Find Your Magic

 By Leigh Stevenson

We choose to write in a way that speaks to us. Fantasy, history, memoir, essay, fiction, non-fiction, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs. It doesn’t matter. Whatever the form, what matters to most writers is that our work also speaks to others.

What is that magic thing that makes someone pick up one book and reject another? Follow one Blog and not another? Topic? Genre? Cover Art? Author? You could go crazy trying to figure it out. One thing I have learned after years of research is that opinions on the subject are just that. Everyone has one and everyone has advice. If you choose, you can read every blog, book and article on the topic and still be utterly confused.

What I have learned for sure is there are no rules. Aside from a good grammar check and edit you can pretty much throw out every other have-to. For every supposed “rule” there is someone who has broken that rule and been published.

You could just stop. It would be a lot easier. Or you could decide to get on with it and make your own rules as you go. Sure it’s hard. You can immobilize yourself with the immensity of the challenge and trying to figure out the “tricks of the trade”. Being a writer is hard enough without trying to second guess what will sell in the marketplace.

Along with the joy of writing, I have found that a large part of the creative process is a lot like running into a wall again and again. Then there’s the slogging through the quicksand of rewrites and editing and more rewrites. Not that much fun. We persevere, even so.

The best I know is to check your grammar, find a good, honest, knowledgeable writing partner and/or writing group and try to enjoy the process.

And then, once in a great while, there is a moment when everything comes together. The words are right and the sentences flow and you say to yourself, “I can’t believe I actually wrote that”. You find your own magic, not someone else’s version of it.

A Plea to Storytellers: Never Forget!

By Shaun McCoy

If you're reading this, ironically, you're probably a writer. I've got to tell you, my brothers and sisters, we used to have it pretty good. Our historic predecessors were responsible for the creation of seminal cultural documents whose tales were regarded as indispensible for development of a person's character. We put out stone cold epics like The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Illiad, the Aeneid, the elder and younger Eddas. Guys, people used to take our stuff pretty darn seriously. On certain ignoble occasions, we even got away with pretending our stories were written by gods (although to be fair, those were probably penned by the predecessors of editors, who even to this day labor under their delusions of divinity).

In those days a successful writer was one who was so influential to his culture that his work would be inflicted on high school students for all time, equipped with a neat little lesson plan that says: "You see this story? This is what it means to be an Ancient Sumerian/Greek/Roman/Norse dude with a pretty kewl spiked helmet."

Things have changed. These days a successful writer might be expected to pen such esteemed tomes as Twilight or Harry Potter.

Yeah, things have gone downhill for us in the last few thousand years. A modern day Herodotus would be torn apart by archaeologists. Scientists and skeptics would giggle at our attempts to explain why spiders spin webs and narcissus flowers think that they're hot stuff. But that doesn't mean it's over, and it sure as heck doesn't mean that we should forget what stories are for.

Nomadic cultures would use their legends as a type of map. A story whose narrative involved a stream would be told about this valley. A tale involving game, or fruits and nuts, might be told about this hill. In this way, even if no member of that tribe had been to a certain place for generations, by listening to the wisdom of their long lost elders a nomad could know where to go in case of drought or famine.

In modern times food and water aren't really all that precious. Wal-Marts are fairly ubiquitous and thanks to the niceties of indoor plumbing, we all literally have our own personal rivers that flow directly into our own homes. But that's not to say that people aren't still hungry and thirsty… not at all. We're just hungry and thirsty for different things.  

We literally live in a world chock full of Homeopathy and hatred. Where lies about living spread through the internet like a Texan wildfire. Where the tools for being connected with the entire world are the same tools that are used to create loneliness and isolation. 

Language was perhaps mankind's first and greatest invention. It lets us learn from the mistakes of others. I love those stories that try and teach wisdom. I love To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Diary of Ann Frank, and The Myth of Sisyphus. I love movies like Milk, Hotel Rwanda, and yes, even Rambo IV. 

So here's my plea: folks. Let's never forget what stories are for, and maybe as you pen your next little ditty you can share with the world your own small secret way of how to find water.

Werewolves, Cinnamon Bun Pirates, and Other Ghosts of My Writing Past

By Amanda Simays

My parents are moving out of the house they’ve lived in for twenty years. Which of my belongings do I discard, and which do I make them lug to their new house and store for me until God knows when? My attempts to weed out parts of my childhood bedroom over Christmas taught me a lot about my priorities. Stuffed animals, summer camp t-shirts, graduation paraphernalia? Toss without a backward glance. But my packrat tendencies kicked in when it came to really valuable stuff like old American Girl magazines, my collection of 1967 World Book encyclopedias…and anything I’ve written.

I hang onto almost all of my writing, whether it’s in a notebook or a computer file. Partly because it represents a lot of hard work, but mostly because (to use a cliché), I’m scared to throw out the baby with the bathwater. What if, buried deep in the piles of writing rubbish, there’s a character, a line of dialogue, or even a phrase I might want to use someday?

During the creation of a 150-page novel I wrote when I was about fourteen, I also ended up with an 80-page rival document of deleted scenes. Most of the writing there I can’t see using in the future at all. There is, for instance, a long, digressive subplot about a pirate who’s so obsessed with eating cinnamon buns that even his name, Nubni Mannic, is “cinnamon bun” spelled backwards…and incorrectly. But the description of a character who has “greasy hair the color of a banana bruise?" Hmmm…worth hanging onto…just in case.

Even earlier in my past, my brother approached me with a request to write him a werewolf story, and his instructions were to “make it as scary as possible.” So I did, and it was very scary. You can tell how scary this story is right from the subtle opening:

Hi! My name is Billy. I’d like to tell you something. It all began four years ago when I was eight. One day I was packing for my camping trip with my mom and dad in the mountains. My family just got a new van and station wagon.

We were done packing and we were ready to hit the road. On our way we saw some blood on the road and some dead peoples heads. We saw some signs that said “DANGER."

The story just goes downhill from there, degenerating into a thousand-word gore fest. My brother and I read the story out loud to our dad, expecting him to shiver with fright and proclaim it a masterpiece of suspense. Instead, he was completely disgusted and gave me strict instructions to delete that story and never show anybody.

But I didn’t, and years later, I’m glad I kept it. At the very least, hanging onto very bad writing gives me reassurance of how far I’ve come in the course of my writing life…or lets me have a good laugh at myself.

Thoughts on the Loss of a Friend

By Fred Fields

Standard advice to a writer is to write about what we know. A familiar event in all our lives is the death of a friend or family member. Being such a passion-filled subject, it requires special care, and sensitivity, but it also requires honesty.

Recent events in my life have caused me to examine this very special subject with more interest.

In my life, counting schools and the Army, I've lived in seven states. Three were actually "home", West Virginia, Arizona, and South Carolina, and South Carolina has been home for me and my family for the last half century.

Last week, my family suffered two losses. On Monday, February 13, my mother's best friend from West Virginia died, and on Saturday, February 18, my best friend from Arizona followed her.

It is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder. As with many old sayings, we nod and say, "There's a lot of truth in that." But, there really isn't.

Mother and I were saddened by the loss of our friends. But we were not affected as deeply as were the locals who lived close to them. We both have many happy memories shared with them, but they touched our lives so rarely in the last few years, that their influence has been reduced to nothing but those memories, not often recalled. "Out of sight, out of mind," is another, truer aphorism.

I'm surprised at how casually my life is influenced by these losses. Time was when either of them would have turned my world upside down for a week. Today it's a call to the family, a condolence note, a call to mutual friends, "Include me in on the flowers and food." I'm astonished at my insensitivity, my lack of feeling.

Actually, my sympathy for the surviving families and friends is stronger than the sense of my loss of a friend. Sooner or later, we all die. We must expect that.

As I get closer to my time, my attitude toward death becomes more one of acceptance, and less of fear.

But it's not a happy thought.

The MFA's Place in Publishing: An Opinion

By Ginny Padgett

I’ve been perusing the November/December, 2011 issue of Poets & Writers magazine. I am astonished to find the numerous ads for MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) programs displayed here – one on nearly every page. Before reading this widely regarded resource, I was aware of one of today’s trends, namely to become published in the traditional manner, an MFA is the way to go. It made me think.

• Is academia the force behind the publishing business these days?
• MFAs are very expensive. Is that making writing an elitist’s profession with an elitist attitude?
• What literature, innovative concepts, and unique points of view might we be missing from those writers who cannot afford to go to graduate school?
• Would William Shakespeare or Charles Dickens get published today without an MFA entrée? Both were men of the people – far from academia – who dealt in the drama of every-day life.
• William Faulkner considered himself a Mississippi farmer. In fact, in a 1956 interview in The Paris Review, he said, “There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.”
• Flannery O’ Conner was a recluse from Milledgeville, Georgia (even though her bio says Savannah).
• Does this raise other points you’d share as a comment to this blog? I’d really like to hear other thoughts. Pardon me. My egalitarian sensibilities are showing.

Once again, I suppose the debate goes back to “art is in the eye of the beholder.” Unless we’re writing for monetary gain (in which case get an MFA), the reward from our creative pursuits may be the personal satisfaction in quelling the need for self expression.

The Power of the Written Word

By Ginny Padgett

Last week I attended my mother's family's Christmas get-together. There are six siblings; their parents have been gone for over 35 years. This year their number was down by one very important member. Their baby brother lost his battle with brain cancer earlier this year.

Before the meal, my mother read a story she had written about an incident from their childhood. As I looked around the room while my mother read, her sister and brothers nodded in agreement and interrupted once or twice with exclamations of veracity. Their rapt attention told me they had been transported to another time and place.

Applause and lots of hearty thanks punctuated the conclusion of my mother's reading. When she said she had copies for her siblings, they were delighted. Hers was a gift that was the right size, color, and appreciated in a different way by each recipient.

We write, write, write to perfect our craft...to reach our goal of publication...to have an impact on the world. This experience reminded me that all writing matters, not the size of your audience.

A Man and His Passion

By Ginny Padgett

Recently HBO aired a remake of Mildred Pierce as a mini-series, starring Kate Winslet. Many of you will recall the 1945 Joan Crawford version. During the credits I noticed the movie was based on a novel. Since I had mistakenly thought this script came from an original screenplay, I was curious about the author of the original work. Quick research yielded more surprises.

James M. Cain, the author of Mildred Pierce, (the first ever block-buster novel) wrote several other novels that were made into big movies: The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Serenade. In addition, I found a collection of his short stories entitled The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction, which I checked out from the library.

His introduction to this book of short stories was more interesting to me than his fiction. His father was president of Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. The younger Cain graduated from that college at seventeen, after which he spent the next four years drifting from one job to another, including teaching grammar at his alma mater. One day in 1914, “out of the blue…he heard his own voice say: ‘You’re going to be a writer.’”

He was not successful at first, but he was committed and kept writing. He enlisted in WW I, came home and spent three years as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and began to work on his first novel. After three drafts, he threw them all away. While he was writing a column for the “Metropolitan” section of the Sunday World, his short works were published in the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, the American Mercury, the Bookman, and the Saturday Evening Post. When the World folded, Cain went to the New Yorker magazine where he was very unhappy.

Upon the advice of his agent, he accepted a job as a screenwriter at Paramount Studios and moved to California. He was let go after six months: another failure. However, he decided to stay on the west coast and try to make it as a free-lance writer.

He found his voice and his characters in California, and he enjoyed his highest success as a novelist during the 1930s and ‘40s. Eventually, his work fell out of favor with the public and critics. He moved back to Maryland in 1953 and wrote twelve more novels – but only five were published before his death in 1977.

James M. Cain is my new hero because he never stopped writing, even when it became unprofitable. He felt that “those who can write must write.” I’ve adopted this as my personal motto. In addition, his experiences speak volumes to me about determination and passion.

I leave you with his quote about the practice of writing, recorded during the time he was working on his memoirs just before he died. “It excites me and possesses me. I have no sense of it possessing me any less today than it did fifty years ago.”

Why I Write

By Deborah Wright Yoho

At an age too young, striving to please my parents, teachers and peers, I lost myself. My writing is about finding my way back, to reclaim what I've always known to be true. Truths about the shifting world, about relationships, about the power of time and memory. Most especially, about the power of my own voice.

To my surprise, this process has been peaceful rather than disturbing, serendipitous rather than deliberative, full of ebb and flow rather than effort. I write for myself but also for another, searching and reaching in the hope of finding a mind capable and willing, even desiring to understand me.

For me, there is no greater luxury than being understood, because true commonality is rarer than a blade of grass in the desert. Yet I remember the feeling. I remember seven-year-old Scott, giggling with me under his jacket on the school bus, cocooned in a private conspiracy. As a teacher, I live for the moment when my eyes lock with my learner's in a flash of insight as together we discover a new idea. As a young woman, I remember my own unconditional trust flashing back to my heart from the eyes of my first love.

It is not approval I seek. I write pursuing a sense of rest, of slowing down my thoughts, so that one mind can understand another's by capturing authentically on paper mental images, emotions, and yearnings. Converting mental energy to black and white squiggles on a page becomes a tangible and permanent record of my connection to others, like a musical composition or a visual work of art.

Coming of Age

By Alex Raley

I recently made a trip with folks who kept referring to me as “sir.” Most of the people were well past fifty years. This was a simple gesture of courtesy on their part, but it spoke volumes to me. Am I really a fossil as my grandsons delight in calling me? Am I beyond elderly? Is my fatigue due to aging and not carousing? I do know that in recent years I have begun to think of my life as having a stopping point, though that may be twenty years from now or it could be tomorrow. Such a thought never occurred to me thirty years ago. I was too busy with career and family, too busy with life.

What has all this to do with writing? This new view of life has given me a new perspective on writing. I no longer write because I think my writing is publishable. Writing is just a natural process, like breathing, sleeping, eating, thinking, talking and all the other things we do routinely. This does not mean that I will stop submitting things for possible publication. It means the rejects will be less important.

Age has also given me a unique view on publishing. With all my years of reading, I have come to know that publishing is more accident, or whom you know, than a sign of quality. I have just finished reading Super by Jim Lehrer. On his or her worst day, any one in our workshop writes as well, or better, than that novel. The real story of the novel barely would make a short story, and the remainder of the book is filled with interesting stuff, but not for a novel. One can only surmise that Lehrer can get something published on his name alone.

In spite of these thoughts of age, I still know that the unexpected does happen. In a recent prayer-breakfast speech, Randall Wallace, script writer, director and producer, told the story of his being near bankruptcy. After some soul-searching, he wrote Braveheart. Though I don’t expect to write a Braveheart, I will keep my eye open for the unexpected. Who knows what may lurk around the corner even for a fossil.

In the meantime, I will enjoy the youngsters who stand to offer me a seat on the Newark Airport bus transfer from Terminal C to Terminal A, the young man who offers to help me lug my wife’s carryon up a stair at Tel Aviv, and the many persons who ask, “How are you doing?” as we trudge over Masada. Maybe there is a story or a poem somewhere in all that solicitation.

My advice to you is to keep writing and submitting, but to relax and enjoy what you do. Fossilization creeps up on you.

Woman in Red Dress

By Laura P. Valtorta

During a recent disaster evacuation drill at Stanford University, all went awry. Workers and students were supposed to stand outside the buildings, twenty feet away, between 10 and 10:30 a.m., marked by siren signals. The sirens failed to go off as scheduled. Still, the Stanford police managed to rally most people outside, and situate them in neat clusters with their groups -- physics department, law school, visitors center, the Cantor museum, etcetera.

Dante and I waited outside the Cantor museum studying the beautiful sculptures by Auguste Rodin, including the Gates of Hell. We waited 30 minutes for the drill to finish.

At 10:20, a woman in a red dress strode out of the Cantor museum. The guards looked at each other. "What happened?"

"She was inside." The guards shrugged their shoulders. This was the first disaster evacuation drill, and all over campus it had been a disaster. Foreign, non-English-speaking tourists refused to leave the non-denominational chapel. The sirens either failed to sound entirely or they were too soft to hear. Students remained inside the dorms.

Then there was that woman in the red dress, who might have been an employee of the Cantor museum. If there had been an actual earthquake or fire, she could have been killed. But there was no disaster. Instead, she illustrated a point. She pushed the boundaries and disobeyed the rules, either out of stubbornness or ignorance. She showed the system did not function well. During this drill, she was an auslander.

Why does disobedience exist? As an outsider myself, I can testify there is no choice involved. Outsiders are born challenging the rules, questioning authority, stretching the boundaries. Auslander writers, such as the great Stieg Larsson, create new realities, illustrate our unexpressed dreams, and blast aside stereotypes. The result is Lisbeth Salander -- the woman every intelligent woman wants to become.

My goal as an auslander writer is to create a vision of the future that no writer has expressed. My future world is inspired with hope -- it is a utopia as opposed to the dystopia described by such writers as Margaret Atwood. Being an outsider causes me pain and disaffection on a daily basis. Oftentimes I fail to understand the world around me because it seems to be so driven by fear. There must be a reason for my pain. Outside thinking pushes the human species forward. It helps us evolve.

Enslaved to Confusion

By Deborah Wright Yoho

As a writer, I feel buffeted by the pressures of globalization. Ever since I read Thomas Friedman’s iconic books on the subject, daily I feel like I am leaning into the wind, weathering the storms of merciless change. Deadlines. Competitions. Places to go and things to do if I ever hope to be published. Yet writing for me requires a slow pace and a measure of peace and quiet. I’d like to think of my writing as a refuge, at least a pause that refreshes. But more and more the mechanics of modern life reduce my writing time to a few moments, like taking a vitamin pill with the hope I’ll have more energy later.

My new intellectual hobby is keeping up with the effects of globalization. I am enslaved to perpetual confusion, dealing with the unrelenting learning curve required to operate my demon computer. I call it the Machine, and I refuse to talk to it.To do so would confirm the presence of another life form struggling to communicate with me in an alien language. While I know it is useless to ignore its demands, I maintain the delusion that the human mind by default should function as master over all machines. Entities with an assertive consciousness require respect I refuse to offer.

The joy of maintaining a connection to friends and family has become a chore. Nobody is ever home, cell phones are unreliable, email addresses constantly change, and who has the time for snail mail? Facebook just won’t cut it. I must plan for a three-day delay trying to reach anybody at all. Not that I am any different. People get mad at me if I don’t return their message in less than 24 hours. Half the time I want the world to just go away and the rest of the time I’m chasing after it.

My private life as a reader has been invaded. Should I buy a Kindle? Must I? Probably. The cost to feed a two-books-a-week habit is bounding away from me. I can’t indulge my preference for ink on paper much longer unless I want to spend more time with the Machine managing a waiting list at the library.

I suspect those who cherish the deliberative writing process, considering, drafting, editing, and then doing it all over again before releasing their thoughts to others, could someday become an extinct species.

Why Write, Indeed?

By Ginny Padgett

This blog spot is a great resource for aspiring writers, full of good counsel and information. Today I’d like to share a different kind of advice that has been balm to my frayed creative nerves. The source is Dan Albergotti, one of the submission judges for the 2007 Petigru Review. I hope this will bring you the sigh of relief I heaved when I read this.

Albergotti observes, “To present your own writing for the world’s judgment is…an act of courage…The only true gauge of you work lies in your own mind and heart. And if you give too much credence to publication and awards as indicators of your artistic achievement, you risk squelching that one true measure – that critic inside yourself who really knows the score.”

He goes on to cite an essay, “Why Write?” (The Cincinnati Review, 2.1, Spring, 2005), written by his teacher and mentor, Alan Shapiro. “Recognition through publication and awards is ‘like cotton candy: It looks ample enough until you put in your mouth, then it evaporates. All taste and no nourishment.’(106)”

Alborgetti cautions the aspiring writer about the danger of being too critical of her work. Again, this part really spoke to me regarding my sense of failing at my chosen art. “Do not succumb to that sense of failure. It is a natural feeling, but it is not true. If you ignore it – if you continue to write regardless of publication or public approbation or immediate personal satisfaction – you will not be failing. That ‘deepening sense of failure’ is what success feels like.”

Bless you, Dan Albergotti! These words helped put my fingers back on the keyboard and, in some strange way, gave me the courage to submit my work for publication again.

I want to leave you with this amazing fact. In her lifetime, Emily Dickinson saw only TEN of her 1600+ poems published. Write on, my friends.

Sacrifice and Robotics

By Mayowa Atte

You have a story, a dollop of your inner pudding that you have decided to share with the world. You have outlines, notes, character bios, plot sketches and countless late night/early morning/during showers/during meals/during anything ponderings. More importantly, you have words -- a line or ten thousand of blessed prose that you are sure will destroy the reader’s world and make it anew. There is only one problem; you can’t seem to write enough, can’t make significant progress, can’t finish.

Why is it so hard to finish? Two dragons guard the road to writing productivity; the first is a lack of time to write. With day jobs, night jobs, families, friends, church, lovers and pets it’s a miracle that anyone ever finishes a draft. The other is the writer’s mental attitude; there is enough time to write but you don’t feel like writing. Maybe you are like me and your writing productivity mirrors your love life, or you want to spend your one free hour watching the Lakers. The truth is that there will always be something else, someone else, and someplace else that needs or demands your attention.

How do you finish then? How do you reach the half-naked pleasure of that last page? The answer lies in Sacrifice and Robotics. To slay the first dragon, you take one of the many other things that require or demand your attention and you sacrifice it. You wake up an hour earlier every day or stay in instead of going out with friends. You sacrifice a favorite TV show or order takeout instead of making dinner. Maybe you tell your boss that you absolutely have to reduce your overtime (please proceed along this path with caution).

To slay the second dragon, you find your best writing atmosphere (place, time, noise level, etc.) and you write in that atmosphere on an unbreakable schedule (using time carved out with your sacrifices). The goal is to make writing robotic, more than a habit, but an automatic, ingrained activity that you perform whether or not you are in the creative mood, regardless of the state of your love life, or how happy, restless, horny, sad, bored…anyhow you feel. Sacrifice and Robotics.

Why will you sacrifice the things and people that are dear to you? Why will you turn the writing you do for pleasure into another must-do task? The answer lies in another question, why are you writing? Why must you tell this story? Do you need to right a social wrong? Do you want your bodice ripper to be a national guilty pleasure? Do you want additional income or a cadre of adoring female MFA students? Whatever your reason, it has to be strong enough to make these sacrifices worthwhile.

It is impossible to make all these sacrifices or adopt every good writing habit but one or two is doable and will bring immense benefits. On most days in August, I left work on time, went straight to the same coffee shop and wrote for a few hours before going home. That month, I went way over my food budget, gained seven pounds (lost my gym time), frustrated my boss and alienated a few friends and romantic interests.

I wrote more in those 31 days than I had in the previous eight months.

Is It Art Yet?

By Ginny Padgett

Recently I saw a docu-drama based on the life of Georgia O’Keefe. Her Svengali cum husband, Alfred Stieglitz, delivered a line that stopped the action for me, complete with bells and red flags. He said, “It’s not art until someone rich pays a lot of money for it.” Of course this line was said tongue in cheek, but it started me thinking.

My thoughts went to writing and publishing. Is the same true with the literary arts? I was still mulling over this question when a week or so later at our workshop there was a discussion about this very subject.

The conversation went like this. Some modern writers have become millionaires from their book sales, but some of these books are like potato chips…not good for you but you can’t put them down. On the other hand Mayo mentioned he was reading Lolita. Although he found the subject matter distasteful, he relished the beauty of the written word and envied Nabokov’s mastery.

Of course, art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. But after giving this is-it-art question some thought and listening to others, here’s where I stand.

I believe art happens when one has an idea that is meaningful to him and strives to convey the impact of that thought or feeling through his chosen medium. I also believe that when one creates art, our collective consciousness is enhanced, elevated, edified. Furthermore, when one practices his art in community with others, like we do at workshop, I believe we inspire each other, and our experience is greater than the sum of our parts. Because of this experience, we don’t need a multi-million dollar contract or even to be published in a small literary magazine to consider what we do as art.

I think this a high calling to which we have responded. We ply our art without an eye to a generous benefactor. We write because we love it; we have a point to make; we have something we want to get off our chests. For whatever reason, we use words as painters use colors on canvases. Perhaps there is no better art than the pursuit of it. So write on, comrades in ink. Let’s make some art!

The Thing

By Brian Butler

How many times have you sat down to write with that blank receptacle before you and yet nothing to plug into it? A common occurrence for many of us, I am sure, yet the passion to write continues to lure us. The void stares back at you, emotionless and cold, but still begging for input, silently crying for existence. And you possess the power to grant it, to create something out of nothing. Much like mad scientists, we as writers are drawn by the ability to conceive our own Frankensteins, giving birth through our fingertips.

When words are put to the page, the creature begins to take on unique characteristics, traits only this monster owns. As days pass and it is fed more and more words, it begins to stand on its own. It grows from its barren space to a starving infant craving nourishment and attention. It feeds relentlessly. Spawned from the depths of our brain, it becomes one of our offspring, developing a distinct personality blended from our experiences and imagination. We start to care for this…thing.

The monster continues to grow and becomes its own entity, gorging on our time. Its greedy voice speaks to us on an unconscious level as it evolves. We respond with all the love such a child needs to develop into a healthy adult. But soon, it becomes too large to contain.

To retain command, we assign schedules and ration its intake to keep the beast from spinning out of control.

The creature rebels.

It is used to over-indulging, taking all we can give. It has had no set of laws to follow to this point. With a life of its own, the progeny stops communicating, punishment for the application of rules. Alone, we slump into a state of apathy. The roles have reversed, and now instead of us being the care-giver, we look to our creation to fulfill our needs. We look for it to give in return.

But it doesn’t. It won’t. It can’t.

It is up to us to continue the relationship, to reconnect and finish what we started. Without us, creations such as these will never reach maturity. They will sit dormant in drawers and in closets and in dead computer memories. They will become abandoned orphans whose creators were too cruel to put them out of their misery.

Be a good parent. Stay in touch with your brood. Feed them incessantly at birth to bring them to a healthy life. Then mold them with subtle refinements. Yes, rules are necessary, but do not let them confine you or condemn your offspring. Instead use them as guidelines to bring your creations to success, where they can survive on their own, and be introduced to the world, not as a monster, but as a beautiful work of art for all to adore.

It's Been Said Before and Better

By Bonnie Stanard

This criticism goes to the question of creativity, especially as it applies to fiction. How can we produce writing that departs from what has already been published? The challenge to poets can be seen in the desperation evident in some poems published today.

We write from our feelings, intellect, and experience, things that make us human. However, these very things are as old as humanity, and we’ve been writing about them for hundreds of years. The scenery may change, but there are no new plots or characters.

Our feelings are strong motivators. We’re tempted to turn our love life into a novel, but an affair, unique to us, becomes boy-meets-girl as a plot. The angst of puberty, loneliness of old age, and pride in battle are but a few examples of stories that have been retold many times.

Can our intellect save us from writing a rehash of what has already been written? It is possible to develop new concepts from our perceptions, as people like Freud, James Joyce, and Shakespeare bear out, but how many of us are in that league?

Surely each person experiences life differently from every other person. This may be analogous to saying nobody has my recipe for chili. The “ingredients” of life may mix, interact, and react differently, but we all have the same ingredients. You may say, “Nobody else can remember the time I cut my foot on a glass bottle while swinging on a vine.” That may be unique to you, but is it original? See what I mean?

The point here is that if we think we’re on the road less traveled, we may be unaware of the traffic backing up in our lane. One of the few ways we’ll discover derivative or mundane aspects of our work is from critics in our workshop. Our group is cautious with criticisms. Questions often mean the text being discussed is weak. If your manuscript gets hardly any reaction, it is either very good, very bad, or very long.

The advice I’ve heard at our SCWW conferences has devolved into my current writing strategy, which is to reach for the unexpected in characters and the unpredictable in plot. For instance, the guy sitting in a nearby seat just mailed a rattlesnake to his girlfriend. The little girl with him is not his daughter. If a character seems to be falling in love, the last place for the plot to go is the bedroom. The boss who promises his secretary a promotion is demoted himself. Screams in the night aren’t murder. They’re cat fights. A pizza delivery man knocks at the door, and he’s carrying...

Writing Hell

By Laura P. Valtorta

My mentor, a Jewish attorney, older than 90, five feet tall, with a hummingbird physique is planning to visit her family in a Big City next month. Her children are doctors. She resists moving to the Big City because here she is an attorney. There, she would be “somebody’s mother.”

She has a bum knee. It’s nothing life threatening but the idea that she might not return home to Columbia floats around, because of her age. She hates staying home all the time. I offered to take her to the Pancake House for lunch next week, and that was an exciting idea I told her I would drive and park close to the front door. For a woman who prides herself on her career as a solo practitioner, and her graduation from law school in 1940 as the only woman in her class, not being able to get around is a nasty impediment. She walked 22 blocks a day until last year. The knee.

I’m supposed to be a writer. What if I never wrote about her philosophy (become a professional, work for yourself, never hate anyone, learn the law, stay away from Worker’s Compensation), her flirtatious treatment of men, her way of addressing waitresses, “I want HOT coffee,” or her knack for lending support to all my efforts, with a touch of sarcasm? Would I go to hell? Jews don’t believe in the afterlife. Neither do I. But there must be retribution for the inability to celebrate a life that has meant something to me. What if the punishment were mediocrity?

I first saw Jerry (not her name) in 1993. She was out walking the 22 blocks, and I saw her from my office across the street. I left that office and worked for a big attorney for a while. He weighed over 250 pounds. Then I tired of the yelling and returned to Attorney Row, introduced myself to Judith and rented the office upstairs. She had Republicans in the building, a secretary and two salesmen, but because they were nice and talkative, she tolerated them and rolled her eyes when they turned away. We went to events together. The Capitol City Club. Women Lawyers’ meetings. Movies about the Holocaust. Talks by Jewish writers. Nickelodeon. She was never afraid of the R-rated. We liked Monsoon Wedding, Road to Perdition, Spellbound, the one about the bee. She made me sit through The Pianist when the musician was hiding from the Nazis. We both complained about French sadomasochism and Nicholson as a retired insurance salesman. She taught me you could demand the price of the ticket if you disliked the movie.

We talked and talked about our families. Her husbands, her children, her grandchildren. My husband and children. She went to college at 16. She played on the basketball team. Both parents wanted her to get as much education as possible. They wanted her to “become something.”

She did. What about me? If I can’t make her live through my fiction, I will freeze in the dark waters of the River Styx. I will burn in eighth circle of hell. I will rot forever in the suburbs of Columbia.

Inspiration

By Leigh Stevenson

People often ask writers where they get their inspiration and why they write. I will try to explain what it is for me.

My mother was a poet and a fiction writer. Among many other things, she taught me to see, really see the world in the shape of trees, the color of light, the beauty of the natural world. My earliest attempts as a writer were in the form of somewhat feeble poetry. I tried to capture all of the turbulent emotions and experiences of growing up and put them on the written page. She encouraged my first attempts but was frank in her assessments. She told me that we often think in trite terms, i.e. clear as a bell, high as a kite, red as a rose. Those expressions are what we hear every day and are what immediately come to mind. The challenge of the writer is to see with fresh eyes and to translate your impressions into fresh terms. This seemed an overwhelming task and I became somewhat discouraged. But I couldn’t stop. A Thesaurus became a good friend.

My father taught me a love of music of all kinds: classical, big band, jazz, contemporary. Sometimes just the sound of wind in the trees or moving through tall grass, the swish of water in a fountain or the beat of the ocean is enough. Sound is important to me as a writer. Sometimes a lack of it.

Inspiration almost always comes to me when I’m still, when I can see the natural world. I don’t think I could write in a windowless room and not see the sky. I have always admired those authors who could sit at a kitchen table with their kids running around them and write a novel. I never could. I was always too engaged with them, too in the moment. I need separate time, space and quiet to create.

I believe a writer must write. He/she has no choice. It’s not enough to see and experience; a writer is compelled to put it on paper. It would almost be painful not to.

What inspires me? Nature. Music. Sound. Great literature. Stimulating conversation. People. Life.

Why do I write? I have to.

My Memoir

By Deborah Wright Yoho

Why would somebody like me want to write a memoir? After all, I don’t have any progeny who might be interested in the details of my life story. Neither am I ready, at age 57, to succumb to the luxury of spending hours in blissful nostalgia for the good ‘ol days.

My good ‘ol days weren’t so great anyway. Yet after forty years, my mind still ponders the significance of just 24 months.

In 1967, I found myself living in the closest proximity to the Vietnam War that was possible for an American of my age and gender. I was sixteen, the daughter of a military career man, a baby boomer whose brothers were slightly too young for the draft. Not that Dad spent any time in Vietnam. Instead we were stationed at a huge Air Force base in the Philippines.

The memories are disturbingly vivid: a roaring flight line clogged 24/7 with screaming jets; the coffins loaded each day onto the C-141 Starlifters; the time I was in the emergency room at the hospital with a North Vietnamese prisoner under heavy guard on the gurney next to me; the nurses who came to our school weekly to line up anyone over 17 they could coax into giving blood; the painful cholera shots we endured every six months.

Most of all, I remember the young, lonely airmen who hung out at the base swimming pool when they were off duty to talk to any American girls willing to listen to them. Eventually, I married one of those airman.

These were the years I learned about sex, death, the power of unquestioned authority, and the disconcerting embarrassment of living in an underdeveloped country. By the time I returned to the States to attend college, I was no longer an American teenager but a citizen of the world.

Perhaps the experience seems worth writing about because I believe this country has never come to terms with the shadow of 50,000 lives squandered in a lost cause. Not only I, but an entire country seems confused, struggling to identify and affirm basic values we once held to be uniquely American. Vietnam was the watershed.

Much has been offered about those days by politicians, retired generals, disillusioned veterans, Hollywood producers and cynical professors on college campuses. What might be learned through the eyes of a 16-year-old girl?

Thoughts on Writing

By Alex Raley

Faced with the frustrations of writing, I ask myself, "Why write?" Does anyone care that I write; aren't there legions who write better; is there anything new to say; shouldn't craft be perfected before writing is attempted; and what will become of all those printed words anyway? Shouldn't trees be saved and this nonsense of words on paper be stopped? The simple answer is that I cannot stop. My writing is not an addiction. Writing is my sustenance. I write to sustain life, to assure myself that I am here, that something in my life has meaning, if only for me.

My writing comes primarily from my own experiences or observed experiences, though one soon learns that writing stalls if it only retells the facts. Even memoirs need the emotional impact of the writer's imagination in pulling facts together in an interesting, cohesive manner. This is clearly demonstrated in Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars and Francine du Plessix Gray's Them. These authors' imaginations construct such powerful words that we flip pages as much for the writing as for the story.

Fictional writing is not so much a retelling of experiences as it is the creative reconstruction of experiences, often experiences not related in any way. Recently, I began a story with a prompt given to workshop participants. The prompt related to nothing other than the dialogue that arose from working it out. Later I tied the prompt dialogue to a fictional situation, one all of us have experienced or witnessed many times, in which the protagonist angers his wife by flirting with a beautiful female at a party.

When the wife reacts negatively, the protagonist decides he will do the walk if he is going to get all the talk, but then I was stuck. Where would the story go from that point? A visit with friends caused me to remember a situation in which the wife of a guy we knew left him for a woman. So I finished my story by having the beautiful girl take off with the protagonist's best friend's wife. In some manner, each element of the story is from my experiences. I tried to bring them together in a new way.

Writing poetry comes from my love of word sounds. From the time I was old enough to remember, there has been a word of nonsense syllables that rings in my ears. The word, if it is a word, seems to have no origin, except in my head, but I love the sounds. They excite me.

Poetry wants to clip along with interesting sounds, creating rhythms and cadences of their own, but poetry also wants to speak to that indefinable something deep within us that makes us who we are. I struggle to bring these elements together, most often without success, but the need for sustenance is strong. I cannot stop writing.