful, and the quality of the moderating was outstanding (overall). And best of all, it was free. Here are some random learnings and observations from my day.

• According to David Shields, author of Reality Hunger, (in which he declares that the novel is dead), we are obsessed with reality because we experience hardly any of it. (Not sure I agree with it, but it is food for thought.) (Apparently, word of the novel’s demise date back to 1925.)
• The novel is not yet dead, but it may be women who are keeping it alive (consider the number of women in book clubs compared to the number of men).
• Check out • Check out The Electronic Literature Collection (vols 1 and 2) to see what approaches are being taken towards writing in the digital age. (Reference, Nick Montfort)
• Good quote from David Foster Wallace: “The best writing constructs a bridge across the abyss of human loneliness.”
• Question: Do we always have to be “advancing” something for it to be worthwhile? Is novelty necessarily a worthwhile goal?
• According to Daphne Kalotay, the novel may return to its 19th century form (think Dickens, with its fast pace, think Tolstoy with reality coming at you every second).
• Assessment of the MFA in writing—“Death by craftsmanship” (David Shields)
• Churches, with their vaulted ceilings, make good venues for discussing ideas.
• No matter how loud you think your voice is, when you have a large crowd (or an audience that spills over into the hallway to hear you), you need to use a microphone.
• Four good themes for Young Adult novels: fitting in, being true to oneself, standing up for what you believe in, finding love.
• Adolescent modes: hypersensitivity, sense of mystery/new discoveries, deep questioning.
• Joyce Carol Oates has an obsessively dark view of the world. Although she is a contemporary literary lion, I confess never to have read anything written by her, and I don’t think I care to based on this brief exposure. Life is too short.
• Fifteen minutes is long enough to read something from one of your works. We can buy it or borrow it from the library if we want to read it. Get to the Q and A, please.
• Don’t ask fiction writers about a) whether they believe in God, or b) whether they are victims of violence. If they want to talk about these things, they will.
• “One town, one story” is an excellent idea, and Tom Perotta’s story, “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face” was an usually good choice—its characters (believable, complex), setting (a Little League playoff), its dilemmas (moral choices, paying for past sins)—all ones that people could wrestle with without any one obvious interpretation. Food for thought: What makes a character sympathetic?
• Alician Anstead must be a great teacher (even though it’s not her primary job), as exemplified by the skillful job did she leading the “One town, one story” discussion and keeping it moving while offering her own insights. (Whatever happened to Tom Menino, mayor of Boston—wasn’t he supposed to be leading it?} Having Tom Perotta there was an added bonus.
• To the Festival organizers: When seeking donations, be mindful of your audience--not everyone texts (though it may seem so), in particular not some older people who might be inclined to donate if given any easy way to do it, other than texting.
• I do not need to buy any more books….

2010 Third Quarter Check-in--July through September

2010-10-13T20:10:00.000-07:00

Summer and early fall had their pleasant distractions—two week long vacations (one of which was productive writing-wise) and a 10-day visit from my niece (also a writer, so many good conversations on writing) along with gardening and going to farmer’s markets. Plus it was a very hot summer, and the house isn’t air conditioned! Too many excuses.

Here's what I did well: I kept up with my schedule of two blog entries per month, and I didn’t cheat by making one all photos. I worked on three different projects, including completing Draft 3 of one novel, Draft 9 of another novel, and getting back to a young adult novel I’d put aside 5 years ago about the time I started writing seriously. Have spent lots of time thinking about this book.

Here’s what I didn’t so so well: I didn’t go to many writing events,I didn’t work on any brand new pieces of writing, I feel like I’m spending too much time on editing, I didn’t write on as many days as I would have liked, I didn’t send out any query letters, and I didn’t read as much as a writer should.

• Participated in six sessions of my writers’ group
• Wrote and published six blog entries (not including my quarterly check-in)
• Participated in an evening workshop, “Creating Complex Characters,” and went to one reading (Jonathan Franzen on Freedom –see blog entry)
• In addition to blogs, wrote on 23 days (eight days in June, seven days in July, and eight days in August)—some of these were quite substantial; others were not. Worked on one query letter. Have done some research and plotting out of young adult novel.
• Discussed feedback on my novel draft (#3) with my niece who gave it an entire read through—I know what I need to do now to take it to the next level (probably the new year)
• Finished The Pact, Oogy: A Dog only a Family Could Love, and Across the Barricades (a British Young Adult novel); made substantial headway in Freedom (but am starting to get bored with it…..)

On the Perfect Off-Season Writer's Getaway

2010-09-30T17:47:00.000-07:00

At least once a year, I like to go somewhere for a week, not only to get away from my work routines and my distractions at home but also to write a bit. The best of these vacations has certain characteristics. Below I describe how my recent trip to Provincetown, MA on the tip of Cape Cod, stacked up against my criteria.

The Location. Distance from home—drive up to four hours, or non-stop plane ride with no more than one hour drive at other end. Things to do and see, nice places to walk, a few good restaurants, a convenient grocery store. Interesting architecture or history a plus. Our Location: Provincetown, MA. Historic, quirky, fun,friendly. 2.5 hour drive from home. Location rating: A

The Condo. A separate bedroom and living area is a must, with a door that closes between the two. A full kitchen is preferable (stove, oven, large fridge, dishwasher). At least 1.5 bathrooms is nice. Bright is a real plus. Convenient to things but a little off the beaten track. Quiet in the morning and at night. Several choices of places to set up the laptop. Free and strong WiFi or cable internet connections. Our Condo: Eastwood A- (roadwork in the morning made the noise factor less desirable. But three good computer spots, and excellent WiFi.)

The Schedule. Leisurely, with writing time every day, long walks, one meal out, a diversion or two, time to read. Our schedule: Some variation every day, but always the aforementioned included. Schedule rating: A

The Physical Challenge. A strenuous hike, a canoe trip, cross-country skiing—something where you feel really good about your accomplishment at the end. Our Physical Challenge: A hike over the dunes to the ocean. Walking up and down hills in soft sand. Physical challenge rating: A

The Surprise. Something unexpected. Our surprise: The entire dune walk, from the hills and valleys, to the vegetation (including toadstools in this dry place), the dune shacks where some people actually lived, the vastness and seeming remoteness of it though it was so near town (we walked to it!), and finally the ocean at the end—we saw no one else there. Second surprise: Being ablet to walk down the middle of the main street with minimal traffic! Surprise rating: A

The Native Tip. An off the beaten track place known to the locals, but not as much to visitors. Our Local Tip: The cliffs at Longnook Beach, Truro. A wide, unspoiled beach, protected by high, sandy cliffs, where we watched the birds dive into the ocean for their food. Local tip rating: A

The Ultimate Relaxation. Whatever turns you on. Our ultimate relaxation. The hottub at Eastwood—after our Physical Challenge. Ulimtate relaxation rating: A

The Local Dinner. Something of the place, not too expensive, ambience. Our Local Dinner: The early bird Clambake Special at The Waterford for $18.00. The lobster was delicious. Local dinner rating: B+

The American Breakfast. One fun breakfast in a local hangout. Our Breakfast: Tip of the Tops’n. Breakfast rating: B+

The Sunset. A spot to share the end of the day—over water is best. Sunsets can be skipped on winter getaways. Our Sunset: Herring Cove Beach. Sunset rating: B (We were lucky to have cleark skies; sunset was nice, but nothing out of the ordinary. Setting was lovely.)

The Original Photo Op. We’re not talking about your usual sights (or sunsets) but something that strikes the fancy. Preferably more than one. Preferably one that is good enough for the annual holiday card. Our Photo Ops. Fences and shadows, colorful buoys, fun mirrors, reflections and shadows in a store window. Photo op rating: B+ Not sure about the holiday card, and the light was a bit iffy at times.

The Cultural Experience. An musical, artistic and or dramatic event/place that delights one or more of the senses. Our Cultural Contribution. Cubano art gallery—one of only 30 galleries in the US allowed to bring in art from Cuba. A range of media and styles. Cultural contribution rating: B+

The Social Opportunity. An arranged or spontaneous gathering with friends or new acquaintances. Our Social Opportunity. Good friends from NYC were visiting the Cape at the same time. We met their friends, ate lunch with our friends, and took a long walk. Social opportunity rating: A

The Friendly Native. An interesting conversation with someone from the area. Our friendly native: Unbeknownst to us, we crashed a staff party at a local bar. The owner of the restaurant (whose staff it was) came over to us and made us feel very welcome. Friendly native rating: B

The Unplanned Stop. Something that wasn’t necessarily on your agenda but turns out to be a real pleasure. Our Unplanned Treat: Truro Vineyards and wine tasting. 10 different wines in a very pleasant setting after a short tour. Showed up just at the right time! Treat rating: A

The Writing Output. At least two hours a day, five days out of seven. Some sense of forward movement on a project. Maybe a new source of inspiration, or an aha moment. My Writing Output: Schedule achieved; output—not as high as I would have liked. Some progress in structure. One blog entry. Writing output rating: B

[Note: More pictures to be added.]

On Franzen Frenzy and Its Meaning for the Would-be Writer

2010-09-12T18:48:00.000-07:00

I am wondering how Jonathan Franzen is feeling at the moment. Is he exhausted after giving countless interviews in the past few days about his first novel(Freedom) in nine years, not to mention at least one reading at the Boston Public Library to which he must have had to travel? Is he stunned that his book debuted at #1 on the New York Times Best Seller Lst? Is he humbled to be on the cover of Time as compared to his somewhat snotty response to Oprah Winfrey’s selection of his last novel, The Corrections, for her book club?

Let me first set the record straight. I loved The Corrections and found it to be one of the most engrossing novels I have ever read. I listened to several of the interviews of the last few days with Franzen, including the short, but surprising one on NPR’s “Marketplace” since Freedom apparentely deals with the futility of an economy that requires continous growth to succeed. I attended the aforementioned event at the Boston Public Library, arrived early, and waited in line with several hundred other people for the author to sign a copy of his book. I confess I have not yet read Freedom although hearing Franzen read his lengthy, but rich observations of his characters reminded me of what I liked about his first novel.

I don’t begrudge him any of his fame. He deserves it, and I am thrilled that a contemporary novelist with something to say is so honored. What fascinates me here is how the author feels about his reception by the world at large. No doubt Franzen, who despite the long gap between novels, has become accustomed to people recognizing his name. Perhaps he has learned to tame any annoyance at having to give so many interviews so that his book sells and his publishers can justify what was no doubt a sizable advance. Does he suffer stage fright before each reading? Does he worry that he won’t have answers for some of the questions thrown his way, or is he comfortable enough with his position that he can happily dismiss those that don’t interest him? What does he make of his fame, and does he feels he deserves it? Is he a shy man who endures that very public side of the publishing world because that is part of the bargain? Or does he relish the opportunity to share his thinking about his work?

Yesterday at the reading, I got some inkling into this v.2 version of Franzen. He was unhappy at a series of questions from one person (why can’t people stick to just one question) that probed what he did about writers’ block (he doesn’t like to call it that), whether it actually took him nine years to write his book (he didn’t really write it until 2009 although the idea was germinating), and what his daily writing process is (he didn’t answer this part.) He skillfully handled a question from a woman who spewed literary critique mumbo-jumbo, and managed to silence another questioner (especially after the audience booed the questioner) whose observation (with a question attached—some people seem to enjoy providing their own theories, and then turn them into a question, with the phrase, “would you agree that…..?) threatened to give away some of the plot. All these off the cuff strategies require a certain amount of cool and sense of confidence, but perhaps he’s heard it all before.

Inevitably, those who are struggling to be published authors ourselves have fantasies of being in Franzen’s shoes. We wonder how we would feel and act in front of a large audience or while giving an interview that will have a public airing and live on in podcasts, be commented on endlessly in blogs. Of course, realistically, we know we will be lucky to be published at all, and we understand that first time authors choosing to do a book tour will be arranging and paying for it themselves. But what if?

My friend Larry finds himself in that enviable, yet frightening position. His first book, Oogy, a Dog only a Family Could Love—a memoir centered around the abused dog that he and his family adopted--- is due out in mid-October with a print run of 100,000 (most print runs of unknown authors start at a few thousand). He is potentially on the cusp of something new for him. Clearly, his publisher has great faith that Larry’s book is going to be a huge hit and has done a great deal to promote it. Larry himself is in disbelief that any of this is happening, that the fruits of his labor merit the kinds of positive reviews trickling in prior to publication. Although he will have some local readings (he lives in Philadelphia), there will be no book tour unless, of course, the book takes on a life of its own. Yet, even the idea of the book occurred because of another situation that most of us only dream about. None other than Oprah’s people (yee gads—her again?) found an article written by Larry for his local animal shelter newsletter, and Larry, his family, and Oogy appeared a couple of years ago on Oprah’s Valentine’s special (re-aired the following year). The rest, as they say, is history, but history still in the making.

Jonathan Franzen is not the first author whose autograph I have sought. I have stood in many a line and shaken many an author’s hand after receiving my signed copy (the short-hand signature, indecipherable)—I once got a kiss from Garrison Keillior. I have known (and studied with) academic authors who, if not household names, were very well known in certain circles. I am friends with somone whose best friend was the subject of an enormous best seller some years ago. But Larry is the first person within my circle who has the potential to rise from obscurity to some version of temporary celebrity because of his book. I will follow his journey with interest. I believe he will maintain his humility whatever the outcome, but I want him to succeed. He’s the underdog (pardon the pun) we all root for in the movies, for whom we shed a tear of joy at the end. His victory is a vicarious victory for all of us who have ever received a rejection letter from an agent or an editor. Maybe Larry is no Franzen, but if I ask him a dumb question, I’ll probably get an answer and maybe some inkling as to what all the hoopla means to him. And maybe I’ll get some perspective about my goals for my own work.

On Query Letter Madness

2010-08-28T13:28:00.000-07:00

Having completed and revised a novel numerous times, I am now paralyzed at the next stage—the query letter. If one does not have connections, the query letter is deemed to be the main foot in the agent’s door. It needs to be perfect. But what does perfection look like when the advice and examples do not agree?

Here are the indisputable points:
• Addressed to a specific person at a specific agency, using a formal salutation (Mr. or Ms.)—include their title, name of agency, full address (unless emailed)
• Agent chosen after researching appropriateness of agency and agent because of your type of book
• Clean grammar, no typos
• Focuses on one project not multiple projects
• Concerns a finished novel only
• Gives title of novel
• Gives approximate length of the novel
• Provides a quick overview of writer’s key credentials—special qualifications for writing this particular book and your fiction credits
• Better to keep to a page
• Avoid gimmicks.

Here are some areas where the experts diverge:
• Giving genre? Most want this, but some say leave it out if you can’t slot yourself into one of the standard genres. Avoid the use of the word “mainstream?”
• Reason for selecting an agent, such as referring to books they’ve published that are similar to yours?
• Where to begin—plunge right with a hook? Begin with “I am currently seeking an agent for my completed x word genre book [give title]. Pose a rhetorical question—what if…. (some agents hate these). Expository description of something about the book—setting and time period?
• Focus only on the main character (or protagonist and antagonist) or share something about other characters who may be key to the story?
• Themes of novel? Again, some agents do not want to be told this, but want it to come through in whatever else you write about your novel
• Include non-fiction publications?
• Compare your novel to others out there? (But don’t compare yourself to well-known great literature or best sellers….)

As a former career counselor, I advised my clients to put their energy into networking rather than answering ads or worse, sending cover letters into the abyss of organizations. To minimize the query dance, I’m seeing the parallels with the publishing world. It’s hard work, as I recall. On the one hand,there is a certain satisfaction to saying I sent out 20 or 100 letters, but if none of them yields anything, you have faced 20-100 rejections. Perhaps it is better to spend your time cultivating a few contacts for whom you are more than a page of type and from whom you may at least get an honest response.

On Setting Stories in Other Times

2010-08-18T18:54:00.000-07:00

I was going to write this blog about the genesis of my young adult novel, and its many incarnations, but instead I want to muse about fiction that takes place in time periods that are still within living memory of many adults. At a workshop several years ago, the leader told me that unless one was writing true historical fiction it was better to make one’s story contemporary, with the rationale that it could more easily be adapted to the screen.

But there are several reasons for choosing another time. The most obvious, of course, is when the events of a particular period are the catalyst for the story itself. The Civil Rights era, and the events of 1963-64, provide the backdrop of the novel to which the characters in my young adult novel respond. One of the characters makes a choice that today might not create as much of a stir as it did then. Some of their problems, though commonly recognized today, had not yet been given names, like bulimia, or attention deficit disorder (whose name keeps evolving.) But teenagers, now as well as then, are notorious for hiding those things of which they are ashamed. Could this story have been set in 2010? I’d like to believe that the concerns of each of the three main characters are timeless, even if the context is different, but I believe the story would lose some of its color (pardon the pun) and interest. After all, stories set in other time periods can be instructive to those reading them—letting them into other worlds and mindsets.

Second, even if the story is not shaped so much by external events, it may be that another time offers some perspectives that make the characters and plot more believable. I had always seen my Japan novel as occurring in 1981, but after the aforementioned workshop, I changed it to the present where it stayed through its many revisions. But meanwhile Japanese society was becoming less patriarchal, the economy was slumping, and the foreign bar hostess was almost a cliché. Having decided I’d followed advice that wasn’t working for me, I needed to go back and review every page for anachronisms (e.g. cell phones), edifices that had not yet been built, relationships to historical events, clothing choices, and the less obvious, such as attitudes. Fortunately, the Internet allowed me to find out that karaoke had just come on the scene in 1981 (but would have been unknown to my American protagonist) and that I could replace a fun park (not yet in existence) with a brand new mall with specialty shops. I could also refer to a kitschier time for love hotels (think themed), make the difference between men’s and women’s roles more stark, and portray my Japanese customers more prosperous. I chose 1981 for quite specific reasons—it was a period when women in particular were flocking to business schools for the first time, but the corporate world, especially in a place like Japan, was less responsive to women on the rise. Although computers were a part of the workplace, personal computers as a common household item were a few years’ off. Cell phones also did not exist. Thus, communications could be awkward. Finally, 1981 was pre-AIDs awareness.

Third, the author may be familiar with a particular time and have the memories and perhaps even the evidence to create a credible world. With my Japan novel, I was able to draw on the descriptions of places, food, people, and events from my journals of a slightly earlier trip to Japan and feel that I wouldn’t be too out of date. First-hand knowledge also shaped my young adult novel .

Finally, of course, in the story that extends over a number of years, history will probably intersect with the story in some way. Movies that spring to mind are “The Way We Were” or “Forest Gump” or even “Same Time Next Year,” in which the characters express themselves in ways that reflect the times.

Whatever the rationale for choosing to write about another period of history, authenticity is important, and research, crucial, to get the details right, including slang. In fact, one can argue that a book intentionally set at an earlier time may become less dated than one written as a contemporary tale. Even that modern story will eventually become historical. Some will stand the test of time, and some won’t.

So I convinced myself to stop worrying about the screenplay—if it’s so compelling that someone wants to buy the rights, they’ll figure out a way to make it happen.

On the Mind-Numbing Movie of the Summer: Inception

2010-07-30T20:07:00.000-07:00

Normally, I would never bother going to a film like Inception. I am not particularly a science fiction enthusiast, nor an action film fan, and this one smacked of both. However, I sometimes like thrillers, and being the product of Christopher Nolan (Memento) it promised to appeal to the thinking person. In addition, I was “down the shore” (New Jersey), and going to the movies is something we do on a hot summer afternoon.

The basic premise is that the Leonardo DiCaprio character, whose specialty is extracting information from people’s dreams, must try a reversal of his skill (i.e., planting an idea into someone’s head) in order to gain the right to return to the USA, where his young children live. His client is a powerful businessman who wants to break up the conglomerate of his nearest competitor. To achieve this goal Leo assembles a hot shot team, including Ellen Page, who will create the dream’s “architecture.” Another twist was Leo’s inability to let go of his past, in particular his relationship with his dead wife whom he calls up in his dreams. Sometimes, she is loving; at other times, she threatens to kill him. His obsession with her is his almost tragic flaw.

After two and half mind boggling hours, my poor head hurt. Although the general plot is clear (and the subplot involving his wife), the route to the disappointingly predictable ending was excrutiating—endless shoot-em-up scenes that seemed to serve no purpose except to attract a young, male audience. We are meant to believe that something original is happening. Much of the action consists of scenes happening simultaneously—dreams within dreams. These were nightmares—unidentifiable snow-suited men (and maybe women—who could tell), chasing each other over a hilly white landscape, weightless bodies floating around (and also killing each other), and a van crashing into the river in very slow motion. The gimmick was that in a normal dream, your subconscious won’t let you die, but because of the particular drug used to induce deep sleep, dream death means a life in limbo. So as the Inception team is trying to control the dreamscape, it must also stay alive within someone else’s dream.

Spoiler alert: His wife believes that her reality is the right one, and that if he lets himself “die,” he will join her in the real reality. He is torn. His wife claims that his children will be in this alternative reality. But he is rational and takes the chance that she is wrong, even though he almost strays from the task at hand. Guess what? The kids are just where he left them, sans dead wife, but otherwise, a happy ending and all. Might it not have been more interesting if the wife had been right, and that she was living in this alternative universe? We wouldn’t have seen that coming. And this is science fiction, after all.

I think the movie could have worked without all the confusing action. My mind would have been more satisfyingly bent without the distraction of the guns and the fights. Let this be a true psychological thriller. The threat of death looming is okay, but how about the threat of losing one’s sanity? Come to think of it, how about a movie about someone who almost loses their sanity watching a confusing movie that purports to be something it’s not. Now that I could get into.

For a delightful and far more entertaining alternative, go see City Island, a small scale, independent film. You want psychological? It’s about what happens when we lie. Oh, and it’s under two hours.

On Technology and the Writer

2010-07-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

I don’t know if I could write if it weren’t for computers. Words flow through my finger tips much more quickly on the keyboard than they do on paper. In fact, other than some childhood attempts at storytelling, I didn’t start writing fiction until two years after I bought my first PC. I’m on my fourth desktop computer now. On the downside, I can’t write very easily if I don’t have access to a computer. I can make notes or scribble comments on a printed out draft, but I am not able to produce anything new. Does that make me less committed than those who still pen entire novels on legal pads?

Editing is hardly a breeze, but it is both more inspiring and much easier to read a clean copy than one covered in scrawls. At the same time, editors and agents can more readily demand revisions. Is an expectation of perfection the price we pay for wordprocessing?

Of course, the computer has all but ruined the credibility of that favorite plot twist of the loss of the only copy of someone’s 500 page handwritten manuscript (as with Michael Douglas’s character in the 2000 film “Wonder Boys.”) It’s become as an anachronistic as the bad guy cutting the phone wires, thus destroying our protagonist’s only access to outside communication. Nor are we likely to feel as sympathetic toward the writer who doesn’t back up his work.

Would I have even bothered with the year of the aforementioned “Wonder Boys” if it weren’t for instant access to the Internet? The library of song lyrics, ideas for character names (including names common in other countries along with their meanings), dates when certain buildings were built, descriptions of religions, and countless other facts and speculations is mind-boggling.

Nevertheless, I still have shelves full of books that I’ve used as background material for my novels. I am more impatient when I search the web for information. If what I want doesn’t turn up in the first couple of pages of a Google search, with maybe a couple of different choices of key words, I give up. The other day, I couldn’t easily find a particular recording artist’s top 10 hits for a particular year, so I turned to my Billboard reference book.

We can take writing courses on-line and never meet our teachers our fellow students who are critiquing our work. We can send a copy of our manuscript to friends and colleagues (and people with whom we’ve become “pen pals” on-line), and receive back “track changes.” Our circle of acquaintances, of people who share our passions and interests, is broader through blogs and social networking. I emailed a published writer who was writing about the same kind of thing that I was, and miraculously, she replied. I read her novel just after it was published and wrote a short review for her; in return, she read and commented on my novel draft—all of it perhaps possible in the days of snail mail, but much simpler in cyberspace. Writing does not have to be the solitary activity it once was when there is a worldwide community of other writers accessible to us.

Theoretically, the submission process should be easier, too. We can research appropriate agents, follow the links to books and authors they’ve helped published, examine sample query letters, and even send many of our queries on-line.

So the next logical question is, what about the novel itself? Are the days of the paper version numbered? Is the novel doomed to a life of binary code, or will it, like my beloved reference books, continue to hold its own despite or perhaps because of all this technology?

2010 Second Quarter Check-in plus March

2010-07-04T14:49:00.000-07:00

I started out this year doing a monthly “check-in.” That didn’t work. I think it might be quarterly now. This one is the second quarter plus March.

Here’s what I did well: I attended my writers’ sessions, kept up with my goal for my blog of two entries per month, attended regular writing events, and did some major revision on my two novels.

Here’s what I didn’t do so well: I did little new writing, I didn’t do as much reading as I would have liked, I didn’t write on as many days as I would have liked, except in June, when I got on a roll one week. But sometimes, you just have to give it a rest. March was depressingly wet, and I ran out of steam in April.

• Participated in 8 session of my writers’ group.
• Wrote and published 8 blog entries.
• Attended the following events/classes: “Winedown” at Harvard Book Store, where they celebrated the short-short in a slim little volume printed on Paige M. Guttenberg (the story I wrote was not selected. Odds-about 6-1); “Grub Gone Blue” (my story was not selected for this event either. Odds--about 40-1; two sessions of “Writer’s Life at Cambridge Center for Adult Education”; evening workshop at Grub on Revision; evening workshop at Grub on Dialogue; Muse and the Marketplace (Grub Street’s full day writers’ conference); “She Writes” 1st anniversary party (networking event).
• Organized my writing papers.
• Did on site observing for my short-story collection based on the Maine Diner.
• Read Those Who Save Us, If You Follow Me, and Olive Kitteridge. (Kind of a pathetic period for reading….)
• Wrote a 3-minute fiction story (600 words) for NPRs contest-“The Curve Ball,” using the words plant, trick, button, and fly. I was pretty pleased with it, but it wasn’t a winning entry (competition 5000:1)
• In addition to blogs, short story, and writing events/writers’ group, wrote on 26 days--6 days in March, 4 days in April, 6 days in May, 10 days in June. All writing was major rewriting of the first 90 pages of one novel and 70 pages of the other to make protagonists more likeable and the stories more engaging. Also, took out extraneous material, and revamped query letter for one novel (after doing some research).

On a Summer Morning's Walk on the Beach at Low Tide

2010-06-26T18:33:00.000-07:00

Wiffle ball, kickball, badminton, bocce, catch, Frisbee, kite flying, castle building, wrestling, digging, napping, reading, roasting, wading, paddling, dipping, swimming, boogie boarding, body surfing, books, magazines, coolers, buckets, shovels, beach toys, beach chairs, loungers, blankets, towels, umbrellas, tents, amblers, strollers, walkers, joggers, runners, bikinis, tankinis, maillots, skirt suits, speedos, trunks, short shorts, Bermuda shorts, pedal pushers, capris, tank tops, halter tops, muscle shirts, t-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, bare feet, flip flops, beach shoes, sandals, Crocs, sneakers, babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, young adults, middle-aged adults, senior citizens, singletons, couples, families, friends, hand-holders, white skin, brown skin, burnt skin, seagulls, foot prints, shoe prints, paw prints, bird prints, white houses, gray houses, green houses, blue houses, green houses, cedar shingle, asbestos shingle, vinyl siding, dunes, dry sand, moist sand, wet sand, grasses, seaweed, driftwood, clam shells, mussel shells, scallop shells, crab shells, pebbles, rocks, boulders, rivulets, tidepools, foam, surf, waves, wispy clouds, puffy clouds, and the long horizon where sky meets sea.

On Sizing up the Competition

2010-06-13T17:31:00.000-07:00

In my previous blog entry, I discussed the perils of comparing one’s as yet unpublished novel to better known works in order to provide a clue as to its nature. Today I examine the immediate competition-- published books that may have elements in common with your story but may not be as familiar. I wonder (and worry)--is it better to be similar to successfully published works (and risk seeming redundant), or different (and risk agents/publishers not knowing how to categorize or place your book)?

Clearly, it’s helpful to know what’s out there. I have assiduously made a point of reading other books about young women in Japan. I found five published in the last five years and read all of them after I had written draft three of my novel. Here’s my superficial analysis.

Four are debut novels, and one is a memoir.

Interestingly, all are told in the first person (one with multiple viewpoints). (Mine is also first person.)

Three are written in the present tense. (Mine is past tense.)

One is written by a Canadian, one by an English woman (and published only in Great Britain, I believe), and three by Americans.

Both the non-fiction book (Bar Flower, Lea Jacobson, St. Martin’s Press, 2008) and the British novel (Sayonara Bar, Susan Barker, Doubleday, 2005) are set in hostess bars, like mine, but in recent years.

The erotic novel (Amorous Woman, Donna George Storey, Neon, 2007) takes place just a few years after mine, and has one section where the protagonist works in a bar.

One of the stories (Lost Girls and Love Hotels, Catherine Hanrahan, Harper Perennial, 2006) uses “love hotels” as a major motif but the narrator is an English teacher.

The most recent (If You Follow Me, Malena Watrous, Harper Perennial, 2010) is also about a young woman who teaches English and has the least in common with my plot but succeeds in portraying a “fish out of water,” without denigrating the culture it is describing.

The erotic novel is light and beautifully told. If You Follow Me is funny, charming, and serious all at the same time. The other two novels and the non-fiction book all assume a slightly superior tone—“I am above these things I have to deal with.”

Except in If You Follow Me, all the women appeared to speak Japanese. (The protagonist in If You Follow Me does learn Japanese during her time there.)

So what did I get from reading my competition?

• Women who spend time in Japan want to write about it.
• Clearly, there is some market appeal for books of this nature (Harper Perennial chose two of them). But how well did these books do? Is the market saturated, or is there always room for a story freshly told? Will I have to try that much harder to sell my story? Are my “credentials” good enough?
• Inevitably when a book focuses on the same culture you have chosen you will find scenes that resemble yours. I know I wrote mine independently, and I probably even have the dated draft (in the computer) to prove it, but I still fear sounding like I cribbed the ideas (the present of the finger…). I can’t now claim that I haven’t read these books.
• Making fun of another culture is easy. Achieving an authentic and sympathetic voice is not.
• Some people overwrite. Overwritten stories are not fun to read.
• I believe my instincts were right to reset my novel closer to the time of the Japan I knew rather than make it contemporary. One can’t always be thinking of the movie they are never going to make.

I’ve been working on my novel far too long. All of these books were published since I wrote my first draft (and most since I wrote my second). Of course, In the meantime, I’ve written a second novel. Isn’t it time to stop worrying, stop comparing, and get that first one out there?

On the Comparison Trap

2010-05-31T18:17:00.000-07:00

If there is one question I hate, it’s, “To what other books would you compare yours?” “Or what other books is your book like?” Agents and editors often ask writers to describe their novels in terms of other published works. In addition to finding this question difficult to answer, I believe it poses a couple of traps to the writer seeking representation.

First, comparing a well-known work of fiction to your own implies a certain level of hubris that might be thrown back at you. (You , my dear, are no Jane Austin.) But it hardly makes sense to pick something so obscure that the agent or editor is unlikely to have read or even heard about it.

Second, let’s say you can come up with a comparison. Now you have to justify how your story is unique. If it’s sufficiently different, then maybe the comparison doesn’t hold. A query letter is not the right place to offer these kinds of explanations, yet it is the place one has to sell oneself sufficiently to get read.

One way of dodging this bullet is to say, readers who like X will enjoy Y. Here, the comparison is implied rather than outright, but it’s still a comparison with all its attendant perils.

Of course, there is always that trick, popularized in the movie, The Player. My book/screenplay is Gone with the Wind meets Catcher in the Rye. The advantage of the analogy is it takes the focus off the direct comparison by splitting it between two targets. But how will the agent/editor know what aspects are most salient about the analogy? Is it the genre of the books we chose, the point of view, the time period, the overall tone, the plot, the themes, etc.?

Is the story in the above analogy a coming of age tale about a young Confederate soldier, who, feeling that his life is pointless as he watches his old way of life being destroyed, goes AWOL , taking his baby sister with him? Or is it a contemporary novel, set in the South, about a day in the life of a headstrong, but wealthy teenage girl, who leaves home and ends up in the middle of a gang fight? The possibilities are endless.

However, as an exercise, the analogy game is thought provoking. So here’s my attempt.

My novel about a young woman who loses her moral compass in Japan is kind of Memoirs of a Geisha meets Lost in Translation. Both books take place in Japan. With the former it loosely shares the overall plot told as a first person narrative of being about a naïve young woman who must learn for her livelihood the ins and outs of entertaining and pleasing men. However, Memoirs is set in an earlier era, the protagonist is Japanese, and she appears to have little choice about accepting this lifestyle. My novel is more contemporary (set in 1981), the protagonist is American, and she freely makes her choices.

Like my story, Lost in Translation highlights the complexity and challenges of being an American temporarily in Japan. Although my novel has its light moments, its overall tone is more dramatic than satirical or humorous. In addition, the protagonist in Lost in Translation is a middle-aged man; mine is a young woman.

How would an agent interpret my analogy? And what if they make different assumptions than the ones I’ve posed? Will they feel disappointed or worse, misled? Am I in danger of descending into absurdity? Will the agent pass if my analogy seems too far-fetched?

So as I construct the dreaded query letter, might I be better off just bypassing the comparisons and trusting that my story will entice on its own? There’s an original idea!

On a Letter to My Classmates Who Didn't Come to Our Recent High School Reunion

2010-05-21T19:17:00.000-07:00

Dear Classmates:

When I tell people I went to my high school reunion, I get a variety of reactions. Most are surprised a) that my school has regular reunions and b) that I actually attended. And not just once in a lifetime but every five years. Reunions have become one of my life markers. I look forward to them—as does my husband! Since you are someone who for one reason or another has not participated in a reunion (or not for a long time), I wanted to share some thoughts about why you might want to consider (or not fear) coming to the next one.

Time waits for no one. As Chris, our exchange student who flew all the way from Munich for more than one reunion, put it. “We are not getting any younger.” Sooner than we’d like, there will not be that many opportunities. We’ve already lost more than our share of classmates.

We are all adults now. We’ve had lots of practice playing at being grown up, and it shows. Those cliques from high school? Erased. Those embarrassing or humiliating incidents? Forgotten. That adolescent meanness? Gone or replaced by guilt for slights or traumas caused. The personalities are largely the same, and the voices may trigger some unpleasant memories, but the rough edges are gone. And someone you didn’t think even liked you may remember you as being a friend, or tell you why they admired you or envied you. If you have demons, come bury them for once and for all. You’ll be glad you did.

No one was immune from problems. It seems that just about everyone had their issues. Now we have names for these things. When we were growing up, we didn’t have the labels for or the understanding of dysfunctional or even abusive family members , eating disorders, ADD, social phobias, homosexuality, or any number of other concerns that may have made our lives a living hell at some point because it seemed that no one (and maybe not even ourselves) understood.

It’s about now not then. Reunions at this stage of life aren’t so much about reminiscing (though a walk through the main building will catapult you to another time) as about finding out where people are now.

None of us is Peter Pan. Those few extra pounds? The gray hair or the bald spots? The wrinkles? All there. I thought we looked great, but then I’m older, too. You’ll blend right in.

Families are whatever we make them. Sure, many classmates got married and had kids; some also got divorced, lost spouses to death, lived with partners, loved people of the same sex, stayed childless, lived alone, bred horses, or smothered their pets with love. We were the generation for whom the rules changed, thank goodness.

We were lucky. No matter what indignities or traumas were a part of your adolescence, or even if you felt you got a raw deal from teachers, or you didn’t try your hardest, you have to admit that overall you got a great education. And it was a bargain compared to today’s private schools. Although the faces of the staff are no longer familiar, the values of the school remain.

We are a damn interesting bunch. Including those of you we haven’t seen. We are entrepreneurs, poets, farmers, doctors, teachers, cheesemakers, grandparents, artists, beekeepers, volunteers, sailors, potters, travelers, writers, inventors. One of our classmates has even been on Oprah. The best part is that you couldn’t predict a lot of what we’re doing now from who we were then. So many surprises! And more to come. You don’t have to have fit any traditional model of success to fit in.

We went through a lot together. Some of it heartbreaking (the accident). Some of it fun (our class language). Not all classes have a bond. And maybe you aren’t feeling it. But it’s there. You have to come to sense it. As someone put it, “The older I get, the more important I find it is to stay connected to the people who I knew way back when.” Several of us stay in touch in the years between reunions thanks to the Internet.

You were missed. Yes, we do wonder what happened to the folks who weren’t there—all of you! And aren’t you just a little curious about us?

Mark your calendar—May, 2015. No excuses.

Faithfully yours,
Belle

On the Immortalizing Power of the Internet

2010-04-17T13:18:00.000-07:00

Most of us would like to leave this earth with some kind of legacy. Before the Internet, unless someone was well known, only a small number of people might be aware of that legacy. Now our lives are open books—the good, the bad, and the ugly. We know that prospective employers and suitors Google us to find out who we are. Of course, there is a fluidity to that information. Each search produces something different, depending on a host of complicated criteria.

Summing up a life from an Internet search may produce an alternative bio to the one we’d write for ourselves. My first three pages include 21 of 30 entries that really refer to me. From them, you would see first that I have my own business, that I was on Facebook, that I wrote a study guide for a documentary on career counseling in 1993 (still in demand). Then, you’d note that I was an author on some scholarly pieces as well as some chapters and reports related to current professional field. Finally, on page 3, if you were patient enough, you’d find a reference to my fiction. In contrast, my niece, who is both a scientist and a fiction writer, fares much better as a visible presence in this latter role. It probably doesn't help that I don't use my full name in my blog.

A year ago, I noticed that Googling my dad, using his full name turned up nothing. On the 14th anniversary of his death, I created an imaginary Facebook page for him and published it on my blog so that he would have his own Internet presence. One year later, I Googled him again and was amazed to find seven entries connected to his full name. Only one was my blog entry. The rest referred to patents he held in electronics and physics. Deciding to investigate further, I entered his name, using his first and middle initial, the way he often referred to himself. In the first three pages, 12 of 30 entries appeared to belong to him, including an essay called “Science Marking Time” from New Country published in 1931, when he would have been 27. In that volume, he is sandwiched between C. Day Lewis and Stephen Spender. Other illustrious contributors were W.H.Auden and Christopher Isherwood. It was the only thing my dad ever formally published. The book has been copied and can be downloaded. From these various entries (minus my blog) you would glean that he was a scientist, held various patents in the electronics industry in the UK, had worked for Marconi, lived in England and Lancaster, PA, and was somewhat of an intellectual. Hardly the full measure of the man but not a bad bio.

Of course, this kind of legacy inference is messy work. I had to weed out the entries with the misplaced punctuation, work published after his death, and references to occurrences from too early a time. And any search of my father mainly calls up a certain legendary Kansas City Royals baseball player of the same name. So it helps to have an unusual name to eliminate all the noise. With punctuation, which Google ignores, my first and last names link me with a male and female from the porn industry.

My mother doesn’t fare so well. If it weren’t for my blog entry of April 3rd, she wouldn’t be there at all. Yet her legacy of paintings and prints is very tangible, and she would be pleased to know that several of my friends proudly display her art work on their walls. My sister, whose first name is more common than mine and who, therefore, has a fuzzier Internet profile, also leaves behind a trail of visible markers in the form of the many garments she designed and produced over several decades. And her legacy has become more stable since her fashion archives are now housed within the very real walls of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. (But naturally, you can find reference to this archive on the Internet.)

My husband has the best of both worlds, and he may not even know it. As an events and fine arts photographer, many, many people possess the fruits of his creative labor. Google him, even with his not so unusual name, and not only is he the first entry, but he dominates the listings. Even those in the non-tangible world of legacy can touch many lives and be noticed in cyberspace. One friend is batting 100% on the first three pages of entries with her name—all 30 entries refer to her and her work. One trick? She has been quoted regularly in articles.

A friend of mine from high school has such an ordinary name that there are 40+ of him on Facebook (and he’s not one of them). But in a few months, after his first book (non-fiction and heart-warming) is published, I can guarantee you that you will see his name appear on the first page of the Google listings. It’s going to be that big.

So I suppose the moral of this story is if you want a coherent cyber legacy, make sure you do something noteworthy, do something a lot or in the company of well-known people, get yourself published or in a museum, or start a business and secure your domain. Routinely use your middle initial, and always use the same version of your name. If your name is relatively common, you will have to work that much harder, but you can do it.

On the other hand, while you can make your mark on the World Wide Web, it’s important to remember that you can’t easily wipe away your presence once it’s out there. You can even write your own autobiography, but it will be augmented by whatever the critics have to say, for better or for worse. So, it’s probably better just to get on with your life and do what you want to do. Let the Google entries fall where they may, and, if you must check up on yourself, try another search engine once in awhile.

[Note: Although I have used my blog to give certain members of my family a web presence, this time I have intentionally omitted names so as not to add to anyone’s cyber biography.]

On My Mother, My Muse

2010-04-03T10:28:00.000-07:00

Today is the tenth anniversary of the death of my mother, Josephine Carlton Brett (June 9, 1908-April 3, 2000.) She was born in London within the sound of the Bow Bells, making her a true Cockney, but her parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. Her life spanned most of the 20th century, encompassing two world wars and the Great Depression. When I was very young, our family emigrated to Pennsylvania for 18 years for my father’s work, but my parents retired back to London, which was always home for my mum. Except for her last year, she lived the final 30 years of her life in a flat in Putney, overlooking the Heath.

My mother was an art teacher and artist, and her huge range of talents, her continual learning of new skills, her creativity, and her productivity in her “golden” years, when she took up a new (to her) art form (silkscreen), serve as inspirations to me, perhaps now more than ever. I own and proudly display pieces from her legacy.

Because of the time in which she grew up and her detour to the USA, she was never quite able to realize all her personal ambitions. Perhaps as a consequence, she was fiercely proud of her daughters and her granddaughter and our professional accomplishments. When I became director of the career services department at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in my mid-thirties, my mum bragged to everyone, “My daughter is a director at Harvard!”

I know she would have been supportive of my writing efforts, if not a little eager for completion of my projects. When I first told her that I was writing a screenplay (probably around 1997), she was very excited. Of course, she kept asking me whether I’d finished it. I think she expected it to magically appear on the silver screen. But even in the last year of her life when she was suffering from severe dementia, she became animated when recalling the passion of the creative process—it’s like “butterflies in your stomach.” Much like love, yes?

A large portrait of my mother as a young woman hangs on the wall in the room where I do most of my writing—serving as my muse. Between my sister (see March 16 blog entry) and her, I should be able to draw sufficient inspiration to last a lifetime. The photo on the left was taken when she was about 23 (and still involved in acting, her other love.)

Below I share a poem about her that my sister and I wrote and read at her funeral, following a family tradition that my mother maintained for many years of composing poems for our birthdays. It seemed fitting to honor her life in a similar way. The last line was originally, “Go in peace,” which she always said to us as adults when we would leave her flat after a visit. I have changed it to be more eternal.

ODE TO JOSIE BRETT

She was-
Creative, imaginative, energetic, vivacious.
Lively, theatrical, talkative, but gracious

She wore-
Tailored suits, high heels, black leather, bright smocks.
Patterned jumpers, silk leggings, red velvet, warm socks.

She did–
Painting, silkscreens, puppetry, and plays
Sewing, knitting, odes for birthdays.

She saw-
San Francisco, Montreal, Boston and Maine
Venice by ship, New York by train.

She shopped at-
Lord and Taylor, Blum Store, M&S with a cart
Fifth Avenue, Liberty’s, always dressed smart.

She made–
Shepherds’ pie, soufflé, sherry trifle, shavas dinner
Sponge cake, stuffed trout, each one a winner.

She took pride in-
Her handwriting, her voice, an organized chart,
All her family’s achievements, her posture, her art.

She was-
Proper, stoical, don’t make a fuss.
Generous, loving, unconditionally supportive of us.

She loved-
White Linen perfume, flowers, teaching children, Matisse.
Sisters, husband, and family.
Now, Mum, rest in peace.

On Failure Deprivation Syndrome

2010-03-28T08:19:00.000-07:00

I’m sitting here watching “American Idol” and marveling at the resilience of these young people who in front of millions listen to some pretty raw criticism—“That was horrible!” is a frequent Simon Cowell comment. Of course, these are the finalists; they’ve already shown their mettle against hundreds of other candidates. But I wonder what happens when they are voted off. Do they cry? Say they’ll never sing again? Resolve to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and start all over again?

Years ago, when I was a career counselor, one of my colleagues at Harvard noted that she regularly saw students who came to her devastated because they had received their first lousy grade in their lives, or some professor hadn’t liked their paper. She named this phenomenon “failure deprivation syndrome.” These young people had never failed at anything, and they didn’t have the tools to handle it.

As I thought about my own life, I realized that I, too, had not suffered big setbacks at least in terms of standard achievements by which we gauge success. I did well in school, was accepted into all the colleges and graduate schools I applied to, and generally got the jobs I wanted. Sure, I worked hard and aimed for things that were reachable given my talents. You could say I deserved my rewards. My early love life was another story, but after a slow start, I even landed the guys on whom I’d set my sights. I guess I should consider myself lucky.

And then I started writing. Let’s face it. This whole business is not for sissies. Last year, I sent off queries regarding my novel to four agents; I actually heard from three. I’m told that it’s quite common to not receive a reply. One sent a form letter saying they weren’t taking on new writers. Another took the time to write back, “I didn’t love it, and I have to love it.” And a third, with whom I had had previous contact, was even more generous with her feedback, though I didn’t understand what she was telling me to do. Later, in a one-one-one manuscript review of the first twenty pages of one of my novels, a New York agent told me she didn’t feel simpatico with my protagonist.

Recently, I entered two local short story contests—in one, the odds were about 6:1, and the other, 40:1. I thought my stories were pretty good. I wondered whether I was close to the cut or tossed out after the first read. Unfortunately, I’ll never know.

I wouldn’t say I am a sore loser. A sore loser complains, blames others, doesn’t use feedback to improve. I believe I take responsibility and listen to suggestions if they are offered. Nevertheless, I can’t say I handle rejection well. It slows me down and makes me reexamine my goals. I know that people we now think of as great authors often had their novels rejected many times, and I have a copy of Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections (Ed. Bill Henderson and Andre Bernard), itself a best seller to remind myself of the variety of viewpoints out there (and that agents, reviewers, and publishers all have bad days).

But how do you know whether for you it’s just a numbers game and that someone out there will eventually like you well enough to represent you, or that your manuscript really does need more work, or that you really don’t have the talent? The agent who gave me the feedback I didn’t quite get did say that maybe someone else would like it as it was. Was she saying, “I could see how some people might respond to this, so keep sending it out?” I stopped at four agents, and maybe I should have just kept sending out my novel. Instead, I decided to take the disparate and unclear pieces of advice and do more revision. So now having stalled on that task, I am in a nowhere land. I’ve made it convenient for myself. If I don’t get it out there again, I can’t be rejected again, can I?

All of those who write need to ask ourselves why we write; how much effort to we are willing to put into it after the first one or two drafts and the inevitable suggestions; how badly we need external affirmation for our labors, especially in the form of publication by someone other than ourselves; and how much indifference or negativity from an increasingly deluged and strapped publishing industry are we willing to endure to get to that place. But I suppose that if John Le Carre could keep going after hearing, “You’re welcome to Le Carre—he hasn’t got any future,” I shouldn’t throw in the towel just yet. After all, it’s never too late to learn something new—even how to weather a little rejection.

Now didn’t I just hear about NPR’s latest 3-minute fiction contest?

On Channeling Beth

2010-03-15T19:36:00.000-07:00

Like many sibling relationships, mine with my sister Beth was complicated. It was loving, competitive, intimate, and at times rage-inducing. Beth was a fashion designer, and not surprisingly she felt somewhat wedded to fashion trends both good and bad. I, in contrast, held a certain amount of scorn about blindly following what seemed to me arbitrary schemes by the clothing industry to shame women into throwing out their wardrobes every couple of years. On more than one occasion, we had screaming fights on this topic. No doubt we both dug in our heels more deeply than our beliefs would have dictated. I liked clothes, but I shopped with an eye to bargains rather than what was in, what suited me, or what even fitted me properly.

Sadly, Beth died seven years ago on March 16 from cancer. After her diagnosis, I promised myself that I wouldn’t start any arguments with her, especially about fashion. During those 22 months of ups and downs regarding her prognosis, our relationship was about mutual support, particularly since we had lost our last parent, our mum, just the previous year.

For some years prior to Beth’s illness I had been writing a screenplay with a friend, but a couple of months after Beth’s surgery, I returned to writing on my own. I wrote another screenplay based on some experiences I had had in Japan as a young woman. As it happens, Beth had spent the last decade peddling her knitwear designs in Japan, travelling there twice a year. I asked her to read my script, and she gave me some practical suggestions regarding cultural references as well as a hilarious explanation for a character’s physical condition that I incorporated. (I won’t give it away!) Beth herself was a wonderful and humorous writer with a gift for an original turn of phrase, but her literary efforts were confined to letters, then faxes, and finally emails. Had she lived, I wonder if she would have written something lengthier, perhaps a memoir of her years in the fashion industry.

For more than two years after Beth’s death, my own creativity dried up. I didn’t have the heart , nor the emotional energy to write anything, much less to complete the novelization of the screenplay. The loss of my only sibling with whom I’d been so close was devastating, and with Beth’s passing went my connection to my nuclear family and all that history it represented.

Then in 2005 two things happened within a few months of each other. I began to shop, and I began to write again. Oh, how I shopped. I began watching TLC’s “What not to Wear,” and I went through my wardrobe with a critical eye, giving away bags of ill-fitting, out-of-date, and unbecoming clothes in unflattering colors. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I followed the trends. For someone in her middle years, some of these seemed most unsuitable. Rather, I focused more on classical pieces that fit, and colorful fun pieces that I would enjoy wearing. I still looked at price tags and shopped at sales, but my sense of a reasonable cost increased from my 1970s yardstick. And, gasp, I even bought a few things at full price! At times I became obsessed with finding the right top to go with the pants I’d purchased or with one of Beth’s designs that I wore, travelling to multiple shops along the way. I felt possessed.

I am not a superstitious person. I walk under ladders, let black cats cross my path, and don’t worry about Friday the 13th. I don’t consider myself a person of great faith, or even a particularly spiritual person. But I swear that I was channeling Beth. Maybe it was her fun way of getting back at me for giving her such a hard time about her passion. But as I mentioned, I also started writing again-with a greater sense of purpose and with more regularity. I took better classes and workshops to hone my craft, and I not only completed multiple drafts of the novel about Japan, I wrote a second novel. This burst of creativity also felt like a gift from Beth, who was enormously talented and prolific. (The prestigious Victoria and Albert Museum in London recently took all her fashion archives—sketches, photos, costings, etc. as well as several samples from her collection.) I know there may be rational explanations for both of these phenomena; I studied psychology. I also understand that both the interest in fashion and the creativity describe my mother. But I like to believe that Beth, who had provided me some seed funds, was watching over her little sister—giving her a push.

A couple of months ago, I perused my bulging wardrobe and realized I didn’t really need anything new for the time being. Beth would have said it was about “want not need.” As a self-employed person who works at home much of the time, I only have so many occasions where something other than jeans is the appropriate attire. Oddly, during this period, I have felt less creative. Each session at the computer has felt like more of a struggle. I am not suggesting cause and effect here. Maybe I am going through an end-of-winter dry patch. Maybe I need to take a break or an inspiring course. Alternatively, maybe there is a time limit to a spirit’s assistance. Maybe Beth has moved on to more important causes. Or maybe she feels her work is done and that I can do this all by myself. Or maybe like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz I had the power all along.

In the meantime, let me honor this day and Beth’s memory with a very short story (or poem if you prefer) that I wrote for a class during my first few months of renewed creativity (and have since revised.) (Note the structure of the story. The first sentence is 10 words; the second, nine, and so forth.)

Channeling Corinne

Corinne was a clothes horse and a slave to fashion.
Her sisterly advice drove me into a rebellious rage.
“Pleated pants are so unflattering; buy something new!”
“You used to wear them,” I screamed.
“They’re no longer in,” she scoffed.
Corinne died two years ago.
I obsess over style.
Replace my wardrobe.
Corinne teases.
“Shopaholic!”

Beth—RIP. I love you. PS. I did just buy a cute little black jacket with white polka dots. Totally didn’t need it.

February Check-in

2010-03-07T15:01:00.000-08:00

So February didn't seem as productive, but I guess it was okay, especially since the month was short.

1. Revised Chapter 1 several more times, chapter 2 a couple of times, chapter 3 once, and gave a cursory revision to chapter 4.
2. Wrote two short-shorts and submitted them to contests. No success.
3. Wrote two new blog entries.
4. Participated in two sessions of my writers' group.
5. Didn't do as much reading as I would have liked. Finished a couple of novels I'd started earlier and am about half-way through another.

I'm feeling a little discouraged about the whole business (see first March blog entry), but maybe it's just the winter blahs.

On Writing as an Olympic Sport

2010-02-28T08:58:00.000-08:00

Like millions of people, I have spent a considerable amount of time tuning into the Winter Olympics these last two weeks, watching in awe at amazing physical feats (and giving up some of my writing time.) I admit to a certain partiality for the figure skaters. My interest in the competitive side of that sport dates to the time I watched in person the elegant Peggy Fleming take the American Ladies Single title not long before she won her Olympic Gold in 1968.

My own relationship to skating predates that spectacle. As a child, I recall trying out my neighbor’s hand-me-down skates on the lumpy, frozen pond of the golf course down the street from our house. Oh, how I wanted to sail around that pond, like Hans Brinker. With neither the right mindset nor the right skills, I spent more time huddled at the edge. In high school, a group of us managed to convince the administrators to let us take skating to meet our winter gym requirement (and avoid the dreaded team sport of basketball), but our instructor didn’t understand that we weren’t quite ready for double axles. In my 20s, inspired by the medal winners, I muddled along on skates before hanging up my blades for good by age 30. My fear of falling and my lack of any real talent were the deciding factors. Only in my dreams would I fly along on the ice, backwards and forwards, leaping and turning.

I turned to other, less physically- demanding, pursuits. In the past few years, my main non-paid work avocation has been writing fiction. Compared to all the winter Olympic sports, fiction writing seems most like figure skating. Maybe this particular analogy seems far-fetched and unnecessary, and the similarities between writing and skating are not why I chose the former. Indulge me. You gotta love any sport that has a figure called “twizzles.”

Skaters are the storytellers of the athletic world. Not only must they have the skills to do the jumps and the spins, they must have the artistry to put all their moves together into an aesthetically pleasing program that meshes with the music they have chosen. They must inhabit a character (or a mood) and convincingly convey emotion. As with writers, not all skaters emphasize these elements equally. Those who can land breathtaking jumps will excite the crowd, even when they lack a certain grace. They may even rack up the points (especially under the new scoring system). These skaters are like the writers whose flair for action and plot produces the blockbusters that top the best seller charts. In contrast, other skaters, still with enormous physical talent, are all about the artistry. They are the literary writers. The critics appreciate them, but they don’t always wow the crowd.

Whatever their style, these athletes have spent thousands of hours practicing their sport, getting instruction, listening to feedback, and improving their form. These are things I didn’t do as a would-be skater but am trying to do as a writer. I write regularly, take classes and workshops, belong to a writer’s group, and revise, revise, revise. So far, I have chosen to put my craft out into the world, where I will be judged—with the reward of getting published rather than receiving a title or a medal. The results will mostly not be to my liking. I need to learn what I failed to learn as a skater and what competitive skaters do with such grace. If I fall, I have to pick myself up and continue, to use that fall as an opportunity to become better, not as an excuse to quit or feel sorry for myself.

I also need to be careful not to compare my own writing to that of my favorite authors and become discouraged. Not all of us can win the Nobel Prize in Literature—the equivalent of the Olympic Gold, and most of us may not even be talented, persistent, or lucky enough to be recognized in the public marketplace. In the end, I may need to decide whether I love writing enough to pursue it regardless of any external reward, like one of my college friends, who just self-published his first novel because he didn’t want all the hassles of the seemingly arbitrary publishing world. I could still experience the joy of ruffling through the pages of my bound novel. Why shouldn’t it be sufficiently satisfying to write because I have something I want to say, or to loop around a frozen pond with a few friends, without the judges’ stamp of approval?

On Maine, A Love Story

2010-02-14T10:02:00.000-08:00

It’s 3:25pm on a Saturday afternoon. I am in Maine, staring out my large dining room window onto the brown marsh, flecked with patches of snow. I can tell that the tide is out because the ravines that criss-cross the marsh are in shadow; in the winter at high tide, they will brim with water, forming a shallow lake. In the distance, a long row of motley houses hides the ocean, and nearby, a tall tree —its many fingered branches poking at the sky-- breaks up the expansive view. By contrast, in summer, shrubbery and leaves block this restful scene.

What is most remarkable is while predictable in some ways, this panorama varies from hour to hour and from day to day. On our last visit, my husband, awake earlier than usual, came into the bedroom to announce the glorious sunrise he was witnessing. The sky appeared to be on fire. At other times it is the land that calls attention to itself, such as when chunks of ice heave up at odd angles, creating an other worldly surface. In the late afternoon, the buildings along the water’s edge glow pink and orange.

I first saw this place on a sunny January day nine years ago, and I fell in love. This was how I wanted to spend my small inheritance from my mother, who had passed away the previous year. She was a city girl, but I think she would have approved. Covering the walls of our condo are her paintings of rocky coastlines—one a monolith adrift in a turbulent sea, the others inspired by vacations to Portugal and Malta. She was a trained artist but did some of her best work after age 60. Both she and the view serve as my co-muses as I sit at the table in front of my laptop.

It’s not just our condo that I love. It’s the feeling of peace I have when I am here. Mainers don’t see the southern coast of their state as the “real” Maine. But less than an hour and a half from Boston, it still feels like it’s light years from Boston. For a resort area, the south coast isn’t that commercial. Along route 1 in Wells, the one mall (with mainly useful stores) is set back from the road. The shops that dot the highway cater to the unusual and include one that sells weather vanes and another, flags of all kinds. Out of season, there is a small town vibe. The Maine Diner beckons with its friendly service. The shoreline with its wide, flat beach at low tide calls out for walks.

We don’t get here nearly enough, but it has become my personal writer’s retreat. What better inspiration than nature to get the creative juices flowing? And what better way to procrastinate than to look through the binoculars and find some new little secret somewhere on the expanse of the marsh?

Happy Valentine's Day!

January Check-in

2010-02-01T18:22:00.000-08:00

I made some resolutions in January about my writing. In the spirit of my public commitment, I plan to report each month how I’ve been doing in relation to those resolutions. So here goes—

1. Revisions. I’ve revised the first chapter on novel #2, with some approval from my writer’s group. The first few pages were the hardest-I’m almost there! Just 38 chapters to go before March 1??? (But it’s the first 8 chapters that need the most work.)
2. I completed a first draft of a short story from my diner series, and have begun another.
3. I wrote two blog entries, as promised.
4. I have almost finished a 600+ page novel—maybe not great literature, but good ideas in terms of fast-paced, page-turning plot. More on that in a future blog entry.

At the time, it didn’t feel like I was doing enough, and I’m not quite on target with the revisions, but there is movement.

On Writer's Guilt

2010-01-28T18:21:00.000-08:00

Usually when we refer to writer’s guilt, we are talking about how we feel when we are avoiding writing. But I suffer from a different malady—guilt when I am writing.

When I think of all that needs doing in the world at this moment, I am reluctant to tap out my insignificant little stories or even this blog. That world encompasses the unfathomable numbers of people in Haiti who need food, shelter, and medical attention as well as my friend whose grown daughter stopped breathing and consequently lost most of her vision. It includes the daily pleas I receive to phone my congressman and let my views be known on important pending pieces of legislation to improve our general welfare.

I gave money in aid of Haiti; I made a vegetable lasagna for my friend because she said she wasn’t eating properly; I’ve signed a few petitions. These acts aren’t dues so that I can write with a clear conscience. They don’t feel like enough especially when I hear or read about individuals who sacrifice their time in service of others. I can remind myself that my paid work targets programs intended to meet the needs of underserved populations, either directly or indirectly, and that this work takes up a great deal of my time. Then I feel like I am rationalizing. Is it all those years in Quaker schools?

I know that the arts of all kinds enrich people’s lives, whether they themselves are participating in the creation of that art of whether they are enjoying the fruits of someone else’s creativity. But who, other than my loyal writing friends and family members, even sees what I produce? I can convince myself that I will have more to give if I meet some of my own needs first (kind of like putting on your own face mask in the airplane before you put on your child’s)—to eat properly (unlike my friend), to exercise, and yes, to write.

And maybe there is some truth to that. I often fantasize about what I’d do if money were no object, if I was the next J.K. Rowling, Stephanie Meyer, or John Grisham. I’d like to think that I would use my wealth to make others’ lives better. The paradox is that if I wrote with the goal of making large sums of money, I probably shouldn’t be writing. Unlike the protagonist in the very funny novel How I Became a Famous Novelist (Steve Hely, 2009), I don’t believe there is any obvious formula.

So I am back to my dilemma. Maybe the everyday acts of kindness should be enough, and maybe, just maybe if I work at it hard enough, one day….

On Resolutions, Goals, and Reso-Goals

2010-01-03T17:23:00.000-08:00

I have never been big on New Year’s resolutions. They smack of being too lofty and often not very achievable. Some people consider the shift in the calendar a rather arbitrary time to make changes (especially those who may live on an academic calendar), but Uncle Sam asks us to report on our income and expenses for the calendar year, so for me, in cleaning out my records (a tale for another blog), it’s always a good reckoning point. However, if the old-fashioned resolution isn’t satisfactory, what’s the best approach?

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary a resolution is a “firm decision to do or not do something.” We all know how that goes. Exercise more, eat healthier, be nicer to my family, get organized, live a greener life, do my part to promote world peace. How do you know if you’ve arrived?

Some people prefer goals instead. Goal. “The object of a person’s ambition or effort; an aim with desired results.”

The resolution is more of a change in behavior without a purpose attached, while the goal focuses on the end point. Do the ends justify any means? In this day and age of terrorists and greed, we’ve seen a little too much focus on the ends. Shouldn’t there be a meeting point where sensible means produce the desired results?

Years ago, as mentioned in an earlier blog entry, I taught time management. There I introduced the concept of the SMART goal, which I notice has not gone out of vogue, probably because it still makes a lot of sense. (I’m not claiming I invented it, but I was rather fond of it.) Specific (see the remaining four characteristics), measurable (how do you know when you’ve arrived?), achievable, realistic (these last two seem similar--not too grandiose given your circumstances), and set within a timeframe.

But even the SMART goal doesn’t talk about the means. So I am going to create a new concept—the reso-goal, which considers both means and ends.

Reso-goal—a firm decision to change behavior in a way that is considered desirable and ongoing that leads to a desired result. Both the behavior and the result should be measurable, achievable, realistic, and set within a timeframe.

I’ll throw in another characteristic—accountability. We all know that by announcing our intentions, we tend to be more honest.

In that spirit, I commit myself to the following reso-goals related to writing for 2010.

1. Complete revisions of my novel on the travails of two women in their middle years (by March 1), obtain further critique from three trusted reviewers (by April 15), make final revisions, prepare manuscript to send out to agents by June 1.
2. Write short synopsis and query letter to be reviewed by six people each.
3. Research appropriate agents and send to 5 a month once manuscript is ready, for a total of 30, if needed by end of year.
4. Write on average two blog entries a month (can cheat and make at least four of these primarily photographic in nature).
5. Write six new short stories for Maine collection (average length-4000 words), or approximately one every two months.
6. Read on average one good novel a month (slow reader…)—already in my possession, used, or borrowed. Only buy new if attending a book signing.
7. Spend at least 20 days in Maine to get inspired for #5.
8. Skim through all magazines, reading only what really interests me (vague, I know—sometimes you have to go with your gut), and complete by end of month in which they arrive, in order to make time for 1-7.

You’ve heard it here. I’ll report about it in January 2011. What are your reso-goals?

Oh, I promise to focus on world peace once the novel gets published or when I no longer have to earn a living, whichever comes first.

On Reflecting Back: One Writer's Year

2009-12-30T19:10:00.000-08:00

Since 1972 I have been keeping a daily log of what I do—just the basics. Last year, I resolved to complete the log in “real time” rather than relying on my fragile memory a week later, and I’ve been pretty good. The result is a better record of my life. Of course, like most good intentions, I started out with more gusto than I ended up. I know, for instance, that the first week of January, I wrote approximately 4000 words. Later on in the year, I know what days I wrote, but that’s it. But as I look back over the year, I don’t see a lot of white space, so I guess I’ve been keeping busy. In an effort to appreciate how much of my life is being devoted to my writing avocation, I have decided to summarize achievements in that arena, based on my log (fittingly, recorded in a diary called “The Writer’s Desk," with photos by Jill Krementz. The diaries are an annual Christmas gift from my husband. This year the theme is beleaguered 1950s housewives. We shall see how that inspires me!)

WRITING and REVISION:
• Began my blog in January: 24 entries.
• Completed a first draft of my novel “How to Write a Best Seller” (HTWS) on July 4th (estimating about 250 additional pages during 2009).
• Wrote one and two page synopses of HWBS as well as detailed chapter outline.
• Completed a second draft on 9/4 and gave to two people to read and critique.
• Revised opening pages of “Gina”
• Reread 7th draft of “Gina,” decided to reset it in 1980, and fixed anachronisms in entire draft.
• Rewrote first few pages of HTBS based on feedback of 2 reviewers.
• Wrote a handful of haiku (inspired by our stay in Hawaii)
• Got new idea for a linked short story collection and wrote 1.5 short stories (November/December)

WRITERS’ GROUPS/CRITIQUE:
• Paarticipated in 21 meetings of my bi-weekly writers’ group (at two hours apiece)
• Participated in a 2-minute critique session with an agent on first 20 pages of “Gina”
• Reviewed chapters of another writer friend, and met/talked with him to discuss our writing on five occasions from April to December.

READINGS:
• Attended readings of: Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot (“The Third Chapter”);”Jury of Her Peers;” Jane Hamilton (“Laura Rider’s Masterpiece); Four Stories, Tracy Kidder; book party for “Map, an autobiorgraphy of my CCAE teacher; Steve Almond and Page M. Guttenberg machine demonstration at the Harvard Book Store; Ha Jin.

RESEARCH & SUBMISSIONS:
• Researched agents, sent out three query letters for “Gina in the Floating World” (eventually heard from two)
• Entered “Book in a Nutshell” contest and one line hook contest
• Researched synopses on websites

CLASSES, WORKSHOPS, PANELS, and FESTIVALS:
• Participated in 7-week Novel Development Class at Cambridge Center for Adult Education; reviewed and critiqued classmates’ outlines.
• Participated in full weekend Grub Street workshop “The Art of Language,” and one-day workshop on “Cinefiction.”
• Attended one full day of Muse and the Marketplace (including 4 workshops and keynote Ann Patchett); Boston Book Festival (multiple workshops); Somerville Book Festival (talked to authors)
• Attended shorter workshops on “Should I be on the Web?” and “Writers’ Contracts” sponsored by PEN; “Nail the Opening,” “Avoid Rejection,” and “Ask the Agent” sponsored by Grub Street.
• Attended panels of debut authors at BPL; “Muses, Monsters, and Mentors” at the Brattle Theatre; “Adaptations” at Coolidge Corner.

MISCELLANEOUS:
• Organized my writing drawer on several occasions

Of course, this list doesn’t include novels read, movies that give me ideas, or conversations about writing. Despite full-time work that pays the bills, I really have been devoting a lot of time to this endeavor –almost like my own private MFA! Now if only I could graduate….

On Who and What I am Thankful for as a Writer

2009-11-26T08:28:00.000-08:00

In no particular order—

• Grub Street Writers, which has offered so many outstanding classes related to writing and publishing and allowed me to develop my craft.

• My bi-weekly writers’ group--Burns, Lisa, and Shellie, who have provided ongoing support and feedback, five pages at a time and have kept me moving along.

• My friends and family, especially Michael, Buki, and John, who have regularly read and critiqued large hunks of my work and have given me encouragement, love, and ideas.

• My Gina in the Floating World readers—Pippa, Susan, and Donna—who took the time to read an entire draft of my novel and pushed me along on the revision process.

• My teachers at Friends’ Central School, who taught me the fundamentals of how to write, oh so many years ago.

• Michael Neff for giving me an initial boost regarding the potential of “Gina” and then publishing my first short story in Del Sol Review.

• Jackie for being my partner in screenwriting and the adventures that shaped my second novel, as well as for her detailed critique.

• The Internet, for making it so easy to access information on any topic imaginable.

• All those interesting blogs by other writers that help me connect to a community of writers and feel reassured that others are going through what I am going through.

• Computers and word processing for allowing the words to flow more easily onto the page.

• Boston area for being such a rich resource for writers.

• My thesaurus (the book version) for expanding my vocabulary.

• Great writers and books for inspiring me.

• You, my friends and readers, for having faith in me!

On Paradise as Muse

2009-11-13T18:17:00.000-08:00

Why I will return to Hawaii-

1. Breathtaking vistas (the view after climbing Diamond Head Crater)

2. Unusual geologic features (Chinaman's Hat, Oahu, windward coast)

3. Exotic wildlife--large (a manta ray with diver a Sea Life Park, Ohahu, but we had a personal visit from a manta ray in our cove on the Big Island)

--and small (lizard on our door stoop, Big Island)

4. Colorful plantlife (some kind of bromeliad)

5. A unique history (the Place of Refuge, Big Island)

6. Its own brand of architecture (the Painted Church, Big Island)

7. Outstanding surf (the Pipeline, Oahu North Shore)

8. Beaches with shade (Kapiolani Beach Park, Waikiki)

9. People marching to their own drummers (or eyewear!)(Pakani Grill, Waimea, Big Island; reminds me of the colorful costumes on Halloween night in Chinatown in Honolulu)

10. New uses for familiar foods (farmers' market, Honolulu)

11. The view off our private deck (Kealakekua Bay, Big Island)

12. The "aloha" spirit everywhere

On Blog Block and the Perils of Revision

2009-11-12T18:39:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader (and I know there were a few of you out there), I have been a terrible blogger these last few months, and I owe you an explanation, knowing I may have lost you to more faithful writers. Initially, I had an excuse. I even told you about it. I was working on the second draft on my novel, with a deadline of Labor Day imposed by my friend, who had agreed to read it through before the crush of her fall semester as a professor began. I'm good with deadlines. After I returned from our Jersey shore retreat, I buckled under, wrote for several hours each day after work and most weekends, and sent off the 450+ re-tuned pages that second week in September. I was also subsumed in an intense report writing phase of work--creative writing was my own "busman's holiday." (Does anyone use that phrase anymore, or is it remnant of my English upbringing?) I posted a few pictures of my garden (a symbol of my productivity?), scraps to assuage the hunger of the empty blog pages.

Following this two month burst, I gave myself a second reprieve from wordsmithing, trusting that the muse would return. But I had been in revision mode so long that my faucet of creativity had shut itself off. Not so much as a drip! I couldn't even write about the revision process itself, which for me was just a matter of considering the various pieces of feedback I'd received and plugging away. Nothing special to share. To maintain my illusion of being a writer, I faithfully went to my writers' group every two weeks, continuing to feed my colleagues previously written chapters and providing feedback to them in return. I attended readings, sat in on a session on writers' contracts, and even paid good money to participate in a full weekend workshop on "The Art of Language," where I froze in panic at having to complete an exercise involving substituting new words in a paragraph of an established writer's prose. On the second day of the workshop, I handed in the first two pages of my newly revised novel. It came back from the instructor filled with brackets indicating unnecessary words and a comment about the stakes feeling low. The stakes of my females middle-aged protagonist who was struggling with her novel! What a slap to the brain! I felt deflated but also armed with some new weapons in my revision arsenal. I would not let myself sink into a vat of self-pity (like my protagonist in one of my several attempts at rewriting the first two pages.)

In the meantime, I had heard from my friend--she loved the second two-thirds but included four single-spaced pages of suggestions about that first third. My husband, whom I nervously watched as he read the revision, had his own set of thoughts, also mostly about the beginning. (Blessedly, he stuck with the novel until he finished it, and I took this as a good sign that if it wasn't a page turner, it at least had a certain modicum of forward momentum.) So now I'm stuck. My homework is clear, except that it means more and more reworking of the same old material. Yet, what sense would it make to abandon something that is so close to completion? Or is it? It's reminds me of the waiting game. The longer you wait in line, the less likely you are to leave that line even though you may not be all that close to getting what you need. You have already committed so much time, to leave would be to admit that all the previous time was wasted.

I will finish that novel, but I need to give myself permission to do other writing for awhile, to not believe that I have abandoned the manuscript just because I don't want to deal with it just yet. I need to absolve myself of my guilt (or shame?), in order to move on.

So, dear reader, that is my story. It comes to you courtesy of a netbook with a nine-hour battery life and and an eight hour non-stop plane ride to Hawaii (but that is a story for another blog). I know there will be no tears shed for me upon that little confession. May my muse be waiting for me, mai tai in hand, on a lanai overlooking the deep blue Pacific. Until then...

On the End of Summer

2009-09-07T17:33:00.000-07:00

You know it’s the end of summer when—

• The boxes of blueberries at the supermarket are half the size and twice the price.
• The apples are really crisp.
• Your daily walk must be completed before dinner if you want to do it while it’s still light.
• You fill garden refuse bags with all the plants you’ve had to cut back rather than with weeds.
• You receive your first seasonal notice of a coat sale.
• Halloween merchandise fills the shelves of the CVS.
• Mums fill the shelves of the garden store.
• You wonder which of the new TV shows you will waste your time on.
• Sports talk starts to focus as much on football as baseball.
• It’s too cool to eat supper on the patio.
• Previously silent frat houses are holding beer pong parties.
• College freshmen walk around in packs discussing their course schedules and the size of their dorms rooms.
• You can’t find a parking space anywhere near Harvard Square.
• At 2:30pm SUVs idle outside of the local elementary school
• The gym is no longer quiet.
• You pull the quilt up at night.
• You can’t use hot weather as an excuse not to do chores.

What marks the end of your summer?

On Vacation!

2009-08-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

I am taking a break from my musings to do a revision of my novel! Enjoy these photos of my garden....

On Going "Down the Shore"

2009-07-19T19:42:00.000-07:00

I’ve just returned from my annual “anchor” trip to Somers Point, NJ, on the bayside near Ocean City. New Englanders don’t get the Jersey Shore at all. Off season, give me the Cape or the southern coast of Maine, but in the summer, there’s room enough for all of us “down the shore,” from the brash and bustling casinos of Atlantic City, to the well-appointed mansions of Margate and Longport, and the year round suburban towns that dot the coast. Here is a sampler of what I like:

• Key lime margaritas overlooking the Bay
• Long walks on the bike path from Somers Point
• Minimal traffic jams
• Beautiful, well-kept gardens
• The little ranch house we call home
• Pancakes and omelets at the Bayside Restaurant
• Splitting entrees at fancy restaurants
• Finding bargains
• Quiet nights, sunny days
• Wide beaches, soft sand
• Real surf
• Decompressing and de-stressing
• Childhood memories of Margate
• Lucy, the Giant Elephant
• Buying Jersey tomatoes at Mazzeos
• Walking the Boardwalk at Ocean City and Atlantic City
• Catching up with my friend Jackie and planning our lives for the next year

Not surprisingly, the Jersey shore serves as the place of inspiration for the protagonists in the story that Jackie and I created originally as a screenplay, and that, I hope, will be my first novel.

On Markers, Anchors, and Routines

2009-07-07T20:51:00.000-07:00

[Musing alert. The following entry will probably make no difference to your life.]

My annual car inspection seemed to come up very quickly this year. It’s a marker for me, signifying the passage of time. There are others. Some are odious, like my mammogram or my three times a year dental cleaning visits (I hate all the scraping and high, whiny machines that strip of tartar and stains). Some are potentially pleasurable, like birthdays. Some are sad, like the anniversaries of the deaths of family members.

In contrast, anchors are like comfort food. Anchors are recurring positive events, activities, TV or radio programs, or routines that help to center me. I look forward to them. Without them, something seems missing. For many years, “A Prairie Home Companion” was an anchor for me. Then one day, Garrison Keillior went off the air, and I felt quite bereft. Fortunately, he returned, though perhaps having been abandoned once, I was more reluctant to allow the show to resume its anchor status. When an anchor disappears, some major readjustment is necessary.

Holidays often serve as anchors. Christmas with my family in London used to be an anchor. I lost that anchor when my family members passed away. In contrast, Thanksgiving was never an anchor holiday. My husband and I rarely do the same thing twice.

And then there are routines. Whereas an anchor might play out differently from occasion to occasion, routines rely on a fixed set of activities and may occur with more regularity—like the morning cup of coffee with the sports section—but they may be infrequent as well. Most of us take some pleasure in our routines. On my first day of that trip to London, I had a routine. Arrive early in the morning, be picked up by my sister and brother-in-law, have a small breakfast upon arrival (usually toast and a soft boiled egg), a couple of hours’ nap, a little lunch, and then a visit to my mum and dad for tea and cake.

For many people, their annual vacations to the same spot serve as anchors. I am about to leave for my yearly anchor trip—my pilgrimage, as I call it, to the Jersey Shore with my long-time friend, whom I only see once a year. For a few days each summer but one since 1995, we have occupied the house of a friend while he is away. It’s a simple ranch house in a suburban bayside community, but it feels like home. We have watched it morph from its original 70s decor of gold shag carpet and dark paneled walls to a brighter, cleaner look with new appliances and central air conditioning. Though relatively brief, the trip serves a major source of recharging for both of us. During this time, we also have our routines--our daily walks on the bike path, our trip to Mazzeo’s to buy local produce for our healthy eating intentions, our check-in at Talbots sale, our visit to the local gallery, our final breakfast on the deck of a little café. In its way, the trip is a marker.

I suppose it’s possible that one can become too dependent on one’s anchors and not venture out of one’s comfort zone. But for me, it’s the anchors that make the adventuresome turns possible, like writing. Writing is not an anchor activity, and although it is something I do regularly, neither is it a routine. It requires some gearing up. But once inside the zone, I can go for hours. And then how nice it is at the end of it all to shut off the computer and delve into the bedtime routine.

On Using the Myers Briggs Type Indicator to Create Character Personalities

2009-06-29T13:04:00.000-07:00

A challenge for any fiction writer whose books are not solely plot driven is to develop memorable characters. These characters should be distinguishable from one another by their quirks, styles of speech, and patterns of behavior, and as they change, they should act in believable and consistent manners. Over the span of 300 or more pages, this is no small feat. There are tools we can draw on from other fields to provide a framework. One of my favorites is the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which I enthusiastically embraced in my former lives as a career counselor and administrator.

Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Meyers expanded on Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types and made it more accessible. Although developed several decades before, the MBTI came into vogue in the 1980s when a number of books about it were published, including the second edition of A Guide to the Development and Use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Isabel Briggs Myers and Mary H. McCaulley, Palo Alto: Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc., 1985) as well as the more popular Please Understand Me (David Kiersey and Marilyn Bates, 1978; new version now available). For awhile the MBTI was a very popular in corporate settings.

In brief, the MBTI poses four dichotomous scales designed to describe a person’s preferences in relation to her perceptions and actions. The names that were assigned to these scales can be a bit misleading in that they may conjure up images different from those intended. Simplistically put, the four scales are:

Introversion (I)-extroversion (E): Where does your psychic energy come from? Extroverts obtain much of their energy from being with others; introverts prefer being inside their own heads and may be drained by spending too much time with others, especially large groups. (Many actors and writers are introverts in this sense; many salespeople are extroverts.) Note that extroverts are much more common than introverts.

Sensing (S)-intuition (N): How do you collect and generate information? The sensing person focuses on concrete information and details gathered through their five senses. The intuitive person prefers the world of possibilities and ideas. (For examples of a sensor versus an intuitor, think George W. Bush versus Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln.) However, although we may associate creativity with intuitors, sensors can also be very creative.

Thinking (T)-feeling (F): How do you process information, especially to make decisions? The thinking person uses analysis and logic. The feeling person is more concerned with values and emotions. (Think Barack Obama versus Bill Clinton.) Note that women are more likely to be feelers, and men thinkers.

Judging (J)-perceiving (P): How do you operate in the world? The judging person likes to organize their world and prefers closure. The perceiver is more spontaneous and continues to collect information. (Think Felix versus Oscar in The Odd Couple.)

After completing a multi-item assessment, each person can be classified into a four letter type, and each of the 16 resulting types also has distinct characteristics beyond the sum of its parts. (Of course, on some scales, people may be more of a mixture; in others they may have much stronger preferences.) However, I’ve found that even a knowledge of the four scales provides useful information, especially to truly grasp why someone may think or act differently from you. As a partner, manager, subordinate, co-worker, or friend, you can manage your own expectations of others’ behavior much better if you understand their type preferences. Setting aside the arguments that the MBTI doesn’t describe all aspects of personality (and has its detractors), it covers a lot of the ground where tensions between people can arise.

Back in the world of fiction, these inherent tensions between types can also provide the fodder for conflict in fiction. Imagine the high J (judger) becoming very frustrated with the high P (perceiver), who seems incapable of making a decision. At the same time, the P accuses the J of being rigid. Or the high T (thinker) may ridicule the high F for being illogical while the high F may think that the high T has no heart. The high E can stay at a party all night, but the high I has had enough after a short while and would rather go home and read a good book.

There are hundreds of references on the MBTI. A useful, though not definitive, URL is ODportal.com. To use the MBTI in the way it was designed to be used requires formal training and certification, but for the writer, the fun is in the description of type and seeing how these different types might aid in character development.

On Taking the Plunge and Other Ways to Open a Story

2009-06-20T18:26:00.000-07:00

Image:FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I start most of my stories by leaping headfirst in scene, into the action. But the opening to my first novel isn’t working, and I couldn’t figure out why. It has high stakes, lots of tension, an unusual setting. Why, after countless rewrites, is it still not doing its job?

Recently, for the long drive back from my college reunion, a friend had lent me some short stories on tape. I listened to these stories as much to learn something about structure as to be entertained. What struck me was that several of these began somewhat languidly, laying out a back story, poking around the head of a key character, or stepping way out for a view of a place or a time in history. If I believed that a novel should start in the middle of things, I had even surer convictions that a short story must catch our attention even more quickly. How else to do this than to plough right in? Clearly, despite regular evidence to the contrary in my own reading, my vision had been clouded by something I had learned or heard that had etched itself in my writer’s brain.

A few days later, thanks to Grub Street Writers instructor, Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, and her informative three hour workshop, “Nailing the Opening,” I now have the language to apply to my analysis. Ms. Beach-Ferrara laid out a framework (along with easy to remember names) of five different kinds of openings that could also be combined with each other. These are:

• “The Plunge.” That’s me. Immediate, out of the gate, immersion into the action.
• “The Wind-up.” A more deliberate entry that may cover a lot of time, maybe even recounting a backstory.
• “The Rumination.” I begin a lot of chapters with these, but I’ve never begun a story this way. In this opening, a character ponders “life’s truths.” The rumination is particularly useful to introduce the voice of a first person character and may give us some sense of the theme of the story/book.
• "The Aerial View.” This kind of opening orients us to the world we are about to see. It is useful when that world operates differently from the one we know. The aerial view is distancing.
• "The Hook." We all know this as the clever sentence or two that immediately snares us, intrigues us, surprises us, makes us take notice and want to know more.

Of course, many stories combine these kinds of openings. Later, I went back to some of my favorite novels to see how they began. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest introduces us to our narrator, Chief. At first glance, it looks like “The Plunge.” We are in the middle of a scene, but it is a scene that has probably played out before. Kesey skillfully lays out the unfamiliar world of the mental institution for us, giving us an “aerial view,” but at closer range. In Catcher in the Rye, Holden insists he doesn’t want to give you any back story, but then he does (A Windup)along with some rumination until he gets us to where his story begins. We have an immediate idea of who this character is, and we are along for the ride. Memoirs of a Geisha, another first person narrative, begins with a short rumination before leading us into the tale that takes place in chronological order. In contrast, the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, takes a short plunge, gives us a piece of back story to help us understand the narrator, and then brings us back to the action.

In that short evening class, we had the opportunity to apply four different opening techniques to a piece we were working on. In just eight minutes each, I spent time in my narrator’s head making observations about this new identity she had assumed (rumination), had her consider the past that brought her to that place (wind-up), described the strange world she inhabited (aerial view), and had her jump in and out of the water more quickly than I had before. What a simple, yet brilliant exercise that forced me out of my comfortable patterns! Now I am so giddy with the possibilities, I hardly know where to begin….

On What I Realized after Attending My College Reunion

2009-06-09T13:47:00.000-07:00

• We look older than we feel.
• In late midlife, people want to write about their stories not just talk about them.
• I feel less nostalgic about the past than I was when I was closer to it.
• Reunions are easier without the presence of one’s spouse.
• Spouses generally don’t care for college reunions.
• No one understands the kind of work I do for a living.
• Many of us are less interested in talking about our work than we used to be.
• I really am an introvert--three days of solid talking and listening has exhausted me!
• Your true friends are the ones you can pick up with where you left off.
• People’s personalities don’t change over time, though some of the edges are softened.
• Death of loved ones is a common denominator for all of us.
• Folk songs from the 60s/early 70s were far superior to what passes today for folk music.
• Peggy Seegar is a true talent and a wonderful entertainer.
• Some people will always be sad.
• Some people will always be angry.
• Some people are dauntingly accomplished.
• Some people have an astonishing capacity to remember.
• Some people can get everyone to listen to them.
• Some people will never come to reunions.
• Most people who seemed to be from another world all those years ago are really very nice.
• Some people in our cohort are grandparents—how can that be?
• Buildings on college campuses should “be in conversation with each other.”
• College dorms are soulless places without students.
• The people who knew you when you were young know you in a way that no one else can know you.
• I am not the only one who saved all our college newspapers, but I do need to downsize!
• Time is whizzing by—it seems like I just attended my last five-year reunion.
• We attended college at an extraordinary time.
• The events—both internal at our college and external in the world--of that extraordinary time bind us together in a special way.
• Although we meant it at the time, we will not follow up on most of those promises to make contact with the people with whom we do not already have contact.
• Most of us will be dead or too infirmed to come to our 70th reunion.

On Creative Symbiosis

2009-05-15T19:14:00.000-07:00

Before I wrote regularly, I took photographs. I bought my first “real” camera right before college graduation. That summer I traveled across the USA to California for the first time, followed by two months in Europe (in the $5 dollars a day era.) Film was expensive, and I think I used up exactly one roll of 36 slides without having tested my camera.

Over time and with a larger budget at my disposal, I switched to print film. Along the way, I figured out what I enjoyed capturing. I began to find my photographic “voice.” And sometimes, I produced some pretty good photos. Occasionally, someone even paid me to take photographs. I took workshops, but mostly I just kept taking pictures and figuring out what worked. Never a lot, just regularly over a lot of years. There’s much to be said for practice.

Digital photography has allowed me to be more adventurous. With no film to waste, I can take some chances, look for different angles, zoom in to the details, zoom out to catch the entire context (with my trusty wide angle to zoom lens). Even better, I can see the approximate results instantly. I compose my shots as carefully (or as impulsively as before). Other than a little cropping, I try to keep my fiddling around with the images afterwards to a minimum. (I’m not into the technology of photo-editing. I want to get it right when I hit the shutter.)

But now that I write, photography is even more satisfying as a creative outlet. The two activities complement each other, using different parts of my brain. There are similarities. Both involve using my imagination, telling a story, deciding on the focus. They are both visual media—in one case I must decide which part of the visual world I want to represent and in what way; in the other, I must paint that visual world with words.

But they are very different, as well. Novel writing, though enjoyable, is a labor intensive, indoor, and lonely pursuit. In contrast, photography for me is an outgrowth of other activities, such as travel. Because my husband is a photographer, I often have company. And the turn around time is quick. Go home, download, select, edit if needed, and print.

Each year, I choose one of my favorite photos and make holiday cards for my friends and family. Many a time I have visited a friend in July only to see my photo on the mantle. Instant external approval and gratification. And then there are the occasional requests from friends and colleagues for enlargements, with no marketing on my part.

In contrast, after months of writing a first draft, there are the revisions, feedback, more revisions, fine tooth editing, query letter creation, etc. before one even thinks of sending out the precious novel into the world for professional scrutiny. Then come the rejection letters, often months after the initial query was sent out. The self doubt. Renewed scrutiny of the manuscript. More revisions…..I can tell myself that the real accomplishment was completing such a mammoth project, that if I want to see my book in print, I can self-publish (sort of like printing up one of those photo books). But after all the expenditure of energy, after each revision, I am even more reluctant to give up. I am too invested. (It’s like waiting in that long line; once you’ve been there an hour, you’re not going to leave, or it will feel like you've wasted your time.)

Maybe I’ll get out my new camera instead. Maybe today will be the day I’ll shoot the photo that will be worthy of the annual holiday card, or maybe I’ll just stumble on an interesting pattern. And if I don’t, it doesn’t matter. With a blink of an eye, I’ll feel my creative spirit renewed, ready to tackle the character that needs some extra “spark,” or that scene that isn’t quite credible. It’s a symbiosis that works for me at the moment.

Of course, there’s always my blog. Not as quick as a photo, but it looks very professional up there on the screen. Just like a real writer….and once in awhile I even get a real reader!

On 26 Things I Learned about Writing at the Muse and the Marketplace

2009-04-27T11:23:00.000-07:00

This weekend I attended Grub Street Writer’s annual writers’ conference in Boston, “The Muse Muse and the Marketplace.” In addition to receiving one-on-one feedback from an agent, I attended four sessions on various aspects of writing (Elinor Lipman, Bret Anthony Johnston) and getting published (Lisa Genova, a panel of agents) and a luncheon with keynote speaker, Ann Patchett (she was witty and informative!). In reviewing my notes when I got home rather than just putting them away, I gleaned the following advice/observations, organized by general topic. I like to think I was practicing some of these, but it never hurts to be reminded. Many of these came with illustrations.

On point of view (POV):
1. Point of view all comes down to selection of events and selection of details.
2. To pull off first person central POV (as opposed to peripheral), you need a distinctive and original voice. First person central is deceptively easy. “How the story is told is as important as the story itself. If anyone else tells it, they will get it wrong.”
3. For every one thing a character notices about another character, we should learn three things about the character doing the observing.
4. When you put one character in the position where they know more than another character, you create tension.

On sharpening your writing:
5. Establish a sense of your main character on page one. You want people to care.
6. Agents are looking for an excuse to stop reading; don’t include details/incidents early that make them question your logic, your research, etc.
7. Don’t write about the weather or the sky unless it’s relevant to your story.
8. Use salient details to move the story along or help us see a person or setting.
9. Sometimes there is no substitute for a well-placed adverb.
10. Some ambiguity in story endings is okay—either this or that happened. Use an epilogue if you need to wrap things up. But don’t have a character stare out into the abyss.
11. Make the reader an equal partner—don’t keep them guessing about what is happened, has happened, don’t trick them.
12. Save your “cuts.”

On dialogue:
13. Watch putting too much exposition in your dialogue.
14. Oscar Wilde said, “The essence of dialogue is interruption.”
15. When you use the word “said” or “says” in your dialogue tags, they disappear as compared with other synonyms (e.g. replied, affirmed, concurred, etc.)
16. Use said or says frequently to avoid confusion about who is speaking.
17. It sounds phony to use a person’s name in dialogue.
18. Some words are inherently funnier than others, so be mindful of the effect you are creating—e.g. haddock vs. filet of sole.
19. Emotions can be conveyed by the quality of the speech, not just the content (e.g. when happy, use run on sentences).

On writing in general:
20. Don’t count on your muse to appear! Be disciplined about your writing; this is a job.
21. Don’t keep beating a dead horse—be ready to dump your project if it isn’t working.
22. Remember that research is where we go to hide when we don’t want to work.

On publishing:
23. Make sure your book fits into a genre, or your book may be difficult to sell.
24. Network and use any referrals you can as you seek an agent, as referrals will more likely lead to an agent reading your work.
25. Self-publishing is not the kiss-of-death it was even a year ago, thanks to the success of originally self-published books, Brunonia Barry’s The Lace Reader and Lisa Genova’s Still Alice, but you will need a good hook (e.g. a place, a topic).
26. Prior to publishing, put excerpts, FAQs, readers’ guides on your website, design a cover.

Not too shabby for one day of my time. Thanks, Grub Street!

On the Great Literary Fiction Debate, or Are Some Writers Bamboozling Us?

2009-04-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

Once again, I’ve gotten myself in a swivet about literary fiction. To set the record straight, I tend to read what is called literary fiction more than “genre fiction.” Basically, I like novels that are well-written, with interesting, distinctive characters who grow and change, rich dialogue, and engrossing story lines. I enjoy being taken to places or times with which I may be less familiar, but I equally I am happy to indulge in a story to which I can relate. If a so-called genre fiction book fits those criteria, I’m in. And as you may have learned, I am not above reading the odd page turner where all these elements may not be present. Perhaps it is my investment in literary fiction that is causing my current state of rage. In my mind, a few writers, including several who have been showered with awards and critical acclaim, are being allowed to get away with a con job because on the surface their writing sounds so good—the literary equivalent of the emperor having no clothes (and I am not claiming this as an original thought.)

First, let’s deal with a couple of definitions. Wikipedia says: “Literary fiction is a term that has come into common usage since around 1970, principally to distinguish serious fiction (that is, work with claims to literary merit from the many types of genre fiction and popular fiction (i.e. paraliterature). In broad terms, literary fiction focuses more on style, psychological depth, and character, whereas mainstream commercial fiction (the page-turner) focuses more on narrative and plot….. Literary fiction is generally characterized as distinctive based on its content and style ("literariness", the concern to be "writerly"). The term literary fiction is considered hard to define very precisely but is commonly associated with the criteria used in literary awards…”

Nathan Bransford in his blog entry entitled “What Makes Literary Fiction Literary?”(February 26, 2007) believes that in commercial fiction the plot tends to happen above the surface (in the external world, where things happen) and “in literary fiction the plot tends to happen beneath the surface, in the minds and hearts of the characters. Things may happen on the surface, but what is really important are the thoughts, desires, and motivations of the characters as well as the underlying social and cultural threads that act upon them.”

So far, so good. So why am I feeling bamboozled? I recently went to a reading/discussion by a well-received literary fiction author (who will remain nameless) presenting her latest book. I had heard of her but confess I hadn’t read any of her books. The first warning light flashed as she explained, laughing, that this one--a very short, light-hearted book--had more of a plot than her previous award winning books (Read—My serious books do not need plot.)

Later that night as I began to read my new purchase, in short succession I encountered no fewer than six characteristics of certain so-called literary fiction works that make me twitch:

1) Switching of point of view mid-paragraph. Unless skillfully done, this sudden turnabout can be very confusing. It suggests either that the writer felt they were above normal writing conventions, or the editors were afraid to suggest any changes.
2) Characters indistinguishable by their dialogue, no matter what the background or personality of the character.
3) Interminable chunks of dialogue using expressions and words that even highly intelligent people don’t use. Few of us are that clever as we speak off the cuff.
4) Internal dialogue that feels implausible for a given character, such as deep insight from a character who is unlikely to have those kinds of insights.
5) Little rationale for why two characters may become involved in each others’ lives.
6) Frequent use of vocabulary that I have to look up in the dictionary, and I pride myself in having a reasonably good vocabulary. It feels like showing off.

As any good sleuth, I searched for clues that I was not crazy or uncultured and uncovered a scathing diatribe against certain forms of literary fiction by BR Myers (The Atlantic, July/August 2001), entitled “A Reader’s Manifesto.” Here are a few of Myers zingers that resonated.

“Many readers today expect literary language to be so remote from normal speech as to be routinely incomprehensible.”
“The critics' admiration for [Annie] Proulx reflects a growing consensus that the best prose is that which yields the greatest number of standout sentences, regardless of whether or not they fit the context.”
“A thriller must thrill or it is worthless; this is as true now as it ever was. Today's ‘literary’ novel, on the other hand, need only evince a few quotable passages to be guaranteed at least a lukewarm review.”
“…what unites these writers and separates them from the rest of the "literary" camp is the determinedly slow tempo of their prose.” The article is filled with examples of sometimes nonsensical language.

Myers claim is that the reviewers aren’t looking at the work as a whole, but rather allow themselves to be smitten by particular images or sentences. Of course, there were critics of his piece (especially of his curious choice of a couple of writers who might not be considered “literary” by some standards), but there was also a great deal of sympathy for his thesis.

Maybe I shouldn’t get so upset. There are plenty of good writers who manage to produce imaginative turns of phrase and still create convincing characters who talk like real people in believable, yet complicated worlds. In short, they are writing books I want to read, books I want to emulate in my own writing. Perhaps I’m annoyed because I let myself get conned into wasting a perfectly good evening (and my $22) when I should have done my research. And there is always something to learn, even if it’s just the meaning of a word I’ll never use.

On Martinis and Mozart

2009-04-11T11:37:00.000-07:00

My dad, George Fairburn Brett, died 14 years ago today at age 91. His life spanned most of the 20th century. He was born not long after the Wright Brothers successfully flew their plane at Kitty Hawk, saw our world shrink first through radio and then television, witnessed a man landing on the moon, lived through two world wars (too young to fight in the first, too old for the second), and the Great Depression. I wonder what he would have made of the socially networked world, what he would have thought of the possibility that he might not have his daily paper to hold in his hand. Interestingly, although he was a physicist by training and worked in the electronics industry his whole life, he never quite grasped the importance or potential of computers or how they would change people’s lives. His very considerable brain power started failing just as personal computers were coming into their own. His vote for the greatest invention of the last 150 years would go to the internal combustion engine.

I tried to imagine what he would have said about himself on his Facebook page though I believe even in his full right mind he would have pooh-poohed the concept. But here is my best guess (with a few additional categories thrown in).

Activities: Listening to music standing up, walking briskly, tinkering with the hi-fi and putting together “Heathkits,” making wine (and drinking it), intellectual conversation, reading, musing, composing doggerel, writing letters, sitting in the sun, traveling for business until age 65 when replaced by imagining what the neighbors are up to and schmoozing at the pub.

Interests: Classical music, three martini business lunches, philosophy (especially Bertrand Russell), physical sciences, the weather, cures for asthma, first class travel, aphorisms, words, foreign languages, theater (selected).

Favorite movies: Never watch movies.

Favorite TV shows: Even though involved with the development of color TV, haven’t watched TV since the 1950s, except for Wimbledon tennis and the news. Did enjoy “Your Show of Shows” (Sid Ceasar) and Milton Berle once upon a time.

Favorite Music: Classical music before the 18th century, mostly Mozart and Hadyn (own 200 records of same). Mozart operas.

Favorite authors: (not in any particular order) Jane Austin, James Joyce (have read Ulysses at least 100 times), Mark Twain (best American humorist), Henry Miller (that man can write about sex), Damon Runyan, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Montaigne, W.H. Auden, and H.L. Mencken.

Favorite places: New York, San Francisco, London

Favorite trip: Travelling around the US by train in 1928, including the Grand Canyon.

Favorite quotations: See my daughter Belle’s profile, plus, “Lay off that nostalgia, brother; it’s lethal.”

Most proud of: Climbing to the top of Mount Rainier. Never having stayed in a hospital (except for a few tests) until those last few weeks.

What I’m most proud of about my children and grandchild: Beth’s prodigious talent and perseverance as a designer; Belle’s trip around the world in her 20s; Pippa’s Ph.D. in Physics.

Greatest regret: Not having sufficient talent to have learned a musical instrument. Not having seen more of the world.

About me: Born in Ipswich, England, January 11, 1904 . Oldest of five (one brother, three sisters). Family moved to Leeds. Mother into health food—nuts and dried fruit. Father, who left school at 12 to work in the coal mines, eventually became Lord Mayor of Leeds. Earned Ph.D. in Physics from Leeds University, did two post-docs, including one at the University of Michigan, setting in motion interest in returning to the USA. Finally had to take a real job at age 27. Worked in same company for whole career: Marconi Co., which later became English Electric, which then became Marconi again before its eventual demise. Moved from the bench to patents in the 1940s. Married to Josephine Carlton, artist and art teacher, in 1943. During WWII, worked on development of radar. Two daughters. Finally landed job of dreams, 3000 miles away from boss, as liaison with the American electronics industry and eventually a VP, enjoying the aforementioned first class travel and three martini lunches. Lived in Lancaster and later Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1950-1968. Retired to London in 1968 to live a life of Riley.

Perhaps it is unfair of me, the daughter, to reveal my father in a way he might not publicly have done so himself. He was not one to laud his achievements. He was as harsh on himself as he could be about others and didn’t want to do anything if he was going to be second rate. But my gift to him is a web presence. And while it is not the sum of us, who are we these days if we cannot be found through Googling our names?

So as I raise my martini glass while listening to a little Mozart, I thank you, Dad, for what I got from you—a fast walking pace, a good immune system, curiosity about the world, a love of language, a healthy dose of cynicism, and a penchant for musing. (I could have done without the bad feet and impossible high standards that sometimes keep me from taking chances). But unlike you at my age, I see a life ahead of me full of possibilities, a life enhanced greatly by my computer. Although you did not believe in God nor an afterlife, I want to think that somewhere in the great beyond, you are urging me on to go forth, make my mark, and hang the critics, including those inside my head.

On the Devil is in the Details

2009-04-06T15:11:00.000-07:00

“Last Wednesday, I went to the mall. No, I think it was Thursday, because I always go to the mall in the morning, and Wednesday morning I had a doctor’s appointment. Yes, I remember it had to be Thursday because I left town on Friday. Anyway…” How many of us have stifled yawns as a beloved family member recounts something that happened to them? As an acquaintance of mine would say sarcastically, “Get it right; it’s important.” But, of course, sometimes the details are important. It all depends on the context. In a police report, the day of the week would be crucial.

In fiction, details are what make a story rich and interesting, and the details you choose to share are important whether to establish texture or to provide valuable information that highlights a character or moves the narrative forward. So, how important is it that the details accurately represent reality? Since it’s fiction, we may conclude that it doesn’t matter. But….

Last year at a writer’s conference, I attended a program called “Agent Idol,” modeled loosely after “American Idol,” with its panel format. The idea behind the program was to show what kinds of things raised red flags for agents and editors and possibly stopped them from reading further. Attendees submitted first pages of their novels or stories to be read out anonymously by a reader. When the reader hit a line in the first paragraph of my novel in which I refer to a pair of handcuffs attached to a wall in a love hotel in Tokyo, one agent’s hand shot up. “Ridiculous,” the agent said (and I am paraphrasing). “I’ve never seen handcuffs attached to a wall; they come down from ceilings.” In fact, I had researched love hotels and their various accessories, and, indeed, photos show quite clearly that wall handcuffs exist. But that didn’t matter. My use of this particular detail, which the agent did not find believable, especially early in my story before I had engaged her, ruined my credibility. In a later rewrite, I eliminated the reference to the wall. Why take a chance?

In my own reading, I notice that I, too, am put off by details that seem wrong, whether or not one could argue for them. For example, much of Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty is set in a town near Boston, where I have lived for the past 30+ years. Early on she describes the architecture of a house that she probably saw in a part of downtown Boston. She transplants this four-story house (mistakenly called “New England” style, which that house is decidedly not) to a neighborhood near her fictional college. I wracked my brains trying to think where such a campus could be to have a house like this, and I could not. Strike one. Just a page later, she talks about someone coming up to see the “Color” in the area in September. By the Color we assume she is talking about the autumn leaves, which don’t turn in this part of New England until mid-October. Later, there were instances of impossible travel routes to add further to my annoyance. Had I found her writing less ponderous perhaps I would have been willing to forgive these transgressions.

In her blog,The Write Reality, Pippa Goldschmidt, a scientist and fiction writer, tells of her irritation when writers misrepresent science. But she also argues that “a desire for accuracy can shade into pedantry.” It may be important to consider from whose point of view the story is told, and what might that person know or not know as they view their world? How does any inaccuracy illuminate their character?

These are useful considerations. If we require 100% accuracy in our stories, we would either write only about what we know very well, spend all our time doing research and fact checking, or create only fantasy worlds. Perhaps what counts are consistency and plausibility within the context of our particular tale. Ask those whom we ask to review our stories before we send them out if anything trips them up? If your setting is one with which you are less familiar, find a reader who has lived there. Or if you are describing a profession, give it someone who understands that profession. When needed, do some basic research using credible sources. And remember, even if it’s accurate, it may not be believable! (But it really happened like that!)

Of course, there will always be readers who, convinced they know it all, will delight in pointing out your supposed errors. You won’t please everyone. Just hope you can please the agents and the editors.

On the Promise of Spring

2009-04-01T13:21:00.000-07:00

Lorraine never knew what awaited her in the garden in those pubescent days of spring. In preparation for the long New England winter, she had cut back the spent shoots, with their brown leaves and mummified flowers but left the plants that seemed to have a vestige of life. Eventually, these too lost their color and began to rejoin the earth. Only the sea grasses, turned straw color, and the small crabapples clinging to bare branches, managed to maintain any visual interest. Finally, when the ground was no longer frozen towards the end of March, she surveyed the tiny urban landscape to determine what work was needed to ready it for the new season’s display.

It didn’t look too daunting at first. With a rusted rake left in the garage by previous owners, she clawed at the masses of tangled twigs of the dead catmint and spirolina and found underneath the drooping leaves of tulips struggling for sunlight. She’d forgotten about the tulips. They flowered so early and then disappeared, but now they were a welcome surprise as she anticipated their yellow and purple cups opening up to the sky.

Lorraine stepped more gingerly now, especially once she noticed the offspring of the twigs poking their delicate red-rouged tips through the soil. Although she found herself perusing the Southern California and Hawaii real estate listings during winters when she and Joe buried the garden with snow from the driveway, she had to admit she would miss the more dramatic change of seasons, especially the promise of spring. The way the flowers and the plants would reappear despite her complete neglect for months made her feel that anything was possible. At the end of May when the grape arbor was still not showing much signs of life, she would be convinced it had finally died, and then leaf by leaf it would return until it was so bushy she had to prune it.

Those acts gave her faith that she wasn’t that old, that maybe even her best years were ahead. Some people started whole new careers at 60. One of her high school classmates had left a respectable professorship to make cheese. Another had sold his business and was building wooden Dory boats. She fancied herself a writer, perhaps a poet. The garden kept her dreams of renewal alive.

***
The above is an excerpt from a story I wrote the first full year I threw myself into writing. Interestingly, my garden was also somewhat new at the time. I like readying it for its all too short growth season. In addition to the sheer joy of being in the fresh air after a housebound winter and of using muscles in ways the gym never quite replicates, I find the creative juices stirring there. Maybe, as Lorraine says it is the “promise of spring,” a chance to shed one’s layers and begin anew. There is something about the longer days, the brighter light, the multiple shades of green, that energize the spirit.

I have been productive these last few months—I’ve about finished a draft of another novel, started this blog, researched my list of agents, and sent out a few queries, but in truth, I think I feel more like a writer this time of year. However, without moving to a land of eternal sunshine, perpetual flowers and warm breezes (though I love Hawaii), I want it to be spring in my mind all the time, to feel confident in this new choice, to let go of any fear of failure.

In her book, The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk and Adventure in the 25 Years after 50 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009), Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot shares stories of people who have reinvented themselves after age 50. She talks about “going home,” replaying experiences from childhood and using new opportunities to heal earlier pain. It wasn’t until recently that I realized I “wrote” all the time as a child. I didn’t actually write down the stories I created, but I talked them out loud as I illustrated them in pencil. Alas, most of these were lost after my parents moved, but I remember a theme of hope that permeated them—poor into rich, plain into beautiful, lonely into accepted—each a story of longing and then fulfillment. Now I, the adult in my third chapter, owe it to that budding writer of so long ago to realize her dreams, and like that child and like the gardener, enjoy the journey itself, with all its effort and promise.

On What I Learned about Getting Published from Watching "Survivor"

2009-03-23T12:37:00.000-07:00

• Being hungry is a good motivator.
• You can be too hungry.
• Be cautious with your trust.
• Find allies, but don’t count on anyone else to pull you through.
• Have a strategy but be flexible. Things can change quickly.
• Don’t badmouth anyone who potentially has power over your situation.
• You need to stay strong to pull through.
• Cast your net wide and keep your eyes open.
• Don’t let a little success go to your head, nor a little failure go to your heart.
• The people who really love you will love you even if you don’t win.

On the Highbrow/Lowbrow Divide Revisited

2009-03-18T20:16:00.000-07:00

The highbrow/lowbrow divide is said to be passé. If you come from that formerly snobbish echelon of society, it’s apparently no longer shameful to read “The New Yorker” at night and “Us” magazine in the morning ("High Brow. Low Brow. No Brow. Now What?" by Scott Timberg, LA Times, 7/27/2008.) Even the holdout distinction between literary and commercial fiction has supposedly been fading, with genre fiction now mixing it up.

Tell that to the agents and publishers who keep asking us to classify our writing. Tell that to the literary critics. And tell that to my brain, which still plays those old parental tapes, still seeks the old man’s approval, long after his death.

My father was disdainful of popular culture. Until he died, he kept a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses by his bedside. His musical interests ended somewhere in the 18th century. Although we were early adopters of television because of his career in the vacuum tube side of the burgeoning post World War II electronics industry, he rarely watched it himself, even as his own world narrowed. I remember once having a maddening argument with him in my 30s regarding the relative worth of fans of opera and soccer. Clearly, my father thought that opera aficionado was superior and belittled my intelligence for defending the soccer riff-raff.

But as opinionated as my father could be (and as dismissive as he was at times about the choices my sister and I made), he believed that people needed to be exposed to different things and make up their own minds. He disparaged our pop music but would never have considered telling us to turn off our radios.

So, here I am in the third half of my life, reading Jane Austin one week and the Twilight saga the next; equally engrossed in the real lives on PBS documentaries and the manipulated lives of “reality” TV; rooting for the Celtics and listening to Celtic music; devoted to “Dirty Dancing” and moved by “Macbeth; fascinated by Facebook and swooning over portraits by Constable. I am happy with my divergent interests but conflicted by them, too.

Not all my friends share my eclectic interests. To those whose repertoire remains distinctly highbrow, I don’t confess my most plebian tastes, afraid they would be disappointed with me or think less of me. As I read my college’s alumni/ae news full of the latest achievements of my oh-so-talented classmates, I wonder, too, what they would think of the author of the tale of a young woman who loses her moral compass in Japan and does some fairly nasty things along the way, or the saga of two women in their middle years who set out to write a romance novel in order to avoid the problems in their own lives. (This is the same college that produced Jonathan Franzen, literary writer extraordinaire and also James Michener, master of the sweeping saga--both favorites of mine.)

If I had to choose between being widely read or having critical acclaim, I think I’d choose the former. I think. At the moment, I’d settle for getting in print. And what would my father say then—-my father, who set the bar for creativity so high for himself he never even attempted to jump? Would he read page one and tell me I shouldn’t have bothered? Or maybe feeling slightly more magnanimous in his unearthly state, would he congratulate me just for trying? Maybe I wouldn’t care because my artistic mother, who happily watched “Father Knows Best” with me, would be bragging to everyone inside the pearly gates that her daughter had just published a novel and “wasn’t that something?”

On the Dirt on Dirty Dancing--The Classic Story on the Stage

2009-02-21T18:41:00.000-08:00

Loved the colorful, swirling skirts with crinolines. Admired the hunky physique of the man who played Johnny Castle (understudy Easton Smith). Was dazzled by the ever-changing scenery that cleverly used video, especially in the water scene where Johnny finally teaches Baby the dance lifts. Mouthed the familiar lines and tunes to myself. “Dirty Dancing—The Classic Story on the Stage” is entertaining, but it doesn’t quite work. I am a HUGE fan of the film, which I saw when it first came out and have probably seen a couple of dozen times. If this had been my first time seeing “Dirty Dancing,” I might have liked the show even less.

The stage versions of both “Dirty Dancing” and “Legally Blonde,” another film on my “favorites” list, were largely faithful to their respective “books.” But “Legally Blonde” morphed into an exuberant musical that took me along for the ride. Of course, it used the traditional formula of having its characters burst into song and dance at appropriate times in contrast to “Dirty Dancing,” where the music served more as a sound track, even at those times when the songs were sung live (but not by the main characters). So why does the film of “Dirty Dancing” succeed where the stage play falls flat, even as the actors spout the same lines and mimic many of the same actions, the scenery tries hard to please, and many of the songs are replicated?

A big reason, I believe, is that the show kept us at a distance. One of the great successes of the film is its sense of intimacy and place, established during the opening credits with the sexy, slow motion dance moves of the young staff of Kellerman’s to the tune of “Be My Baby.” We can almost smell the sultry summer air, feel the hormonal surges. Whatever their lives are away from the resort, whatever is happening in the world at that moment doesn’t matter. (The stage show tries to make the story seem relevant by adding references to the civil rights movements. Injecting the larger issues of that era into this most personal of stories was one of the play’s missteps.) As Johnny and Baby rehearse for their upcoming dance number at another resort, the heat increases. Although their class differences are part of the dramatic backbone of the story, within the confines of this sequestered place, they connect in a believable way.

Marshall McLuhan, media and popular culture guru of the 60s, once pronounced, that “the medium is the message.” Although we might assume that a live play should be more intimate than a film because of the flesh and blood presence of the actors, that is not always so. Because of the camera’s ability to focus in, the medium of film can make us feel that not only are we in the room but that we are almost inhabiting the characters’ bodies. A stage play can do that same thing, but without the shifting lens, it must rely on other means. Sometimes plays do not make the transition well to film because they try to do too much, to be in too many locations, so we lose the focus we need to establish the relationship with the characters. In this case, the reverse happened. Maybe if I’d been in one of the $135 dollar seats, I would have felt more bonded with Johnny and Baby, but even the binoculars didn’t help. During their intimate moments, I felt like I was spying on them. At others, I had to chase them around the stage to keep up.

As a fiction writer, I need to understand what my medium conveys and how I can get the most from it. How do I establish that sense of intimacy with my characters? What kinds of details will provide an appropriate sensory experience since you will have only the words on the page and your imagination to pull you in? At what point will I lose you if I provide too much detail? Fiction writers have the added luxury of being able to take you inside our characters’ heads to show how they are reacting to a line of speech, a situation, another character. Again, we must decide how much internal dialogue is enough, and how much we should convey through showing you and not telling you.

Maybe with its fast cut scenery, as clever as it was, its mile long playlist, and its dozens of dance numbers, the stage show of “Dirty Dancing” put me on overload, so I no longer knew where to focus my attention. It never slowed down enough to let me in. The familiar dialogue seemed strained at times, out of its element. In short, “Dirty Dancing—The Classic Story on the Stage” still thought it was a movie; it forgot the strengths of its medium and as a result it failed to win the heart of this audience member and give me the time of my life.

On Endless Love and Vampires

2009-02-14T19:37:00.000-08:00

I have an embarrassing confession to make. I’m hooked on the Twilight saga (by Stephenie Meyer), a tetralogy about a turgid romance between a human girl and an ageless, but breathtakingly handsome vampire who quenches his thirst by eating animals not people. The series has been an enormous hit with tweener and teen girls, and the first book was made into a movie (confession #2, also seen). But like Facebook, I think there are signs that the adult population is catching on. The books are classified as romance/thriller/fantasy, three genres in which I’ve had very little interest. While many of my aging friends lapped up the Harry Potter series, I shook my head. No 750 page wizard stories for me. So what was my attraction to this tale of teenage angst set in the rain-soaked town of Forks, Washington?

Initially, I was motivated as a writer considering young adult fiction. Why were these books so popular that all four have been on the best seller lists (oh, envy) and created such a stir among the blogging public, four years after the first book was published? (See, for example, The Twilight Series: Is It Really Just Soft Porn for Teens? Feb 13, 2009.) As some have pointed out, this is less a story about vampires than a romance. Complaints abound about how the vampires are not accurately represented. They can come out in cloudy days, and they glitter in the sunlight. Do we care? These are mythical creatures, for God’s sake. So how does the saga stack up as a romance? Aside from the grating prose style of the first book, Twilight (beware the omnipresent adverb, looming at the end of every tag line, but virtually eliminated in book two, New Moon), I found myself completing these 500 page tomes in several days, unable to put them down, despite their many writing and story flaws. (As Meyer’s critics point out, why are these two characters attracted to each other, except for superficial reasons—they smell good to each other, she baffles him, he looks good? Why do these vampires go to school anyway? Is a young woman willing to abandon everything for love really such a good role model for young people? But I digress.)

There are a number of factors that make these stories compelling as tales of romance. First, of course, Twilight is the classic story of forbidden love, like Romeo and Juliet (to which the protagonist, Bella Swan, frequently refers, or Johnny and Baby in "Dirty Dancing" (still one of my favorite movies, I admit). Can their differences be reconciled? Second, the two lovers are portrayed sympathetically so that we root for them. (Personally, Edward’s cold skin and marble hard body don’t do it for me. One critic found him too controlling.) Third are the elements of danger. Edward (vampire in question) might lose control, after all, and there are other “bad” vampires, who do feast on human blood, and who may stand in the way. (The introduction of the werewolves was excessive, in my opinion.) Fourth is the overarching question that must be answered—is Bella’s love so strong that she would be willing to become a vampire herself at the risk of losing her human identity and contact with her family? Fifth is the love triangle between two mortal but likable enemies. Who will win Bella’s heart? Can both enemies coexist? And finally, each book leaves the reader dangling sufficiently to want more. (confession #3: I have two more books to go.) The sexual tension is present but not the driving force. This book harks back to the days when relationships were consummated only within marriage. Hardly the stuff of “soft porn.”

So all I can say is good for Stephenie Meyer. She’s figured out a way to keep kids reading, even if it’s not high class literature. She’s got us talking and dissecting and forgetting for a few hours that we have an economic crisis out there. And as for me, maybe it’s time for me to make a date with a little wizard in training.

On Procrastination and Swiss Cheese

2009-02-12T19:56:00.000-08:00

For the last six months a forbiddingly large package has been sitting in my hallway. Although of sentimental value, the painting that was entombed in the package was not something I needed in the near future, and the box was not particularly in the way. But its constant presence served as a reminder of a seemingly daunting task that needed to be completed. This was not an ordinary package. Approximately 40 mammoth staples were deeply embedded through a covering of heavy corrugated cardboard. In short, the removal of the painting seemed akin to storming Fort Knox. Each day I passed this giant object, I felt increasingly annoyed, frustrated, and guilty.

Then last night, as I lay awake, I visualized a process involving a screwdriver and a hammer that even I, a physically small person, might be able to manage. When an enjoyable but long phone call ate into my planned workout at the gym, I decided that the time had come to tackle the monster. Wedging out the staples along three sides, cutting through the masses of tape around the inner cardboard box, and unearthing the painting shrouded in a blanket took exactly one-half hour. Thirty lousy minutes! How many half hours have I wasted over the last six months when I could have polished off this chore and stopped it from haunting me?

Of course, this project serves as a metaphor for all those things put off because they felt too time consuming, too overwhelming in scope, or too likely to lead to failure. Sometimes, the build up to the task takes more energy than the task itself, which may be dispatched with a short, concerted effort, as with the unbundling of my package or cleaning the bathroom. We just have to commit that small amount of time. On other occasions a delay of the simplest of tasks may lead to greater problems, such as the fine I once received for failing to affix my new parking permit by the deadline—a parking permit that was already sitting in my glove compartment. A one minute task!

But what about the really intimidating projects—especially the ones we are so personally invested in, like writing that novel or sending the completed manuscript out to agents? Here I like to use something I once heard called the “swiss cheese approach,” which involves breaking a very large project down into much smaller steps—writing the first paragraph of the query letter, writing the second paragraph, etc., giving it to three trusted colleagues for review, revising once, revising again, doing a web search or index review to make a list of five plausible agents, researching each of them and their requirements, addressing five envelopes, etc., each step designed to take just a moderate amount of time. It may be long plod, but we arrive just the same.

The key, as with the big package, is psyching oneself up (maybe through a little visualization? A reminder from a buddy?), not using other undone tasks as excuses (I can’t write until I’ve done the laundry, played solitaire on-line, cleaned out my email box…) and then just getting started. Time management experts suggest that each day, no matter what other expectations await, we aim to check off at least one item on our own “most important” list. (Note: Not someone else’s priorities for you, but your very own—those things for which you live and breathe.) Punch a hole in that project until there is no cheese left! I conquered the oversized package, but the real accomplishment of my day was using my effort to create my next blog entry. However, my self-congratulatory mode expires at midnight. Tomorrow is another day. Now where was that agent list I made a few weeks ago…..?

On Death and the Writer

2009-02-09T10:46:00.000-08:00

In the third half of life, we confront death more often as childhood heroes and icons, aging family members, and even contemporaries pass away. I’ve been thinking a lot about the final passage this past month after reacting to the deaths of five people with varying degrees of psychic distance from me, from my 92 year old mother-in-law to the esteemed writer John Updike.

In the hands of a writer, death is a useful plot device to engage or hook a reader. Along with love, it is one of the most common events around which we build stories. Death or its possibility can create suspense (will it happen; if so, how; and if not, how is death avoided?) or mystery (why did it happen, or who did it?), reveal personality (what do we learn about the central figures of the story?), and provoke temporary or permanent psychological changes (how do they react?) that may lead to change or action (what do they do as a result?) The death of a bad guy provides a catharsis while that of the personality with whom we’ve bonded or for whom we feel sympathy prompts a sense of loss. Although it’s not always easy to kill off a favorite character—sometimes they don’t let you, as a writer you are largely in control.

What strikes me now is the contrast between my purposeful and manipulative handling of death in my fictional worlds and the complexity of my emotional states this past month to the five deaths, each touching me in different ways. There was sadness in all cases, though the nature and intensity of the sadness varied. But there was also shock, at receiving unexpected news of a sudden death; anxiety waiting for the anticipated phone call; relief that the difficult days were over; fear of not knowing the right words of comfort; empathy because of common experiences with loved ones’ illnesses; nostalgia at calling up distant memories; regret at not having known someone better; longing for more time; amusement on hearing a funny anecdote about the deceased; envy at a person’s accomplishments; and even guilt at being able to get on with my own life when a friend is grieving.

My reactions are causing me to assess whether I am capturing that complexity of sometimes contradictory emotions or perhaps falling into what Ann Hood (Creating Character Emotions, Cincinnati: Story Press, 1998) calls the “curse of writing like a writer”—of filtering or watering down the emotions of my characters as I write the way I think I am supposed to write. Am I too busy advancing my plot that I don’t give my characters space to react in convincing ways? Hood advises to “write like yourself” without necessarily replicating what happens in real life. This mantra is a great reminder to use my experiences in service of my artistry and to slow down, even if I need to shed a tear of my own while doing so.

On the Title of My Blog

2009-01-27T10:37:00.000-08:00

Some of my best ideas come to me in the shower. Maybe that's because the steady stream of water has awakened my brain before I am required to put it to good use. This morning the title of my blog presented itself to me, and I am now riding on its momentum to create my first post. What does it all mean?

Musing: n. contemplation, reflection. Origin: 1300–50; ME musen to mutter, gaze meditatively on, be astonished (Dictionary.com Unabridged v 1.1. Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc., 2006).

But as a writer and a word monger, I also like the the reference to the word muse: n. the goddess or the power regarded as inspiring a poet, artist, thinker, or the like.

The third half refers to my stage of life. It is obviously fractional nonsense if you are a mathematical purist. I requisitioned it from "Click" and "Clack," the Car Talk brothers, who refer to the "third half" of their show. But life does not divide up into neat fractions. I see the third half of life as a second chance, as a time for possible reinvention and reformation. As a writer, my novels (still in progress, but stay tuned) focus around issues of identity over the life course, and so it seems appropriate to explore some of these in an interactive format (should I be so lucky as to attract any readers....). And of course, that some of my musings may be nonsense goes without saying.