A Writer's Winter Feast

By Kim Byer

Beyond a beautiful piece of art or the occasional puppy, a new book is my favorite Christmas gift. During the holidays, my bedside table swells in waves of books, precariously stacked and teetering. At night, donning reading goggles, I dive in head first to read Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, Little Bee by Chris Cleave, and Knives at Dawn by Andrew Friedman. Beneath this stack, an undertow of old favorites: A.M. Holme’s Things You Should Know and several colorful spines highlighting the venerable editions of New Stories from the South, edited by Shannon Ravenel.

In the morning, new interior design books inspire my day: Design*Sponge at Home by Grace Bonney and The Perfectly Imperfect Home by Deborah Needleman. Beside an afternoon fire, I listen to Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson, narrated by Steven Kaplan. Little in life is more luxurious than getting lost in a good story on a winter afternoon.

As writers, we are passionate readers. We read not only to enjoy the suspension of disbelief, but also to listen to our muse sing along to the cadence of a well-paced story. We appreciate a hook that leaves us hungry and a plot twist we wish we’d thought of first; we are amused by an odd simile and pained by a mischievous typo in a published work.

Winter is the most wonderful time to feast on words. Unlike summer’s pink-hued and thin paperbacks, winter kindles our intellect with thick bound classics and historical memoirs.

At the beginning of each year, we rush out of January’s gate with good intentions of healthier eating, cardiovascular overhauls and literary conquests. Easily discarding our first two resolutions, we are determined to maintain our third. We scour the book reviews and journal picks, making our lists and checking them twice. We linger in big box bookstores sipping pumpkin lattes and secretly filing titles behind our ears, which we’ll check later on Amazon, hoping for a deal. We download eBooks and update wish lists. We sit in dark theaters thinking snarky, hideous thoughts about a screenwriter’s adaptation, and upon leaving, say too loudly to our companion, “The book was much better.”

Back at home, we curl our legs under a crocheted throw and snack on a delicious sentence, nibble away at a chapter, and munch through an entire mystery without stopping for a sandwich. Thanks to writers, we are satiated in the exquisite cerebral feast we call story.

So, what exciting and wonderful stories are stacked on your bedside table?

Here are my recommendations for a five-course feast of online book resources:

www.Audible.com: If you love listening to books as much as reading books, you may want to try this audio library. For a fifteen-dollar subscription, you can listen to one book per month. If you are familiar with audio book prices, you’ll appreciate this deal. Discounted specials allow you to purchase additional books for less.

www.Goodreads.com: This free site allows you to collect and share book reviews. It helps me remember what I’ve recently read as well as find new books through fellow readers’ reviews and ratings. Are you a member? Add me to your friend list.

www.Gutenberg.org: Project Gutenberg is an iReader’s dream. Over 36,000 eBooks are available for free download. Through its affiliates, an astounding 100,000 books are shared.

New York Times Book Review Podcast: Authors, editors and critics discuss books and the literary scene with Same Tannhaus, the editor of the NYT Book Review. Listen to the mp3 episode of your choice or subscribe to the podcast.

www.PBS.org, Arts & Entertainment section, subtopic Literature & Writing: Although DVR and TiVo may be two of our favorite acronyms, we still miss some of the best book talk on TV when we don’t program these devices. Going online to the PBS site can fill the void. The site offers one stop clicking for all of your video feeds and literary needs. Check out Jeffery Brown’s thoughts on "The Year (2011) in Fiction."

Sparse Space, Mighty Muse – Part II

By Lisa Lopez Snyder

Are you making stereotypes of your characters? Are they predictable? If so, you need to give them a good hard shake and see what falls out of their pockets. If you’re lucky, you’ll find something deliciously odd, dangerous, or scandalous. The goal here, folks is surprise. And surprise for we writers is good, very good.

That’s at least one of the thoughts I came away with from my workshop with Danzy Senna at Skidmore College this summer (see previous post for Part I). In several of the sessions, we reviewed more than a few manuscripts that had some scintillating prose surrounding the character, but there was the predictable narrative that never got away from itself, e.g:

A compulsive young man spends his day watching and calculating every minute[okay, fascinating], but nothing every challenged his compulsive habit, and nothing changed about him or around him; a little boy places a bowler hat on his head to make himself invisible because life at home gets pretty scary [intriguing, let’s keep reading], but he keeps doing this, no one does anything, and that’s all that happens.

We’ve all done this! We get so into our characters and we love them, good or bad, but we don’t let anything happen to them to challenge them or transform them. Nothing pops out and hits them in the face. And to top it off, we may veer wildly off tone. Danzy explained this dynamic as the need to get a narrative strategy to help get inside your character, to get beyond the “clean and easy” (my term), and to get…well, “dirty” (her term). The idea, she said, is to get yourself out of your head.

She suggested reading some folk stories as a way to discover narrative strategies to strengthen your writing. “Notice the tone,” she said, “and study at the dialogue.” Using dialogue, she added, “helps you see more characters more clearly.” Folktales not only do this, but they use a framework that astounds not just us, but our characters, too. Here are a few that came out of that class:

• Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol’s "The Nose" http://h42day.100megsfree5.com/texts/russia/gogol/nose.html
• Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales
• The Hebrew story about “the talking fish” that ran in The New York Times in 2003. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980DE0DE1F3EF936A25750C0A9659C8B63&scp=1&sq=Miracle?%20Dream?%20Prank?%20Fish%20Talks,%20Town%20Buzzes&st=cse

On another note, I should add that during my stay the faculty and my peers continued to expand our recommended reading list. Ah, that we should live as long to read all the good books our friends suggest! Here’s just a snapshot of several on my “to-read” list:

Novels
Bad Behavior - Mary Gaitskill
Letters to a Young Novelist – Mario Vargas Llosa

Short Stories
“Women in Their Beds” – Gina Berriault
“Hole in the Wall” - Etgar Keret

Non-fiction
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers – Mary Roach


Enjoy!

Giving Women What They Want

By Laura P. Valtorta

Stieg Larsson, (1954 – 2004) the Swedish author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (in Sweden originally titled Men who Hate Women), The Girl who Played with Fire, and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, wrote books that are wildly successful because they give women what they want: a strong female character who defies every despicable stereotype. The character, Lisbeth Salander, lives the way she wants in a society that tries its best to suppress her. More than 27 million copies of Larsson’s novels have been sold in 40 countries.

There is no doubt in my mind that Larsson’s longtime companion, Eva Gabrielsson, helped invent the characters in these novels, especially Lisbeth Salander. Full credit must be given, however, to Larsson for being strong enough to write such a fantastic female character, who steals the show from Blomquist, the character who may be Larsson’s alter ego.

But to say that Blomquist is Larsson’s alter ego is unfair. Every character is part of the author’s psyche. Lisbeth is Larsson.

Lisbeth Salander exists in a world of misogynists, a world that is constantly trying to beat her down. She thrives, nevertheless, because she displays so little emotion. For a five-foot-tall woman she is exceedingly strong, physically, and knows how to use weapons and fight. She always protects herself and successfully fights off the larger men who try to kill her. She has sex when she wants, with whom she wants, and then she walks away unscathed. (Except for Blomquist, who is the love of her life, but whom she ignores when he goes off with another woman.) She excels at math and science and makes her living as a computer hacker. She depends on no one.

There are no children in Lisbeth Salander’s world. No husband. She makes her own money – lots of it – and spends it as she wants – on a luxury apartment and lots of travel. Nothing ties her down. When the time comes, she drives off on her motorbike, leaving the expensive apartment, and its IKEA furnishings behind.

This is the dream world, the ideal world that Stieg Larsson has given us. It is a wonderful gift.

Trying to Get Unstuck

By Lisa Lopez Snyder

Earlier this week I got stuck in the mud. Over the holidays I started a story, and step by step I put my protagonist, “David,” in a pickle (purely intended, of course, and all as a result of the actions he took earlier). Faced with the consequences, he then had to make a completely new decision, and I was ready to wrap up the story. But I was leaving him without any options because I couldn’t decide what would happen next. He could certainly do something unexpected, but because he is a little boy, I couldn’t have him do something suddenly adult. What to do?

Have you ever been in this situation? Have you ever taken your main character on a wild ride, thoroughly enjoying it yourself, and then come to a curve in the road, only to ask, “Dang, what’s on the road beyond?”

I turned to a nifty little book I read about a year ago to help me figure out some possibilities. It’s called, Writing Great Short Stories, by Margaret Lucke, and I highly recommend it. Lucke breaks down all the aspects of writing the short story into easily digested bits with clear examples, tips and exercises. Lucke reminds us that “not every short story has a plot,” which describes my story exactly.

Lucke says while you may have a plot-less story, you still have to have a “story goal,” that is, your story must “evoke an emotion or mood, explore a theme, share an experience, or describe a person”-- all in an effort to “help the reader comprehend some aspect of the human condition.” In fact, each of the pieces of your story does not have to be “linked by chronology or cause and effect, but by similar emotional or psychological resonance or other things they have in common.”

She cites as an example Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, where the author tells the Vietnam soldiers’ stories by cataloguing the various items the narrator’s fellow soldiers brought on their missions, including not only objects such as matches, morphine, M-16 rifles, and M&Ms, but the intangible items, including guilt and fear.

That said, I’ve already got some possibilities for David. I’ve been inside his head for the last month, and I know how he interprets the adult world. I’ll stay true to David’s perceptions and just let the reader explore them, all the while leaving the reader (fingers crossed), with the sick feeling of what could have--and just nearly--happened.

Plot Line for Doubts, Hopes, Fears

By Bonnie Stanard

Point of view (POV), like other literary devices, changes fashion as the art of writing explores new territory. The omniscient POV, which prevailed in the 19th Century with authors like Dickens, Poe, and Hardy, has given way to first person POV popular today.

Many critics claim that first person POV began as interior monologue, historically used by playwrights (i.e., soliloquy) and poets. It came to the novel in a big way with James Joyce’s Ulysses, an entire book written as the stream of consciousness of the narrator. Not many novels today are as immersed in first person as Ulysses, in which the narrator’s ramblings fail to identify other characters or places, leaving the reader to pick and sort for himself.

I am reading The Zahir by Paulo Coelho, which is a first person narrative, further defined as stream of consciousness POV. It is heavily invested in one man’s ruminations. The plot simply sets up the situation that the main character meditates on at length. In fact, aside from minor activities as a novelist (the main character is an author), the only plot so far is his wife's leaving him. From that event, the writer ponders his relationships with his ex-wife and current lover, his own sense of worth, his future without his wife, etc. He has just met the man who stole his wife, and I'm hopeful that something will happen.

Not long ago, I read Shantaram by Gregory Roberts, a very different first person narrative. This book, given from the POV of a character named Lindsay, is plot-driven. We follow Lindsay as he arrives in the slums of Bombay where he falls in love, is imprisoned and rescued by a mafia don, and goes to work (and war) for him. The author introduces numerous other characters, and the interaction that results fashions the plot. Though we get some insight into Lindsay's thoughts, the book is driven by the events of his everyday life. Needless to say, this type of story can only succeed if the life is exciting.

Very close to the first person POV is third limited. This too is a popular device for delivering a story. In fact, the main difference between first person and third limited is the choice of pronouns for the narrator, whether “I” or “he/she.”

A number of contemporary writers are experimenting with POV. You can find books in which POV shifts from one character to another and from first to third person limited. Stef Penny, as an example, employs first person and third person limited POV in her novel The Tenderness of Wolves. What each POV character doesn’t know is revealed to the reader by other POV characters until the reader has more information and can solve the mystery before the “I” narrator who tells the story. Tension arises when the first person narrator makes mistakes because she doesn’t know what the reader knows.

The changes in POV technique are moving toward greater intimacy. The narrator is less likely to be the bard standing aloft his audience and describing the world as it is. He has morphed into a character in the story, one who experiences the plot and feels the bullets, if vicariously.

Niffenegger!

By Laura P. Valtorta

It took me three readings to understand how Audrey Niffenegger took a vain protagonist (Claire Abshire) dropped her into a completely implausible situation (time travel backwards and forwards) and made a wonderful book out of it. The answer is depth.

The main character in The Time Traveler’s Wife, (2003) who also narrates the story along with her time-traveling husband, is a beautiful, charming redhead with a pencil thin mouth (she describes it “like a geisha” in order to make a thin mouth attractive) who sounds a lot like the author. Claire first meets her husband, Henry, when she is 6 and Henry is 36. Henry has time traveled backwards. He has no control over his chronological fits.

Claire comes from a wealthy family. Like Audrey, she earns her living as an artist. But Audrey Niffenegger the author is not married. Both main characters, Henry and Claire, are grossly good looking and nauseatingly sexy.

What makes this story readable and irresistible is that it contains meaningful questions about chaos, determinism, the effect of time on personality, Patty Hearst, picking locks, running from the law, love, art, music, and books. These questions form the heart of the book.

If I met Claire or Henry in real life, I would run the other way. The characters are slop and the story is ridiculous. The author, however, has something important to say.

Flashback or Not?

By Beth Cotten

A fellow writer, who admitted to being new at the game of novel writing, asked a group of our members how to go about properly using the writing technique known as the “flashback.” Several opinions were rendered by those present about whether flashbacks were the way to go. Of course there were varied opinions. One mentioned that it was probably not the best technique to use although many writers have used it and have been published. The conversation left me curious about what actually were the disadvantages, technically speaking, of using this method of writing.

I had purchased the book written by Chris Roerden Don’t Sabotage Your Submission: Save Your Manuscript From Turing Up D.O.A. and thought it might cover this subject. It does. Roerden dedicates eight pages to “Fatal Flashbacks.” Since the space available for this blog is much less, I will try to shrink that information to fit the requirement.

Correctly used, a flashback makes the present story clearer in a significant way. The technique is tempting, but the publishing gurus highly suggest that new writers stay away from using it as “even experienced writers have problems with it.” Why? Roerden gives eight objections to using flashbacks which I have paraphrased below.

1. A flashback requires the writer to make a shift in time which is challenging to every writer.
2. It not only stops the story’s forward motion, it actually reverses it which can be fatal to the storyline.
3. Often it inspires writers to include information that adds no value to the story.
4. Less history is needed by the reader than many writers think and can be presented in the current story in a less disruptive manner.
5. Longer flashbacks cause a greater risk of damaging the forward thrust of the plot.
6. A flashback from within a current scene is hard to segue into and then smoothly return to the action.
7. When some readers detect an impending flashback they simply jump ahead in their reading.
8. Many writers like to use flashbacks for their own convenience and not for its primary purpose.

Roerden goes on to explain in detail and through example the ways in which flashbacks and what are called mini-flashbacks can be used effectively. He cautions writers to avoid taking readers into the past if a way can be found to include “brief…selected highlights from the past” in the current action.

I highly recommend this book to anyone hoping to be published (aren’t we all?) and especially to a newbie like me.

10,000 Hours

By Janie Kronk

Need a new perspective on what all those hours at the keyboard mean? Check out Malcom Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers.

Although this is not a book about writing, I recommend it here for two reasons:

1) It’s good. For anyone interested in “big idea” books, this will be an entertaining and informative read. Well-written and full of stories illustrating the ideas it puts forth, Outliers turns the notion of the American Dream on its head while examining why some people are successful and others are not.
2) It shows that practice is important, which can be a hard thing for a writer to remember while slogging through that first draft—or second, or third. Gladwell includes an eclectic mix of success stories, including those of Bill Gates and Mozart. What is interesting is that while the book does not deny the genius of these individuals, it does not focus on genius as a reason for success. Instead it focuses on the set of circumstances that allowed these individuals an opportunity to PRACTICE the thing they would become known for. One study described in the book separated university level music students into three groups based on skill level. What was the only thing that separated those that could go on to become world class performers from the rest? The amount of time they had practiced over the course of their lives.

So maybe practice does make perfect. What great news! At least, it’s great news as long as we can keep finding those opportunities to practice.

According to Outliers, there is even a magic number of hours of practice one must go through before becoming an “expert” (i.e. on par with Bill Gates in the computer world, or a world-class violinist in the music world), which seems to hold true in any field: 10,000. This could seem discouraging when you do the math and realize that this number corresponds to approximately three hours a day for ten years—what about our jobs? What about the kids?

But then again, how long have you already been writing? Is it necessary to be a writing expert to pen a story that is beautiful, or entertaining, or just plain good? No, it’s not necessary. That’s why we workshop. That’s why we edit.

The important thing to know is that practice makes us better, and, as long as we keep grabbing those opportunities to practice, no matter how brief, we will get better.

How close are you to your 10,000 hours?

Writers

By Ginny Padgett

Recently I was asked, “Who is your favorite writer?”

“William Faulkner,” was my quick, word-association answer. I do think that is always the most accurate answer.

Afterwards, I asked myself if that answer was really accurate. After a brief mental review I came up with my three favorite authors: William Faulkner, Lillian Hellman and John Cheever.

Then I asked myself if that list was accurate. (I guess I talk to myself quite a lot!) After all, it had been quite a while since I had read any of them. So I embarked on a reading adventure.

I began with what I thought to be my all-time favorite book by my all-time favorite writer, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Yes, it still tops my list. His writing and characters are as rich and fecund as the Mississippi land he immortalized.

I read The Sound and the Fury for the first time in my late teens. It was the experience that dropped me to my knees to worship at the feet of the novelist and his calling. The skill of transporting a reader through space and time to that of the writer’s choosing via a bit of ink and moldy paper seemed like alchemy. That first reading impelled me toward writing.

Next I read Pentimento: A Book of Portraits, by renowned playwright Lillian Hellman. Superb! Probably my all-time favorite passage comes from this book. It’s a description of what the word pentimento means, which is an artist’s alteration in a painting. If you’re not familiar with this beautiful language, I urge you to seek out this book to see for yourself what a prose poet Hellman is!

Then, I read all of John Cheever’s short stories, for which he is most famous. I began with a slim volume entitled Thirteen Uncollected Stories by John Cheever. I discovered the reason they had remained uncollected for so long! I next launched into The Stories of John Cheever, a 700-page tome of beautifully crafted, laser-sharp commentaries of post-WWII middle-class America.

The adage about the power of the pen is as true as ever. In my opinion, the exigency to write should be the eighth addition to Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Seven Basic Needs. Man has been compelled to record his experiences and their impact on the world around him since prehistoric times. Writing is what makes us human; that’s why we have opposable thumbs, for goodness sake…to hold a writing tool!

Writers hold up a mirror for self-examination. Writers grind the lens to sharpen our myopic vision. Writers have the power to change lives. Writers are gods among mortals.

So, now I’ll ask the question of you, “Who is your favorite writer?”

A Few Words on Writing Them

By Meredith H. Kaiser
Columbia II Writers Workshop

One of my favorite books on writing is Parting the Curtains: Voices of the Great Southern Writers. Through Dannye Romine Powell's interviews with 22 writers, the rich variety of writing experience is revealed and celebrated. I read it every couple of years and underline newly recognized wisdom each time. Here are a few excerpts.

Shelby Foote, Civil War historian and novelist, recommended reading works of a great writer chronologically to watch him or her grow. He also said that writers who want to write better (who doesn't?) should read and reread the great writers of the past. "When you know where he's going, you can better perceive how he went about getting there. And that's what can teach you really about writing."

Novelist and short story writer Doris Betts said writers must be observant. "It's like being a child, because children can't tell what's important and what's unimportant, so they have to pay attention to everything. Well, writers are like that, I think. They are always just kind of -- I don't know -- watching and listening, and you just can't tell what you are going to use."

Essayist and novelist Walker Percy said, "The best thing about writing is to repeat the ordinary experience, and by putting that experience into language, it makes it available to the person who reads it in a way that hasn't been available before."

T. R. Pearson, author of humorous novels, said, "I don't have any inclination to hang around with people who write books. I know how I am, and I wouldn't want to hang around with me." He also said, "I'm sorry to say that I think writing is a semi-sick compulsion. An itch. It's not very healthy. I feel guilty when I don't write. I can remember, even as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, sitting down and writing, and I can't even begin to tell you why. There was no prospect that I was going to win the Pulitzer Prize when I was thirteen. I don't know what I was doing."

I love this book because I recognize myself in many of its passages. And if someone interviewed me -- a wild-eyed woman, breathing through labor pains as I birth my first novel (I'm sweaty and scared to push, though I know out is the only direction this thing can possibly go!) -- I would say this: Writing expands my heart and it terrifies me. It's like that relationship you know is good for you, but tests you in all the ways you've avoided for so long. I've decided to say yes to it. What choice do I have?

FOUR GOOD BOOKS on WRITING

By Beth Cotten
Columbia II Writers Workshop

Most of the following books were written in the 1980s and 1990s; a paperback edition of The Weekend Novelist was released in April, 2005. No doubt there are newer books on the market, but I think you will find these to be useful and easy to read. I have read some chapters of each of them, but I still have yet to read them completely. I think my summer will be taken up by checking out these resources again. Enjoy!

Writing the Block Buster Novel: Author - Albert Zuckerman
Albert Zuckerman is a former novelist, TV writer, and teacher of playwriting at Yale and is the founder of Writers House. This book is a comprehensive look at all phases of writing a best-selling novel, from "Getting Started" to "Getting it Published and onto the best-seller lists." The book is excellent and should be read by anyone interested in publishing fiction. Currently available at Amazon.Com Be sure to check out the Writers House web site.

The Writer’s Digest Handbook of Novel Writing: Edited by Tom Clark, William Brohaugh, Bruce Woods and Bill Strickland.
A compilation of 37 writings by 30 authors, agents, editors, teachers and publishers. All of the material first appeared in Writer’s Digest Magazine and were compiled into this book with permission. The book is excellent and is also available, new and used, at Amazon.Com.

Show Don’t Tell-A Writer’s Guide: Author - William Noble
For those of us who stray into lecturing our readers instead of entertaining them, this is another very useful book. Currently available in paperback at Amazon.Com. Noble has written other writing guides, Steal This Plot, “Shut Up!” He Explained, and Make That Scene. All are also available through Amazon.Com. Check under used or textbooks by title.

The Weekend Novelist: Author - Robert J. Ray.
This is an interesting book, in that it is a 52-week program designed to help a writer produce a finished novel in a year, one weekend at a time. Some of us are very busy and at least I am inclined to use the excuse of not having time to write. The author says you can become a "real writer" if you only have time on the weekends. In 1994, when this book was published, the author had very successfully published eight "highly acclaimed books." The book is touted as a step-by-step program, the one Ray uses himself to produce a book from "the blank page to a completed novel." The book is also available at Amazon.Com, as is his 1998 book The Weekend Novelist Writes a Mystery.