He Had me at Rustlers

My agent is trying to peddle a collection of Flash Fiction. For grown-ups. He suggested that while we wait to see what the NY houses say I might take a look at some places that don't bother with pages and covers. So I went into the land of e-books. Kindle and Amazon. That kind of thing.

The title of this blog comes from the precis of an e-book about two city slickers who struggle to open a vegan restaurant outside Tucson and are stymied by homophobes and rustlers. God, I can hear the dialogue now: "Put down the gluten-free waffle, you snivelin' cur. We've been watchin' this here buffet table all night. Now skedaddle! Before we fetch the powdered sugar and run you out of Rancho Delicious on a rail! Well, maybe not a rail. That's uncomfortable. All right, we'll call a gol-darned town car, but you're leavin'!"

I know, I know. You think that pretend-quote is just me being me. Not so, amigos. There's a lot of that in the world of e-books, but they're not kidding.

You might Goggle a few e-book sites and see what you think. The upside is publication (of a sort) and 50% of any sales. The downside is the company your book might be keeping and checks for $9.75. And I wonder if easy e-publication is a kind of gateway drug to dumber and dumber books. Why write well when somebody will accept and put up for sale almost anything?

I'll bet I'm missing something. I'll bet there's a cool e-site somewhere with a selective editorial board, good writers and checks in at least the hundreds. If there is, I'm sure we'd all like to know about it.

Filter Words

I often hound my students about filter words. And yesterday I found myself cutting a whole bunch of them in my own manuscript. One example:

"She watched as mixed emotions throttled Cynthia’s face."

Becomes:

“Mixed emotions throttled Cynthia’s face.”

I usually write in a very close third person POV. "She watched," “she looked,” “she saw” and so on are seldom necessary because the reader knows who is doing the seeing, watching, etc. But oh boy, they sure find their way onto the page. (Same for when writing in a first person POV, of course.)

“Filter words” is a term picked up somewhere or other. Hamline, probably. Why "filter?” I guess because the phrase (she saw, etc) adds a filter--layer--between action and reader, decreasing immediacy. Some filters clarify things, of course, and at times that clarification is necessary.

Another term I use: “Slider words.” This is for the “Oh” or “Well” or “Okay” that often begins a line of dialogue. These words help us slide into the sentence--as writers and speakers--but can almost always be cut from the page. Sometimes there's a need for a beat or pause, but a slider word is probably not the way to do it.

These terms and others got discussed a lot at Hamline residency this past January, especially in regard to how foreign they can be to someone just entering the culture. The writing world, like any small society, has its own vocabulary. We're putting together a glossary of basic creative writing terms so incoming students aren’t so flummoxed by the in-speak. What term would you add?

SETTING OUT

The January residency for the MFA in Writing for Children at Hamline has been over for a few weeks now, but I’m just starting my stint as a blogger, so I’d like to rewind the clock to the morning after graduation. That Monday morning, my daughter Amelia picked me up at the hotel where faculty and students stayed, and we drove my somewhat-rattletrap car up north about five hours to pick up my other daughter Ellen’s somewhat-more-rattletrap car and drive it back to Minneapolis.

Ellen won’t need the car for a few months. She and three other people will be skiing and dogsledding through the Northwest Territories as part of a wilderness classroom trip. Amelia and I had planned to drive up, get the car, and drive back all in the same day. I ended up staying the night, helping sew a last few items for the trip, clean up the house where they had been staying, and load Ellen’s car with recycling and a few things that will live at my house until she returns from the north.

As we were tidying up, I thought about how we send our graduates at Hamline off with good wishes for themselves and their writing, and I thought these brave and adventurous travelers needed a benediction, too. I scribbled on a scrap of paper: Travel well. Be kind to each other. Stay safe. Bring back stories. I gave Ellen that scrap of paper before they left—it doesn’t weigh enough to slow them down, and perhaps the words will warm her in the way-below-zero temperatures through which they’ll travel. At the very least, the paper may help to start a fire when they need one.

When writers sit down to write, we are also brave adventurers setting off into unknown territory. (After all, if you know the territory, why go there?) So I wish for each of us as we write another sort of benediction: Write well. Be kind to yourself. Don’t stay too safe. Bring back stories.

Creative Idleness

I may have mentioned in this space that my husband rolls his eyes when I insist that I'm working as I walk, swim laps, or take a long shower. Brenda Ueland labeled these activities "Creative Idleness...the dreamy idleness...when you walk alone for a long, long time, or take a long, dreamy time at dressing...or dig in a garden or drive a car for many hours alone, or play the piano, or sew or paint..." ( If You Want to Write, p.33). (Or knit: Phyllis? Or hang out at the track: Ron?)

On the last day of the residency, Marsha Q gave an inspired talk about the "Paralyzed Protagonist." I realized that her title describes the narrator of the YA novel I'm trying to finish. Marsha also said--wisely--that when a narrator changes, his/her close relationships will also be altered. After her talk, I knew I should write a scene showing the change taking place between my P.P (as I thought of Brandon now) and his best friend. This scene could even become the missing crisis point near the end of the novel.

After the residency, I read through my novel, drafted the scene. The day after another big storm, I typed it up, threw it out, shoveled the front steps, came back to my desk, started again, gnashed my teeth. It wasn't working. The sky cleared, and every snow crystal glittered in the sun. I gave up, loaded my skis into the car, and drove to our little park. I was in luck: the town hadn't ruined the skiing by plowing the track. Fresh snow, frothy as meringues, lay waiting. I pushed through knee-deep powder the first time around the track. The second time around was easier, and the third time was the charm. I heard Brandon and his friend Marty talking. I witnessed their fight. I understood what what each boy felt, what each learned about the other as they raged and came out on the other side. I took my skis off, came home and wrote. It's still an ugly first draft, and it may be melodramatic, but it's getting there, thanks to the skis and the soft powder.

Butt in Chair is important. But so are those moments when we're doing something unrelated to writing, when our minds are open and that stray moment of inspiration slides in, like a ski gliding along a fresh track.

The Dark Side of the Light Side

Ron wrote about petting zoo vs. lion's dens critiques on Wednesday. (By the way, nice figurative language, Ron--I think you have a future there.) Of course part of being a writer is learning to accept critique. (Though as someone who tends to whinge and wail in the face of editorial letters, I should add that we don't have to accept them well.) But I think part, too, is figuring out what kind of critique you need when. When I'm just starting out, my ideas are as fragile as my ego--I've lost a book idea by having someone spin it out in a direction I didn't want to go, and been stopped for too long by dismissive things said about my first pages. I seem to need to get the book to a place where it can take wing on its own before I can have it ripped apart too much, otherwise it pretty much plummets to the ground with a pathetic splat.

My friend Laura and I tend to read all of each other's stuff, and we work well together both because we have a similar aesthetic and because we seem to need the same thing at the same time in the process. I send her chapters, and she tells me how devastatingly awesome they are, and how she can barely see from the beams of brilliance coming from them, and then points out a couple teeny tiny things I might tweak but none of that should take away from the overall awesomeness and beaming brilliance that is my first draft. When I finish it, then she tells me what she really thinks. And I listen, and I revise, and then we do it all again the next book. It might be co-dependent, but, like so much co-dependency, it works for us.

Your job, after all, is to find what your book wants to be in whatever way works for you. For me, that's writing like crazy through a draft, charged with an utterly deluded sense of the draft's utter perfection. Then I give it to my perceptive, exacting lions, and take the tattered, bloody thing that emerges, whinge and wail for a while, and then try to make it into a book that's actually good. It might be different for you--what's important is that you know when in the process to give your words to the petting zoo, safari park, exotic animal auction, or shark feeding frenzy. And when it's time to leave the metaphors to Ron.

The Light Side of the Dark Side

or the other way around. One of those. But first The Treadmill Desk. You've heard of these, right? Buy a treadmill, put a shelf across it the arms, lay your laptop there, and write as you walk. Nice metaphor for a writer, huh? Work for days and weeks and end up right where you started.

And then this advice from SCBWI: "If you know someone is openly dismissive of your writing then they're probably not the person to read the first draft of your picture book." Let's forget about the grammar problem (someone/they're) and let's agree there's not much point in showing something to an enemy.

There is, though, much to be gained from showing a first draft to someone who's hard to please. Some writing groups are the equivalent of petting zoos. Try the lion's den. Go to someone discriminating or censorious and -- rather than ask about the whole book or story -- ask about the first page, the father-character, the scene where the muskrat has a heart attack or even a single paragraph.

If the dark side of writing is criticism and the light side is praise, step out of the light sometimes. There are interesting things in the dark.

OPEN WOUNDS

This past weekend I was dreading being all alone in weird Jersey, where I have a year-long teaching gig (my apologies to anyone from south jersey, but it is a strange and depressing place to me, a small time New Englander—the deep south of Savannah felt more “normal” than this state).

My teaching schedule gives me extra long weekends, which I can use to visit my honey in Savannah, or hole up and write. This was a hole-up weekend. It went like this:

Day One: moped about, walked the dog in the frigid cold, swam in the school pool and tried to work out some plot points while holding my breath under water and splashing about.

Day Two: pretty much the same, except after the swim I started picking at my book like an annoying scab, opening the wound and letting it bleed. It really hurt, and I went to bed in tears.

Day Three: Things got messy. I started wiping the blood up (seriously, that was the day I vacuumed, did the dishes, and waded through the reams of crumpled paper).

Day Four: I wasn’t planning to write on day four—it was reserved for class prep. But the wound was still oozing so I had to attend to it first. I spent most of the day covering the scab with a brand new dressing. By the time I went to bed I was exhausted and worn out, but felt good, like I had actually fixed something. This morning, it’s starting to heal. Now I can go in and teach.

Perhaps being stuck in the armpit of America is not so bad after all.

The Tiger Mother and bestsellers

Commercial nonfiction has always been a foreign animal to me. For one thing, I wonder why books about banal topics, like a woman's move from house to house, should be reviewed in all of the major newspapers and magazines (Aren't there other books? Could it be connections?). For another, I am slightly annoyed that such books sell more than mine.

My husband has a knack for detecting the next big thing in books, so I should have known when he e-mailed me The Wall St. Journal article about the Tiger Mother that I was not hearing the last of her. I'm not sure if he was musing as a family therapist or giving me pointers, but it was mid-residency, so I quickly read and dismissed the article, then watched as the dialogue and controversy (death threats?) blossomed. No doubt the book will become a "best seller."

Aside from thinking jealously about Ms. Chua's promotional abilities, I considered the role of timing in relation to cultural phenomena. Americans are obsessive, escapist, and mass thinkers. After days of national grief over the senseless murder of six people (and the ensuing dialogue about gun control and the treatment of psychosis), fixating on parenting formulas must have offered relief in the same way that "Leave it to Beaver" and Doris Day romps did after World War II (Never mind that Doris Day's husband cleaned out her bank accounts, and that her son was the actual target of the Mansons. In those movies, she rode off into the sunset with Rock Hudson). As a culture, we seemed to need then, not reality, but a sugary dreamscape upon which to cast our anxieties and fears.

Just after the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother article, author Ayelet Waldman, gave a comical Jewish Mom's response. She said, for example, that she allows her kids to quit the violin or piano just before the recital so she won't have to listen to the "hackneyed pieces of the juvenile repertoire" of the other children. Ayelet Waldman is no stranger to the literary scene. She is the author of two books and half of a literary couple; Michael Chabon is the other half. It was a very witty piece: more riding a wave, then bumming a ride. And I have no doubt that by now Ms. Waldman is sifting through offers from publishers. No kidding.

What is your parenting slant? Get out your keyboards and start typing those book proposals before the topic cools like this year's winter.

Required Reading

Students enrolled in the Hamline MFAC (MFA in writing for children and young adults) program have a required reading list of 120 books to deal with in their first two semesters. This last residency we had a fun conversation about the list. It was great to hear complaints about a book trigger immediate cries of "But I loved it!"

Like or dislike isn't the point of the reading list. These books have been required because it's useful to be familiar with them, for one reason or another.

We spent part of the discussion compiling a list of titles that each MFAC students had found useful to his or her own development as a writer. Not many titles were on both the official list and the student list. The student list had many more recent titles, and it was heavily weighted toward novels.

I've already started reading from the student list and have just put Craig Thompson's Blankets on the top of my stack. Can't believe I missed this one. That's the best thing about teaching--there's no better way to learn.

The required list is available on the MFAC site; if anyone would like a copy of the student list, email me.

Bukowski-inspired Mini-rant

I was on my way back from the car wash when somebody on NPR touted the Bukowski exhibit at the Huntington Library/Gardens. Buk (as he liked to say then added that it rhymed with puke) is gone now but his recorded voice lives on and in the snippet NPR played, he said that his poetry looked good because "everybody else was so damn bad."

I had to read a handful of YAs recently (some old, some new), and they were pretty damn bad. Generic and weirdly corporate with predictable arcs and the kind of quirky characters that made me want to breathe into a paper bag.

My problem was not so much the assembly-line feel but I know that some of them took years to write. Years. Rhymes w/ tears. Which is the part I don't understand. Why can't run-of-the-mill fiction (which, I admit, meets a need just as Gap clothes fill a need) be written fast. Why can't it frankly be from-the-mill. At least one a year. Make twelve or fifteen thousand bucks and write another one. Stop pretending that the atelier isn't just a factory. Put on some coveralls and just go to work.

I think I'll lie down now.