Category Archives: creative writing

It oughta be fun!

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I’m still at it, slogging away at a freelance writing project. I’m about two-thirds of the way through but today my brain snatched up a grenade and threatened to blow us all to hell. You can’t do that, I told my brain. We have to finish. We’ve never missed a deadline — until now. But my brain was like Trumbo’s wounded soldier. It couldn’t communicate except by banging my poor skull against the wall.

Despite my brain’s act of rebellion today, I’m not complaining. There are worse things you can do in life than write for money from the comfort of your own home. And mostly I enjoy the work. But it is just that: work.  And today I couldn’t seem to make any progress no matter how bleary-eyed I got reading over the materials.

I was avoiding Facebook but it lured me like the false-hearted siren that it is, and I clicked on it out of habit, out of boredom, out of desperation, anything to distract my brain from the live grenade. And lo and behold, the lead “status” on my feed was from Frances Lefkowitz with a list of words that she used to create a short-short story. I am not sure if these were words Frances came up with or if they came from a friend of hers. I only know that Frances hones her writing skills and garners fame if not fortune, whipping up micro-fictions based on these word lists.

I usually look at the word list when she posts it and think that looks too hard. Not tonight. Tonight I glommed onto that list. I can do this, I thought, and bam in about five minutes I had a short-short story that delighted me. It made me laugh. It was fun, so much fun, and my brain set down the grenade and started dancing in joy. And then I remembered why I am here, why I do this — for the sheer unadulterated joy of it.

To paraphrase Bukowski, if it’s not fun, don’t do it. I’m not talking about the writing you do to pay your bills, I’m talking about the writing that feeds your hungry soul, the writing that shouts out the secrets of your heart, the writing that feels like a lover’s mouth against your bare shoulder.

This is just one more way that transformative writing transforms: it makes you happy. What more could you want?

Some games for you to play:

  1. Here are some words to play with: time, milky, uncle, hey, fancy, coping, necktie, bent, bookcase, cat’s paw, sweat, choir, lake, white, childish, magnetic, forgotten, breath. Can you come up with a short-short story (say 300 words or less) around these words?
  2. Write a nonsense poem. Out Jaberwock the Jaberwocky.
  3. Write a funny sex scene! Let there be wardrobe malfunctions or . . . well, I’m going to leave it to your imagination.

Get Your Rhythm On

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I have been working with a fellow writer on her novel. It’s a gorgeous piece of work with compelling characters and a deep sense of place. But I had one suggestion: balance the point of view chapters so that the pattern has a rhythm.

We humans are rhythmic beings. We have a little drummer inside us that never stops beating until we’re dead. We have cycles. We are attuned to seasons. When writing has rhythm, it satisfies something primal in the reader’s psyche. We feel at home with the words. This rhythm can be achieved on the macro-level where the chapters move from one point of view to the next at a steady, logical pace or on a micro level — the level of syllables.

We find the foundation for rhythm in poetry. Haven’t you noticed that poets tend to write wonderful prose? Think Mary Karr, for instance. Or Heather Sellers. Or any of the many poets who have turned their hand to memoir. It’s because even when they are writing prose, a pulse beats in the syllables they choose. They’ve brought the music of their poetry with them.

At a recent workshop, writer Rebecca Wallace wrote about inheriting a trunk from her grandmother. She writes about the various items in the trunk and then she turns her attention to a glass bowl. Notice the balancing act. The long descriptive sentence with the two pauses followed by the short punchy sentence. The contrast of hot and cold. The similarity of sounds: chest and choke. And then the repetition. There is a sense of balance and a feeling of rhythm in this short passage:

My most cherished possession is a small glazed bowl, brown on the outside with a baby blue interior. In the summer when Granny made ice cream in her big churn, this was one of the bowls that – if we were lucky – we would eat our ice cream from. I have the only remaining bowl.

As I run my fingers along the edge, I can feel the coolness of the thick vanilla ice cream against the sultry heat of a July evening in Missouri. The coolness radiates from the bowl in an almost protective layer from the brutality of the humidity rising from the river bottoms to sit upon your chest and choke your breath.

It is in this simple bowl that the best memories of my childhood are kept. Here is my carefree childhood, here are the moments of unconditional love, and here is the nurturing and safety that my own parents did not give me. Here in this tiny bowl, holding no more than five bitefuls of thick vanilla ice cream, wrapped in tissue paper, tucked in my Grandmother’s trunk.

When I was writing my memoir and I needed to describe a particular time I remembered that I had written a poem about it. I took the line breaks out of the poem and voila, I had a lyrical passage:

This Christmas is different. This Christmas we linger nearby. The shopping is less frenzied, the dinners more subdued. This Christmas as we sit in the family room, Beth comes through the doorway, gaunt, hollowed, stoop-shouldered. Tears fall at their leisure from lashless eyelids as she recounts these long six months since July: the trips to the emergency room, the good nurses who bathed her as if she were a baby, the scar from sternum to pubis, the row of chairs in the chemo room. She takes off her wig and swigs from a beer, this soldier who looks at us from the middle of the trench, and the words pour like coins from a torn pocket. We are the dream of home she’s falling toward, the place where she plans to be born again.

Rhythm implies balance. When working on a longer piece, a memoir or a novel, consider bringing balance to the different elements. Are dark scenes balanced by lighter ones? Is action balanced by reflection. If you switch points of view, is there a logic to the changes that will feel natural to the reader?

Some exercises to get you in the rhythm:

1. Read your work aloud. Read it slowly. Listen closely. Record yourself if you can. Where are the natural rhythms? Where does it fall a little flat?

2. Take a piece of prose that you have written and create line breaks as if it were a poem. What words do you need to change to turn it into a poem? What words do you need to lose?

3. Put on some drumming music. Dance before you write. Or write while you’re listening to the drumming.

The Yoga of Transformative Writing

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I can easily remember the date of my first yoga class here in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was Sept. 11, 2001. I had taken a few classes here and there in the 1990’s back in Florida, and I’d been wanting to start taking it on a more regular basis, but there were no classes nearby until a YMCA opened up near my house. Of course I’ll never forget that day. I was so happy that I’d found a class near me, and I immediately liked the teacher. And yet the day that I started my journey with yoga, our collective journey as a nation “at war with terrorism” also began. The juxtaposition of my individual peace-filled morning practice with a nation’s unexplainable horror made everything seem surreal and uncertain. But two days later I went back to yoga. It sustained me through many a difficult time.

The other night, I watched a documentary on Netflix called Ashtanga, NY about a yoga class taking place in New York City at the time of the 9/11 attack. It was interesting to see how the yoga practice helped the participants absorb the terrible news and cope with the tragic sense of loss. Yoga helped them internalize and process external events.

Yoga means union. I have studied both the spiritual side of yoga through Isha yoga and the physical aspects of it through my local YMCA. The physical practice of yoga has grown enormously in popularity. According to an article in the New York Times, “the number of Americans doing yoga has risen from about 4 million in 2001 to what some estimate to be as many as 20 million in 2011.” The article was actually about the negative effects of yoga. No doubt people can injure themselves doing yoga, just as you can injure yourself any time you get up off the couch.

But there’s a reason for its popularity. When you are doing yoga you are fully present. I rarely think about anything else when I am doing yoga. My family worries disappear, the latest drama with my students is of no importance, and I’m not wondering what I’m going to eat next! I’m completely there on the mat. I’m in my body, fully aware of the steadiness of my breath, that tautening of my muscles, and even the expression on my face.

So how does this relate to transformative writing you may be wondering? It relates because the greatest gift we can give to our writing is to be fully present, to be in the moment, absorbing each detail, recording the sounds we hear, and noticing our thoughts and bodily reactions.

I think there are other connections as well. Yoga is a practice, and as it grounds us in the now, it becomes a spiritual practice. The now moment is where we meet the Divine. Transformative writing is also a practice. We do it regularly. Sometimes we have rituals associated with our writing practice: a hot cup of tea, a special place where we like to sit, or some other routine. When we engage in transformative writing, we are accessing the Creator within. It is our creativity that makes us divine. When we are in the creative flow we enter a blissful state. We are more alive.

When you are in your yoga class practicing with other yoginis, you are in communion with others. Transformative writing is also about communion. It is the connections we make with others that make the writing truly transformative. Yoga and transformative writing bring us together and sustain us through tough times.

I am certainly not saying that you have to take yoga in order to write well. I could just as easily say you should become an alcoholic to write well! (We have plenty of examples to back up that statement.) No, I’m simply making a connection between two activities that are meaningful to me.

The thing I love about both yoga and about writing is that I will never be perfect at either one. I will always be a student, always learning, always trying to get a little better. The mat and the page will always challenge me. They remind me not just of my divinity but of my fallible humanity as well.

WIY: Here are a few prompts to play with this week:
What do you do that is physical? What are the rewards and challenges? Describe it. Get into the body.
What is writing like for you? By that I mean, what other thing can you compare it to?
What is your spiritual practice? How does it feed your writing? And how does your writing feed your spirituality?
Create a character who has an obsession. Show that character doing what he or she loves to do, needs to do.
Finally, put a character or a community in a situation of crisis or tragedy. How does the character/community cope with it? Show us what enables them to move forward.

A Little Help from Our Friends

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The other day I got an email from a writer-friend. She was feeling a strong desire to put more time into her writing and wanted a guide-rope to help her get up the mountain. She asked if I could recommend any writing books that might have exercises to inspire and guide her. I’m glad she asked because when it comes to writing books, I’m a believer. I used to think that perhaps it was a waste of time to read books on writing — time that was better spent actually writing. But quite early on, I realized there was a lot of wisdom in those books, as well as good company.

Now I’d have to say that all of the writing books I’ve ever read have been useful in one way or another. It’s not necessarily the exercises they offer as much as the feeling of being in conversation with another writer, discovering their thought processes, and learning the tricks and techniques they use to keep their writing honed. Whenever my writing is in a lull, I find that reading the musings of another writer nearly always manages to reboot my own writing program.

The writing book I quote the most is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. I love her admonition to give yourself permission to write shitty first drafts. But the writing book that taught me the most was Jerome Stern’s Making Shapely Fiction. The “shapes” that Stern provides are like doorways into the heart of short story writing. Of course, for building a foundation in fiction writing, you can’t go wrong with Janet Burroway’s book, Writing Fiction.

Another book I enjoy, especially for its prompt on writing the 15-sentence portrait, is Wendy Bishop’s Working Words: The Process of Creative Writing. And then there are the standby’s that no writer should be without –Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg. She’s got a new book about memoir writing that I plan to add to my list. Many people swear by the Julia Cameron books.

Recently I picked up a different kind of writing book. It’s called Citizens of the Dream and is a series of letters to Salon.com advice columnist Cary Tennis, whom I recently met at the Sun Magazine’s Writing Conference at the Esalen Institute. The subtitle of the book is “41 good, serious, smart answers to your questions about writing, painting, paying, acting and living the creative life.” And that’s just what it is. He has gathered questions pertaining to creativity (and lack thereof) and provided answers that are heartfelt, thoughtful, funny, and so human.

Here’s an excerpt from one of one of Cary’s answers:

Assume that your writing is important. Assume that you have the right to do it and that it’s necessary and important. Assume that something has happened in your life such that you must attend to certain moral, aesthetic, and philosophical needs, or that you have reached a certain passage, or phase, or that you have been blessed, contacted by aliens, touched by God, whatever works, however you want to put it. Something has happened. You have received a call. Assume whatever you need to assume in order to answer the call.

WIY: Write a letter of advice to yourself. What is the wisest, most compassionate thing you can tell yourself about your own writing? Next, Get thee to a library and check out a book on writing. Spend time with it. Treat it like an old friend. Or a new friend. Get to know it. Get inspired.

Mind Over Matter: Make the Most of POV

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A lot of fiction these days is written either in the first person or the close third person. Close third person is similar to first person because the character’s sensibility is the lens through which we receive the story. Close third person gives the writer a tremendous advantage — we get to know every thing that the character sees, hears, thinks and feels. We are privy to the character’s internal monologue. Sometimes I think this is one of the main reasons we read: we want to get in someone else’s head and find out what that is like.

But some writers don’t take full advantage of the close third person. They underutilize that wonderful device we call point of view. Here’s the thing: if you are going to use a close third person (or a first person) point of view, you need to spend some time in that character’s head. What is the character thinking? Or not thinking!

Here’s an example of the close third person from my novel From May to December:

Lolly picked up the pie from the round metal table where Aunt Jewel had left it and turned to go inside. Sue, a friend from work, had invited her to the movies, but she didn’t really feel up to it so she called and canceled. Saturday night and all she wanted to do was to eat some left over Thai food and read a book.
After her dinner she decided to take a bath. Her bathroom was small and covered in green tile. She’d need to redecorate in here, she thought. Maybe make a mosaic. She lit a vanilla-scented candle and undressed, drawing a hot bath. As she eased herself into the water on her one leg, she looked down at her body. How long had it been since a man had touched her? More than a year. Damn it, she thought. She used to see a guy named Sean. He was a French horn player, and what he could do with his lips was pretty spectacular. But then he got a symphony job in California and moved away. She missed him. Most men were afraid of her. Was it because of the leg? Or just because she didn’t take any crap from them? Being a feminist didn’t mean you were dead down there, she wanted to tell them. She leaned her head against the plastic waterproof pillow she’d stuck against the bathtub wall for just this kind of deep, soothing soak.

Supposedly we have about 60,000 thoughts a day. (I have no idea how they figured that out.) That’s a lot of thinking. You don’t need to overload your poor reader with all 60,000 thoughts, but don’t be stingy with them either. I know we harp a lot on the idea of “show don’t tell,” but sometimes you just need to tell your reader things and the best way to do that is through a character’s thoughts.

Why is it important? Mainly, it helps your reader begin to identify with the character, to care about the character, and to understand the character’s motivations. When you withhold information that a point of view character should know because you don’t want to give everything away, you run the risk of making your reader feel cheated.

Like most fiction guidelines this applies to memoir as well. The more we get in your head, the more engaged we will be in your story.

WIY: For ten minutes, write down all the thoughts that go through your head. Intersperse the thoughts with what is going on in your body and what you are experiencing externally. Now, let one of your characters talk to you. Ask your character what he or she wants to say, and then have your pen at the ready. If you’re writing memoir, that character can even be yourself.

Mirror, mirror!

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One of the most frustrating things for a writing teacher is to encounter students who say they love to write but they don’t like to read. What? Really?

Recently I was writing a proposal for an introductory course in creative writing. My colleagues couldn’t understand why so much of the course was devoted to reading and analyzing the works of others. Did I need to point out the obvious? Reading the works of great (or even good) writers is simply the best way to learn how to write well. One of my coaching clients has never taken a creative writing course, but he’s read everything Tom McGuane ever published. McGuane is a brilliant writer. My client is pretty darn good, too.

Immersing yourself in reading helps to plant a narrative voice in your head. You begin to think narratively. This voice is something we need to coax. It is the muse. And quite often we catch the muse from another writer. Reading widely also opens your mind to the incredible, the infinite, variety of forms that your own writing might take.

Of course there are those who are afraid their own unique style is somehow going to be unduly influenced by reading someone else. Harold Bloom called that the “anxiety of influence,” and I suppose at some point that can happen. You might not want to read Ulysses while you’re in the middle of your epic novel. (But you should read some James Joyce at some point in your life — if only his famous short story “The Dead.”) If this is a worry, read outside the genre you are working in. I love to read poetry. I read several poems a day, but I rarely write it. Still, reading poetry makes me think about language. It keeps me attuned to the way words crumple the spaces in my heart.

In the end models aren’t likely to turn us into imitators. Our own experiences and filters will ensure that. I love Faulkner, for example, but I’ve never lived in Mississippi or experienced life from that particular perspective. That doesn’t mean I might not want to try on the long, verbose sentence for size. On my story it will look different.

When I teach introductory poetry, I ask students to study a particular poet and then write a “mirror” poem. That is, take the cadences of the poem or the rhyme scheme or some essential aspect of the poem and borrow it to write a new poem. What comes out is often fresh and exciting even if the frame has been borrowed.

WIY: Try it. Find a poem you like and borrow the structure to write your own poem. And if you’re writing a novel or a memoir, then read a novel or a memoir, paying close attention to the structure. Is there something that will be helpful to you? We don’t reinvent the wheel (forgive the cliche), every time we write. It will still be original if we’re true to the heart of the story or the poem that we need to write.

Slay ‘Em with Your Verbs

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It’s a truism among writers that the most important word on the page is the verb. Beginning writers sometimes think it’s the adjective, but nothing works harder than a good, muscled-up verb.

Here is an example of muscular writing from Frances Lefkowtiz’s memoir To Have Not:

My brothers and I are released from the truck like air from a tire, and we scatter off to find a driftwood for a campfire. We help pitch our five-man ten behind dunes and out of the wind. Then we tighten up the hoods on our blue sweatshirts and go to play tag with the thick, foamy surf. Signs warn of rip tides, undertows, and sneaker waves, but we don’t need signs to tell us that we are not supposed to enter this water. Its danger advertises itself: thick gray wedges curl into sharp peaks before smacking with a loud pop against the beach. We run up, up, and way, to the dry sand, where the thunder of the surf subsides, and we give in to gravity and geography and emotion, dropping onto that dark , pigeon-colored sand, our faces to the sky.

You could almost use the verbs to plot a small arc of action. Strong verbs are not particularly showy. You don’t even notice them at first. They simply sweep you up into the swirl of the language. But they make writing more vigorous or, as an Irish writing teacher of mine used to say: They fill it with verve. Even if you know this little truism, which you probably do, we need to be reminded of it from time to time. That’s what Frances’ memoir does for me — reminds me of how transformative writing can be.

Does your writing seem a little flabby? Look at the verbs. Could they be stronger? If so, then shoot some steroids into your sentences. Don’t worry. It’s legal.

WIY: Make a list of ten things a dentist or a carpenter does. Now use those verbs in a passage that has nothing to do with dentistry or carpentry.

Directions to Carnegie Hall

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One recent Saturday night, a friend and I went to see the Charlotte Symphony perform. We went because I wanted to hear “Pictures at an Exhibition,” one of my favorite pieces, but the Mussorgsky composition was not the only music on the program. In the first half a pianist named Martina Filjak was scheduled to play Tchaikovsky’s “Piano Concerto No. 1.” I don’t follow the classical musical world that much though it is quite often on my car stereo, and I had never heard of Filjak. I didn’t know what we were in for as she glided onto the stage in an emerald-green gown.

Filjak was phenomenal. It felt as if she had reached into me and was pounding my heart with her fingers. I instantly recognized the piece but watching her play and seeing the concentration on her face and the way her hands rose and fell as she waded into the music was like walking into a palace that I had only passed by — blindfolded.

Aside from the fact that she possessed astounding technique combined with heart-rending musicality, I was also thinking about my recently deceased mother. I remembered watching my mother in her glittering red and gold dress as she sat at a big black Steinway grand on stage and tore up the keys. And I was also thinking about myself because since my mother’s death I have begun to teach myself to play.

The distance between the way I haltingly play the pieces from my daughter’s leftover piano lesson books and the way Filjak soars over the keyboard is probably equal to the distance between the moon and the sun. But I have discovered that playing the piano offers almost immediate rewards if I take the time to practice every day. And so I do. I play scales. I play a short piece by Beethoven, entitled “Rage Over a Lost Penny,” over and over again. My poor roommate probably hears it in her dreams. I fumble through “House of the Rising Sun.” And I get better little by little.

I don’t think anyone listening to me play the piano would call it a transformative experience. And they probably never will. And yet it is transforming me. Now I listen with a different, keener ear when I hear music. I am sure that neurons are digging new trenches in my brain. My ennui gives way to something like happiness.

There’s an old joke that poses the question: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The answer, of course, is “Practice. Practice. Practice.”

And it is similar with writing. If you want to write work that is transformative, you must practice. You must journal, you must experiment with poems, scenes, reflections, and whatever else comes to your mind, and you must do it often. You must train your writing muscles, and you must advertise your availability to the muse.

I can only imagine how many hours a day Martina Filjak must practice in order to gleam diamond-like on the stage for that half hour. Six? More? I don’t know. But practice she must, and so must we.

WIY: If you aren’t writing daily, start. Spend at least ten to fifteen minutes every day playing with language. Try writing down scraps of conversations you’ve overheard. Look out your window and describe what you see. Listen to some classical music and let it take you to an alternate reality. Don’t worry about whether or not your writing is any good. You’re just practicing.

To see a video of Martina Filjak, go to this link on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuGTL-zy5tk