In praise of revision, as always

In a fit of optimism (insanity?) I promised our esteemed blog administrator that I would post at least once during the residency. Ha! I did, however, think of things to say as I walked the track or crouched in the single seat on the van. I even made some notes one sleepless night. Here are some thoughts from home. (Home. Isn't that the most beautiful word?)

One aspect of the residency that I enjoy most is the chance to learn from my workshop partners. Kelly Easton and I teach at Rhode Island College's ASTAL Institute each June, but we haven't run a workshop together, so I was delighted to be paired with her this time. Kelly gives each student in workshop "designer homework," an assignment geared to his or her individual stories. Even if the assignment was focused on story structure, each writer had to include these words: Umbrella. Ravishing. Hurtle. Onions. We gave out the assignments on Day Two of workshop, received them on Day Five and discussed them on Day Six.

During the final workshop, we all took turns reading the new pages out loud, so that the writer could hear the words in someone else's voice. The new scenes showed the power of revision as writers wrote dialogue without tags, opened up hot spots, used sensory detail to nail a setting, added action to reveal emotion, or changed a story's structure. We were already invested in their stories, but the revisions showed the power of seeing a story anew. We laughed at the creative use of totem words, and the new scenes made us hungry to know what would happen next.

Finally, Kelly threw out a wild card that last morning: she asked us to jot down, at random, three things we would add to our stories. I found this exercise illuminating. Now that I'm home, with my unfinished novel on my desk, I am poised to add: a champagne poodle, a failed batch of bread--and sex. Try this exercise, and do it fast, without thinking. What would you add to your story?

Thanks to Kelly, and our workshop group, for six lively and fascinating sessions. Write on!

Nuts & Bolts

I'm sure everybody who went to St. Paul for the Hamline MFAC residency is deeply battered and fried at this point, but for those who didn't and are tussling with a novel, here's some advice.

I was downtown in L.A. a few nights ago in a snazzy loft in a terrible part of town (nothing like cruising through the homeless to make one recite the Gratitude sutra). I was part of a panel. Three other writers and me. They were all women; they wrote for grown-ups. I was not a woman, and I didn't.

What was a little remarkable was this: every one of us mentioned the first chapter. How many drafts we did. How useless it was to craft a first chapter with precision. How the first chapter is usually the writer telling himself or herself the story. Getting started. Lifting off. It's almost never the first chapter that opens the real book.

So go ahead and start telling yourself a story. Introduce some characters. Plant a revolver or two. Write some snappy dialogue. Then even as you're cuddling up to chapter one and saying sweet things, kiss it good-bye.

ALA Awards and Ron's Best Book

Last week while Hamline students were at the on-campus residency in St. Paul, the ALA Awards were announced at the annual Mid-Winter conference. The exciting news (for fresh young writers, that is) is that both the Newbery and the Caldecott awards went to a first-time published author and illustrator. This is unusual, and should be hopeful to all you starting out! In case you have not yet seen the complete list go here.

AND to top it all off Hamline’s own Ron Koertge made the ALA Fiction Best Book list for his outstanding novel, Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs. Yippeeee, Ron!

Hooray!

A quick shout out to an alum of the Hamline program, Cheryl Bardoe. Her book Mammoths and Mastodons is an NCTE Orbis Pictus Honor book!

Cheryl was an educator at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and wrote the book in conjunction with the museum's M & M exhibit.

From the front

Another update from the residency.

12 days of lectures, workshops, and conversations about writing for children and teens. This is intense AND wonderful. Swathi Avasthi was a guest speaker yesterday and she spoke on Voice and YA fiction. A wonderful snippet: "Voice is the circulatory system of the novel."

You should have heard the buzz in the room when she shared that.

Today Kelly Easton and Claire Rudolph Murphy led workshops. Kelly's was on dialogue as a tool of character-building, while Claire led an exploration of the role of the antagonist. I slipped in and out of both and will be using snippets from both in my lecture on "The Paralyzed Protagonist" come Saturday.

We finished up the lecture/workshop part of the day with Marsha Chall's lecture on anthropomorphism (try spelling that at 1:30 a.m.!) in picture books. Piaget, Freud, Frog and Toad, and Marsha's own Labradoodle, Scout, were all part of the mix. I bet more than a few of the novelists in the crowd were inspired to go home and start a picture book about, well, bunnies or some such.

I'm learning lots and having fun and I need to go to bed.

Marsha Q.

It Matters What You Call Yourself

I just got a ms. back from Candlewick. I was sure it wasn't what hey were looking for when it was wrapped in barbed wire and had a skull-and-crossbones on the envelope.

I went through the usual Kubler-Ross stages: Denial -- They must have confused my novel about a kangaroo who finds a portal in the outback and ends up as Shakespeare's pet with another like it. But not nearly as riveting. Anger -- My editor looks charming with a flaming sword buried in her sternum. Etcetera.

Basically what I really do when I get a ms. back or an editorial letter I'd rather not have is remind myself that all I want to do is tell a story. Something a reader would be glad to stick with for a couple of hours.

Thinking of the NOVEL never helps. Thinking of the story helps a lot. Terms like Novel and Novelist cast a very long shadow. Story teller not so much. We all tell stories all the time.

All I need to do is tell a long one.

Simple, no?

Gene Luen Yang

Our low residency session here at Hamline is in full swing, and today we had a marvelous presentation by Gene L. Yang, author of American Born Chinese and other graphic novels and comic books. He talked quite a bit about his writing process and the things he focused on while crafting his stories. Character, page turns, arc--all of it just as important to a comic book and graphic novel as it is to a picture book or traditional middle grade novel. The lecture hall was buzzing with excitement.

Marsha Wilson Chall, one of our faculty members, reminisced about buying comic books as a child, and whether that had any influence on her becoming a picture book author. I too remember trips to the drugstore to buy comics. Maybe a fascination with Archie and Veronica is the real reason I turned to writing YA fiction.

Humble Pie

When I'm between books, I almost always write poetry. I write it during books, too, but it isn't the same thing. Poetry doesn't always like playing second fiddle. Poetry can be, as Billy Collins said in another context, "a cruel and savagely attired mistress."

So I was being faithful (in my fashion) recently and writing verse-in-forms. First the villanelle. Holy $*@!. Two lousy rhymes -- one of them 13 times and the other one 6. And two entire lines are repeated four times. Whose freaking idea was this? I ask you, whose?

Mine, obviously. And, God help me, it's fun to sit down and work with such a -in this case - nagging, repetitive and also meditative form. I also found a good subject, one that would clash with the form: a strip club. Also called euphemistically a Gentlemen's Club because really we're all a bunch of barons and viscounts in there.

And I worked it out -- the rhymes, the repetition, everything. It was correct but not very good. Predictable and stiff. So I chatted with a friend of mine, took her advice and tried again. Different POV (in the soul-sense of those daunting initials), different rhymes, different key lines. Really much better. Who knew!

Then I boldly turned to couplets. I used Thom Gunn's "The J Car" as my model. What a beautiful poem it is. Effortless and very, very touching. Mine was neither effortless nor touching. It was stiff and clunky and risible. Frankenstein doing the polka. And yet it had one very nice couplet out of probably twenty.

I'm afraid writing poetry is like mining. Lots of times nothing buy gravel and sand. But every now and then, flakes of gold.

P.S. I'm not at the residency so I'll write a little more often. My friends there have enough to do. (Though as I remember there was plenty of on-site blogging last year.)

WORDS

Some inkpot readers are heading over to St. Paul for the Hamline winter residency. I am not. I am taking this break to work on my novel. So while you are immersed in the field, getting inspired, and sharing brilliance (and suffering) I am holed up in my room thinking of words. I am in that space where everything I see, do, hear, and read is relevant in some way to my book, and I am busily collecting words. The previous posts contained the words “silence” and “bliss.” They went on my list. I read a chapter of a novel last night and wrote down: “fire-engine red,” “ricochet,” “knocking loose.” I read an article in the New Yorker and found: “mysterious taste on my tongue,” and “inside my hollow head.” I watched a movie and picked up, “rattled around the brain,” “lives in the attic,” “tremendous feeling.”

I keep these words on post-its around the house. The trick now is to string them together in a way that gives them meaning, but my intuition already tells me they are completely relevant to my work in some way.

I’m envious of folks at the residency—you are going to receive a plethora of words, some already containing incredible meaning, others from which you will get to extract your own meaning or change in ways that are unique and suitable to you. Write these words down. Any word or phrase that speaks to you, write it down. Writers are word collectors so be one.

Sometimes we need to hole up and write, as I am now, other times we need to be out in the world interacting and observing, and sometimes we need to be with our people. This week Hamline-ites you are with your people. Enjoy.

Follow Your Bliss...

This afternoon I tried to take a little nap during my boy's "quiet time." Quiet Time is sort of a Rovian term for the two-hour period of the day during which I constantly yell at him to go back to his room. Today I heard him go into the bathroom at some point. Somewhere in my dream state I realized he had spent a long time in there and thus this might be the kind of bathroom visit where a newly-four-year-old boy needs some clean-up help, but I was also really enjoying my nap. So it shouldn't have been too much of a surprise to wake up to find the bathroom smeared with fecal matter. At some point he also dumped out buckets of toys, and while we were having a friendly discussion about whether or not he was going to be picking these up, he launched himself face first off the couch into the edge of the coffee table, smacking his mouth into the corner. After a time, I was able to stop the nosebleed.

It was then that I reflected how much I am looking forward to residency starting this week. Hamline's program is low residency, meaning most of it is done through correspondence, but twice a year we meet on campus for ten days of workshops, lectures, readings, and discussions. It's epic, exhilarating, exhausting--and sort of like childbirth in that you forget the parts where the anesthesia doesn't work and the faculty lounge runs out of wine so eventually you're all excited to do it again.

The faculty reports on Thursday and we get to meet the new class, and everyone arrives on Friday. I'm kicking things off then with a lecture on The Hero's Journey, though it's been difficult to think too critically about mythical structure when I'm cleaning up blood, fecal matter, and stray Matchbox cars. I'm sure there's some hilarious monomyth joke to be made here, and I'll get back to you on that as soon as my assistant finishes his research.

We'll be blogging from the residency, and while the posts may not be informative, it should at least be entertaining to watch us grow more incoherent as the time wears on. But right now I need to read workshop pieces, work on my lecture, think about packing, and email Claire Rudolf Murphy to ask about the coffee situation in the hotel that we'll be billeted in. See you soon, friends.