Editeyes

According to Chris Baty, the creator of NaNoWriMo, “The biggest thing separating people from their artistic ambitions is lack of a deadline.”  That’s why the plan to write a novel in a month works so well. The event creates a deadline. To reach the deadline and the goal of a 50,000 word novel, you have set the pragmatic goal of 1667 words per day.

This is my second year signing up for NaNoWriMo and the power of the deadline is what brought me back. In early October, NaNoWriMo popped into my head as the perfect solution to help me through a considerable layer of procrastination.  I needed to get started on a book-length project I had agreed to work on. My friend Julia had done a great deal of research on modern women inventors and I had agreed to worked the material into a cohesive package. It occurred to me that I could create the book she was looking for if I sat down and organized the material at a rate of 1667 words per day–the daily rate when one signs up for NaNoWriMo.

I’m working outside the box of NaNo this year because I’m not writing a novel; I’m working on a non-fiction piece. The contest is so personal that it allows such freedom.  Nobody is watching me to say I’m breaking the rules because the entire motivation for this event is intrinsic. Just because I signed up, I feel a compelling urge to write at least 1667 words every day. Though I know people who have not signed up but are working as if they had, it took the formal step of logging on to the NaNoWriMo site to call this urge forth in me.

Many successful writers operate under the principle that they simply have get their bottom in the chair each day and write. Some writers set a goal of X number of pages. During the month of November, there are 125,000 writers who set a goal of 1667 words per day.

The goal is not magical; it’s practical. But the experience of typing those 1667 words day after day is definitely awesome! Having a deadline really works!

Tags: Free Write, Word Wise, Writing First // 1 Comment »

Most writers recognize the value of reading extensively as a means of honing one’s writing skill. I find that I read with two parts of my brain working simultaneously. One part is enjoying and/or learning from the piece I am reading while another part of my brain is studying style, structure, and language.

These processes were heavily at work when I read Atul Gwande’s Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. Gawande has written a collection of essays that probe skillfully and poignantly into the depths of medical ethics and the performance of doctors. He is a fine researcher and an astute observer who carefully delineates many facets of each issue that he explores, be it washing hands, malpractice concerns, or the Apgar score.

As a non-fiction writer, I was acutely aware of how adept Gawande is at using narrative to illustrate and discuss complex moral and ethical issues. He does not avoid considering controversial notions such as what happens to the soldiers who have been saved from grave injury on the battlefield and come home limbless and with horribly scared faces? Or why hospitals avoid publicizing the results of their effectiveness in treating certain conditions? Gawande’s work is a marvel to read.

At the end of his book, he makes five suggestions about how doctors might make a worthy difference. All of these suggestions make sense for anyone wanting to make a difference. I’m only going to include one in this post with the hope that you’ll get his book and read the others for yourself.

However, one of Gwande’s suggestions hits close to home, so I’m going to quote him. He says, “write something. . . it makes no difference if you write five paragraphs for a blog, a paper for a professional journal, or a poem for a reading group. Just write.”

To this suggestion, I add: Just read!

Tags: Styl'n // Add Comment »

Last year when I did NaNoWriMo, I experimented with writing in public places. I didn’t think I would do well writing away from the privacy and comforts of home, but I was wrong.

I started off with baby steps. First, I took my laptop to the public library and hid away in a little carrel at the back of the stacks. A few days later, I decided to try writing at Starbucks. I was pleasantly surprised at how easily I disappeared into the writing and for the most part was undisturbed by the comings and goings in the shop. The hardest part was when I needed to use the facilities and couldn’t figure out if I should take my laptop with me or ask a nearby coffee drinker to watch it for me.

In the third week of NaNoWriMo, I decided to try something suggested by veteran WriMos: The Write-In.  This is when a group of writers carrying laptops gather in a public place–generally a coffee shop but there are other possibilities.  For a set amount of time, the writers sip caffeinated drinks and clack away on their novels. Two of my WriMo buddies agreed to meet for a Write-In last November, and by the end of the evening we were hooked.

This year, I jumped at the chance to regularly join 6 other WriMos for weekly Write-Ins. Here we are at the kick off event.

And here is a list of the wonders of write-ins:

1. Never underestimate the power of camaraderie in any foolish activity, such as writing a 50,000 word novel in a month. It’s a known fact that kids get into more mischief when there is more than one. Well, the same can be said for writers except that mischief is a good thing when it comes to written expression.
2. When you get blocked regarding a word or the name of an actor, movie, song, car part, kitchen utensil or some other triviality that figures into the scene you are currently writing, you can ask your cohorts, and they–not being invested in your story–  immediately provide the term that is alluding you.
3. I like to ask all the writers for one word at the start of a Write-In. I jot these words in my notebook and then aim to get each one into the story somewhere. These words stretch my thinking in directions I would never have otherwise taken. For example, here’s a list of words I was given at the Write-In pictured above: sizzle, Timbuktu, assassin, mimic, and fiddle.
4. When you are in a public place, you often hear snatches of dialog that wiggle their way into your scene. The same can be said for aromas, textures, tastes, and other sensory data.
5. If you are even a tiny bit competitive, the fact that your neighbor has reached the requisite word count in under 2 hours will spur you on to reach the goal, and more likely motivate you to get a few words more than the eager beaver sitting across from you.
6. The last push to get one more sentence, phrase, or word before departure time sometimes holds the seeds of much better stuff to come.
7. And when you are with friends, you never have to worry about leaving to use the facilities because you can trust your friends to watch your laptop while you are gone and who cares if someones steals the last line you wrote. It won’t look the same in their novel as it does in yours anyway.

So Write-on and Write-in.

Tags: Going Public // Add Comment »

Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month: NaNoWriMo for short. This is my second year of signing up for this event which boasts 125,000 participant writers from around the world. In my little corner of the world, I’ve located 6 other WriMos, and we are meeting at local Starbucks this afternoon for a Write-In as well as weekly for the rest of the month.

The purpose of the event is to complete 50,000 words of a “shitty first draft.” This quote is directly from Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird and is particularly fitting to the contest’s intention.  Chris Baty, who initiated the event in 1999 with 26 friends, is the first to say that the intention is not to write beautiful, lyrical, quotable prose. The goal is simply to give one’s imagination full rein until there are 50,000 words on the page.

I have to admit last year’s NaNoWriMo was a thrilling exercise in freedom for me. I wrote the worst mystery novel ever, but I discovered so many facets of my imagination in the process and so much about my ability to do concentrated work in a myriad of settings and under all kinds of conditions. WOW!

Of course, I signed up again. I leaped from bed this morning, not early but nevertheless excited to start work on my new book. I filled my new NaNoWriMo mug with coffee (unused until this day), donned my blue chiffon porpoise-print writing jacket, opened a word doc, and typed the title of my book: The Right Sisters.

I’m off and running with 700 words! I’ll meet with my fellow WriMos this afternoon at Starbucks where we will down caffeine and write for 2 or more hours.

Are any of you, dear readers, participating? Please speak up! In the mean time, I’ll post periodic NaNoWriMo updates along with more thoughts on point of view over the next few weeks.

Tags: Free Write, That's Personal // Add Comment »

I recently completed Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin.  The book describes Mortensen’s gifts of time, energy, and devotion when building schools in the remote regions of Northern Pakistan.  Interestingly, Mortensen did not start out with the intention to promote peace, but the notion evolved as he came to know and understand the people of Pakistan and witness his own country’s overt errors resulting from a lack of understanding.

What really intrigued me, however, is the co-author David Oliver Relin. Relin’s picture appears in the book and one assumes he is the narrator of the story since Mortensen is spoken of in third person. I think it is interesting that no mention is made of when Relin enters the scene and actually begins to witness the things that are written. Certainly much of the early story is written as it was told to him. Then at some point he met Mortensen and was invited to collaborate on the book or maybe he offered to collaborate. I wonder about the decision to make him the narrator of the story rather than write the narrative in first person since both men’s names are listed as author. It’s a journalistic approach for sure and perhaps a good one, but I kept waiting for Relin to arrive in the story so apparent were his sensibilities in the tale.

As I prepare to write a non-fiction book, one in which I will relate the stories of 10 women inventors, I’m very conscious of point of view. I generally find first person point of view more compelling, but that wasn’t so with Three Cups of Tea.

So the question is: How did Relin accomplish a profound level of intimacy and a compelling degree of potency when employing a third person perspective? Was it the story itself? Or was it protagonist Mortensen’s strength of character? I’m sure it was both of these. But I also think it was more . . . something in the way Relin manages the material. A closer look is in order.

What does it take to make compelling storytelling from third person point of view?

Tags: From Whence We See // 3 Comments »

I’m getting tired of receiving political email, usually messages that have been forwarded hundreds of times. I’m sick of reading blog posts that slander or at least underline the foibles of McCain and Palin. But yesterday I got an email message–it was another forward– that brought me up short and made me think about perspective and point of view.

Early on as writers, we learn to consider the importance and relevance of point of view in writing. Here are segments of the email message that made me shiver, that frightened me and forced me to recognize how deeply entrenched our country is in a racist point of view.

What if things were switched around? Consider the following:

What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?

What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?

What if McCain had only married once and Obama was a divorcee?

What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?

What if Cindy McCain had graduated from Harvard?

What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)

Why aren’t people talking about John Sydney McCain if they are saying Barack Hussein Obama?

What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing three planes?

This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes, and minimizes the positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.

Education isn’t everything, but I think it should be a part of one’s perspective when evaluating candidates for the most important position in the country. Consider the disparate educational backgrounds of the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates:

Barack Obama:
Columbia University - B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in International Relations.
Harvard - Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude

Joseph Biden:
University of Delaware - B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
Syracuse University College of Law - Juris Doctor (J.D.)

John McCain:
United States Naval Academy - Class rank: 894 of 899

Sarah Palin:
Hawaii Pacific University - 1 semester
North Idaho College - 2 semesters - general study
University of Idaho - 3 semesters - B.A. in Journalism

There is no minimizing the power of point of view when one considers how much harder a bi-racial man has to work to reach the same heights as a white man or a white woman.

Tags: From Whence We See, Going Public // 1 Comment »

Author Kate Evans writes in not one but several genres: fiction, poetry (Like All We Love), non-fiction (Negotiating the Self), and blogging. In each case, she demonstrates clear competence managing the distinctive features particular to the genre. Kate is one smart lady.

In the following interview, she responds to questions I asked about her process when writing her newly published novel For the May Queen. I was interested in how Kate’s “editeyes” worked as she approached the task of writing fiction.

ME: The setting of For the May Queen is dorm-life culture in the early 1980s, focusing on drinking, drugs, and sex prevalent in such a context. As a 60-year-old woman who came of age in the late 1960s, I admit to feeling a sense of disturbing recognition as well as powerless disappointment as I read, particularly during the first 2/3rds of the story. You manage to present this as a valid context for a rite of passage without minimizing it as a societal problem. Can you speak to how you arrived at telling a story that takes place in this particular context?

KATE: I lived in the dorms in the early 1980s.  I was always interested in writing about that experience.  I even tried to write about it as memoir, but that didn’t work for me. I worked on a lot of other things for years–poems, stories–when one day Norma’s voice came to me.  Then the dorms emerged as the setting.  It wasn’t really a conscious choice, but clearly that setting had been brewing in my mind for quite some time. 

The dorms are a good setting, I think, because there are many juicy built-in conflicts.  I chose the early 1980s because I didn’t want to deal with the internet and cell phones!  Well, that’s part of it.  The other part is, retro and nostalgia are fun.

ME: It is often said that a fiction writer’s first novel is to a great extent autobiographical. I’m interested in how this was so for you, particularly in terms of the characters in the story. Assuming there were prototypes in your experience for these characters, how and when did they become their own entities, more fictional and less the individuals from whom they originated?

KATE: I like that the semi-autobiographical novel is and is not the writer.  I think this genre or sub-genre allows us to play around with the slipperiness of the self.  I’m both Norma and not-Norma.  Norma’s both Kate and not-Kate.  It’s fun to play around like that.  As Jeanette Winterson says, reading yourself as fiction is liberating.

Of course memoirists do this too, to an extent–it’s just that the readers are more likely to see memoir as you, whereas readers have to grapple with fiction as being both you and not you.  I think it’s fun and exciting because I like identity to be in motion.

The characters became more fictional and then paradoxically more real–more truly themselves–the more I wrote them.  They became three-dimensional as they grappled with all the roadblocks I placed in their way, as they made choices and interacted and, ideally, grew.

ME: I particularly enjoyed the symbolism in the character’s names and how their names fleshed out the central theme about identity. For instance, Norma sits at the center of the story, thereby establishing the “norm” which is not exactly normal, and who is also called Norma Jean by Chuck thereby alluding to the subtext of the Marilyn Monroe persona. Chuck, who is really Paul, is renamed by Norma, consistent with his dual identity and her failure to see the real him.  Can you talk about the naming of characters and the degree to which your choices were consciously symbolic?

This is cool! Thanks for the great insights.  I didn’t make conscious choices about the names, but clearly my unconcious was busy at work.  It takes a reader like you to enter the story and help me see the method to the madness of my unconcious. 

When Norma walked into Paul’s dorm room, I didn’t know they were going to play around with each other’s names.  Paul’s calling Norma “Norma Jean” is led to his becoming a film buff–which evolved into being an essential aspect of his character.  Norma’s renaming Paul is certainly a way for her to claim him and to not-see him, but I didn’t have this in mind as I wrote it.  The playful banter was just part of their rapport.

ME: There are other symbols in the story: bridges, mirrors, and games, along with cultural icons like James Bond and Marilyn Monroe. The story explores themes like nonconformity, altered states, friendship, marriage, and even education and the relative value of an instructor’s choices for her students. How much of this arose organically in the story? Did you ever discover something inherent in the tale that you developed in the revision process?

KATE: All of it arose organically.  When a friend of mine read the manuscript, she noticed a bunch of references to fairy tales, like “Billy Goats Gruff ” and “Goldilocks.”  I didn’t know that was all in there.  That’s what’s so wonderful about writing.  It takes the readers to enrich, to complete, the experience.

I do think I amped up some of these patterns and recurrences in my revision, but not with an eye to theme.  It was more with an eye to repetition as a satisfying way to weave patterns into, or out of, chaos.

ME: Finally, you’ve mentioned that your editor sent you back to the drawing board to write a denouement—the second to the last chapter. Would you talk about your process in writing this chapter?

This was actually my agent who did this.  At any rate, he said he wanted to know the fall-out of Norma’s discoveries that are essentially the novel’s climax.  I realized he was right, that we never know what Norma does to grapple with what she suddenly sees.  Sorry for being so vague, but I don’t want to give away what Norma discovers for those who haven’t read the novel.  

At any rate, Norma discovers something big.  But my agent was right, the book couldn’t just end there.  We had to know how she grappled with what she discovered.  After I resisted for a while, it turned out to be really fun to watch her deal with this alone.  She turns to a book, in fact, for advice.  It’s the longest section in the novel that she’s alone, reading and thinking.  She gets more quiet and still than at any other part of the novel.  I saw her growing up just a little bit, right there.  It was very cool, and it provided a bridge to the last chapter.

Thanks Kate. I wonder if my readers have questions for you.

Tags: Styl'n, That's Personal // Add Comment »

On my last day in Ashland, I walked with two other women, Kim and Haley, to buy squash soup at Pangea restaurant. All along the way, we read freestyle chalked graffiti on the sidewalks–the late night mischief of our fellow travelers to theater-land. We laughed at the imagination apropos in each line we encountered.

As we waited for our soup, we each spoke about one thing we would take with us from the trip. Haley described being particularly moved by a line from “Our Town” about the swiftness of 1000 days passing.  The gist of the quote was about “realizing life while you live it.” She was going to write in her journal every day for a 1000 days, beginning right then. Kim and I decided to join her in this plan, and we made a pact that we would each write daily.

I’ve written in my journal for 7 days straight. Right from the start, I struggled with whether to write about daily happenings or “practice” creative writing. I’ve written in a journal intermittently for years. For instance, I generally write when I’m on a trip like the one to Ashland, noting emotions, sights, impulses, and plans that arise from being in a new and different place. Whenever I teach writing classes, I write with my students to the prompts I give them. Sometimes, I get on a roll at home and write for several days or weeks using pictures or poems or nature as prompts, but then for reasons unknown I stop this daily journaling. So the commitment to write for 1000 days is challenging, particularly in terms of what to write.

This morning, I wrote several pages about what I should be writing and why I was writing, and then I decided to get one of my favorite books off the shelf– Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones– to point me in a more fruitful direction.  I opened the book and read several pages, and when I came to a segment called “Nervously Sipping Wine” on page 66, I knew I’d found the guidance I was looking for.

Here’s the suggestion that did it for me.  Goldberg recommended for a starting line to “take the first half of your sentence from a newspaper article and finish the sentence with an ingredient listed in a cookbook.” I modified these instructions because I didn’t feel like getting up to retrieve her ingredients. Instead, I copied a line from the AARP Bulletin that was sitting on the end table by my chair and finished it with a phrase from the Columbia Nursery Newsletter also sitting nearby.

Woah!!! From that first line emerged two pages of the best stuff I’ve written in a LONG time.

Try it! It’s a powerful journal exercise not unlike mischievously composing sidewalk graffiti in chalk.  And while you’re at it, join my friends and me in writing in your journal for 1000 days. Maybe we can all do a better job of realizing life while we live it.

If you do decided to commit, how about making the commitment public by dropping a statement to that effect in the comment section here.

ph

Tags: Free Write // 2 Comments »

I first learned about making the abstract physical during a seminar offered by Paul Lisicky, one of my instructors at Antioch University.  We took the study of “show don’t tell” deeper, looking at how writers make the body–its sensations and movement– integral to an image. My understanding of “embodiment” and writing deepened when I read Gayle Brandeis‘ book Fruitflesh.

During a recent trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I revisited the power of physicality in writing while taking part in an actor’s workshop. Our workshop focused on how an audience views a play through a cultural lens. We did a number of exercises to get in touch with cultural and societal concepts, particularly those in the last 60 years, and then we looked closely at language in the plays we would be seeing, teasing out specific images and working with them.

Most importantly, we got actively involved with the imagery. For instance, in one activity we were broken into groups to study a small passage from “Midsummer’s Night Dream.” Our instructions were to chose a line of text and create a tableau that expressed that text in terms of the culture and thinking of the 1950s. What was most interesting was the process of finding a way to express the words visually so that our audience (the rest of the class) would get it. Here is my group’s line of text and a picture of our tableau:

Egeus speaking to the Duke after Hermia, his daughter, has told him she wishes to marry Lysander rather than Demetrius, his choice for her:

Egeus:  “As she is mine, I may dispose of her.”

We made the image graphic by having one of the men shove a woman’s head into a trash can while the other women cowered submissively nearby, with one exception.  In the background, this woman was “just” stepping up onto a chair, beginning to rise above such patriarchal behavior, to signify the rumbling of change in the 1950s.

I walked away from this workshop considering how effective ACTING is in feeling the meaning behind an image. We actually took the line of text into our bodies as we worked with it.

Now my question is how can I bring this “knowing” into my writing? How do I get more engaged physically as I write? I have a few ideas but wonder if you, dear readers, have your thoughts about embodiment and writing?

Tags: Imagery, Word Wise // 2 Comments »

Recently, I mentioned Julia Cameron’s idea about Artist Dates, and it seems the mere mention of this idea manifested one big fat date for me. According to Cameorn’s description, the Artist’s Date is a block of time especially set aside for nurturing your creative consciousness–an excursion, a play date that you take all by yourself–quality time in which you open yourself to insight, inspiration and guidance for your art form.