Fear, Complexity, and the Dark Night of the Soul

Greetings from the waning days of residency, and the waning vestiges of my brain. Tomorrow is graduation and the final banquet. We've been through the typical stages of residency--first there's the elation of coming, followed quickly by the abrupt reminder that you are in fact a raging introvert and don't usually talk to this many people in a year, then settling in for the work ahead, then exhaustion, then raging paranoia and digestive issues. Now we're getting ready to close up this wonderful shop for the summer--my roommate Claire already has her bags packed, which I'm pretty sure has something to do with me.

None of the faculty know how to use words anymore, but fortunately the students do. We had a couple great student lectures this morning. Chris Campbell talked about using fear in young adult fiction--what is your character afraid of? Will he be confronted with this thing immediately or is there anticipation? How does he delay confronting the thing he fears? Will he overcome his fear? It's an intriguing way to think of character arcs. Then in "They Can Handle It," Jamie Kaillo talked about some of the "rules" of YA writing--that it has to be a teen protagonist, that there can't be too many plotlines, that it has to be under 300 pages, that it has to reflect the teen world. She urged us toward complexity in writing for teens, using The Book Thief and Octavian Nothing as examples. It's interesting because these rules don't really hold for fantasy. It's a genre that demands complexity and asks a good deal from its readers. But the popularity of dystopian fiction has made fantasy more mainstream, so will the freer nature of the genre begin to infiltrate contemporary fiction or will fantasy become more rule-bound? And is me wondering this sort of thing aloud what drove Claire to pack her bags?

That's the fear and complexity in the post's title. I don't really know what I mean by that last part. It sounds fancy. The sun streams in my window at 6am, so the metaphor doesn't even make sense to me. Maybe I meant something about Batman.

It's time to go to more lectures, and think about graduation and going home and anticipating when the cycle can start again. There's a lot of elation, really. There's a student who just started here who once approached me at a conference to ask me about Hamline. We were talking about this today and he said I told him, This program is the greatest thing I've ever been involved with in my life. This has nothing to do with anything, except sometimes our boss reads this blog.

More Theme, More Tears, More Writing

Does the watershed ever stop? This writing is serious and profound business. Debbie Wiles was the visiting guest today at the Hamline Summer Residency. She had the lecture hall blubbering with her moving speech, culminating with the empowering reminder that we are all connected, our stories are all equally important, and forgiveness is at the center of everything. She pointed out that stories fulfill these five basic needs:
1: To Love and Be Loved
2. To Be Safe
3. To Belong
4. To Matter
5. To Understand
These are not themes, but basic human needs, therefore all stories contain one or more (or all!) This is what we strive for in our art and in our lives. But, I want to remind us all of what Claire stated earlier this week, “You can’t figure out all this theme and meaning if you’re not writing!”
Writing is the way to discovery.

A big THANK YOU to Deborah Wiles for opening her heart to so many through her books and through her humanness.

Day Five - Residency Fever

Sorry we have been all so quiet. Residency fever has us all hot and bothered - about theme, about great children's books, about writing process, about being together in a community that I want to bottle up and take home with me.

But I know if I did I'd never sleep. In Jackie Briggs Martin and Liza Ketchum's workshop we mined childhood memories to write powerful sensory scenes that lay buried inside us. These residencies are like overwhelming sensory scenes that wash over us, full of laughter, tears, exhaustion and awe. I think all of us here - faculty and students - know how unique, how privileged we are to spend this time together twice a year. In a way it is like summer camp as Anne blogged about. One leans new skills, whispers into the night, sometimes even tears into one's pillow about not being good enough.

Last night I tried to write a post, but had no words to sum up the stimulating day. A presentation by writer Wendy Orr and illustrator Lauren Stringer about their individual processes that produced the delightful picture The Panther and the Princess, a discussion about girl heroines in Alice's critical thesis presentation, an evening of awe inspiring grad and grad assistant readings, followed by delightful conversation with first year students, laughter with faculty and a decompression conversation with my roommate Anne.

Five days into the residency and it feels like a fever dream that I don't want to end, but that if it doesn't, I may burn up from the stimulation of lectures, workshops, readings and fellowship with beloved faculty friends and old and new students.

As I try to look back, what stands out for me is the deep sharing on process this week. So appropos because our focus is theme. Betsy Partridge in her talk on "Kickass Nonfiction" talked about kotodomo (spelling ?) the idea that every word has a spirit, a soul. But we can only find those soul words, the themes in our writing by sitting down every day to write them. Betsy shared how she takes her primary research and weaves the details into her story, word by word. She talked about how when dealing with controversial or complex information she lets actual quotes do the heavy lifting.

This morning we return to our workshops after a morning off yesterday to cool down and recharge for the second half of the residency. Each workshop with fellow faculty Kelly Easton has offered deep and respectful discussions with student writers about each piece, focused on craft and also evolving into the process behind it.

Anne just came out to ask about her outfit for the day. She gave me a new word. Ineffable. Much of what goes on here is unspeakable, like our writing. But we try to speak, to share, so we have the hot spirit to return home to our work.

I must stop. My temperature is up. More from the front later. More for me to savor all semester long. CRM

News from the Front

A lot of the Inkpotters--well, all--are on campus now at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. It's time for the residency portion of our MFA program. Which means we're sort of at summer camp. Yesterday Anne Ursu gave a terrific lecture on THEME. Get a bunch of writers in a room and ask them about themes in their work and you'll hear a lot of disclaimers. But Anne made it all concrete. Sorry I don't have details ... maybe one of the students will comment.

In about an hour I'll be talking on "Reading as a Writer." When I was planning my talk I decided there was an inherent problem with talking about it, so I'll be forcing the students to read stuff and then come up with responses to some challenges I'll pose. In other words--they'll be doing the work. Which is why I'm blogging right before curtain time. Everything's cool.

Sunday July 11 (tomorrow as I write) the fabulous Elizabeth Partridge will be doing a reading. It's open to the public. 103 Law school building at 4:30 PM. Please join us.

MQ

Dressing in Layers

We faculty all arrive at Hamline for residency tomorrow and my anticipation at seeing the beloved faces of my colleagues is quite high. I'm trying to pack, but it's hard to know what to bring. Hamline is its own portal universe (I am a fantasy writer and so I am qualified to diagnose these things) and things don't work like you'd expect. I believe the lecture hall we spend our lives in is about 700 degrees in the winter and -70 in the summer. You might call this inefficient--we just call it fatal. Also, the abrupt temperature changes we experience traveling from the inside and outside put our bodies in a heightened state of alertness that's quite useful. If you're going to spend ten days immersed in conversations about craft, it helps to be in constant fight-or-flight.

On Thursday, we have a faculty meeting, and there are sandwiches. One of the many benefits of teaching at Hamline is the sandwiches. We get to meet the new students too. (I should add for the record that this is even better than the sandwiches.) Friday everyone comes in, and I'm kicking things off with a lecture on theme. My computer ate my Powerpoint presentation yesterday, which was thematically unfortunate. I had just figured out how to do special effects and everything. I might have to rely on kazoos.

We'll keep you updated as the residency progresses, though once again things are bound to get weird very quickly. They probably already are. I'm just so happy to be going. Plus I get to room with Claire. This is good for many reasons, including that there will always be coffee.

Travel safely, all.

Four Pages a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

I came back from a little trip up the coast a few days ago, read the posts I'd missed, and added a comment on one -- a little afterthought about writing an entire novel in a very short time. Someone e-mailed me and asked for a little more information, so - as my last post before the residency - here it is.

Basically it's four pages a day for a month. Sick or well, hot or cold, good pages or bad. The point is to push ahead. Have many men come through many doors with revolvers. Introduce new characters all the time. Have cliff-hanger chapter endings. Solve problems with Magical Realism. Defy logic. Lots of non sequiturs in dialogue. Lots of dialogue. Use any and all points of view.

Break up the four pages any way you want. If one headlong sprint is too much, write a page at four different times of the day. Turn them face down when you're done and don't re-read except to pick up the story from the last page of the day before.

Forget most of what you think you know. The only rule is to fill up the pages. At the end of thirty days you have a complete manuscript to work with, edit and revise. I guarantee there will be wonderful things in it. Surprises. Gifts from the writing-gods who love it when you sit down every day and fool around with words.

See you soon.

Distopian YA Novels

My final post before the residency. Check out this link for a great, very thorough New Yorker article about past and present distopian YA novels.

It opens with this thought about one of our common books this residency.

"Rebecca Stead chose to set her children’s novel “When You Reach Me”—winner of the 2010 Newbery Medal—in nineteen-seventies New York partly because that’s where she grew up, but also, as she told one interviewer, because she wanted “to show a world of kids with a great deal of autonomy."

The article goes on to discuss that kids today don't have the same kind of adventures because of their limited freedom due to safety concerns, thus their interest in experiencing life through the reading of distopian novels.


http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/06/14/100614crat_atlarge_miller?currentPage=al.

Words, words, words

A wordy novelist to the bone, I've been trying to writer shorter. This has been a challenge. Nothing helps writing like reading, though, so I've been reading and looking at lots of flash fiction (Thanks for the reminder, Ron), picture books, and graphic novels. My sister-in-law Sara Qualey is a painter, and she pointed me toward the amazing woodcut wordless novels of Lynd Ward. Ward, of course, was the well-known illustrator of many children’s books and the author-illustrator of more, including The Biggest Bear, which won the 1953 Caldecott. His wordless novels are stunners.

Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels, by David Berona, provides a wonderful overview of Ward’s books and those of many other artists, including Frans Masareel (1889-1972), considered the granddaddy of wordless woodcut storytellers.

Interesting stuff, and very good medicine for someone who usually needs about 50,000 words to get her point across in a story.

MQ

Just a Little Chat

I thought I'd go to the races (big surprise, huh?) and I wonder what everybody is up to for the 4th. In South Pasadena, there's a dinky parade, hula hoop contests at the park with wall-to-wall geniality and a huge fireworks show at the high school. The kind of thing that makes me want to shoot myself. Give me a passel of low-lifes and degenerate gamblers any old day.

The husband of a close friend of mine always talked about going to some small town for its celebration. His wife insisted that where he lives is that small town. No, no. It'd be more authentic somewhere else. So a few years ago they went. The drive was onerous, the motel expensive, the food over-cooked. The parade consisted of leering politicians and sun-dazed Brownies with merit badges for Respiration. Just like in South Pasadena.

There's a terrific essay by Walker Percy about the Authentic. And it's a hard commodity to come by these days. A better faux is often the best one can do.

P.S. By the way, if you want to read a poem of mine about beginning-as-a-writer, it's at a site called Creative Instigation. Google it and scroll down a bit.

Be safe this weekend, my friends.

Talk, talk, talk...

I’ve been trying to think of a clever, helpful writerly post that will get us all thinking and writing, but truth be told I’ve been writing, traveling, and swimming so much lately that clever, writerly posts are the furthest from my mind. I find the more I write the less I can or want to talk about writing. The process is elusive and enigmatic to begin with, and in many ways irrelevant since every single writer has her way of working. And things like craft—well, when writing I don’t think about that. Words come out, spill on to paper or computer. Maybe they make sense and maybe they don’t (an editor may tell me, and if not, I’m sure a reviewer will).

I met with my editor recently at a conference. She kept asking about my novel-in-progress. She’s read an early draft and “likes” it (whatever that means—come on, come on, just put the money on the table, that’s the only way we really know if they like it.) She asked what was going to happen, what changes had I already made, and the hardest of all, how do I write? I think I bs’d my way through it okay while maintaining the balance of professionalism and humility. Don’t get me wrong this editor is extraordinarily brilliant and very, very classy, so the fact that she even took time away from all of her famous authors to meet with me is amazing in itself.

But please, do I have to talk?

Perhaps it’s the upcoming residency and all the talking that I know will be done—good talk, useful talk, brilliant talk, clever, witty, helpful and inspiring talk (at least from my colleagues and students)—that makes me want to write as much as I can beforehand, and in silence.

Believe me, I am truly looking forward to talking with those of you who will be at the Hamline residency next week. I just need to get this next draft done and OUT by then. Silence and isolation can be a thing of beauty, but then so can conversation.