No.32 A Strange Writing Lesson

THEORY
I was curled up on my Parisian friend's couch. Rain splattered the windows, making staying in the best possible alternative. I'd spent the last three hours writing, which fulfilled one childhood fantasy of writing in a garret in Paris (although this was nicer than my fantasy garret).
I watched Marina's DVD ON THE ROAD TO PERDITION then I listened to the bonus: the director talked about how he made his creative decisions. It was one of the best writing lessons I've had. The DVD is available on http://www.amazon.com/ for as little $2.99 used, but be careful of the different zones.

Rather than explain that Paul Newman was the surrogate father and loved his surrogate son Tom Hanks, at a wake, Newman sits at a piano and plays a song with one hand. Hanks joins him and plays the harmony, also, with one hand. The look they exchange and Newman's pat on the back tells everything.

In the background we see Newman's biological son's face reflecting hatred and jealousy. The camera angles down so only the son's legs show, effectively cutting him out of the relationship.
In another scene Hanks' son has seen him kill a man. Hanks and he talk about it in their Model T. They make no eye contact until the last moment of the scene. There is another separation that the director did deliberately. He shot the scene in such a way that the bar of the driver's door separates father and son. It is so subtle that no one would say, "Oh look at the bar of the driver's door emphasizing the separation between the father and son." Yet visually and psychologically it is there.

Whenever there is a death, water is involved. Sometimes it is rain, another time it is water in a bath tub. Repeated symbolism can be effective. The more subtle it is, the more effective.
To show Hanks' son as slightly alienated, the boy is bicycling in the opposite direction of people going home from work.

The director uses light and dark and many other techniques to show the action of his movie.
Scene by scene he covers the little details that show what he wants us to see.

As writers we need to think as carefully as that director on how to work the details to convey the message we want to our readers.

When I went back to my writing, I rewrote the chapter I thought I had finished, using the director's message. We learn from the strangest places.

EXAMPLES
"If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul. " Joan Didion

"Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them." John Ruskin

"I've always thought of writing as active thoughtfulness thinking taken to a physical level made manifest on paper, where the thinker is able to account for his thoughts, reflect on them, question them, revise them, and ultimately, communicate those thoughts to others." Mary LaChappel, talking about Sarah Lawrence College in Jan/Feb 2005 Poets & Writers

EXERCISE
Watch your favorite movie. (Mine is LION IN WINTER http://www.lioninwinter.com/) And watch it through. Then go through scene by scene without the sound to see what you notice in sets, color, props and any other details.

NOTES

Author Linda Oatman High (http://www.lindaoatmanhigh.com/) will teach a writing workshop in Tuscany! Join Linda on July 2-9, 2005, in Cortona, Italy for an instructional and inspirational workshop. Package prices include meals, accommodations, and tours. Reduced registration before February 30th. For more info: http://hometown.aol.com/upcoevents/differentdrummerhomepage.html Tel. 717-445-8246

Sadly the library in Salinas, CA is closing because of funding problems. John Steinbeck's papers are stored there.

Although the American Library in Geneva is a warm friendly place that keeps me in Reading matter, it was a real joy to be in the Boston Public Library with its hundreds of thousands of books.
I met Louisa May Alcott when I was in Boston. No I do not need to be committed. Jan Hutchinson, who is the curator of Orchard House Museum, the house where Alcott lived and used as a model for LITTLE WOMEN did a one-woman show as Louisa May. She totally transformed the small theatre at the Boston Public Library, with her tales of nursing during the Civil War. She "confessed" that when people stopped to meet her because of her fame as a writer, she put on an apron, covered her hands with flour and pretended to be the maid. Orchard House as many small museums, could use help with funding.

No 31.Playing with Words

THEORY
New writers often think they can write something once. Experienced writers know that our work needs to be cut, added to, polished, reworked. Even the slightest change can add depth or give your readers more information. In the same way stretching warms us up before exercising, reworking the same sentence or two can increase our craftsmanship. Supposing you want to get your character, John, up a hill fast - there are many ways to do it.

Version 1: John was running up the hill. (Okay, John is getting to the top of the hill fast where we want him. But is the writing as strong as we want it? It depends on the image we are trying to create in the reader's mind. )

Version 2: John ran up the hill. (Was +verb+ing is weak. Ran without the was and the ing is better.)

Version 3: John catapulted himself up the hill. (It implies John put himself into a machine and somehow launched himself up the hill, however, the force with which he got up the hill is stronger.)

Version 4: John bounded up the hill. (We see John as athletic taking the hill like Superman.)

Version 5: John sprinted up the hill. (Makes the hill seem smaller if he can reach the top with a
sprint.)

Version 6: Breathing heavily John struggled up the hill. (Instead of John being seen as an athlete easily running up a hill now he is struggling. We don't know if he is running or walking, but we do know that he is having problems.)

Version 7: John's feet pounded against the dirt path as he raced up the hill. (John is racing again, and now we know there is an unpaved path. Also we have some sound, pounding, adding another sense.)

Version 8: Breathing heavily, John ran up the dirt path until he reached the summit of Grey's Hill. (Now we have given the hill an identity. We have the sound of his breathing, but we eliminated the pounding.)

Version 9: Breathing heavily and with his backpack slowing him down, John ran up Grey's Hill. (Now we can see that John is being handicapped as he goes up Grey's Hill. We have increased the visual image with the backpack.)

Version 10: Breathing heavily and with his backpack slowing him John pounded up the dirt path of Grey's Hill. Trees hung low scratching his bare arms. (A new fact and we are back to pounding feet adding sound to the scene.)

We could go on indefinitely until John totally collapses from all those trips up the hill.
What does this prove? The more we manipulate words, the more of an image we can create. Playing and rearranging, adding and subtracting can increase the strength of our writing.

EXAMPLES
"Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."Gene Fowler

"The tendon part of the mind, so to speak is more developed in winter: the fleshy in summer. I should say winter has given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and blood."John Burroughs

"This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what you're doing, or it comes out flat. You can't fake your way through it."RealLivePreacher.com

"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."Tom Clancy

"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the
writing will be just as it should be."Mark Twain

EXERCISE
1. Find a paragraph in a book. Now rewrite it by changing the words, sentence order, etc. Rewrite it again. Rewrite it a third time.

2. Take a paragraph from your own writing and start polishing it. First change the verbs. Change the sentence order. Add another sense (smell, sound, etc) to the paragraph.

NOTES
The Writer's Guide to Places by Don Prues & Jack Heffron (2003) will help you write about 51 cities in the US and Canada. .

Good website: www.FabulistFlash.com.

If you are approached by Nobel House to publish your poetry, there have been some complaints that they do not send the books that you will buy.

As a fascinated reader or blogs, I finally started my own - theexpatwriter.blogspot.com. It's great therapy, much cheaper than a shrink.

A Russian friend who borrowed the Russian edition of my novel Chickpea told me there was a quote from the Russian edition of Cosmopolitan on the back cover. Not being able to read anything at all including my name and the title, I was pleased.

After two months of waiting I received the contract for the publication of my second novel, THE CARD. As always the novel had gone through many rounds of rejections, so to those writers who get discouraged and who doesn't, keep trying. This was the novel I wrote for my M.A. in creative writing at Glamorgan University in Wales, and I feel part of the credit goes of my mentor, Siân James, who patiently chanted "less is more" until it became my mantra. Siân also kept my characters in line, my descriptions believable and a thousand other nags that eight years later still are there. Thank you, Siân.

No 30. Make Description Work ard

THEORY

If dialogue moves the plot forward, then description should flesh out scenes. Description puts readers into your story while engaging their senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, feel).
Victorian writers over described scenes giving credence to the statement "That's more than I needed to know." However the selective use of details (See earlier W3 www.wisewordsonwriting.com/newsletter-0202.html ) adds to the description.

The most common things writers describe are: character's physical appearance, clothing, neighborhoods, housing, furniture, scenery, weather. W3 will deal with writing about emotions and interior thought at some future date.

New writers often break into the story creating author intrusion especially when describing people. The reader is subjected to a litany of details about height, weight, hair color, etc. Slightly more experienced writers use the overworked mirror trick, letting the character herself describe how she looks - She watches herself in the mirror as she brushes her "long black shiny hair and puts a touch of pink lipstick to her full lips, etc..

Showing not telling is a better way to introduce appearance. Shortness could be shown when a character has to stand on a chair to reach the middle cabinets in a kitchen. Overweight can be shown by struggling into an outfit that refuses to zip, a man can rest his hand on the stomach that overhangs his stomach.

My pet peeve is the statement "she didn't look 45," which I've read in any number of books. I am not sure what 45 looks like nor 32 or 55 for that matter. At a high school reunion my classmates had aged at such different rates that there could have been 20 years between us instead of the real 12 months. Perhaps a better way to describe someone appearing younger than their years might be - Her face was unlined and she moved with the energy of a young woman. Then he looked at her hands and saw raised veins and age spots. - By adding the details the reader does the work instead of having to figure out what X number of years look like. We also get the reaction of the observer assuming he is a major character. Or if the woman is a major character she could hide her hands as a tell tale sign of her age if she were ashamed of it, or flaunt them if she were not. How we manipulate our description changes the story we are telling.

Likewise when describing a room make the description work - The cracked red leather was molded to his shape from countless hours of watching the boob tube. Although there was standing room only at the mandatory after-funeral feed, no one dared sit in Papa's spot, even though he would never sit there again. Instead they stood crowded together with their plates piled with baloney sandwiches and potato chips. My brother watched from the sidelines. Then he walked over and sat down in the chair. Everyone stared. The king is dead, long live the king, I thought. - That description tells a lot more about Papa, the son, the economic class of the family and the speaker than it does about the room.

The same goes for exterior description. A playground with brightly colored and innovative equipment built by a committee of parents is different from a playground with a netless basket rim, cracked cement and a broken swing. Each fleshes out the economic status and condition of far different neighborhoods with out giving the professions and incomes of the people who live there.

Personal perspective makes scenery more than scenery. In Switzerland I love looking up at the mountains and feel they are opening to eternity, but they mentally imprison a Swiss friend. They are the same mountains: an Alp is an Alp is an Alp. Which way a character reacts makes scenery work hard for your story. Does the person love the sea? Is it frightening because of an accident that killed a relative? Does sailing a boat through a storm represent a (wo)man vs. nature challenge?

Weather gives chances for all types of descriptions, but it shouldn't always rain at funerals or when characters are in bad moods. Describe cold to give readers a feeling of temperature without saying it is below freezing - Jenna's cheeks were bright red as she unwove the long hand-knitted scarf, unzipped coat. The smell of cold rose from the wool as she tossed it on the chair nearest the fire. "Thank God, you lit it," she said holding her aching hands out to the flames.

Noises and smells in a neighborhood can flesh out a story - the cock from the other side of the village went off about five minutes before her neighbor's alarm gave a ping ping ping that floated up from the window below. The street cleaner's broom scraped the pavement, followed by the village's new street washing machine that chugged and released a water scented with so much lemon that she wanted to vomit.

EXAMPLES
Notes on the samples: two novels both have windows. One character wounded in war recovers by looking out. The other with a woman wounded by love looks inward. Frazier doesn't say Inman sees a road, a wall, a tree, etc. but says it might have been a painting of the same yet we know the objects are within Inman's range. Rees, on the other hand, mentions looking out the window, but her description of everything is what is happening around her and more importantly for her novel, in her.

That summer, Inman had viewed the world as if it were a picture framed by the molding around the window. Long stretches of time often passed when, for all the change in the scene, it might as well have been an old painting of a road, a wall, a tree, a cart, a blind man. Inman had sometimes counted off slow numbers in his head to see how long it would be before anything of significance altered.COLD MOUNTAIN Charles Frazier.

She turns the bed against the other wall, under the slope of the roof so she can look out of the side window, moves the sofa to the wall opposite, settles her blue Indian cotton wrap over the table and arranges the fruit she brought on her way home in a china bowl. The two novels she plans to read she stacks on the floor by the side of the bed. OVEN HOUSE by Lynne Rees

EXERCISE
For the next few weeks keep track of HOW you write, WHAT you write, WHAT HAMPERS your writing, WHAT WORKS with your writing. Then look it over to determine any patterns that will help you plan your writing in the future.

NOTES
More on people writing in their second language. If anyone looking for a partner writing in their language wants to register with me, please let me know your email and the language you are writing in. I wish I had the resources to pair writing mates in English, but I don't. However, I recommend that highly. I would have not made the progress I did without mine, not just because her critiques were so valuable, but because it made me critique another person's work.
http://www.wakeupwriting.com/ For people who need help in doing daily writing. There's a daily assignment.

No 29. Do you need a writing degree?

THEORY
In the last two decades university creative writing degree programs in Anglophone countries have cropped up faster than poppies in Afghanistab. Do writers need them? The answer is yes, no, maybe.

It all depends on what a writer needs to further the mastery of the writing craft.

What advantages and disadvantages can a university creative writing degree offer?

A publisher won't publish a novel just because the author holds a degree if the novel is bad, nor would they turn down a good novel because the writer didn't have a degree. However, the flicker of the idea that a person who held a degree was serious might cross their minds…or not. However, if the studies help someone write a publishable work, then the degree would be worth it.

If a person wants to teach creative writing, the degree is a plus. One university, Antioch in California offers a post M.A. in teaching creative writing.

Degree programs are varied. Some are heavy on theory and academics with courses called things like form and theory in literature, studies in short fiction, etc.

One of the most frequent pieces of advice given to new writers is to read. A degree program that insists students read the great writers and examine them for technique could offer an advantage to those writers who feel they are lacking in these areas. However, if a writer wants to devote as much time as possible to the writing, reading Nathaniel Hawthorne could be a time waster.

Other programs concentrate on writing itself putting students through writing workshop after workshop. These are ideal of the writers who want to do little else but write, but not so for those who want theory.

For many adults dropping back to full-time student-status is not financially possible. Distance learning programs or low-residency programs fill this need. Distance learning programs such as Humber in Canada pairs a writer and a student. Low-residency programs such as Goddard requires student to be on campus for short bursts of times then sends them off to write.

How important is it that a "name" writer is on the faculty? Working with a name writer might bestow status and may even result in an endorsement on the back of a novel when it is published. However, working with a name writer won't guarantee an agent or publisher introductions. Working with a university, however, sometimes brings connections. Many invite agents and publishers, but again it is not a guarantee of publication.

Writing students want to work with good writers (with or without a name) who can teach. The quality of individual teacher is only apparent after enrolment when students talk about who is good and who is bad. One writer, paired with a successful writer, spent six months working on the first twenty pages of her novel, but when she finished she was sure of every word and more importantly why the word was there. She could then go on with the novel and had a greater confidence in what she was doing.

The critiquing is a major element, but a writer involved with Open University felt that the criticism wasn't deep enough - certainly nothing like the woman who spent six months on twenty pages. In fact he felt the comments were so superficial they were almost useless.

Many of the people I talked with cited the major advantage for them was to be around other writers who could look at their work and see its strengths and weaknesses. They also cited the discipline. Having to write created or strengthened good work habits.

My own personal experience with two creative writing degree programs was mixed. One helped me make giant strides in my writing, thanks to the perceptive demands of my talented mentors writers Catherine Merriman and Siân James. Both pushed me to be the best I could be. The second program hurt my writing. I was caught between my own voice and what the school wanted and I dropped out.

Here are some things to check on:

1. Do graduates have publishing credits?
2. How much emphasis is there on writing vs. theory/literature?
3. Is the program accredited (depending on the country)?
4. What type of writing support is there?
5. What writers will be working directly with the students (guest name writers can be inspiring, but will they evaluate student work?)
6. Is it possible to take a test course?
7. Who is on the faculty and how much involvement do they have with the students?
8. How much professional writer-student contact is there?
9. How are workshops handled?
10. What needs to be produced for the degree (novel, play, chapbook, academic paper, etc.)
11. How long is the program?
12. Cost?
13. Are there networking opportunities?
14. Will the program help you improve your writing?
    

Only after you weigh what the degree offers with your own needs will you know whether to proceed or not. As for me I regret neither the program that brought me so much nor the one I didn't finish. Both advanced my own sense of my craft, albeit in very different ways.

EXAMPLES

Rather than samples from writers I have included samples from people who went through degree programs and were kind enough to share their feelings.

Lynne Rees THE OVEN
The MA was, both at the time and in retrospect, a very positive experience for me. I was at a very early stage in my development as a writer and the structure of the course - regular submission of work, feedback from my tutor and other students/members of staff at the weekend meetings, reflecting on my own processes and discoveries - gave me a much needed discipline and focus, and encouraged me to immerse myself fully into the world of contemporary poetry.

At the end of the two years, while I had a number of very strong poems and a few publication credits, my work was, generally, still in an embryonic stage and the submitted collection a long way from being ready for publication, though I was still awarded the degree. I like to think that my potential was recognised (my poetry has been widely published and anthologised in the last six years, this year my first novel was published, and a poetry collection is forthcoming in 2005) and I value that a great deal, and hope that tutors and leaders of all creative writing courses keep this in mind when assessing creative work. It's something I'm aware of as a tutor myself now.

No writer's development can be confined to a particular time scale. Some graduates…published very quickly and very successfully, others, like myself, needed more time and/or have published more in the world of the small presses, some are yet to place their work. But we have all succeeded in our own ways.

I understand that MA programmes thrive on the recognised publication successes of their graduates, but I'd still like to see a continuing place for the nurturing and encouragement of new voices, the recognition and celebration of 'good' writing regardless of it's ability to find a place in the current market.

Tony Curtis THE ART OF SEAMUS HEANEY, THE LAST CANDLES LOVE FROM WALES, THE ARCHES, WAR VOICES, TAKEN FOR PEARLS, The POETRY OF SNOWDONIA (and more)(Note: Curtis is a graduate of Goddard in the US and went on to found the creative writing program at Glamorgan University in Wales)

I decided to enrol in the Goddard program because it seemed like the right thing to do at my stage - I'd published one book and won a couple of prizes, but needed a kick. Goddard fitted in with my family and professional commitments (my college also paid the fees!!). Also, I was open to the American confessional approach because I'd dealt in my poetry with the recent deaths of my father and grandmother.

The Glamorgan Masters was based on the distance-learning program at Goddard. It was the first such in the UK.
Our course brings personal satisfaction, a professional qualification by a research degree and, for over two dozen writers, publication.

Kaytie M. Lee(Note: I have included this lengthy description to help those who want an in-depth program to share the experiences of one degree candidate.)
I am a thesis candidate…(for a) Master of Professional Writing Program. The MPW program is set up so that a student takes 15 units in a major, 9 Units of electives, and two mandatory classes, one with a thesis advisor and the other a survey course. The idea is that writers should be able to create in different forms, so diversity in electives is encouraged.
As a fiction major, I took fiction workshops with Gina Nahai, S. L. Stebel, Aram Saroyan, and Shelly Lowenkopf, and I was fortunate to take Hubert Selby Jr.'s last fiction workshop--he died in the spring, a few weeks before the end of the semester. Each instructor is a published and publishing author, and they each had very different approaches to fiction.
For electives I took non-fiction with Noel Riley Fitch, and two sections of screenplay development with Jason Squire. Though I had the opportunity, I did not take poetry, playwriting or technical writing.

I enjoyed the screenplay development classes. They helped me focus on dialogue and character development in a focused form because I was not able to rely on description and internalization for my characters. Story arc was more rigid than I was accustomed too - it's good for novelists to think in overall terms. Diversity of form is a benefit of the program--students are encouraged to try something outside of their experience--many traditional MFA programs limit a student to Poetry and/or Prose.

There are approximately 130 students enrolled in it at any one time, some just starting and taking three classes a semester, others at my stage, taking only a one-credit class with their thesis advisor. The large number of enrolled students is, I think, a benefit in the long run because every class affords a new opportunity for fresh perspective on writing, whereas I imagine in those smaller programs, the same faces across the table in each class might get a little predictable in commentary. Of course, it's difficult to develop camaraderie when people disappear after the class is over, but since I wanted to hear as many opinions about my writing as possible, the large student body worked for me - most of the time.

Some instructors used exercises and prompts, others assigned submission times and looked at whatever a student brought in.

Each workshop consists of a mixture of students-a fiction workshop is never just fiction students. While this mixture allows for a range of viewpoints, it became discouraging to me when students commenting on my prose claimed never to read novels because they were too busy watching films or reading poetry. It was when one (screenplay) student objected to an assignment that required reading novels in a fiction workshop that I began to long for a more traditional MFA program experience.

The MPW program wants its students to be writers, not scholars. Consequently there is very little emphasis placed on reading and discussion what's being published and virtually no study on literary critique. By not bogging down students with "homework" the program encourages students to "create."

While I am grateful for the extra hours to write, I think the program stunts its students by not giving them the vocabulary or even basic understanding of literary criticism that a Master's degree ought to deliver. It may not be a Literature Degree, but if we're trying to create it we damn well better know what's being said about it!

There were no novel workshops! As an aspiring novelist, I was looking forward to developing my novel and having the whole of it work shopped. This did not happen. Most of the instructors requested that students start new projects in their classes. I can see their point--it's difficult for a new teacher to take over where another left off, since comments and suggestions may be very different or even contradictory from one instructor to the next. And it never seemed to work when students brought sections from the middle of a novel that no one in the class had read-what could we say since we hadn't read the rest of it?

Since I wanted to take as many of the teachers as possible, I sacrificed continuity in my novel. I wrote more short stories (which was a good thing) and now that I've just got my thesis to complete (which is a novel) I am working solely with my thesis advisor. I suspect that novels would flourish more in a smaller program--but perhaps that's just me longing for greener grass.

My Own Bias: I prefer to read and write literary fiction -many of my peers want to write genre fiction. Nothing wrong with genres, and I'm pleased to know that there are writers of genre fiction who love to read and love to write and want to make their work of the highest calibre they can. I quickly found the other students who shared my interest, and we seek each other out when we feel we aren't getting the criticism we need. After the program that's what will last--the small community we created, our own salon of writers who write very different work but who share the sensibility that we want our writing to transcend the confines of genre.

I'm Terrified of the Creative Writing MFA Backlash: Now that I'm done I fear that my writing has ceased to be my own or that I have lost my "voice." Work shopping is a dangerous tool- if a person isn't stubborn or able to refuse suggestions (not belligerent in class, not that at all), she risks morphing into the sanitary graduate writer that some critics loath and deride. Is that me?

I don't know.

I think not--but the fear is there. Perhaps I'd have been better off toiling or traveling, working odd jobs and writing in coffee shops or laundromats.

When I get too angsty about writing I shut up, sit down, and just write. Better to do than to agonize over doing.

EXERCISE
Sit quietly and think what help you need to improve your writing: feedback from other writers, a single course, a writing group, a degree program. Then go out and find it. By the way the internet gives lots of degree programs if you enter university writing programs.

NOTES

We are coming into fall or autumn as my British friends call it. I've always thought of this season as the New Year, perhaps because this is the time of year to start school and new projects after the summer break. In the South of France cool weather alternates with leftovers of summer heat. Up in Geneva, a sure omen of fall is the appearance of the hot chestnut stands along with signs in restaurants announcing they are serving meals from the hunt. I divide my time between the two places, but it is one of the few times that I really miss the bright reds and golds on the trees of my native New England, Saturday night baked beans and football games.

Grammar questions? www.grammarbook.com.

No 28. VALS and Your Characters

THEORY
When I was working in marketing at the now defunct Digital Equipment Corporation, I found a marketing tool called, VALS, Values and Life styles. It "explains the relationship between personality traits and consumer behavior. VALS uses psychology to analyze the dynamics underlying consumer preferences and choices. VALS not only distinguishes differences in motivation, it also captures the psychological and material constraints on consumer behavior. "
The company that wrote VALS can be found at http://www.sric-bi.com/VALS/. If any of you are doing marketing, it is an extremely efficient tool.

However, I found a second use for it while I was working on a creative writing degree. I needed a research component about my writing, and I used their survey to categorize my characters by answering the questions as each of my characters would. http://www.sric-bi.com/vals/surveynew.shtml It helped me keep them in character by reaffirming that the traits I ascribed to them were consistent. The survey is also interesting in judging our own characters.

Admittedly, there is an American slant to it, but some aspects of human behavior transcend geographical borders. It is another way to think about the people we create.

The groups are as follows:

Innovators are "successful, sophisticated, take-charge people with high self-esteem. Because
they have such abundant resources, they exhibit all three primary motivations in varying degrees. They are change leaders and are the most receptive to new ideas and technologies. Innovators are very active consumers, and their purchases reflect cultivated tastes for upscale, niche products and services. Image is important to Innovators, not as evidence of status or power but as an expression of their taste, independence, and personality. "

Thinkers "are motivated by ideals. They are mature, satisfied, comfortable, and reflective people who value order, knowledge, and responsibility. They tend to be well educated and actively seek out information in the decision-making process. They are well-informed about world and national events and are alert to opportunities to broaden their knowledge. Thinkers have a moderate respect for the status quo institutions of authority and social decorum, but are open to consider new ideas."

Achievers are "motivated by the desire for achievement, Achievers have goal-oriented lifestyles and a deep commitment to career and family. Their social lives reflect this focus and are structured around family, their place of worship, and work. Achievers live conventional lives, are politically conservative, and respect authority and the status quo. They value consensus, predictability, and stability over risk, intimacy, and self-discovery."

Experiencers are "motivated by self-expression. As young, enthusiastic, and impulsive consumers, experiencers quickly become enthusiastic about new possibilities but are equally quick to cool. They seek variety and excitement, savoring the new, the offbeat, and the risky. Their energy finds an outlet in exercise, sports, outdoor recreation, and social activities."
Believers "are motivated by ideals. They are conservative, conventional people with concrete beliefs based on traditional, established codes: family, religion, community, and the nation. Many Believers express moral codes that are deeply rooted and literally interpreted. They follow established routines, organized in large part around home, family, community, and social or religious organizations to which they belong."

Strivers "are trendy and fun loving. Because they are motivated by achievement, Strivers are concerned about the opinions and approval of others. Money defines success for Strivers, who don't have enough of it to meet their desires. They favor stylish products that emulate the purchases of people with greater material wealth. Many see themselves as having a job rather than a career, and a lack of skills and focus often prevents them from moving ahead."
Makers "are motivated by self-expression. They express themselves and experience the world by working on it-building a house, raising children, fixing a car, or canning vegetables-and have enough skill and energy to carry out their projects successfully. Makers are practical people who have constructive skills and value self-sufficiency. They live within a traditional context of family, practical work, and physical recreation and have little interest in what lies outside that context. Makers are suspicious of new ideas and large institutions such as big business. They are respectful of government authority and organized labor, but resentful of government intrusion on individual rights. They are unimpressed by material possessions other than those with a practical or functional purpose."

Survivors "live narrowly focused lives. With few resources with which to cope, they often believe that the world is changing too quickly. They are comfortable with the familiar and are primarily concerned with safety and security. Because they must focus on meeting needs rather than fulfilling desires, Survivors do not show a strong primary motivation."
All quoted material is from the company site that developed VALS.

EXAMPLES
Daisy had a job running a food bank. Though this might not seem like suitable work for a newly minted Harvard cum laude, Daisy saw it as a natural progression from the soup kitchen where she and Henry had volunteered as undergraduates and where her heart had leaped at the tenderness with which he had placed bowls of minestrone into scabbed and trembling hands.
(Notes: From HOST FAMILY by Mameve Medwed. Notice how much information is crammed into this paragraph. We learn where she went to school, which carried many social and intellectual connotations. We see she doesn't follow the crowd and look for top dollar in a job. We see what attracted her to her husband, as well as her sensitivity to those around her. I ran Daisy through the VALS test and her primary personality if a Thinker and her secondary is an Achiever.)

EXERCISE
Take one of your favorite characters in fiction and run them through the VALS suvery.
Take one of your own characters and run them through the VALS survey.

NOTES
This is from an artist, but the creative process can be the same for writers. So many times someone says, "I love your symbolism," and I reply, "what symbolism?"

I found this story of the creative process fascinating. Whether painting or writing, sometimes wonderful things happen. Thank you Barbara for letting me reprint it.

"I can tell you as an artist that paintings not only take on a life, but also take over at times so that I don't know what I've really painted until sometime later. Other artists tell me similar stories. A Montreal artist told me a story about a painting she was working in a workshop she attended with fellow artist friends. She commented to the artist at the easel next to her that she had no idea what she had painted. Her friend looked at the painting and told her it was so obviously her pet cat. On second look, her cat just looked at her out of the painting.

When I saw the painting, all I could see was her cat, yet she did not consciously paint her cat.

"This month I share a story of my latest painting "Saratoga Springs Passion," a red, black, grey and white painting on glass meant to be hung in a window.

"The Saratoga County Arts Council has a "Win, Place & Show" juried equine member exhibit every August when the Saratoga Race Course horses are running. Every painting has to have a connection with horses or racing. Never wanting to be a "me-too," I pondered over the image I would create.

"As luck or fate would have it, I acquired a nicely grained wood frame at an estate sale. I chuckled when I realized the framer had assembled the matted image backwards in the frame. Well, the last laugh was on me when I got it home and realized that the "framer" had glued everything into the frame. A die-hard, I refused to chuck it and painstakingly ripped and tugged at the mat and framed poster until it cleared the glass. Now, I had clear glass glued into a frame. And, I had just received some samples of professional grade liquid watercolour and acrylic I had been anxious to try. I always wanted to do reverse painting on glass.

"I am now in my Red Period and white horses were the subject. After I painted them, I decided to put a black silhouette of myself in the painting. The horse on the right looks menacing in hard darks into the white with some greys. The horse on the left looks as innocent as the horse it faced looked fearsome. In the middle, facing the viewer comes a galloping horse with mane moving. When I first looked at the painting, I saw the menacing horse as a racehorse hot to win.

"The innocent mare as a pet and the galloping horse as a wild horse. I named it "Saratoga Springs Passion" after the fascination and obsession with horses there exists here with our City mantra of 'Health, History and Horses.'

"Three days after I painted it, I woke with a start early one morning and got the message of what the painting really meant to me. Recently, three friends in their 60s were out of my life due to a variety of illnesses that confined them to spaces. One widowed friend was put in an adult home and was lost to me both physically and mentally and she was represented by the menacing horse. Another friend was suffering from a myriad of illnesses along with her husband and was represented by the innocent mare walking resolutely forward eyes to the ground. Finally, another diabetic friend went in for a routine colonoscopy where doctors discovered a cancerous polyp, which was removed with a section of her intestines. She is represented by the galloping horse running to take back her life. I am in shadow because they don't see me in their lives any more.

"So, a routine theme painting for a juried show turned into a picture of my heartache at the recent absence of my three friends in my life. "There you have the painted message my soul wanted to tell me."

Source: "Watercolors Your Way" free Monthly E-Newsletter (to subscribe please go to http://www.barbaragarro.com/ and click on "Newsletter.
http://mudsmith.net/bobbing.html#writing Has some interesting articles on writing.

A W3 reader is really clicking up some credits. To those of you who haven't yet seen your work in type or on the stage, keep working. Sandra Seaton, a playwright and librettist, has a play THE BRIDGE PARTY which won a Theodore Ward Prize for New African American Playwrights. The renowned actor Ruby Dee appeared in a 1998 production of the play Seaton's text, from THE DIARY OF SALLY HEMMINGS was set to music by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom and has been sung at the Library of Congress, the Kennedy Center, San Francisco Performances, the University Musical Society in Ann Arbor, and other venues. Her most recent work, SALLY, a solo play about the life of Sally Hemings, premiered at the New York State Writer's Institute in Albany, New York. Website: www.grad.cmich.edu/seaton Congratulations Sandra.

One of my readers who writes in English as a second language asked me if I had any tips for people in her situation. At the moment I don't but if anyone out who writes in any language as a second language, has any ideas please let me know so I can pass them on to her.
Break through writer's block and embark on a journey of self-discovery during a Reflective Writing Workshop, September 10 to 12th, in the Swiss Alps. We will practice a number of journaling techniques and explore a form of meditative writing. For more information, email journalingingeneva@yahoo.com or call 33 4 50 20 26 23

The e-rater is a computer that grades essays for the GMAT, the exam students take in the US to get into business schools according to an article in the Washington Post. A spokesman "emphasized the modest goal of computerized scoring: to judge the structure and coherence of the writing, rather than the quality of the thoughts and originality of the prose. In college, he said, professors grade the development of ideas, while essay-rating computers "are better suited to judgment about more basic-level writing." The College Board which regulates the SATs (the exam taken by high school students and used as a tool by universities for admission) which are the entrance exams does not rule out that the future SAT essays will be graded by computer too.

Maybe I am being old-fashioned, but I always thought the quality of thought and originality of prose major factors in writing.

No. 27 Writing Habits

THEORY
The Writing Process (with apologies to Dr. Seuss)
I can write in a carI can write by a fire*
I can write in a boat
I can write on a float
I can write on a table
I can write when I'm able.
I can write anywhere
*with my Boston accent fire, fah rhymes with car, cah

Many of my writing students ask if they should write the complete work then edit, or edit as they go along. They want to know should they create biographies of their characters before starting or invent them as they develop the work. Should a writer do the first draft by hand then type into the computer or go directly to the computer? Should they have fixed writing hours or not? Is it important to write daily or not? The answer is yes.

Confusing? Yup. As a collector of how-to-write books, all of which I have read, the amount of contradictory advice is only limited to the number of books I own. Does this mean that all writing advice should be disregarded? Not at all - if so I'd give up writing this newsletter.
When I talk to successful writers about their working habits, I have discovered they are as varied as their personalities. Some are extremely disciplined setting aside a time each day to write. Others cram writing time around other responsibilities. If any common factor exists, it is their extreme seriousness about their work.

Many things in this world can be standardized, but standardized creativity is an oxymoron.
The secret is to find what works best for you and throw away any guilt or inferiority that you are disregarding the advice of Best Selling Author X. Remember Jeffrey Archer once told would-be writers the only way they can be successful is to quit their jobs and write full time. Tell that to a single mom trying to finish her first book.

Does that mean the advice of Best Selling Author X is worthless? Absolutely not. Try their methods, but adapt them to your needs. Testing allows us to develop new skills.

So to continue the poem…
I can write on my head,
I can write in bed,I can write as I eat,
I can write on my feet,
I can write with ink
I can write in a sink,
I can write everywhere

What is important is to find what works for you and then have the confidence to do it as well as the wisdom to know when it needs to be changed. And do it without guilt.

The dichotomy of this topic is if you follow my advice, you will disregard my advice if it doesn't work for you. Do it with my blessing.

EXAMPLES

"I merely took the energy it took to pout and wrote some blues."Duke Ellington.

"Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long."Leonard Bernstein

Note: I know the first two quotes are about music, but writing music and writing words are variations of the creative process.

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."Henry David Thoreau

Note: I know this is often quoted, but whenever I realise the crowd went in the other direction, I realise that it is okay if I don't follow.

"Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it." Jesse Stuart

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. "Joan Didion

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. "Thomas Mann

EXERCISE
For the next few weeks keep track of HOW you write, WHAT you write, WHAT HAMPERS your writing, WHAT WORKS with your writing. Then look it over to determine any patterns that will help you plan your writing in the future.

NOTES
One of the purposes of W3 is to share information between writers. Because we are an international publication, we welcome information from all continents.

Kwickee Bitesize seeks short articles and fiction. No registration fees or charges to writers. When work is downloaded by customers paying to view on mobile phones or PC's you'll receive royalties. Editors and Sub-Editors also needed and paid on a royalty basis. Read guidelines etc.at www.kwickee.com/

A person who happened on my website submitted this thinking my readers would find it interesting. It's a place to show your work. www.eliteskills.com/
Any artist who would like to rent art studio space or to give courses in Argelès-sur-mer, France, www.argeles-sur-mer.com/ email Christine at argeles.hostalet@wanadoo.fr / The studio is located about five minutes from the hotel. Argelès is a French-Catalan village on the Mediterranean less than hour's drive from the Spanish border. I find it a terrific place to work, but am prejudice since I have had my nest here for 17 years and divide my time between here and Geneva.

Spelling: W3 uses American spelling. The differences in the usage of English from country to country, is fascinating. Once I worked in office, with American, English, South Africans, Australians and Swiss who learned either American-English or English-English. We often needed translators from English to English.

When it was my turn to make the tea, I made it the English way, heating the pot, measuring the right amount of leaves, then adding the water. We all took our tea seriously, that was something we never disagreed on. "I've left it to steep," I said to the room where we had all gathered. A couple of blank stares.

"You mean draw," someone said. "Steep is an incline."

"Draw is what artists do," someone else said.

"Set, the tea is setting," another person said.

By that time the tea was ready (a word we agreed on), we had no problem on agreeing to drink it.

We had tons of this type of conversation describing tights-stockings-pantyhose-legwarmers, or shops vs. stores, chemists-apothecaries-druggists-pharmacies, parking garages vs. car parks (I suspect the latter have smaller spaces due to smaller cars) the American habit of changing nouns to verbs as in to party and to charge it.

English is such a rich language to write in.

The same company had the habit of opening a bottle of champagne for whatever good news came about. Maybe because champagne is a French word, we never debated that.

No. 26. Listening to What We Write

THEORY
Let your computer read to you. Guest Editor

Many Text-To-Speech (TTS) programs are inexpensive, have almost human voices, and are designed for sighted people to operate. In the past, writers read their work aloud in order to catch grammatical errors and to edit mistakes more effectively. Even improper word choices which spell checkers might miss can be spotted and corrected with the help of synthetic voice software. Why not rest your eyes and let the computer read to you?

One of these inexpensive Windows-based software packages and one of the best as far as voice quality goes, is Fonix' i Speak. It can be purchased at the www.fonix.com web site. Not only does this program read text from the clipboard, highlighted portions, and from files but it can create MP3 versions of the text. This is useful for listening to your writing on an MP3 player while away from the computer, perhaps on a long bus trip or while jogging.
Read Please www.readplease.com offers a number of voices to choose from and it highlights the words or sentences being spoken. It also offers translations into four languages.
Real Speak www.scansoft.com can speak 21 different languages plus this software works in Linux as well as Windows.

Text Aloud www.nextup.com also makes MP3 versions of text files and is inexpensive too.
If you want to make use of an old PC, HELP Read www.helpread.com is free and runs with Windows 3.1.

Unfortunately there aren't many Mac TTS programs. Information regarding outSPOKEN, plain Talk, and KeyRead can be found at the www.apple.com/speech/ page. outSpoken won't work on Mac OS X and is not supported by ALVA Access Group but it still can be obtained for use with

Earlier OS versions. E-mail info@enablemart.com to learn more. Mac OS X, Windows 2000, and Windows XP have built-in TTS programs, making it even more convenient to hear your writing.
The previously mentioned programs are not screen readers, designed to verbalize everything on the monitor. People with extremely low vision or none at all need to use software packages like Window Eyes www.gwmicro.com, JAWS www.freedomscientific.com or HAL www.dolphinoceanic.com These programs are in the $1000-$2000 range but are a boon for computer users who can't see the screen. The next release of Mac OS X will have a built-in screen reader called Spoken Interface.

Speech-To-Text (SST) programs are a great help to writers who can't type, have diseases like carpal tunnel, or who express themselves more freely by talking. IBM's Via Voice www.scansoft.com and Dragon Naturally Speaking www.vocalinks.com are two of the best in this category.

There's a ViaVoice version for Mac users too. Another nice thing about these programs is that they have demo versions, allowing people to decide if the program is worth buying. Some demos are full working versions which run for a specific amount of time while others have built-in limitations.


Either way, this gives writers a chance to use and intelligently choose suitable software for your needs.

EXAMPLES
In keeping with the topic, I decided to use as samples that have the word listening in them. Very few people are good listeners but listening is an active, not a passive skill. Writers may listen more closely than the general public but we often superimpose our own stories on what is being said.

Example 1

"He did not know whether it was late or early. The candles had all burned out. Dolly had just been in the study and had suggested to the doctor that he should lie down. Levin sat listening to the doctor's stories of a quack mesmeriser and looking at the ashes of his cigarette. There had been a period of repose, and he had sunk into oblivion. He had completely forgotten what was going on now. He heard the doctor's chat and understood it." Leo Tolstoy ANNA KARENIN

Example 2
The Lion once gave out that he was sick unto death and summoned the animals to come and hear his last Will and Testament. So the Fox came to the Lion's cave, and stopped there listening for a long time. Then a Sheep went in and before she came out a Calf came up to receive the last wishes of the Lord of the Beasts. But soon the Lion seemed to recover and came to the mouth of his cave and saw the Fox who had been waiting for some time. "Why do you not come to pay your respects to me?" said the Lion to the Fox.

"I beg your Majesty's pardon," said the Fox, "but I noticed the track of the animals that already come to you; and while I see many hoof-marks going in, I see none coming out. Till the animals that have entered your cave come out again, I prefer to remain in the open air."Moral: It is easier to get into the enemy's toils than out again.Fable

Example 4
I should not dare to leave my friend,
Because - because if he should die
While I was gone, and
I - too late - Should reach the heart that wanted me,
If I should disappoint the eyes
That hunted, hunted so, to see,And could not bear to shut until
They "noticed" me - they noticed me;
If I should stab the patient faith
So sure I'd come - so sure I'd come,
It listening, listening, went to sleep
Telling my tardy name, -
My heart would wish it broke before,
Since breaking then, since breaking then,
Were useless as next morning's sun,
Where midnight's frosts had lain!
Emily Dickinson. Poem 76

EXERCISE
If you don't have listening software read your writing into a tape recorder and listen to it. If you don't have the software or a tape recorder, ask someone you trust to read it to you. Keep your eyes closed and listen. Listen a second time following the text on the paper. Mark whatever sounds the least bit out of kilter.

Conduct an interview and record it. Ask open and closed questions. (An open question has unlimited possibilities for answers. How did you feel about that? A closed question asks something that has a simple answer. How old are you? What is your favourite color?). www.businesspotential.com/charles_listen.htm and www.joansvoboda.com/listening_skills.htm have good information on how to improve your listening skills.

NOTES (guest writer and editor)
Bruce Atchison is a legally blind freelance writer who has appeared in a range of paying and non-paying magazines. He has written articles on a diverse range of topics ranging from being a cheapskate to the time some friends and I had a clandestine tea party in the blind school dorm after midnight. He is reviewer of electronic music.

Take a second each day to help. Subscribers to W3 come from over 16 countries. All industrialized countries except the US have some system of universal health care. In June it was reported that during 2003 82 million Americans at one point or another had no health insurance. One of the problems is that many people go without treatment including women who can not afford to have mammograms. The Breast Cancer site www.thebreastcancersite.com has a number of sponsors that if people click on the site once a day will fund a free mammogram for a woman who can not afford it. At the moment they are having trouble getting enough people to click. Please do this daily even if you are outside the US.

If you run a writing circle and want a special course for your group, I will come to you. Reasonable rates. donna-lane.nelson@wanadoo.fr or call +33 4 68 37 90 11. I will also work with you online or here in my nest in Argelès- sur-mer France. (doesn't include accommodations but inexpensive housing and kitchen facilities available).

Warnings: How do we know if a magazine will pay us, an agent is honest, or a publisher is on the up and up? The internet makes it easier to check. Here are some sites to look at. www.sfwa.org/Beware/. Likewise another warning list www.nwu.org/alerts/alrthome.htm/ However,one warning holds true NEVER PAY A READING FEE. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER Another source of unreliable payers for free lance writers is www.writersweekly.com. Most of this is directed toward American writers, but any warnings from anywhere else of people who take advantage of writers will always be gratefully received and will be passed on to W3 readers.

Here is a list of 400 agents http://www.authorsteam.com/agents/ I have not verified quality.
Although many writers write me, the letter below brought me great joy.
Hi DonnaJust thought I 'd say many thanks for your excellent newsletter. In particular I sent off my first two query letters using the guidelines in your newsletter. Both replies were swift and exciting. I chose one. In short I've now signed a contract for a collection of short stories.
Thank you so much for your help

Cleveland W. Gibson

Cleve was willing to share his letter with our readers in the hopes that it will help others.

I am seeking representation for my ever-growing collection of short stories, Pure Adventure, currently at 38,000 words. I am enclosing a synopsis of the stories and a sample story.
All the characters are portrayed in an exciting way, often as being dark and ruthless yet imbedded in surreal surroundings. It is the interaction of characters with settings that create a spark of danger, tension and intrigue.

As a writer I already have credits to my name. I have been an associate member of the National Association of Writers Groups. My work has appeared in Acorn, Auguries, Link, LBF books, Thriller UK, Creature Features, Thirteen Magazine , Lost In The Dark, and other magazines. Some of the stories have appeared on the RD Larson and Mike Broemmel web site as well as the Star Trek web site. RD Larson is an EPPE award finalist and Mike Broemmel is author of 'The Miller Moth.' I have also had work broadcast by the BBC. I am a BeWrite.net writer
Thank you for your consideration of this proposal. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely
Cleveland W. Gibson

No 25. Why do we write?

THEORY
What drives us to spend hours trying to create formations of words that resonate with others?
We can rule out wealth. For every rich Stephen King or Anne Rice there are another 5000+ writers toiling below the poverty line. We may make money as freelancers, journalists, or corporate communicators, but our creative work is much harder to sell. Even when a check arrives it usually gives an hourly rate of less than a person toiling on the land in a developing country.

I asked several writers the question: Why do you write?

A woman writer who has published a series of short stories in various literary magazines says, "I can't not write. Words pound in my head. Stories pop up all around me. I have to get them down."

A writer, one who is wonderfully talented but only submits her work to top commercial publications has a large stack of rejections, said, "People say I should build credits with the little presses, but I want my first publication to be a big name. I am good and sooner or later an editor will see it." This is a person who spends at least two hours daily writing despite the heavy demands of a family and a part time job. She has Erica Jong's poem about wanting a clean house but not enough to sacrifice writing time, taped on her refrigerator. Woe to the family member that interrupts her at her computer. They didn't even knock to tell her about 9/11.

"I don't know if writing makes me happy, but not writing makes me miserable," a poet told me. He scribbles his poems during his subway rides, at lunch, and when the boss isn't looking. A few have been published in literary magazines, and every time he sees his work in print he says,

"Knowing I've shared that moment with others makes it worthwhile."

A writer who writes for the Christian market said, "I feel God gave me a gift. I can't deny it by not writing."

"I love language, manipulating words on the page until they carry the exact meaning that I want," a writer in her 50s said.

"For me it's therapy. I've had so much pain in my life, that it is one way of getting it out. Cheaper than a shrink," said a man who seemed much too young to have suffered as much as he did.

"If I don't write, I'll shrivel up."

"I've stories to tell. I just hope someone will listen."
And on and on and…

Does it matter when we start to write? I don't think so.

At four I knew I wanted to create stories. The writing compulsion came to my writing mate late in life after realising that the corporate ladder and MBA was not what she wanted to do. Both of us take the same pride in our work ever searching for ways to improve ourselves in our craft.

Does it matter what genre we write in? I don't think so. A student in my creative writing class apologised that she liked to read romances and hoped to write one. A genre writer needs to work just as hard on technique. The need to tell a story in the best way possible is true regardless of genre.

Energy is the operative word. Whatever we write, when our work takes on energy, we experience an incredible rush. Sometimes the rush is for us alone. If we are lucky the rush will extend to a person who buys the piece and finally to an ultimate reader.

Years ago writer Pamela Painter, who was teaching at a Simmons College writing program, defined a writer as someone who writes, not someone who is published. Others believe you aren't really a writer until you are published. Under that definition if Emily Dickinson's poems had never been published, she wouldn't have been a poet. Although her words would have been lost to the world, would they have been any less moving? Is it a variation of if a tree falls in the forest and if no one hears it does it make a sound?

Last night at Les Flowers, a restaurant in Argelès, after we had satiated ourselves with magret de canard, I asked the same question of my two female friends, both excellent communicators.

"No, if no one reads the writing, only half the process has been completed," the anthropologist said. "I agree," said the photographer.

It is one of those issues that could be argued endlessly with no clear result. We write.

What we do with our writing is another thing. We may keep it for ourselves, share it with our
families or seek publication. One woman I worked with is writing her life story for a friend. Another is trying to capture the Baghdad of her youth so the world can see another view from that portrayed in the news. Many, many writers are working on peace issues whether through letters to the media or world leaders. Others work with International Pen to free writers in prison, feeling they need to use their writing to give back. For some it is a need to look inside to touch something hidden: call it a soul, heart, etc. Others want to find the universal in the detail. Some admit they want to see their names on the best-selling books list.

Writing makes us writers. Work makes us good writers. Why do we do it? Because we must.


EXAMPLES

Example 1
"' Success at any price' is not my motto. In particular I don't urge what Virginia Woolf called 'adultery of the brain.' Prostituting one's talents to the highest, most prestigious or only bidder is not ultimately satisfying. .. if we define writing with integrity as remaining true to one's own values, what counts in this respect will differ from person to person…Aim to find your own path to success as you define success and keep in mind that you'll probably feel your way through by trial and error."
Marcia Yudkin: FREELANCE WRITING FOR MAGAZINES AND NEWSPAPERS: BREAKING IN WITHOUT SELLING OUT

Example 2
Anyone who has struggled to teach a creative writing course and explain to a bunch of would-be writers just what makes a piece of writing come alive, what makes it heat up and burst into life, will know what an impossibly slippery thing it is to define. What is that enviable, indefinable something that makes a piece of fiction fizz? What makes you believe in it absolutely and without question right from the start?
Julie Myerson reviewing ZZ Packer's DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE in The Guardian.

Example 3
"My work and my art, it is life."
Montaigne

Example 4
"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run."
Henry David Thoreau.

I included this sample because everything in life has a price and whether it is the time we devote to writing, earning a living, or anything else. Hopefully we will all make these decisions wisely.

Example 6
Lots of people want to be writers; just about everybody talks about writing a book someday. Most don't know about the typical annual income and the isolation; they know about only the cocktail parties and the bylines. Of those who wouldn't mind being writers, relatively few really want to write. It's work.

Talent is potential. Develop it and you have something; let it atrophy and you squander it. Talent is not ability.
Art Spikol

EXERCISE
List all the things about writing that frustrate you.
List all the things about writing that make you happy.
List what you would do if you didn't write.
List what you've discovered about yourself by writing.
List observations you have made because you write.
List the things you want to write.
List what stops you writing.

NOTES

When I moved to Europe I discovered different nationalities use different terms for punctuation: an American period is a British full stop. Because W3 has an international audience (14 different countries), I arbitrarily decided to use semicolon for ; in this note.

An editor once said he never bought a manuscript unless someone used a semi-colon (;) correctly on the first page; probably not a good way to find the next best seller, but I thought just in case you submit your work to that editor, I'd review their use.

Semicolons separate the clauses of a compound sentence that have no co-ordinating conjunction. Ex: Harry ran to the store; he did many errands.

Semicolons separate the clauses of a compound sentence in which the clauses contain internal punctuation when the clauses are joined by a conjunction. Ex: Harry, who is often late, ran to the store, stopped at the dry cleaners, washed the car; and he rushed home.

Semicolons separate the elements of a series in which items already contain commas. Ex: Many people attended: Dr. John Jones, president; Irene Dunn, ghost and actress; Jason Haskell, architect and artist; and me.

Semicolona seperate clauses of a compound sentence joined by a conjunctive adverb (nevertheless, therefore, hence, etc.) Ex: The electricity was off for several hours; therefore the play was cancelled.

Write in Italy
The Centro Studi Pokkoli, a non-profit organization, makes available to individuals or institutions, for a small fee, workshop space for up to 15 people, free lodging for instructors, and arranges housing and meals for participants. We are located in a historic building in the old center of Vitorchiano, a medieval town one hour from Rome. For information: contact Linda Lappin md2948@mclink.it

Write in Southern France
I will work with students either individually or in small groups for up to a week in my French-Catalan village, Argelès-sur-mer, in intensive workshops designed to your needs. The workshop includes an in-depth analysis of your manuscript. For more information contact me at donna-lane.nelson@wanadoo.fr or call +33 4 68 37 90 11.

To the many people who commented on the article about Lee Gutkind and passed me information, thank you. Creative fiction has also been called the new journalism as many pointed out to me.

No 24. The Godfather of Creative Non Fiction

THEORY
Lee Gutkind (Goodkint) ambled into the Geneva mansion, the current home of the local press club, with a beige paper cup of coffee in his hand. In Switzerland coffee is normally drunk in cafés but seldom carried around. However, Gutkind was there to lead a one-day workshop in Creative Nonfiction (CNF) not to follow local coffee-drinking customs.

Some call CNF a genre, but Gutkind considers it a movement. When he started CNF at the University of Pittsburgh in 1973 where he teaches, the powers-that-be did not consider it worthy of much more than a course. Now some thirty years later not only does Gutkind publish a CNF magazine with a circulation of 25,000, universities as far away as Australia are offering degrees in CNF. Gutkind has authored several CNF books including his latest FOREVER FAT.

As a CNF writer he spent four years with an organ transplant team, lived and worked with baseball umpires and been a circus clown. It is a life that writers stuck in routine jobs can only dream of.

Gutkind and CNF are not without critics. James Wolcott in VANITY FAIR damned the format as "confessional writing" and its proponents as "navel gazers." It was Wolcott who first called Gutkind the Godfather of CNF, meant derogatorily, but Gutkind adapted the title as a badge. It did not hurt the development of the format to have the term Creative Nonfiction adopted by the US National Endowment of the Arts.

Gutkind divides CNF into two types: Personal experience and emersion journalism. Gutkind defines CNF emersion journalism, where the writer "captures other people's lives or places" by spending large blocks of time with the subject. It is extremely marketable.

CNF does not create untruths. CNF involves imaginative ways to present the truth. There is no CNF police to stomp out untruths, but unlike journalists who must be objective, the CNF writer can be subjective. "The concept of trust and direction of accuracy doesn't stop us from interjecting ourselves into the story," Gutkind says.

CNF writers use the same techniques as fiction writers do. Scenes are the building blocks throughout the entire work. Gutkind was quick to remind the writers that "a scene is where something happens."

Scenes use dialogue that move the story forward. Gutkind does not work with a tape recorder because he feels it hampers spontaneity, but uses his memory. The second he leaves his subject he writes down as much as he can remember. He often shows his last draft to his subjects to make sure he was accurate. Almost always they accept what he has written with the exception of one person who asked that the swear words be removed so he could show the piece to his mother who didn't know he swore. Gutkind did.

Scenes use description. Gutkind uses the word "specificity" and just like fiction writing is stronger when someone says "yellow roses" versus "flowers". CNF benefits from this type of detail.

Scenes must have action or tension. Gutkind considers that CNF writers cannot be boring. He tells CNF writers that they must, "manipulate, seduce, twist readers around your finger to make them listen."

Gutkind draws a difference between CNF and straight journalism which often by necessity of space need to be brief. CNF allows a writer to be more expansive and he cited that a number of his CNF students who have worked as journalists who in the beginning had trouble producing 12+ page assignments.

Gutkind summarizes that "Creative nonfiction writers visualize a world in three multi-colored, multi-conflicting dimensions." In that aspect they are like fiction writers, but instead of plumbing the depths of their own minds, they base their work on what they have witnessed.


EXAMPLES

Here are two samples from FOREVER FAT.

Example 1
I was in the office of a dermatologist who, while tearing into the plantar's wart on my right foot, glanced curiously up at my chest. "Wait," she murmured, "Melanoma."
At the time, I did not know precisely what melanoma was, but I knew the word to which it was most associated: cancer. She tenderly touched the mole she had spotted as the likely suspect and commented: "I don't think this is malignant, but you need to have it removed immediately." She paused and continued in a hushed voice. "Not that I want to worry you." I braced myself for what was coming next. "But three weeks from now, in a worst-case scenario, you could be dead."
I smiled bravely. "I thought you didn't want to worry me. "

Notice the dialogue. It is short and realistic. The details are tight. The dermatologist wasn't simply removing the wart she was "tearing" into it. The circumstances certainly create tension.

Example 2
"My father, an egg-shaped, balding man of eighty-three, was struggling with a corrugated cardboard boy he had been lugging from the car into the terminal. Without asking, Richard decided to help. He snatched the box from my father's hand and flung it up over his shoulder-and then he almost toppled over backwards. 'What's in this?' he asked. My father didn't answer."

Notice the father's description. He is easy to visualize. We know we are in a terminal so in one word we can see the scene. We know exactly what the box looks like. It is neither a Bonwit Teller box nor a jewelry box, but a corrugated cardboard box. Gutkind doesn't need to tell us that it is heavy. He shows us because his father is lugging it, not swinging it. He reinforces the heaviness when Richard almost topples over from the weight. The father not answering builds tension. If we wrote a fiction scene, we could have built it exactly that way, except for on thing. This happened.

EXERCISE
Think of an incident that you witnessed, a mother hitting a child in a supermarket, a group of kids on a plane ride, whatever struck you strongly and write up the scene as accurately as possible using dialogue, description and tension. You can be subjective, but keep your involvement more as an observer.
Write a personal experience that touched you using CNF techniques.

NOTES
To order Gutkind's Creative Non Fiction magazine: www.creativenonfiction.org.For more information about Lee Gutkind: www.leegutkind.com. His books are available on www.amazon.com.

No 23 Writing Query Letters

THEORY
Writing query letters is almost as much fun as writing a synopsis, and we all know how horrible synopsis writing is. But here are some of the common questions I've received when talking to new writers about marketing their work whether it is fiction or non fiction.

• When do I need a query letter?
• When you want to interest a publisher in your book.
• When you want to interest an agent in your work.
• When you want to interest an editor in article, story or to get an assignment not yet written
• When you submit an unsolicited piece and require a polite cover letter. This is usually for short work not full books.
• Should I send my query by snail or email?

Many publishers accept submissions by email. In the past we checked with different writer market directories but now most publishers have websites with publishing guidelines. I can not stress strongly enough CHECK GUIDELINES!

How do I know where to send my writing?
Research. Don't waste your time to mail science fiction to a mystery publisher. It won't work.

Is it important to send the query to an exact person?
Yes, yes, yes. Look at the website or directories and find the name of the correct person. The website should be up-to-date but the directory might not be. It is worth it to telephone to get the name of the current editor.

Does neatness count?
Yes, yes, yes. Although there are no hard and fast rules, the query should have good margins, a normal typeface, etc. 10 to 11 points, spacing between paragraphs. Neatness is the easiest part. Proof-read several times or if you're as bad at proofing your own work as I am, ask someone you trust.

What kind of letterhead should I use?
Create your own letterhead. Include all the relevant information: name, address, email, telephone number, fax, URL if you have the last two. However, don't use cute drawings.
Use good quality paper. A problem for submitting work internationally is that the US has a standard 8 1/2x11 size of paper and the standard for most of the rest of the world is A4, a slightly bigger sheet. However, an editor, agent or publisher won't say, "Although this is the best query I've ever seen, and the idea is fascinating, I won't use it because the letterhead is the wrong size."

What should I avoid?
Too much blah blach. Make every word count. Don't use meaningless phrases like "Attached please find." If the editor isn't bright enough to see an attachment, you won't want your work published by that person anyway. Also avoid trite phrases such as "in due course" which is different from due north.

What goes in the first paragraph?
You only have one chance to make a good impression. Your first paragraph should work the same way as the lead in a good news story. Make the reader want to go on.

Ex: fiction: Chickpea Lover (not a cookbook) is a 90,000 word novel about a woman who falls in love with a man who dresses as vegetables. Note: The title and the premise I hoped were strong enough to capture the publisher's attention.

Ex: feature article: Although absinthe, the liquorice-tasting drink that drove people mad in the late 1800s was banned in Switzerland in 1905, it is still made illegally in the Jura Mountains. Instead of asking guests if they prefer white or red wine, absinthe moon shiners in the little town of Môtier ask if they want red, white or blue. The blue refers to the blue fairy, another name for absinthe. Note: I didn't take for granted that the editor knew what absinthe was, so I identified it, mentioned it was illegal to titillate and then tried to add some color with words like moon shiners. I also tried to establish my expertise by giving one of absinthe's nicknames.

What should I tell them about myself?
Enough to show you are professional and any related knowledge depending on the market.
For fiction I use: I am an American writer living and working in Geneva Switzerland and Argelès France. My short stories and poems have been published in six countries and read on BBC radio. My novel CHICKPEA LOVER was published in paperback in 2003 and will be published in paperback in the US in 2004. It will also be published in Germany and Russia this year.
For non-fiction I use: I am an overseas correspondent for an American trade journal and the author of a novel that has appeared in the US and will appear next year in Germany and Russia. My news articles have been published in the US and the UK. Note: If I have some expertise in the area, I try and do it. While trying to sell an article to a religious magazine I added: For four years I judged the Templeton's Foundation Annual Religious Writing Award. The 3000 CHF ($2500) prize is awarded to the person who has done the most effective job covering religious issues for a major European newspaper. I gave them the Templeton Foundation website.
What if I don't have any credits?

If you have none at all, say nothing. A good idea is to join a professional writing group or say: I have a been writing for X years and am a member of: Otherwise try and find whatever, an article appearing in a magazine, a degree (if related) e.g. A writer sending an article on child development might say: I have been a teacher for 12 years and have worked with over 1000 students. In other words: establish you are serious about your craft and/or knowledgeable about the topic.

Do I include writing samples?
Although it depends on the guidelines, if you have a good sample it wouldn't hurt to send it along when looking for free lance work. One way to build a small portfolio is to have articles printed in small papers. If you have a small local paper try and work with the editor to get published.
For fiction it depends if the guidelines ask for sample chapters.

What about an SASE?
A stamped self-addressed envelope is required for your manuscript to be returned. However, in this time of cheap printing and high postage costs it might be more economical not to include an SASE and say, "Please notify me of your decision by email at Imasuccess@yahoo.com I also like to keep everything positive and saying things like "If you don't want my manuscript…" reminds me of the Girl Scout who knocked at my door and said, "You don't want to buy any cookies do you?"

How long should a query letter be?
No more than three paragraphs: a powerful opening, a paragraph about yourself and a closing. Short letters are less intimidating to read. If the opening is powerful enough, the person will probably scan the rest of the material. An editor once said he spent 30-second on a query and if it didn't catch his attention it was binned.

How should I end a query letter?
Successful sales people (when we trying to get our work published we are sales people) ask for the order. Writers need to be a little more subtle. I've had the best success with "I look forward to your response and thank you for your consideration" which is both polite and almost asking for something.

How long should I wait before I follow up?
I would say six weeks to two months so you don't look too pushy. Editors are busy people. They may not remember anyway.

Note: I find people outside the US much more polite and tend to send rejection letters or if interested get back to you immediately. Americans often don't respond at all. When I got the offer for CHICKPEA I needed an agent because I am NOT a detail person and have no idea of contracts. I emailed 15 New York agents and said "I have a firm offer for a book contract for my novel. I need an agent to negotiate it." Not one came back to me. Two years later I am still shaking my head that anyone would refuse business that was handed to them.

Is a cover letter different?
Unsolicited: The opening paragraph should mention the title, what it is and the word count. The second paragraph should be about you. The third should be a polite close. In that way they are the same. The cover letter is polite although the manuscript should speak for itself.

Solicited: Always mark the envelope and the top of the cover letter "REQUESTED MATERIAL" to make sure it isn't added to the slush pile.

TIP: Mark all the pages in the manuscript in the footer with your name and the number of pages. Nelson 1 of 5. Editors' desks are usually messy and things can get lost. This is NOT necessary with email submissions.

Although there is no 11th Commandment referring to query letters the guidelines above are just that. The best query letter is the one that works. Here are two books that might help:
QUERY LETTERS THAT WORKED! Real Queries That Landed $2K+ Writing Assignments hhttp://www.booklocker.com/books/1409.html
How to Write Attention Grabbing Query & Cover Letters by John Wood < href="http://www.amazon.com">www.amazon.com

EXAMPLE
Here's the query letter that sold several agents on Luck and ultimately led to a two-book contract with Bantam.
Specific person
Agency
Address
Address
Dear (Agent/Editor's Name):

I am seeking representation for my fantasy adventure novel, Luck In The Shadows, complete at 170,000 words. I am enclosing a synopsis and a sample chapter. The sequel, Stalking Darkness, is nearing completion and another free-standing book featuring the same characters is in outline form.

I love thieves and spies - those sneaky people who live by intuition, skill, and inside knowledge. In fantasy, however, they are often portrayed as dark, ruthless characters or relegated to second string roles, a la Falstaff, as useful or amusing foils for more conventional heroic types. Luck in the Shadows gives the rogues center stage.

Seregil is an experienced spy for hire with a murky past and noble connections; Alec is the talented but unworldly boy he rescues and takes on as apprentice. "I admit I've cut a purse or two in my time," Seregil tells Alec soon after they meet, "and some of what I do could be called stealing, depending on who you ask. But try to imagine the challenge of overcoming incredible obstacles to accomplish a noble purpose. Think of traveling to lands where legends walk the streets in daylight and even the color of the sea is like nothing you've ever seen! I ask you again, would you be plain Alec of Kerry all your life, or would you see what lies beyond?" Alec goes, of course, and quickly plunges into danger, intrigue, and adventure as their relationship deepens into friendship. The interaction between these two forms the core of this character-driven series.

I've been writing professionally for ten years and am currently a freelance journalist. My articles appear regularly in the Bangor Daily News, Preview! Magazine, and Maine In Print. I've covered everything from software to psychics; my interview credits include Stephen King, Anne Rice, and William Kotzwinkle. Thank you for your consideration of this proposal. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,Lynn Flewellinghttp://www.sfwa.org/writing/query.htm

EXERCISE
Write a query letter for the last novel you just read and enjoyed, but substitute yourself as the

author
Write a query for an article you read in a magazine, but substitute yourself as the author
NOTES
Getting grants
Writers can help fund their work by applying and receiving grants. Some countries are far more generous. Governments are not the sole funders for writers. Universities, individuals, foundations also help support artists and writers.
http://www.fundsforwriters.com/grants.htm (US)
http://www.lib.msu.edu/harris23/grants/3writing.htm (US)
http://granthelp.clarityconnect.com/resources.htm (US)
http://www.burryman.com/markets.html#awards (Ireland and other places)
http://www.anarchist-studies.org/grants (Ireland)
http://www.placesforwriters.com/funding.html (Canada)
http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/ (England)
http://www.ozco.gov.au/ (Australia)

The list is just to get you thinking. The best way to find money is research. Sometimes the award is more than money. My writing mate who lives in France won a chance to work with a leading Australian editor to polish her novel. If anyone has a success story on finding financial help as a writer and would like to share it

No 22. Writing Dialogue

THEORY

Riding on the bus from the Cornavin Train Station to the UN building in Geneva takes ten minutes. Two American young women sat near me. I knew they were American because their sentences were peppered with "like" and "you know." I started counting when we were at the main Post Office, half way. In five minutes they used the two phrases over 200 times.

"Like, you know, he called and like he said, like do you want like to do something you know?"

"Like what did ya say."

"Like I told him, you know, like…" and on and on and on.

Besides wanting to strangle them to get the story out without all the "likes" and "you knows" it reinforced the point that we can't merely copy real dialogue. We need to write dialogue realistically - a dilemma at best. (I admit to being an eavesdropper and have no desire to reform. It's a great way to get story ideas.)

For example the following conversation must be repeated millions of times each day, but makes boring reading.

"Hello," she said.

"Hello," he said.

How are you," she said.

"Fine," he said.

One of the reason dialogues like this fails is because it doesn't serve one of its primary purposes, which is to move the plot forward.

Many novices make the mistake of putting in too much information that the other speaker knows.

"You know, Sis, our Auntie Helen who lives next door at 113 Embury Avenue, and is married to our Uncle Ed, and works at the same supermarket as you do, is coming for dinner."

Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, but I've seen things close to that in the first efforts from my creative writing students.

Information should be imparted, but it has to be based on information the other speaker doesn't know. The same information given is more believable if done this way.

"Hey, Sis. Auntie Helen is coming to dinner. Did she say anything to you at work?"

"Didn't talk to her. When I went on break, she took over at the cash register. The store was mobbed today," she said. "Uncle Ed coming, too?"

"Don't know. Run next door and ask."

At least we know that Sis and Auntie Helen work together, Auntie is coming to dinner, she's married to Uncle Ed and they live next door. The rest of the information can be imparted in background information if it is necessary.

Dialogue can also be used to show character. People can be assigned speech mannerisms like the word "like" if it is not overdone. Gs' can be dropped, a man can talk down to a women by calling all of them sweetie, etc.

A character's educational level can be shown by the vocabulary used. A high school drop out might not use six-syllable words. A pretentious college professor would. However, if we use too convoluted language for the professor we'll lose our readers.

What people say can contradict their actions.

"I love you," he said right before he hit her.

Dialogue can also show accents, but caution is necessary. Too much can be hard to read. Consider this example of the Bostonian accent.

"I flunked out of Hahvahd, but Bawston College accepted me. That was too hahd for me, too."

A single sentence might work or wohk, but imagine reading that for 250 pages.

Dialect can be shown. While in Boston I was buying a camera for a friend, who wanted to take advantage of cheap US prices. The clerk waiting on me was from Russia. Later the same day watching a skating show, several Russian skaters were interviewed. I noticed none used articles in their speech. Likewise the English don't use the article the in front of the words hospital and university. They go to university, and are rushed to hospital. And if your character is a Scot, an occasional "wee" would not be out of place. Irish people sometimes refer to family with the word our.

"Our Maria will be late getting home."

If characters speak foreign languages sprinkling the foreign phrases is sufficient. Peter Mayle in his books does well in showing foreign language usage. A good trick is to use a foreign phrase and then explain it in the dialogue such as:

"C'est vrai?" Jean-François looked doubtful.

"It's true," Marie-Claude said.

Many new writers vary the appellation: she said, asked, replied, demanded, cried, smiled, grinned, screamed, whispered, etc. This marks the writer as an amateur. Use said or asked almost exclusively. An occasional whisper or screamed might be acceptable only in extreme situations. You want the reader to easily identify the speaker but you want the appellation to be invisible to the reader. Some writers avoid appellations as much as they can.

A way to get around it is to ascribe an action to the speaker.

"I won't go." Amy folded her arms across her chest.

"Oh, yes you will," Her mother grabbed her hair and pulled her.

If you want to check how your dialogue sounds, read it into a tape recorder and listen. Or have friends read it aloud. If anyone stumbles that is clue the dialogue doesn't work. Also what doesn't sound right becomes clear.

A quick word on punctuation based on manuscripts I've reviewed from new writers. (Experienced writers, please humor me). The correct formats are:

"I love you," he said. Quote mark-speech-comma-quote marks-lower case on a pronoun appellation-said-period (or full stop).

"You love me?" she asked. Quote mark-speech-question mark-quote marks-lower case on a pronoun appellation-period (or full stop).

Americans tend to use " marks and the United Kingdom uses '. Likewise quotes within quotes are reversed.

American: "I heard Aiden say, 'No way am I going,' and then he laughed, that laugh," she said.

English: 'I heard Aiden say, "No way am I going," and then he laughed, that laugh,' she said.

How you do quotations depends on which market you are preparing your manuscript for.

EXAMPLES

Example 1

This sample is from THE REMAINS OF THE DAY by Kazuo Ishiguro and is an excellent example of moving the plot forward. The butler Mr. Stevens, does not want to leave his duties. The housekeeper conveys the gravity of the situation in print. The hesitancy of the butler shows his character. He puts his job before his father. The relationship between the housekeeper and the butler is shown because it reveals what she did for the father and she is not about to accept no for an answer but calmly keeps adding information to convince the butler that he really cannot wait any longer.

'Your father has become ill, Mr. Stevens,' she said. "I've called for Dr. Meridith, but I understand that he may be a little delayed.'

I must have looked confused, for Miss Kenton then said: 'Mr. Stevens, he really is in a poor state. You had better come and see him.'

'I only have a moment. The gentlemen are liable to retire to the smoking room at any moment.'

'Of course. But you must come now, Mr. Stevens, or else you may deeply regret it later.'

Example 2

Jane Smiley in MOO doesn't use appellations in this sample. There is little doubt who is speaking. She does use ellipses and contractions. Notice the punctuation.

Marly, who had finished her shift after lunch and gone home without passing Lafayette Hall, was just waking up from a long nap when Nils called her from the emergency room at the hospital. She looked at her watch as she answered. It was nearly seven and she had slept through Father's suppertime. Where was Father anyway? She picked up the phone on the fourth ring after calling out. "Father" Father? You here? and receiving no answer. Rooms were dark.

"…pick me up because Ivar is all involved with the police," said Nils.

"What are you talking about?"

"Well, my dear, you'll be happy to know that my injuries seem to be very slight, although I am sure that there will be neck problems later on. And I am going to press charges against that little mat -"

"Nils, I've been asleep, so I really don't know what you are talking about."

Example 3

This sample is from TRUFFLED FEATHERS, a mystery by Nancy Fairbanks and shows how incorrect speech can be used. A waitress is speaking.

"You'd have to ask the cops. They didn' tell us. Ask a hunderd questions, don' answer none."

Later the waitress says…

"Well, it's not like people don't get offed in Jersey, too. Ma's got MS. She thinks someone's gonna break in an' tip over her wheelchair. Like anyone would think she's got anything worth stealin'."

EXERCISE

1. Eavesdrop on a conversation somewhere and try and transcribe it as accurately as possible. What are the speech mannerisms? Can you guess the social status and/or educational level of the speakers?" Rewrite it to a meaningful dialogue. (Don't get caught listening)
2. Go to a movie or watch a DVD and listen closely to a dialogue between two characters in a single scene. Play it over and over. How is information given to the listener in dialogue? Unlike in prose, the background information is shown. Now go back and see what information you get from the set, the facial expressions, etc.

NOTES

NAMING CHARACTERS

An earlier W3 wrote about naming characters. Netscape has just reported the 20 most popular names for babies born in America during 2003. They are really different than names chosen even five years ago. As we said in an earlier edition we need to select names that are appropriate for the birthplace and birth date of the character.

20 Most popular boys names.
Aidan/Aiden/Aden (could this be because of SEX AND THE CITY?), Jaden/Jayden, Caden/Kaden, Ethan, Caleb, Dylan, Jacob, Jordan, Logan, Hayden, Connor, Ryan, Morgan, Cameron, Andrew, Joshua, Noah, Matthew, Addison, Ashton

20 Most popular girls' names:
Madison, Emma (did Rachel and Ross have anything to do with this?), Abigail, Riley, Chloe (Good thing I named the baby in my novel CHICKPEA LOVER NOT A COOKBOOK this), Hannah, Alexis, Isabella, Mackenzie, Taylor, Olivia, Hailey, Paige, Emily, Grace, Ava, Aaliyah, Alyssa, Faith, Brianna

BOOK RECOMMENDATION

As writers we are so concerned about getting the words right, but we seldom think of the units that make up words, units being letters. I came across a book I found fascinating called HOW 26 LETTERS SHAPED THE WESTERN WORLD ALPHABET by John Mann. I'll never take my vowels and consonants for granted again.

FAQs ABOUT W3

Q: Who is D-L NELSON?
A: D-L Nelson is an American who makes her living as a novelist and freelance journalist. Her fiction and poetry have been published in six countries. Her novel CHICKPEA LOVER (NOT A COOKBOOK) is in its second edition hardback and will appear in paperback this year. It will also be published in German and Russian this year depending on completion of translations. She divides her time between Geneva, Switzerland, Argelès-sur-mer, France and Boston, MA USA.

Q: Where do the ideas for topics come from?
A: The first few issues were topics that I taught in my creative writing class at Webster University in Geneva and in seminars. Over half of the topics have been suggested by readers. In two cases, I felt that other people would be better to write the theory part of the newsletter. Thus Larry Habegger, publisher of the popular travel anthologies Travelers Tales www.travelerstales.com and Susan Tiberghien, author of LOOKING FOR GOLD, www.susantiberghien.com were guest writers.

Q: Why do you describe it as an "almost monthly" newsletter.
A: To give my self wiggle room in case my life goes out of control.

Q: Why do you do this?
A: I started writing in a vacuum. I could have learned my craft faster had I known some simple tricks. Eventually through writing seminars, my M.A. in creative writing at the University of Glamorgan in Wales, and the support of the Geneva Writers Group (GWG), I began making progress in my writing as well as learning the business side of writing. People were extremely generous to me and this is my giving back. And it's selfish. I feel happier with myself when I share.

Q: Can I put announcements in W3?
A: I am happy to include announcements about retreats, seminars, contests as well as print letters and comments, space permitting.

No 21. Writing an Essay

This issue is guest written by Susan Tiberghien of the Geneva Writers Group http://genevawritersgroup.org/ and http://www.susantiberghien.com/

THEORY

When Robert Atwan published the first Best American Essays in 1986, it was a gamble in the world of letters. But not only has the series continued every year since, other anthologies are also flourishing. Once a "second class citizen" (E.B.White), the essay today finds a regular home in periodicals ranging from the New Yorker to Creative Nonfiction, from Newsweek to Esquire. And it has seeped into all other kinds of non-fiction writing, from travel pieces, to op-eds, journals, commentaries, and to memoirs. As Annie Dillard writes, "The essay is all over the map, there is nothing you cannot do with it, no subject matter is forbidden, no structure is proscribed."

A short history of the essay would start with Montaigne, in the 16th century, writing essais (attempts), letting the subjective and the objective intertwine into a new form of prose. Montaigne was a gentleman farmer, his essays were conversations with an unseen neighbor. If we skip up to the 20th century, Virginia Woolf speaks of the essay as a balance of subject and style, each component equally important. When writing an essay, says Philip Lopate, "It's not enough to render the experience. You also have to put it in perspective. It's not enough to show. You also have to tell."

So how do we do this? Let's look at four steps, each step a new draft, and then let's pretend we're following the four steps to write a story about going food shopping in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But remember, we have to have gone food shopping in Cambridge. We cannot imagine the whole experience. This is the litmus test of nonfiction. We can embellish description, include dialogue, write in scenes, but the experience has to have happened.

Here are the four steps.

1. Choose an experience, or rather let it choose you. What experience do you want to write about? Close your eyes, go within and let the experience find you. Focus and frame it in your mind, like a photo, not everything, but the important part of the experience. Montaigne wrote, "Everything has one hundred faces, I chose one of them…I jab into it as deep as I can." Depending upon the subject, do some research, go deeper. Then write a first draft. Free write, and perhaps let the essay meander to another subject.

2. Now show the experience in a second draft. Think about the elements of story telling - specific details of setting and characters, tension, dialogue, plotting, and revelation. The protagonist, the "I" of the essay, has to discover something. Philip Lopate (The Art of the Personal Essay) writes that an essay has a rise and fall, "that it appears to dig up something, to reach deeper understandings than it began with."

3. Slowly start to polish your words. In this third draft, think about the elements of poetry. Essays walk the border between story and poem. Imagery: look for the images, which images reveal the meaning of the experience, what images are symbolic? Rhythm: find repetitions (alliteration and assonance), meter (try scanning your lines, where are the stressed syllables, read it aloud, does it flow?) And compression. What is the core of the experience? What is its truth?

4. And now set it aside. Let it gestate, at least overnight, more happily over several days. Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet, "Everything is gestation, then bringing forth." If you have the good fortune to have a writers' group, share the essay. And then rewrite: look at length of sentences, paragraph structure, shape your essay, look at descriptions, prune adjectives and adverbs, passive voice, highlight the imagery, listen to the sounds. Then find a home for it. If in the writing, you have discovered deeper meaning in one life experience, the reader will share this discovery. In moving from the personal to the universal, the essay is the writer's gift to the reader.

Now let's write our essay. Or rather let me write the experience that I had food shopping in Cambridge, for my daughter and son-in-law and three-day old baby - food shopping in a country where I had not lived for thirty years, but in a country that looked like me and spoke like me. First draft (step one), it was a sad experience. I felt out of place. Misunderstood. Second draft (step two), I started to make it into a story. I added some dialogue, some humor. Some tension. I moved towards a revelation. Third draft, I polished the images (paper or plastic bags, pink fingernails, the pin-striped suit), the rhythm (plastic or paper…the young man stopped and waited, the people stood still and waited). And the core? The truth of the experience? Well, let me ask you. Here is the story, as it was published in The International Herald Tribune, Meanwhile Column.

EXAMPLE - Plastic or Paper

"Plastic or paper, lady?" asked the young man with a pony tail, as I was looking in my purse for enough cash to pay the groceries.

It was summer vacation, and I had returned to the States to become a new grandmother.

"May I pay with my American Express card?" I said to the woman at the register, not yet ready to tackle the option of plastic or paper.

"No, Ma'am, only Visa or Masters."

"And a check?"

"With two identification cards, Ma'am," she answered, handing me the stub. Her fingernails were longer than I remembered ever seeing and painted brilliant pink. "Do you have a driver's license?"

I started to fill out the check. "I have a driver's license but it's Swiss."

The young man who had asked me about plastic or paper eyed me with curiosity. He had three earrings of different lengths all on the same ear.

"What did you say dear?" asked the cashier.

The line behind me was getting longer, but it was also getting interested.

"I said my license is Swiss. I don't live here, I live in Switzerland."

Everyone turned toward me. If only I had a hint of a foreign accent, no one would have paid attention. This was Cambridge, Massachusetts, where in summertime one out of two people speak a foreign language. But my English sounded like their English. Where did I come from? I looked American, I spoke American, but I didn't perform American.

"Let me see dear. I don't want to make you trouble."

Again the young man asked, "Plastic or paper, lady?"

Lady? I thought I was a woman. What was this lady business? And ma'am? And dear?

"Honey, he just means how do you want it wrapped? In a plastic bag or in a paper bag."

I had such a large, attentive audience that I found the question difficult. Which was more ecological? I should give the right answer. Making paper bags destroyed the trees and forests. But was the plastic bio-whatever? I never had learned that word. I made a wish that the plastic be whatever it should be and said, "Plastic, please."

The young man snapped open a large bag and placed it on a frame at the end of the check out counter. The plastic bag sat suspended.

"Your license please, and another piece of identity."

All this hassle for $22.20. I thought about giving the groceries back, but my daughter and French son-in-law were waiting for them - one romaine lettuce (not iceberg, but French and leafy), three red apples (they were so polished I squished one just a little to see if it were real), sharp cheddar cheese (they didn't tell me there were a dozen varieties of sharp cheddar), and steak (ah, I thought, after thirty years in Europe I could easily choose steak, but no, there were meters - I mean yards - of packaged steaks, each with different names.) I couldn't give it all back, it was to be our dinner.

So out came my Swiss driver's license, written in French, with a photo of me about twenty years back, well, maybe thirty. The cashier looked at me and then back at the photo. Skepticism. Next came my American passport, recently renewed, like one month ago. Mistrust. Grandmothers do age.

She rang for the manager, her bright pink fingernail poised on the bell.

I waited. The young man packing my groceries stopped and waited. The people in line stood still and waited. No one murmured, no one was impatient. This too was different. I could hear the air conditioners.

When the manager, dressed in a grey pin-strip suit arrived, I was so confused I reached out to shake his hand. I was ready to apologize. I had only wanted to do the shopping for my daughter and son-in-law and their new baby, born three days earlier. I had flown from Geneva to be a grandmother. I was even trying to be an ecological grandmother.

"Is this all right?" I asked, pushing the check, the Swiss drivers' license, the American passport in his direction.

"Yes. Everything is fine." He smiled and wrote his signature on the back of my check. I could feel the wave of general relief. "You know," he said, "I always dreamed of going to Switzerland."

The core: The little grocery store in Cambridge welcomed me back home.

NOTES

1. Susan M. Tiberghien, American-born writer living in Switzerland, has published two memoirs, LOOKING FOR GOLD (about dreams and Jungian analysis) and CIRCLING TO THE CENTER (about silent prayer) and many narrative essays in journals and anthologies on either side of the ocean. She will publish a collection of her essays, FOOTSTEPS, A EUROPEAN SCRAPBOOK. Tiberghien teaches writing workshops for the International Women's Writing Guild and C.G. Jung Centers in the USA, and for the Geneva Writers' Group and writers' conferences in Europe. And she is the editor of the literary review, OFFSHOOTS, WRITING FROM GENEVA.

Any wisdom she might wish to share would be patience! When asked how long it took to write her first book, she replies 60 years. And that included bringing up six children.

2. A few years ago I was showing a fellow writer Lowell, Massachusetts where I went to university. We were more interested in the textile museum and Lowell as Jack Kerouac's hometown than my alma mater. Peter picked up a stone and confessed he had a collection of stones from different writer's homes, graves, etc. For a time whenever I went anywhere near a writer's house I picked up a stone for him. On my own desk is a small white stone that was on the ground in front of the French writer Collette's grave in Cimetière du Père Lachaise in Paris. I admit to fingering it whenever I'm blocked. There is something about visiting the home, hometown, grave of someone you've read. Looking at places they've seen is often an inspiration and can create a new way to look at the influences in our lives that affect our writing. I know we can't all travel, but here's some websites and/or locations of different writers that may have influenced us. If you know of any good museums about writers, please let us know.

3. Louisa May Alcott: Walking through this museum is like spending a day with Jo, Meg, etc. www.louisamayalcott.org

Writer's Museum, Edinburgh, Scotland located in a 1622 townhouse. Desks, pens, clothing of famous Scottish writers. I find is amazing that these items still exist in comparison to our current throw away society.

Dublin Writers Museum: www.writersmuseum.com/

James Joyce : James Joyce died in Zurich in 1941 but is considered on of Ireland's greatest writers. www.jamesjoyce.ie

D.H Lawrence: Photos of his childhood home which has been restored to reflect what it must have been like during his lifetime. website.lineone.net/~alan.rowley/dhlpm01.html

William Faulkner: A photo of his house now the home of the Pirate Alley Faulkner Society. They are sponsoring a writing contest. www.wordsandmusic.org

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of Seven Gables. It reeks of Puritan New England. www.7gables.org/

4. Each year the American Library in Geneva holds a used book sale. The library is located in the American Church. Its wood panelling and stained glass windows inside could as easily be in the UK or New England and reminds me of my childhood church fairs. At this year's fair I went in time for lunch: homemade egg salad sandwiches, apple juice (in New England it would have been cider) and chocolate cake. No longer hungry, I started going through the tables and tables of books all priced between 2 and 10 CHF. New books usually start at 20 CHF and paying up to 50 CHF because of additional shipping costs isn't unusual.

In the textbook session where I was browsing for a learn Arabic text, I spied a book, WRITING HANDBOOK. Its title was in silver lettering on a plain brown written by Michael P. Kammer, S.J. and Charles W. Mulligan, S.J. and published by Loyola University Press. Although it was written in 1953, it is the most logical and helpful grammar book I have ever seen. I've checked Amazon.com and the book is still for sale, for someone who wants a great grammar reference. No matter that it is 50 years old. I recommend it highly.

No 20. Writing Synopsis

THEORY

Even the most talented writers quake at the word synopsis. Spoken aloud it sounds like a disease. Perhaps it is the idea of reducing work that took months or even years to a few pages combined with the pressure that it should represent your best writing that makes writing a synopsis so hard.

Some publishers state what they want in the synopsis. Others don't. Check each publisher's guidelines. However, if you have a synopsis already written it is easier to adapt it then to create one fresh.

Your synopsis is a commercial for your work. First time novelists tend to do a chapter by chapter review of their work. This is NOT the way to create a powerful selling tool for your novel. Would you buy a soap product if the publicity only listed the chemicals? A mere listing will turn off the editors. You must make the story fascinating.

A synopsis is a deconstruction of your novel. After spending weeks/months/years structuring your novel deconstructing it can be painful.

Starting:

1. Free write the story. Sit down and just write about the story. Give yourself ten minutes and don't stop writing. Keep your pencil moving. Don't worry about spelling, corrections.
2. Mind map the novel. I've put two examples of mind mapping on my website at www.wisewordsonwriting.com One is a mind map of the major characters and the other is of the major story lines and subplots. A mind map is when you put down all the ideas as fast as you can, connecting related ideas with lines (it cannot be done fast on a computer. Use pencil and paper).
3. Pretend you have ten minutes to tell the story of your book to an audience.

Suggestions (not rules) on format:

1. Length - plan to write about a page for every hundred pages of novel unless the publisher gives you a limit. Think of a synopsis as a blurb on steroids. However, don't write to word count. Make it long enough or short enough to tell the story.
2. Use the present tense for a sense of immediacy.
3. Don't confuse the structure with the story.
4. Make sure somewhere in your presentation the number of words plus genre. "Title is a 65,382 mystery novel that…"
5. Chronological order usually makes more sense, even if your story is not told in chronological order.
6. Use the third person.
7. You don't have to include each scene.
8. There should be a flow from one scene to another.
9. Resolve everything. An editor will not want a cliff hangar.

The actual writing (gulp)

1. Lead sentence - A good story starts with a sentence that hooks the reader. The same is true of a synopsis. I used the following for CHICKPEA LOVER "From the moment Liz admits she's in love with a man who dresses as vegetables, her life was never the same." If you haven't got the opening sentence, don't let that stop you. You can write it later.
2. Flashbacks should be interwoven into the story not break up the flow of the story. Only include necessary flashbacks. For example if you've done a three-page flashback on a Vietnam war scene that haunts your hero, don't bring this in great detail but reduce it to the "The horror of watching an entire village die when his fellow office opened fire with an M14, still haunts John's nightmares.
3. Emphasise major and minor plots and connect them within the story.
4. Separate characters by giving each their own paragraph, but don't break the story line. Include their feelings and motivations.
5. Theme should be touched on. In my novel CHICKPEA LOVER the theme is how power is used in personal and professional relationships, but it is shown through the story of a woman who falls in love with a younger man as her marriage and career fall apart when she gets embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal at the college where she teaches.
6. Show how the characters have developed and changed.
7. Resolve all plot lines. Editors don't want to be kept in suspense.

After writing your synopsis

1. If you haven't a reliable critic, put it in a drawer to let it "compost". Look at it again in a month. If you have a reliable critic, have them read it and listen to their comments.
2. Go over every sentence to make sure every word is necessary.
3. Have you over worked the verb to be?
4. Are you being lazy and relying too much on adjectives and adverbs?
5. Spell check.
6. Reread to make sure their and there, you're and your and other words that spell check will miss are used correctly.
7. When you are satisfied that it is one of your best piece of writing, add sample chapters, a good covering letter and put it in the mail with a wish that it will motivate that editor to ask for your complete manuscript.
8. Treat yourself to something special. You've earned it.

EXAMPLES

The two examples are about telling stories. A good synopsis is a good story.

Example 1

"So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favour the stretch in between since it is the hardest..." Margaret Atwood

Example 2

"I'm a novelist; I write novels. It's convenient for everybody but the writer to categorize writing: readers know what they like, bookstores know where to shelve them, reviewers can slot them. But it's irrelevant to me Dostoyevsky also wrote crime novel. I'm trying to do what Faulkner or Fitzgerald tried to do. They just did it better. We're all trying to do tell a compelling story." Robert B. Parker in an interview in October 2003 Yankee Magazine.

EXERCISES

Take the most recent book you've liked and write a synopsis of it. You won't have the emotional involvement that you have with your own work.

NOTES

A reader comments on writing about place from a foreign country

I found your excellent newsletter significant for personal reasons as well. When I was 18, I ripped myself away from my comfortable English culture and background to go and live in Paris. Real identity crises! It was then and there that I started writing. So the topics you touched on struck very resonant chords. The problems related to (near) bi-lingualism have been dogging me for decades. Thanks for exploring the theme in the way you did. (Incidentally, I didn't pick up a single spelling error, so your singing must be improving by leaps and bounds!)

Kind regards,
David

(For all my advice about proof reading, I am a terrible proof reader of my own work.)

Take a look at this site

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No 19. Writing about Place Part II

Last month W3 examined how writers "see" places they live. This month we look at the opposite - how foreign places influence writers' work. In this issue W3 talks with two ex-pats, American writer Jake Lamar and Canadian writer Lauren B. Davis. Both make their home in Paris. (See notes for a list of their work). W3 examines how living in a different culture shaped their writing and their attitudes. Not everyone can change countries, but as writers if we look at how other writers develop we can take from their experiences to improve our depth in our own work.

Any comments can be written here or sent to donna-lane.nelson@wanadoo.fr

THEORY

Any writer who has ever read about the Lost Generation must have imagined themselves living and writing in Paris, jumping on the Metro, buying baguettes, sitting in cafés while scribbling in notebooks. Jake Lamar and Lauren Davis are two writers who live and work in the City of Light.

When Jake Lamar was growing up in the Bronx, he read James Baldwin GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN. His teacher told him that Baldwin lived in Paris. He thought that was pretty cool. However he didn't pack his bags just then. He went to Harvard, back to New York, and then to Ann Arbor, MI. Lamar was half way through his second book when he won a grant. It was then that he moved to Paris planning to stay a year. That was ten years ago.

Lauren Davis moved to France with her husband. She was first in Annecy then in Paris. As she was working on her first novel, she found herself accompanying her husband to New York, Canada and then back to Paris. Three international moves within a few months is not necessarily ideal for writing, but her novel THE STUBBORN SEASON made the Canadian best seller list despite the changes. She is now settled in a flat that overlooks the rooftops of Paris, a living postcard.

Davis' work area is a room inside her flat, while Lamar has a studio away from his home.

If their reasons for being in Paris are different, so are their reactions to how living in a foreign country makes a difference in their writing.

Lamar has seen an evolution in his work as a result of living abroad, although he says it has not made a "line for line" difference. At first he continued to use the USA for his settings. His third book used the OJ Simpson trial as a backdrop. He told W3 that the geographic distance gave him a perspective that he could not have had in the USA, which he said "seemed obsessed with the trial," where in Paris it was a quick blurb in the news. However, his book that will be released in November titled RENDEVOUS EIGHTEEN is set in his Parisian neighbourhood. The one he is working on now is also set in Paris. Lamar is using the same characters as RENDEZ-VOUS 18 with minor characters taking protagonist roles in the new work and vice versa.

When Davis was asked how living abroad had affected her work she said, "There's no doubt I write differently now than I did when I lived in Canada. Although I suspect that has as much to do with being sober and ten years older. Time and experience, both life and literary, certainly change you as a writer. Still, living abroad with the singularity of the perpetual stranger, as I have for over a decade, can't help but alter one's outlook. In turn, this affects the work. As a result of being confronted so often with opinions vastly different from my own, I am more introspective than I was. One has to think about beliefs one has taken for granted when in the company of people who approach life from a vastly different perspective. One is often asked, 'Why do you believe such and such…' When I first arrived in France I found that question unsettling, and discovered that to some degree, much of what I said I believed was simply what everyone around me back home had believed. I entered a period where I deeply questioned my assumptions, my perspectives, my beliefs. It's a period that has never ended, and frankly, I hope it never will. "

Davis's book THE STUBBORN SEASON was set in Canada during the Great Depression. She was writing about her home base as much as the untravelled Flannery O'Connor did. For Davis it meant leaving Paris. She said, "There was a point during the writing when I simply had to go back to Toronto to do some research. Not only did I want access to the libraries and archives, I found I needed to soak up the atmosphere of the streets. I think that was largely due, however, to the historical nature of the book. I find I write quite easily about Canada in general. Of course, this may be like writing about one's childhood, which is as much, I think, a question of imagination as fact. I often say the childhood I remember is probably not the childhood I had. Perhaps that's the case with the Canada I write about. But this is also true of any work of fiction, isn't it? I write about the Canada that is mine, related to my memories, my experience, and although I hope it strikes a chord of recognition with others, there's no guarantee it will."

Lamar, who knows Davis, says that he does not do the research she does, but he tends to use areas he knows. In THE LAST INTEGRATIONIST he used Martha's Vineyard as a location. His description was so vivid I became home sick reading it. Lamar admitted he had only been there once.

Like Lamar, Davis has changed to a Parisian setting for her next novel, THE RADIANT CITY. "One main character is a Canadian war correspondent, another a Lebanese woman who runs a restaurant, and a third is an American Vietnam Vet. A lot of the research involving the journalist I was able to do on the web - details of various conflicts, journalist reports, that sort of thing, and the same with the wars in Lebanon and Vietnam, but nothing takes the place of talking to people, walking the streets, listening to the voices, soaking up the sense details."

Being an ex-pat can leave you English-isolated. Lamar says French has become more and more present in his life. After his first three years in Paris, he became serious about learning the language and began to work with a tutor. Last year he started dreaming in French, and found he corrected himself as part of the dream. When he told his Dutch/Swiss wife, she pointed out that his original French was correct and in his dream he corrected himself incorrectly. Lamar now is comfortable in talking at book fairs in French. He doesn't see the mixture as a problem. He says he never expects to be proficient enough to write in French, but admires writers who can write fluently in a second tongue. Learning a language does take time and patience, one more chore for a writer's day.

Davis has strong feelings on living surrounded by a tongue not her own. "Up until about a year ago working in English while surrounded by another language made English almost sacred. I loved how precious it was, special, while there was a wall of other language just outside the door. French was the language of the street, the shops, the bureaucracy, while English was the language of my imagination and, because it's the language I speak with my husband and friends at home, also the language of love and even sanctuary. However, over the past year or so I find I'm forgetting words in English, substituting French words. And worse, I'm no longer able to conjure up the voices of characters whose mother tongue is English with the same ease as before. The rhythm of French has crept into my English construction. This is not good. It worries me, and to be honest I'm looking forward to going back to North America for this reason. Although it's obviously possible to write well in English while living in a non-English speaking country, I think, for me, it is important to spend a certain amount of time in an English-speaking place. Perhaps I haven't been back enough, for long enough, over the last decade - whatever the reason, it has begun to take a toll.

Hemingway hung out with Fitzgerald, but does Paris have a community of writers today? Lamar spoke of his writer friends, which include Davis, the late poet Ted Joans and Diane Johnson. Lamar said he found American writers he met in Paris, "more open and feeling of camaraderie then in the US." He suspects that "it may be a function of us being foreign."

Davis also has writer friends on both sides of the ocean. She says she receives "invaluable support from them all." She chooses careful. "In France the writers I know come from all over, and we're all living outside our primary markets, which does make a difference. We're not competing for the same publishing dollars from the same publishers, nor for the same prizes, etc. Although writing should never be a competitive sport, there's no doubt that the lions of jealousy and resentment have to be tamed by all writers. I learned the hard way to give a wide berth to people who haven't dealt with those sorts of things. The writers in my circle now, either here or in Canada are all dedicated craftspeople who delight in the successes of their friends and are generous with their support."

Lamar does not visualize returning to the States, although he says he does not consider himself in exile as some other Black American writers have felt. He has renounced nothing. He feels he is an American who loves living in Paris. Davis may or may not stay there.

On a personal note and as an ex-pat myself, I am aware that the perception of those that stay "home" about those of us who live in foreign lands varies from the reality. This became clear when I emailed a friend who was Stateside about meeting my daughter in Basel for lunch, the half way point between her home in Mannheim and mine in Geneva. His response -- "You have such a glamorous life." I didn't have the heart to tell him we'd lunched at Burger King. I then changed the laundry and took out the trash followed by sweating over a story I was working on and couldn't quite nail.

No matter where we live as writers, we have the richness of our surroundings for our stories. It is what we do with them. Ex-pat Hemingway said writing was more perspiration than inspiration. Those serious about their writing perspire wherever they write.

SAMPLES

These two samples are from LIFE IN A POSTCARD ESCAPE TO THE FRENCH PYRENEES by Rosemary Bailey. It's non fiction book about how she and her husband renovated a medieval monastery. It could be best described as the movie THE MONEY PIT meets A YEAR IN PROVENCE. Unlike A YEAR IN PROVENCE, which tends to mock the locals, Bailey treats them with a great deal of respect. In every line, the reader feels her reverence for the past as well as her respect for the present.

"The battered but beautiful thirteenth century Romanesque chapel was abandoned by the monks at the Revolution and has been used as a barn and cowshed ever since. Once after going in for firewood stored there we forgot to turn off the light and it shone all night, the only light in the darkness of the valley, just as if would have done seven centuries ago when the chapel was built and there was a hermit in residence to keep a candle burning day and night."

The place plays on her sense of well being, but she not only changes her life from the city of London to a tiny French mountain village, a flat for a monastery, but in her imagination she changes time zones and assumes the role of a monk growing herbs during the Middle Ages.

"I have responsibility for the herb garden, where we grow herbs and medicinal plants, for cooking and treating ailments. One of our most important duties is to care for the sick and needy and there are many in need in the village of Mosset. The lavender is ready to cut, so the flowers can be pressed for oil. It has so many uses: for bites and stings, rheumatism, and burns, as well as relieving tension and insomnia. The yellow flowers of St. John's Wort, good for wounds and bruises, and used to dispel melancholy, are already are already steeping in oil in the sun. I nibble a few feathery leaves of chervil which we can add to the salad tomorrow."

Throughout the book we see how her life is changed by her environment.

EXERCISES

1. Using what Lauren B. Davis said about belief, list five of your most common beliefs. Try and imagine the opposite. If necessary use the web and try and get into the head of a person who thinks totally differently. If you're a conservative, try and think like a liberal, if you're a sportsman try and think about being handicapped, if your religious think like a pagan, etc.

2. Find a newspaper on the web from another country and read it daily for a week and try and notice what the different perspectives are. If they have a classified look at the way flats and houses are advertised, help wanted (Example: an American might be surprised to see how many countries specify, age, gender, and appearance in their help wanted ads). Try and gather enough information for a short story set in that place.

NOTES

1. Lauren B. Davis was born and raised in Montreal, Canada and now lives in France where she teaches creative writing. Lauren is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection RAT MEDICINE AND OTHER COLLECTIVE CURATIVES (Mosaic Press 2000) and the best-selling novel THE STUBBORN SEASON (HarperCanada 2002). Her short stories, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous literary journals. Her website is www.laurenbdavis.com.

2. Jake Lamar is the author of BOURGEOIS BLUES and four novels: THE LAST INTEGRATIONIST, CLOSE TO THE BONE, IF SIX WERE NINE, (translated into French as Le Caméléon Noir) and the forthcoming RENDEVOUS EIGHTEEN. He grew up in the Bronx, is a graduate of Harvard where he studied literature. He worked for Time Magazine writing Milestones before being promoted. His web site is www.jakelamar.com.

3. Although W3 deals primarily with fiction, it is amazing how many different niches we can find as writers. We came across The Keeping Hearth & Home Series, an American publisher producing primers for living in the United States…100 to 150 years ago. The Keeping Hearth & Home series recalls the ideals of 19th century America through the "prescriptive literature" of its cookbooks, newspapers and magazines. Featuring culinary practices characteristic of their states and social advice pertinent to their regions during the second half of the 1800's, books on Old Alabama, Massachusetts, Ohio, Texas and Colorado entertain with period quaintness and enlighten with timeless wisdom. Says author Carol Padgett, It is almost like a picnic under the family tree beside the river of time! Order at www.menasharidge.com. Meet the author at www.keepinghearthandhome.com.

No 18. Writing about Place Part I

This is the first of two parts on writing about place. What is it like for writers who have always lived in one location? Next issue we will talk with ex-pat writers who find themselves far away from their home. We'll look at how location combined with experience can help or hurt us as writers.

THEORY

When I was growing up in a small New England town, my mother claimed she was English although our ancestors left England around 1635. She never got closer to England than a few waves into the Atlantic. She pushed our WASPishness (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) background against my Father's Frenchness, which was not considered acceptable. Because we concentrated on being so English I didn't think I had an ethnic background. That was the norm. I envied the Italians in town who ate spaghetti with every meal instead of periodically and my friends with names of O' something when they step danced. At the time I didn't think that my grandmother baking beans in her grandmother's bean pot every Saturday night, carefully balancing the mustard to the molasses and salt pork much as our Pilgrim ancestors had done, was ethnic.

In the same way, I thought school closings in winter were normal. Everyone had Robert Frost stone walls around their land, and went to Saturday football games and tried out for the baton squad.

I felt the same way as many writers I've met who've always lived in the same place. What can be interesting about things that are so common we don't even see them.

I was wrong. Place can often serve almost as another character in another dimension to a story.

The lesson was reconfirmed when I was doing my masters at the University of Glamorgan. I had written a scene where children ducked under their desk as an anti-atomic bomb drill when the town's siren went off. My seven cohorts, all raised in the UK, thought it was exotic, in the same way I envied them the details in their writing about vicars, jumble sales, A-Levels, gap years, the pub and dart games. These details would not have worked for a book set near Boston MA.

An anthropologist friend of mine said good anthropology can't be done in a person's own culture because people are too close to it. How sad it would be if that were true for writers. However, if it were true you wouldn't have wonderfully regional writers like US Southern writers like Flannery O'Connor, Australian writers like Janet Turner Hospital, etc. Not to mention the great English writers like Waugh or Lawrence who captured their own home areas to such a degree that readers feel we are living in the environment.

To truly reflect the regions that we come from, we need to almost pretend we are newcomers. What are some of the details that writers can use to create place:

Geography - Is the land flat, hilly, forest covered, near a lake or sea? A book set in Louisiana needs a bayou, and Paris without the Eiffel tower isn't really Paris. The question is - is it trite to mention it? Can another famous landmark be used? And if the region isn't famous, what in the landscape can make it vivid to someone who will only be there in their imagination.

Food - What are the local dishes and can you mention them without stereotyping? Catfish and grits come from the US south, lobster from New England, but MacDonald's exist almost everywhere (but not in Syria). If you are trying to write about another area make sure you have the local favourites down. An English writer once talked about Shoe Fly Pie as a Boston favourite. It is a traditional Amish dish in Pennsylvania, a good five hours away by car.

Weather - Despite climate change, a blizzard in Puerto Rico would seem out of place, but if you have a novel set in Maine in January, it is almost necessary. If it isn't there, then its absence says something.

Accents - How to write good accents could be a book in itself, not a mere paragraph in a newsletter. If overdone, it turns the reader off. Think of reading page after page of a Boston accent. I think I will pahk my cah in Hahvahd yahd while I get a Hoodsie, and watch the Sawks and eat candy bahs while waiting for my Awnt and Uncle. (Note: You can't park in Harvard yard, because it is grass covered and the Harhavhd police will arrest you). A sprinkling of an accent can give flavour. Likewise expressions can trigger local feelings. In the TV show mystery "Murder She Wrote" Jessica solved the crime because the person who claimed he was from the area didn't know that Maine is known as "Down East".

Class - Place should also include the socio-economic status. A good choosing of details can tell a lot. Do the people work in a factory, or commute to Wall Street leaving their SUVs and boats behind. Do they mine opals? Have an air boat that ducks alligators? Place can be a neighbourhood as well as a town or region.

Environment - As humans we are affected by what is around us. If a character lives far out in the country does he long for a chance to visit museums? Likewise does a person feel trapped in concrete canyons of a major city and yearn for a garden and raises tomatoes in a garbage pail (bin if he's in London). Does the person who lives near museums but not go. Use the place to develop the character for your readers.

Limited place - a story can take place within a house, a room that has no bearing on which part of the world the character lives in.

Transportation - SUVs aren't popular in Europe. In fact big cars aren't appreciated what with gas prices at about four times those of the States. If your character has a bike, is he in step or do people think he's weird. If the setting is Holland, it would be normal, but someone biking to work in Los Angeles, might not ring true or be a wonderful character detail.

Clothing - As a child I read a series of books about twins all over the world and they always wore native costumes. Although you will still find Bavarian women in Dirndls, and farmers in jeans, clothing is a way to show about location and climate. A bikini is not worn outside in January in Montreal, but a person could put on a sweater, jacket, scarf, hat and mittens and still be cold "showing" something about the place and temperature without having to "tell" the reader anything. Or if something is based in Ocean Grove, NJ, bathing suits can't be worn anywhere but the beach.

Smell - Seasides have a certain odour, as do fish markets. Mud smells different in spring, a factory can ooze smells, as does any place near a bakery. The NECCO factory in Cambridge, MA used to leave a smell of caramelized sugar in the air. NECCO are round coloured wafers sold in rolls. I'm not sure if they are still made, but it is a detail that could add a special feeling to a story set in that city where MIT and Hahvahd students predominate.

Mores - What we consider normal, other people might consider exotic. A bonfire is normal to celebrate many occasions in various localities. Do people drop in unexpectedly or is it necessary to make plans well in advance?

Sometimes newer writers give too many details about a place. This was common in literature of the 1800s where every piece of furniture might be described until a reader wanted to yell, "Enough all ready!" It isn't necessary to describe each turn in the road to get from place A to place B. Choose the details that make the place jump out in the minds of the readers.

EXAMPLES

Example 1

"We've got a ranch house. Daddy built it. Daddy says it's called RANCH 'cause it's like houses out west where cowboys sleep. There's a picture window in all ranch houses and you're in one of them out west, you can look out and see the cattle eatin' grass on the plains and the cowboys ridin' around with their lassos and tall hats. But we ain't got nuthin' like that here in Egypt, Maine. All Daddy and I got to look at is the Beans. Daddy says the Beans are uncivilized animals, PREDATORS he calls them."

Notice how Carolyn Chute in the BEANS OF EGYPT MAINE, has used language. We immediately are in the scene with a narrator that is not highly educated. Interestingly she gives a picture of what isn't there.

Example 2

"Hazel Motes sat forward on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. The train was racing through tree tops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun standing, very red, on the edge of the farthest woods. Nearer the plowed fields, curved and faded and the few hogs nosing in the furrows looked liked spotted stones."

Here Flannery O'Connor places us on a train, we feel the material and see the colour of the seats to get an interior sense of place as well as the exterior sense with red sons and a country setting. The name of the place isn't important, but readers feel it.

Example 3

"The Chamber of Commerce defines Cape Cod as comprising fifteen towns divided into countless villages, 365 lakes and ponds, long ribbons of good road and 399 square miles of land forming a strong flexed arm reaching out to grab a hunk of the North Atlantic. Nary a word about Marshfield, although when asked to describe the town, most locals hesitate only a moment before responding, 'down the Cape.'

"Marshfield, the so called 'Irish Riveria,' isn't exactly Cape Cod being that land divided from the mainland by the Cape Cod Canal with Bournedale, Cedarville and the Cape Cod Canal and Buzzards bay tacked on to gain access to lovely Sagamore Beach and including of course, those two famous islands, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, refuge of rock stars and presidents.

"Marshfield's too far north to qualify. Wrong county. A working class neighbourhood dotted with small, mostly neat cottages a half mile walk from an eroding beach.

"I am not talking 'summer cottages' as in Newport or the Berkshires. I am talking no loyer, walk smack into the living room, one or two bedrooms max…"

Here Linda Barnes narrows her place from region, to town, to type of cottages, to a tour of one of them all the while throwing in class comparisons.

EXERCISES

1. If you live in a town go to the centre. If you live in the city go to a park. If you live in the country go to a quiet spot. Make a list of everything you notice,
2. If you have always lived in the same place, find a newcomer and interview them about what they note as different from the place they come. (In Boston I was amazed when an exchange student was fascinated by all the different colour trucks he saw. I never had noticed.) If you are new to a place make two lists comparing the old place to the new.
3. Find out something about the region you've lived in all your life that you didn't know. If you are living outside your home region, go back and find out something you missed while you lived there.

NOTES

In Europe it has been the hottest summer in summer. The French use the word La Canucule to describe the heat wave. Although I love the way the word sounds as it rolls off my tongue, I hate what it is doing to the continent. Forest fires are ravaging France, Portugal, Canada. The Danube has lost two-thirds of its water, revealing a German ship hidden from view since WWII. Wherever you are, please work to help conserve this planet, before we all destroy it.

No 17 Naming Your Characters

THEORY

Although she is 34, my daughter Llara, still hasn't forgiven me for putting the second L in her name. All my explanations that I disliked the commonness of "Donna" although I love D-L or Donna-Lane and wanted to give her an original name have not changed her opinion. No matter that she brushed aside the common name David for our Japanese Chin puppy in favour of Amadeus (now long gone to the great dog biscuit factory in the sky). However I got to name my villain David in my novel CHICKPEA LOVER NOT A COOKBOOK.

As writers we get to name far more people/animals than we get to do in real life. However, the names we select are another tool in developing the character of the person we are writing about.

Names tell us about nationality, age and much more.

Names have trends. Most of Llara's friends had names like Jennifer, Laurie or Lisa. If she were a teenager today she might be surrounded by Brittany(s) and Courtney(s) if she still lived in the States. An eighty-year old American Brittany isn't believable any more than a ten-year old American Mabel.

Old fashioned names can make a comeback. Emma(s) are beginning to be found more and more. I still think of Emma as the bitch my best friend's father used to date not the talented writer actress Emma Thompson or some little girl splashing in a plastic swimming pool on the grassy area of our apartment complex.

While an English writer might be happy to name a character Nigel or Simon, a writer wouldn't choose it for an American man. I have thought of a short story about an American politician named Simon and christened "Simple Simon" by the press because of his honesty. It's not the name that's giving me problems, but the idea of an honest politician in these troublesome times.

Living in Geneva where parents often transfer from country to county every four or five years, they agonise over giving names to their children that will work in many different lands. Some work cross-culturally like Thomas or Alexander for boys or Mary and Anne (Anna) for girls. However, many of you write from your own culture only, but if you ever have a foreigner in your stories, think of what works for your characters from other places. Remember there can be regional and class differences as well.

Gender can be a problem on naming as well. I did learn the hard way that a British Robin is male rather than female as in the States. The mother of the baby boy Robin smiled politely, after she opened my gift of a frilly pink dress. The lesson is if you use a sexually ambiguous name identify the gender immediately for your readers.

A writer with a Welsh character can't go wrong with the names Richard or Owen. Evans or Jones always makes a good last name and if you want to show Welsh patriotism, Bronwyn for a girl. However good a Scotsman by the name of Angus would be, it might not work for a Texan unless the father named his kids for cattle, which certainly shows character. Likewise Irish-ancestry characters can be Fiona, Shamus, Sean (of many spellings) and Liam.

In my classes at Webster University in Geneva, my Russian students all seemed to be named Elena, Oxana, Vassily, and Victor and one Thomas.

German names Ute, Elke, Regina, Günther, and oh yes, Thomas might work, but I am not sure of which age group to assign them too. I would rely heavily on my German friends if I were creating a German character.

Names have connotations personal and otherwise. For me the name Maud always conjures up my lavender-smelling, lace handkerchief carrying great aunt. She was nothing like the 14-year old living down the hall. But the name, added to the smell and handkerchief carrying, makes a character I can put it in a story.

Telling why you named a character can add to the depth of a story. Why did the mother choose Elvis for her son or why do people have numbers? A character named Thomas Witherington IV says a lot a person's status - or a family trying to gather status.

Romance writers seem to give unusual names, especially to their men. Thor, Stark, and my favourite by Sandra Brown, a Cajun named Cash Boudreau - half because Boudreau was my maiden name. Non-romance writers should choose more plebeian names because an unusual names draw attention away from a character.

Names are becoming more and more globalised. For example: Last year the most popular names given to babies in the Francophone part of Switzerland were Emma and Jennifer (I suspect because a Jennifer won the talent contest on Star Academy on TF1) and for boys David and you guessed it - Thomas. However these names might not work if you were writing about Swiss characters. (By the way if anyone wants to write about a Swiss-French woman over 50, try Madeleine.) However if we have foreign characters too American sounding names they just don't ring true.

My Australian mate says that names from Oz would include Bruce, Alan, Darryl, Gregory, Geoffrey, Jeffrey, Robert, Rob, John, Dick, Colin, Ian, Brian, Sue, Philippa, Margaret, Jennifer, Lyn, Marjorie, Cynthia, Christine, Chris, Diane, Cheryl, Sharon.

Where do we find our names? For my mystery set in Argelés, France, I walked through the cemetery there. I can guarantee regional authenticity, besides being able to look at the photos often sealed in the tombstones.

Name books, the telephone book, newspapers, name plates on apartment buildings, and death notices also are sources. Matching the age of a character to a name might work. Little English girls were often named Elizabeth and Margaret after the princesses in the 1950s and Diana became popular from the time of her engagement to Prince Charles.

One mistake new writers often make is to give names to their characters that are too close to each other. A short story with characters named Jean, Joan, Jane, Jack, Jenny, could drive the reader a bit batty.

My daughter should be grateful to her father for making me abandon the hippie name of Cloud in favour of Dr. Zhivago's 1969 name of Lara even with the second "l" as I'm grateful to a cocker spaniel named Bonnie, which would have been my name had my mother not met a dog with that name the night before I was born. That's Bonnie not Bbonnie. I like the name, but it doesn't fit me.

A note on name changes when you decide to change the name of a character after you've written a number of pages, there can be a problem with find and replace on your computer. I changed one character's name from Lou to Gino and found I had a lot of words like BGinoese, Ginoisiana, etc.

EXAMPLES

Sample 1

This isn't a sample you can read, but if you haven't seen the movie SHAKESPEAR IN LOV E go see it or rent the DVD or video. For those who have seen it, remember how the first title of "Romeo and Juliet" was "Romeo and Ethel" then Romeo and Rosalind" and then finally a character suggest Romeo and Juliet? Think of the line

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

It just doesn't work as well with the names Ethel or Rosalind although Romeo and Rosalind as a title does have a nice alliteration.

Sample 2

I think this is the greatest naming explanation in modern fiction. It is from THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving and tells the story of Garp's conception. Garp's mother, Jenny is a nurse and his father is a soon-to-die patient who is limited to one word. At one point she makes love to him and conceives her son, whom she names after the one word that patient could say. (Notice that John Irving breaks the rule not to use many!, but if you're John Irving, you can do that.)

"He cried 'Garp' when he was glad; he asked 'Garp?' when something puzzled him, or when addressing strangers, and he said 'Garp' without the question mark when he recognized you. He usually did what was told, but he couldn't be trusted; and he forgot easily, and if one time he was as obedient as a six-year old, another time he was as mindlessly curios as if he were one and a half…

"She gave up trying to teach him a new word. When she fed him and she saw that he liked, she'd say, 'Good! That's good.'

"'Garp,' he agree.

"And when he spat out food on his bib and made a terrible face, she'd say, 'Bad! That's stuff bad, right?'

"Garp!' he'd gag.

The first sign Jenny had of his deterioration was when he seemed to lose the G. One morning he greeted her with 'Arp'.

"'Garp,' she said firmly to him, 'G-arp.'

"'Arp,' he said. She knew he was losing him.

"Daily he seemed to grow younger. When he slept, he kneaded the air with his wriggling fists…But gunner Garp was not all baby. One night when he nursed at her, Jenny noticed he had an erection that lifted the sheet. ..

"'Ar,' he moaned. He had lost the P.

"Once a Garp, then an Arp, now only an Ar: she knew he was dying.

EXERCISES

1. Write out three series of character traits. Make them very different then come up with a name for the three people. Ask yourself at what point you decide on a name of your characters.
2. Take the last book you just read and see if you can think of a better name for the main characters.
3. Think of how you associate names with people. For example: in first grade a little girl name Brenda, who sat behind me in class, painted my new blouse and ruined it. I have a tendency to name my less nice characters Brenda. (apologies to all readers named Brenda) but then ask yourself is it a personal reaction or a general reaction.

NOTES

A letter from a reader on our last issue about more places to get story ideas:

Just meeting an odd word and wondering what it means can lead to interesting thoughts sometimes, too - in the end you might not even use the word in whatever you are writing, but it might set up a chain of events

Conversations are another favourite source, though I'm still trying to fit in the two old ladies I heard about 20 years ago saying that the country's woes would be cured by us having a "collision government".

Dreams - as worked for Robert Louis Stephenson - can trigger off thoughts, am currently working on a couple of short stories where I have wakened up with

a)a sentence and
b)an idea in my head.

Then don't forget pictures, past and present, famous, family... I'd love to know what other people use as inspiration, too!

CHILDREN'S WRITERS WANTED

Can you write a vibrant, gripping story that will make children want to read?

If you can then StoryPlus would like to hear from you.

StoryPlus is an online children's publishing company that aims to provide high-quality, entertaining stories that will help children develop the most fundamental of all educational skills - literacy - by making reading fun.

If you believe you can write stories that will grip children and carry them through page after page then please send an email to info@storyplus.com for Writers Guidelines and further information. Or check the website www.storyplus.com

No 16. Story Ideas

THEORY

One thing I hear most often from new writers is where do ideas come from. What triggers a story or a novel?

Everything.

In our very active Geneva Writers Group when a member talks about a personal experience usually over lunch at the Café du Soleil, someone will almost always ask, 'Are you turning it into a story?' Thus a runaway child, a child that gets bad grades, a husband's affair, a grouchy boss, a death in the family, a broken-down car on the autoroute, a woman on the beach who talks incessantly are all potential stories.

When I was a new writer still unsure of everything I did, I visited an inner city Digital plant. The HR person told me how she wasn't afraid of being at a rather dangerous T-stop (T is the nickname for the Boston subway system) while waiting for the shuttle to the plant.

'Why?' I asked her.

'There's a wino with a big dog. He comes and stands with me. He says he's protecting me.' She laughed and shook her head. 'Not that he would be any good, but in a way, it's nice.'

This led to my short story, 'The Wino and the Woman.' The heroine changed races, age, and economic class, which became part of her story. An unsatisfactory boyfriend was added. He faired badly as a decent human compared to the wino. I showed the story to the woman who had triggered it, because I felt in I had stolen her story, but she was thrilled with it.

Many new writers when they use a life event often say, 'but it happened that way,' when a critic suggests this or that should be changed. One of the wonderful things about taking a seed of a story, is that the writer can change the results to suit themselves. Characters whose prototype never suffered for their bad actions can be penalized, the dead can live, the living can die, the fire can be put out in time or not. We don't have to follow the exact events but rearrange them to suit the story (would that we had the same power in real life). However, we have to be true to the story on what makes it work.

John Irving talks about starting with something real, but because it is boring he adds something here and there until he has an "autobiography on the way to becoming a lie."

Sometimes stories don't come from something as exact as a specific situation. Years ago, Dr. Hug, Leo Buscalgia, talked about old people still making love. This triggered my story 'Never Too Old' about how two grown daughters reacted to the discovery that their 72-year old mother was having an affair. One was shocked. One was thrilled.

Story ideas can come from the news, television programmes, an unsuccessful short story written earlier, but with a character that has something to say, from events, a sermon anything that you observe.

If you have writer friends sit down together and talk about story ideas. Try and write an anthology around a central theme: a fair, several people in the same movie theatre, a vacation resort, etc. Or take a sentence at random from somewhere and see what different stories develop from it.

Read Nathalie Goldberg's WRITING DOWN THE BONES and free write regularly.

The secret as writers is to find the seed and nourish it. To ask the what ifs - what if this happened, what if that person said this or did that. Maybe we need to do two or three different versions, highlighting different scenes, changing the balance between characters, cutting out or adding to the original idea.

The key to finding story ideas is to observe what is happening around you.

SAMPLES

"Story ideas come from everywhere and anywhere. I might see a wire service article in the LA Times and realise that it contains the kernel for a novel as I did when I wrote Well-Schooled in Murder. I might see an exposé in a British Newspaper and decide that it can serve as the foundation for a novel as I did when I wrote Missing Joseph. I might want to use a specific location in one of my books, so I'll design a story that fits into the location…I might see someone on the street or in the underground, overhear a conversation between two individuals, listen to someone's experience, study a photograph, or determine a particular type of character would be interesting to write about. On sometimes what stimulates the story idea is a combination of any of these things.
Elizabeth George in I Richard.

EXERCISES

1. Take a book you like. Find a minor character. Then using that character as a base, develop a life for that character.

2. Buy a tabloid. Using one of the stories about an event, 'Man escapes shark' or 'Little boy found after hours in the woods' and develop that into a story.

3. Walk around a shopping centre and listen to bits of conversation. Jot them down in a journal. Develop one into a short story.

4. List three events in your life where you were totally unsure of yourself. Narrow it down to one and create a character of the opposite sex that has a similar problem.

No. 15 Travel Writing

THEORY

Remember the Story
by Larry Habegger.

The best travel stories are really stories about life, with lessons for the writer and reader about ourselves and the people and places in our still magical world. We don't have to travel far to explore both the outer and inner worlds.

Some of us love to roam the world, close to the ground, under the radar. Others would rather stay close to home, poking into niches in nearby neighborhoods and discovering new meaning in everyday things. It doesn't matter, really, which way you approach travel when you're interested in writing about it. It's all life experience, and the probing of meaning beneath the surface of things.

But travel writing is necessarily about place and the traveler's relationship with it. What is it about the place, whether it's a market in your own hometown or a souk in a medina, that captures, engages, or even repels you? What does that place tell you about the culture you are suddenly immersed in, the people who create it, and yourself? These answers don't come readily; they require observation, reflection, teasing out. They require taking your time to draw in what's around you and distil it through your own experience to find a truth for yourself, and then, once found, to communicate to others through your writing.

An easy way to begin this process (and a good way to get started writing anytime, even at your own desk) is to focus on all five senses and write about them in a simple journal. Think not just about what you see, but also about what you hear, smell, taste, and touch (or what touches you: the chair, the air, the breeze, the pen and paper in your hands). This helps you draw a portrait of the place and gives you entry points into deeper reflection, like a painter sketching a scene before applying the brush. This reflection will often lead toward vignettes that can develop into deeper, longer stories, but sometimes the vignettes will be enough to communicate a world of meaning. They tell a story of their own, sometimes the whole story. And telling stories is vitally important. It's the way we learn, teach, and share our humanity.

The Importance of Stories

The importance of stories to prepare for travel was at the core of the founding of Travelers' Tales, the publishing company started by James and Tim O'Reilly and me in 1993. When Tim, a computer book publisher (O'Reilly & Associates), was heading to Australia for a conference many years ago, he intended to bring his family along and take an extra week to explore the Great Barrier Reef. He read about places to go and things to do in several guidebooks, but as appealing as everything sounded, it all sounded the same, and he couldn't find a way to make a choice. In the end he didn't bother. On the way home he read a story about a family vacation on Lady Elliot Island in the in-flight magazine. Suddenly he knew where he wanted to go, but by then it was too late. If he had read that story while preparing for his journey he would have found the place he wanted and discovered it for himself.

Tim's experience illustrated a premise that is all too often overlooked -- the importance of stories in travel preparation. It started him thinking about a void in travel publishing and led to discussions with his brother, James, about creating a new line of travel books that would do for others what that magazine story had done for him - capture the imagination.

The story he had read of a woman snorkelling with her daughter brought Lady Elliot Island to life because it was presented through the lens of human experience. The story itself was not particularly dramatic-the author's daughter's encounter with a sea turtle was the centerpiece-but it made clear the relaxed, family-oriented nature of the island and the easy access to the reef. Mostly though, it was the human element of the personal essay that made Lady Elliot stand out as a desirable location, when the glowing paragraphs of the standard travel guides had given an overwhelming sameness to all the islands.

The point of Tim's story is that information is so much more accessible-so much more real-when communicated in narrative form. Stories act as vehicles to link information with different parts of your psyche so places stand out, ideas get translated, and you make the information your own.

Everyone knows the pleasure of a good story. When you've been on the road and had remarkable experiences, it's great fun to tell your friends about what happened and how it moved you. Or as we all know, when things go wrong, the story gets so much better once enough time has passed. In fact, creating our own stories is one of the reasons we travel. But stories are much more than entertainment.

Stories are the lifeblood of human interaction and have fueled the imagination about the outside world since time immemorial. Stories inform, enlighten, engage, communicate, open up the individual and create access to cultures and places that would otherwise remain mysterious, challenging, even threatening. Stories demystify while helping retain mystique. Stories make the exotic seem both more alluring and more accessible.

Stories act as a magic carpet to explore concepts you might never otherwise know and prepare you emotionally and psychologically for adventures into foreign lands. And in the most practical sense, they help you decide what experiences you'd like to have or avoid, what places you'd like to visit or bypass.

Who could imagine the hospitality of a Berber's tent before reading a story about the extraordinary feast a traveler had there? Who could conjure the interaction with the Tibetan llama on the flanks of Mount Everest without hearing the tale of the traveler who made the simple human contact? Who could comprehend the thrill of racing across the Mongolian steppes on horseback without reading the story of the traveler who did it?

Well, maybe we could all imagine it, but when reading these stories we know that these experiences are real and could be ours. Or we know that experiences like these are possible, and are possible for us. The power of stories is so strong that often all it takes is a few words to create worlds of meaning. Take, for instance, James O'Reilly's encounter in a French restaurant. In this simple vignette he communicates the influence of French culture on both dining and language and also on the behavior of outsiders, specifically, those with inadequate French.

The maître d' fixes you with an intense gaze, and with a sweep of his hand grants permission to leave his exquisite, perfect restaurant. He says only "Bonsoir, monsieur," but his words-so deep, rich (yes, mellifluous)-are a gift, a magnanimous act. You strive to reciprocate, but it comes out too high, absurd: "Bone-swahr," a German dog biscuit which goes skittering across the floor to clatter at the feet of frowning diners. Alas, you are a caveman. You may as well go now to the coat check and ask for your skins and your club and shamble into the night.

Or consider my own account of seeing the Himalayas for the first time in an Indian hill town. Again, a simple few words creates a profound understanding of the power of place, and puts the reader squarely there.

I arrived in Darjeeling in a dense fog. Above the window in the living room of the teahouse was a panoramic photograph of the most magnificent mountains I had ever seen. I asked where the scene was. The proprietor tilted her head as if I were nuts and pointed out the window. "There," she said. I looked out at the solid bank of clouds and vowed to stay as long as necessary to see that sight. Each morning I'd wake up and eagerly look out my window but it was always the same grey mist, until one morning I awoke at dawn and sensed something different in the texture of the sky visible from my bed. My heart started to race. I sat up and there, filling the window and most of the sky was the glimmering massif of Kanchenjunga, dusted a brilliant red by the rising sun and sprawling across the horizon as if embracing the whole world. For many moments I disappeared into it, overcome by the sheer gravity of the mountain. I had never seen a more powerful vision.

Or take James O'Reilly's thoughts while visiting a World War II site in Normandy. They bring the horrors and poignancy of war to mind with a force so powerful you can feel it in your gut.

I don't think the hideous intimacy of war ever quite came home to me until I visited the Peace Museum in Caen. It wasn't a picture of bodies blasted to bits, or gaunt prisoners, or tanks in flames, but of a 17-year-old girl about to be hanged in Warsaw. She was smiling, forgiving the whole thing with the beauty of her soul and her short life. But the most awful thing about the picture was the face of the German soldier with the noose. He looked so terribly unhappy. Poor bastard, I thought (standing there with my own daughters) he didn't want to do it. Perhaps he was even a father himself, and if he refused his orders, no doubt he would be shot. What awful set of events brought him to this moment? What daisy chains of evil and banality and failures of free will? What would I do in such a situation? What would you do? And then, a bit farther down the hall, a photograph of Hitler in Paris, smiling.

These vignettes communicate far more to the reader than any practical information could, and it's because they are stories. Stories touch our human core and reach our emotions, drawing us in to the possibilities in the world and between each other. Stories carry magical powers, and sharing stories can make all the difference in the world.

The story you tell about your travels might create the same wanderlust in your friends, and inspire them to embark on a journey that could change their lives. Or you might motivate them to explore their own surroundings with greater awareness. You never know. Stories are like that. They are treasures, not to be hoarded, but spread around, enriching all.

Now sit back, and let me tell you a story…

SAMPLES

For plenty of samples go to http://www.travelerstales.com/carpet/index.tcl.

EXERCISES

Take your journal to a comfortable place (an outdoor café is ideal), and write for a certain period of time (as little as a minute, or as much as five to ten minutes or more) from each of the five senses: I see, I hear, I taste, I smell, I touch. When finished, add a sixth: I imagine. What you write should produce a portrait of the place and you in it, and lead to ideas to develop

NOTES

LETTERS TO W3

About Literary Factories

· My first reading was the Hardy Boys and their authorship was attributed to a Franklin W. Dixon -- who in fact was a Canadian who wrote the first two or three. I've done some ghost writing for a brand name, and with no compunctions. It was just a bit of fun, and pay check) but I would never want anyone to know that (blank) occasionally writes under other names. Nor would I like it if anyone wrote under mine.

Take care,
Rod

· Hi, thanks for the e-letters, they're inspiring.

It's funny literary factories came up, because I was just thinking about this yesterday.

First, (it's hard for this not to come across as snotty through e-mail, but I swear I'm not sneering as I type this), it's Tom Clancey, not James Patterson who has the Op-Center series. Poor Patterson is innocent! (Note from W3 - I was quoting Writers' News) I have to say I don't find them deceptive at all because it says right on the cover "'Tom Clancey's Op-Center' by Tom Clancey (in big letters), written with blah blah blah (in small letters)." These books pop out once a week, so it's obvious Clancey's not writing them. He created the original idea and original world and deserves to have his name on the cover. The minion who actually wrote the thing also has his name there, it's obvious he did all the writing, so for me; I see no problem with these.

I WOULD be upset if I read a book that says by JK ROWLING and come to find it was written by someone else (as is happening in China -- Harry Potter and the Golden Tortoise, etc.).

Second, as an author, you want to be branded. You want your name to become a brand because that's how you get name recognition and pump up your sales so you can make enough money to continue writing. Nothing wrong with that, I'd love tobe a brand name someday.

Third, branded industries can be a source of inspiration when sharing a world. I'll give an example -- the Star Wars novels. These are more often than not written by hacks, but its a universe familiar to many, and many writers might enjoy writing within the decided boundaries of this universe and get to contribute to and expand on it, as well. Personally, I'd rather create my own little universe, but as a child I spent countless hours in the Star Wars world inside my head, and I can definitely understand the lure of wanting to go back there.

I admit, this is different from the Nancy Drew series -- here you have a character, not a world, so it's closer to you personally, as a reader. Happens to other branded characters, too -- James Bond, Conan the Barbarian, Tarzan, etc. As long as the person who wrote it has his or her name on the cover and there is no deception involved, I see nothing wrong with it. At least you can shake your head and say "So-and-so sure doesn't write them like the creator!"

Ok, off to bang my head on my desk for a few hours...

-Derek Seklecki

No 14. Committing Acts of Language

THEORY

When we finish writing a piece how do we critique it?

If we have just finished it we are far too close to be objective. I've never understood why writing, which was brilliant when I put it in the drawer, becomes so flawed when I look at it months later. Are their demons inside changing my pristine prose into blathering?

Giving it to friends and family isn't any good. Either they will love it not to hurt you or hate it to hurt you. There may be an exception if a family member or friend is a professional editor or writer. Most of us aren't lucky enough to have one of those. Also family members are forever thinking your characters are really them or resent that you use other family members instead of them.

I'm fortunate to have a writing mate, an Australian who looks over everything I do (and vice versa). Until Sylvia says a piece is done, I don't consider it finished. She ferrets out the scene that doesn't fit, the phrase that doesn't work, the plain old-fashioned typo, the character who has blue eyes in the beginning and green at the end. We may never agree on commas, nor prepositions, which we chalk up to the difference between American and Australian English, but it does short circuit drawer time for our writing. It took us years to build up both our critiquing abilities, but at the same time it helped us both develop as writers. Since we are both fanatic writers, we also boost each other when we have had a rejection and celebrate each other successes.

Sometimes there are writing circles or groups. The success of depends on how good the critiquing is. If members are out to prove how bad everyone else but themselves is, then you won't get the help you want. If members can't articulate why something is good or bad, it may offer some help in identifying that there is a problem, but not what the problem is. Comments like that comma should be a semicolon certainly don't go deep enough when you want to know if Marcy was believable when she left Jack or did you need more foreshadowing.

A few years ago I came across a helpful grid. The original was developed by English writer Alex Keegan (author of the Caz Flood mystery novels and originator of a writers' boot camp that was a hard-driving self-help group). A later incarnation of the gird, the one used below, was used for critiquing for submissions to the World Wide Writer's magazine and is available on my website at www.wisewordsonwriting.com or www.worldwidewriters.com.

Although all critiquing is subjective going through the list helps focus anyone who is critiquing another. I wish my writing mate and I had it in the early days. It would have helped show us what to look for. It is a tool you can give to people when you want them to evaluate your work with more feedback than saying "I liked it," or "I didn't like it." It also allows them to be a bit more objective in their criticism.

Learning to critique another's work helps you learn how to critique your own, although to some extent you will always be to close.

SAMPLES

OPENING

• Superlative opening to a first class story 25
• Original and inventive - attention catching 20
• Intriguing start 10
• Room for improvement - not best feature 5
• Slow-pace for short story - picked up later 0
• Flat, lacked pace and punch -5
• Needed re-writing, an early letdown -10

TITLE

• Suited the story 10
• Needs improvement 5
• Try again 0

PLOT/THEME

• Strongest part of the story - Memorable 30
• Confidently handled - an assured touch 25
• Demanded and deserved full attention 20
• Original but not totally convincing 18
• A familiar situation but well handled 15
• This scenario has been overdone 12
• A touch superficial for the effort involved 10
• Strained credulity 5
• Neither important nor entertaining 0

ACTION AND PACE

• Effortless and well constructed 25
• Good control and well edited by the author 20
• Deteriorated after a promising start 15
• A re-write might improve the flow 10
• Struggled for control 5
• Too involved for a short story 0
• Too many unanswered questions -5
• Anecdotal - Lacked a good narrative -10

CHARACTERS

• Strong, confidently drawn and believable 25
• Easy people to understand and to recognise 20
• A mixture - some good, some sketchy 15
• Main character fine - lesser personnel flat 10
• Stock types, one dimensional 5
• Hard to believe these people could exist 0
• Much more work needed on characterisation -5

ENTERTAINMENT QUOTIENT

• A joy to read - Brilliant 40
• Quality writing throughout 35
• A page turner - as the Bookseller would say 25
• Good, but slightly run of the mill 20
• Some merit - competently told 15
• Might appeal to a minority 10
• Difficult to recommend 5
• No merit 0

DIALOGUE (if applicable)

• Vivid and crisp, in period, idiom and character 25
• Story well told in the words of the character 20
• Good, with one or two crisp exchanges 15
• Good, with one or two crisp exchanges 10
• More variety would have helped 5
• The idiom failed to match the theme 0
• Weakest point in the story -5

LANGUAGE

• Effortless style, sensitive feeling for words 30
• Smooth and easy to read 25
• Flashes of originality gave it extra sparkle 20
• Stylish but parts could be polished 18
• Fluent without being striking 16
• Good command - lacked memorable phrases 15
• Good story slightly let down in the telling 10
• Little feeling for words 0

ENDING

• Totally apt 25
• Room for improvement 15

DIRECTIONS

• Add up all the points. It is interesting to see how several people score the same story.
• Max Score 230
• 160+ is a good score
• 108 is average

EXERCISES

1. Take a short story that you have never read before and use the grid to critique it. Then give it to a friend to do the same and compare the results.

2. Give the grid and one of your short stories to at least two people you trust and ask them to grade it without telling them it is yours. Then compare the results.

NOTES

1. If any reader would like a FREE sample copy of Writers Forum please e mail your name and address to writintl@globalnet.co.uk of write to Writers forum PO Box 3229 Bournemouth BH1 www.worldwidewriters.com then check on manuscript checklist.

2. My writing mate Sylvia Petter's short story collection, "Past Present" is available on Amazon.

3. Alex's website is http://www.btinternet.com/~alex.keegan1/

No 13. Committing Acts of Language

THEORY

How many of you have confessed to a stranger that you are a writer only to be told, that they too are planning to take a month off to write a book? Yet can any of us imagine saying to a brain surgeon that we'd take a month off to learn to operate on the brain? (One writer friend claims to have said exactly that to a doctor after the doctor said he was going to write a book during a two-week holiday.)

Those who don't write often think writing is easy something to be whipped out on whim. You put words on paper in a recognizable format making sentences with a subject, verb, a direct object, maybe a preposition here or there. Add a period, a question mark or more rarely an exclamation point. Then after the first sentence, there's another and another, until you a paragraph, a page, a story, a novel. It's magic.

Good writing does not appear like magic. It takes work, discipline, commitment. As writers we commit acts of language.

It is not any noun or verb committed to paper that makes turns our work from a ditty into an opera, it is which noun and which verb is the best. It is building a sentence, a paragraph, a story, a novel as deliberately as carpenter constructs a house.

Words aren't just squiggly lines on paper. They have power to those that can decipher them. In a French movie, SWING, a middle class boy gives a gypsy girl the notebook where he had committed the contents of his soul to paper. After he leaves, she looks at the words and throws the notebook away. She can't read. His gift of words was lost to her. He, however, carried them away in his heart. Even without an audience, the young boy had committed acts of language.

Words carry weight, give color, make music. Words can say things that aren't there, reveal secrets, tell truths or lie. We as writers choose which words to give our thoughts. Sometimes they flow out of fingertips faster than we can type. Other times they stay locked in boxes as we search frantically for the key. One writer I know when she can't find the right word puts in a wrong one and marks it with color. She confessed that she will get up in the middle of the night if she wakes knowing the word that escaped her earlier to fire up the computer and scroll down until she finds the color and substitutes the better word. She says she needs to commit to a word. To know that it is that word and no other, that anything other than the final word she has chosen will weaken her story. Writer Isabelle Huggins in a workshop mentioned that once something wasn't working in a short story. It turned out to be the name of a piece of music. When she changed it, everything else fell in place.

Another writer was talking about his current work. He said he was at the stage when he was going over each sentence to decide whether to change a word here or there, rearrange the order, take out or add a detail.

When we start as writers we are often happy just to get the words on paper. As we learn our craft, we then begin to control our finished projects by realising that we can do without that adjective, we are better to show that action rather than tell about it. At this point, our writing although perhaps still inspired, becomes polished AND inspired. We become more confident that we have truly nailed that phrase rather than doubt our ability. We also develop an instinct of when, where and how our writing can be better.

Writing calls for deliberate and constant decisions not just on what our characters do, say, look like, feel and feel, but the language we use to describe all this. If a journey starts with a single step, a story starts with a word.

Is the color to describe the flower lilac, mauve, lavender, purple? Does the child run, lope, gallop, stumble across the yard? Is anger shown by throwing a vase or dropping it on purpose? Are his eyes guarded, open, laughing, tear-filled? Whenever we choose one over another we have committed an act of language.

Then when we have the right words in the right sequences we further commit ourselves to stacking them together in a way that pulls our readers along with us.

For example think of the following four sentences:

· She was sitting in the chair.

· She sat in the chair.

· She sat in her chair.

· She was rooted to her chair.

The last sentence gives a much stronger image to the reader than the rather mundane first one. Yet there may be a time when we want the mundane. The difference is when we consciously select the right words to create the right tone. That is when we commit acts of language.

I have always proudly told people I am a writer, but now I'm seriously thinking when someone asks me what I do, I will say "I commit acts of language."

EXAMPLES

"When I had written the first draft of Women and Nature, the book had a disorganized quality. I had several small chapters, some a paragraph, some a few pages, and no final sequence for them. And so I put the little pieces all in a logical order, by topic, or chronology or whatever seemed most reasonable. But his order did not 'work'. It was like a well-built bench that had no grace, and so one did not want to sit on it. So I began again putting the pieces together next to one another where the transition seemed wonderful, and that was when the shape of the book began to seem beautiful to me."
Susan Griffin THOUGHTS ON WRITING A DIARY

"…one morning I took my three-hundred page manuscript and began to lay it down on the floor, section by section. I put a two-page scene here, a ten-page sequence there. I put these pages down in a path, from beginning to end, like a horizontal line of dominoes, or like a garden path made of tiles. There were sections up front that clearly belonged in the middle, there were scenes in the last fifty pages that would be wonderful near the beginning, there were scenes and moments scattered throughout that could be collected and rewritten to make a great introduction to the two main characters. I walked up and down the path, moving batches of paper around, paper-clipping self-contained sections and scribbling notes to myself on how to shape or tighten or expand each section in whatever necessary way."
Annie Lamont BIRD BY BIRD

"The great writers keep writing about the cold dark place within, the water under a frozen lake or the secluded, camouflaged hole. The light they shine on this hole, this pit, helps us cut away or step around the brush and brambles; then we can dance around the rim of the abyss, holler into it, measure it, throw rocks in it, and still not fall in. It can no longer swallow us up. And we can get on with things."

EXERCISES

Find a paragraph from some published fiction work of a minimum of 100 words and copy it. Then rewrite it by changing nouns, verbs, etc. Rearrange the sentences to see if it makes more sense.

Take a piece of your writing done as far back as possible. Choose something you were not happy with but didn't throw away. Change the name of your main character. Change sixteen verbs. What does this do the piece? Keep on making small changes. If you have passive sentences, make them active. Or if it is very active, put some things into the passive voice. Rework the order of your paragraphs. Play with the piece and see what each set of changes does to the overall work.

NOTES

Mary Wesley, the English writer who published her first novel at age 70, died at the age of 90. Wesley was passionate about what she did, deliberately sought out friends of all ages, and once said her success was an example of "arrested development." Wesley is a hope to all of us that it is never too late to become successful.

No. 12 The Year in a Life of a Writer

THEORY

Because I was travelling on assignment from Geneva to Boston, I was given the luxury of business class, something my thrifty New England heart would never allow had I been paying for it. However, I had no problems enjoying the new seats that allow passengers to stretch out completely. Unfortunately, it was a day flight. Sleeping was unnecessary. Movies passed the time. One of the special selections was a documentary about English mystery writer, Minette Walters. I watched every minute trying to glean hints on how to write better.

The documentary covered the year plus Walters spent writing THE SHAPE OF SNAKES. What she talked about can be an example to all writers.

Walters sat at her computer and bragged how she had finished three chapters that day. However, before I could go into a complete funk on my own lack of productivity, another scene had her moaning it had taken her twelve hours to write two sentences. Thank goodness. The woman is human.

When she wrote about a ridge she carefully changed the "ridge" to "spine" and then gloated because "spine" was more picturesque. If we are dealing with serpents it fits. In fact in the book there is a bit more slithering going on than in some of her other books. Whether it is a snake image or another detail, Walters was extremely careful in her selection of each word.

A small English village was the setting for one of her scenes. She visited it to get a feel for the area, and told the viewers that her foreign readers love when she gives a thoroughly English feel to a scene.

Poet Rita Dove said in a "Poet & Writers" interview a few years back reading lets us live other lives. As a reader I'm grateful to Arthur Golden for letting me live as a Geisha or Barbara Kingsolver for sharing a drive to Arizona with her and an Indian foundling. Walters was giving her readers another life, and as writers we should think about creating other worlds for our readers. What may seem mundane to us, can be exotic to others, a lesson I learned at the University of Glamorgan. I had written about a 1950 bomb drill in a grade school as routine. My cohorts, all English, found it fascinating, but couldn't understand why I was intrigued by a Barbara Pym jumble sale.

Walters invited her readers into a lot of other lives, and her research added depth to her writing. Because one of her characters sculpted, Walters visited a stone quarry and from that visit picked up just enough extra details to make her scene more vivid. (see samples)

Later in the year she announced she finally figured out who the murderer was. Hurrah!!!! Despite the school of thought that all details, characters, etc. should be worked out in advance, not everyone does. For those of us who write it as it comes, watching a best-selling writer do it my way felt wonderful, but then we all know that there is more than one way to create. Creating to rigid rules stunts creativity. For all of you who determine all details in advance if it works for you, don't stop. If you don't and feel guilty about it, pack away that guilt.

I was equally cheered when her agent hated part of the book. This isn't because I wish her ill will, but the idea that a best-selling writer could be so challenged was inspiring. We all can be better. Walters had relied heavily on letters and documents as part of the story, which was what her agent wanted taken out. They stayed, but I bet if she were a first-time author she would have lost the battle.

She had her doubts. At one point she sat at her kitchen table and figured she had enough money to quit writing. She wondered why she was putting herself through the torture. The next day she was back at the torture machine, her computer, puffing her cigarette and taping out new text.

There is something comforting in knowing that as writers we all have moments of self-doubt, moments of satisfaction when we nail a phrase, critics, etc. So much of our time is spent alone, but we are not alone in our experiences and in our hope that tomorrow we will get up and the words will flow from our brains to the keyboard exactly as we want them to.

SAMPLES

All samples are from THE SHAPE OF SNAKES

"We heard the sculpture workshop before we saw it. A constant rat-a-tat of hammers on chisels, over laid by a whistle of wind through a polythene canopy, that had been rigged above the sculptures heads. It was a scene of intense industry because everyone was there for a purpose, to learn how to work in three dimensions. White stone chippings littered the ground and a fine white dust clung to arms, hair, clothing like baker's flour.

My last port of call that day was a small 1930s semi in Isleworth with pebble-dashed walls and lattice-style windows.

"You better believe it," I agreed slithering around the bonnet of the car.

The following day I drove my mother to Kimmeridge Bay on the Isle of Purbeck. It was a beautiful summer morning with puffs of white cloud dotted across the sky, and we climbed the cliff path to the Clay Tower on the eastern arm of the bight. Larks sang in the air above us, and the occasional walker passed us by, nodding good day or pausing to look at the bizarre folly behind us that some long-dead person had built as a sentinel to guard the ocean approaches.

EXERCISES

1. Visit some familiar place and try to make a reader from another country feel the place. A New Yorker might chose a Deli, a Swiss might find a café with a fondue specialty, a person in Holland a walk along a canal with or without a windmill in the background. However if you do include a windmill, does it make a sound? Do it in less than four sentences.

2. If you are someone who writes as it comes, try mind mapping the plot for a short story. Mind mapping involves writing a word, circling it, and then letting your mind wander and adding words, connecting them, etc. It might start out as the word tree. You'd write branch, gift, to father, ten years. This might trigger the thought red flannel shirts, jeans, work boots. When you have the details, then list all the habits of your main character. Outline the way the plot flows.

OR

If you are someone who always plots out in advance everything in your story, try to free write. Sit for five minutes and keep writing no matter what. Don't lift the pencil from the paper (or take your fingers from the keyboard). If you can't think of anything keep writing the last word. Just let it flow.

(This is not a suggestion that you change your technique, it is just to stretch your working habits into new areas one time.)

NOTES

Immediately last month after I mailed out my newsletter which contained the suggestion about starting or improving a writing group, I came across this book, WRITING ALONE, WRITING TOGETHER. It's available for $10.47 from www.amazon.com and tells how to maximize the benefits of working in a group.

D-L Nelson is an American who lives and writes in Geneva, Switzerland and Argeles-sur-Mer, France. Her stories and poems have been published in six countries, including being read on BBC World Radio. Her novel, Chickpea Lover: Not a Cookbook, will be published in February 2003. She works as the Overseas Correspondent for Credit Union Times covering credit union activities around the world and teaches writing at Webster University's Geneva campus.

No. 11 Fighting Discouragement

THEORY

"What am I doing?" Is there any reader of this newsletter who at one time or another hasn't questioned why they are slaving over a hot computer?

How do you find the strength to keep going when you reread your work and feel it might have been better if you had hit the keys with your feet?

Do you want to give up when your mailbox spits out another rejection?

You forsake an evening with friends because you want to finish a poem or a story only to have someone ask, "How much are you going to make from this?" Do you fantasize strangling the speaker?

Do you wake up in the middle of the night wondering if you can ever say what you want to say, how you want to say it, when you want to say it?

All writers have down moments. Sometimes these last weeks and months. I'm not talking writers block, I'm talking stomach-churning doubt that you will not be good enough. It happens to new writers. It happens to published writers who take too seriously the statement, "you are only as good as your last published piece."

How do we get the courage to keep fighting? With few exceptions we as writers will not experience the financial rewards that many of our societies say is the mark of success. We have to have the courage to set our own benchmark for success that reflects our values and not that of the society around us.

There are two situations for writers. Those who have a supportive environment, be it family members and or other writers or both, have it easier than those surrounded by people who do not understand our need to write.

A fellow writer giving constructive criticism is beyond value. A family that gives you time alone to write, maybe brings you a cup of tea when they feel you need it, is wonderful. I've been lucky on both fronts. Geneva, Switzerland has a supportive writing community with people always willing to critique and share marketing tips. I also have a daughter who encouraged me. When someone asked if she didn't mind all the hours I spent at the computer, she replied, "Are you kidding? If my mother succeeds, it will be my inheritance."

What if there's no writing group near you? Start one. Put up notices on bulletin boards or in local papers. If there is a college nearby see if there is a writing department.

What if you are already in a group, but the participants are back biting, refuse to share, show off, and do not give the feedback you need? Perhaps others feel the same and they would like to change it, too. Get them to discuss what they want from the group and possible ways to get it. One writing group that was clearly dysfunctional switched to the Peter Elbow's method of critiquing
http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~writprog/director.html.

Members weren't allowed to criticize negatively. Feedback was given in the form of a metaphor, which stimulated each writer's creativity. The majority of the group functioned better. Two of the worst members, who were always posturing but contributed little, left. If your group can't adapt to being helpful, leave. Constructive criticism is a gift. Destructive criticism is to be avoided. We can create enough doubts on our own without seeking them from others.

If it is family making you doubt yourself, that is harder. Husbands and children may resent the time you are spending. Parents, if they are not readers or writers, won't understand what you are doing. Disowning family, although at times tempting, may not be the best solution. Don't try and make them understand. Write when they aren't around and don't discuss it. It's an old public relations truth not to waste time on those who are negative. Work with those who are positive or at worse neutral.

Writers need encouragement as much as flowers need water. Try and find people to encourage you the same way you search for the right word in a sentence to convey your exact meaning.

And the rejections? Always make sure you have several pieces out. When one comes back, you have the hope that the others might find a home. Then send that one back. I always keep all my work circulating. I usually do major mailings after a particularly painful rejection, and somehow out of those mega attempts my greater successes have come. Remind yourself of all the great writers that have been rejected.

Buy Bill Henderson's PUSHCART’S COMPLETE ROTTEN REVIEWS & REJECTIONS Under the misery loves company school, it is nice to know even the great writers have had their share of rejection. Read Annie Lamont's BIRD BY BIRD.

So many writers I know have started out making all the normal mistakes, too many adverbs, telling not showing, etc. But as they gain experience, their work becomes crisper and cleaner. Some writers, even after their work has been published, still fight doubts. They were accepted in a minor not a major literary magazine, their book didn't sell as much as they hoped. Anyone who is creative enough to write can be creative enough to wallow in self-doubt.

The problem with doubt is that it saps the energy we need to make our work stronger.

Pamela Painter at a writers conference long ago answered a student's question, "How do I know when I am a writer? Do I have to be published?" with "A writer is someone who writes." I would add a writer is someone who tries to write the best s/he can and is constantly looking for better ways to say it.

It was Garfield's creator who gave one bit of advice to cartoonists that we can use as writers. He said to keep trying. If you send out 32 samples of your work and are rejected 32 times send it out again. Maybe the 33nd will say yes and you don't want to miss out.

SAMPLES

Sample 1. Michele Murray CREATING ONESELFS FROM SCRATCH. This is an excerpt from her journal. She died of cancer at 41.

May 25, 1972

I think of abandoning writing - that is abandoning myself - to teach or write for money. After so much? I think it is age, the end - the lingering end - of my youthful dreams and belief in my talent and inviolability…it gets more difficult, more complex-the books make very little money and the work is even more difficult….

May 18, 1973

Good reviews of both my books.

Sample 2. Ingrid Bengis, THE MIDDLE PERIOD

When the thoughts and feelings come over me (and they arrive not infrequently) I am quick to invent a new career for myself: chef, psychotherapist, lobsterfisherwoman, diamond cutter, filmmaker, each of which, from a distance, appears to combine in its own way the intensity and symbolic weight and singularity of being a writer with none of its disadvantages. As a diamond cutter, I am part of a highly specialized working community, involved in the transformation of a lump of matter into an aesthetic object universally recognized for its value. I have a useful, financially stable trade and participate in an activity that engages a broad spectrum of society, from miners to merchants, Hasidim, movie stars, Irish, Puerto Rican, Jewish, and WASP brides, of old moneyed families, and royalty. As a chef and master of culinary aesthetics, I move back and forth between my two preferred environments: the marketplace the kitchen. As a therapist, I work with the same intensity as a writer but deal with the inner lives of others rather than with myself. I see specific results. I am not alone. As a lobsterfisherwoman, I am alone, but nonetheless part of a tight inter-dependent community, daily testing myself against nature in its purest form.

These fantasies have been very important to me, giving me an imaginative freedom that I rarely possess otherwise, providing me with a momentary breath of fresh air, releasing me from the sometimes claustrophobic intensity my own work engenders. But at the moment when it becomes necessary for me to do anything about them, I always balk. For each new imagined career, even as it is stimulating me, is raising a dread spectre as well…that if I become too deeply involved with it, I might stop being a writer. The prospect pitches me headlong into such an acute state of anxiety that I instantly discard all my career fantasies, resolving to protect at all costs the cast inner space in which everything I want to write is obliged to germinate.

EXERCISES

1. List the things about writing that make you feel good.

2. When you find yourself writing a sentence or paragraph that you feel is especially good, print it and put it on your computer to remind yourself, you can do it.

3. Whenever you get an acceptance, a word of encouragement, anything positive put it somewhere you can see it for the times when you aren't as sure.

NOTES

ITo the reader who asked about writing ghost stories here are some sites to look at.

http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~agg/ghosts/

The Ghost Story Society The Ghost Story Society P.O. Box 1360 Ashcroft, British Columbia Canada V0K 1A0 Telephone: (250) 453-2045 Fax: (250) 453-2075 E-mail: ashtree@ash-tree.bc.ca About the Ghost Story Society Find out about the GSS, its history, http://www.ash-tree.bc.ca

http://www.visitorinfo.com/ghost/fright.htm

No 10 Chicken/Egg--Writing/Marketing

THEORY

When we write do we think of where we can sell our work then write it or do we write and then hope we can find a market? The answer can be yes and no to both methods.

It depends on us and the type of writing we do and why.

Poetry: The beautiful poems that have touched me are usually written because the poet had to write them, not that they have found a market and then wrote the poem. Of course, this isn't the case 100%. A poet laureate is asked to create poetry on demand, but we have no poet laureate subscribers (yet). Most literary magazines print poetry and it's a matter of researching the various literary guides, the web or looking at the classifieds in Poets & Writers www.pw.org from the U.S. or Writers News from the UK www.writersnews.co.uk. Other sources are THE POET’S MARKETPLACE, THE DEFINITIVE SOURCEBOOK ON WHERE TO GET YOUR POEMS PUBLISHED; LITERATURE AND THE MARKETPLANCE, ROMANTIC WRITERS AND THEIR AUDIENCES IN GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES.

www.writersweekly.com is a free weekly newsletter giving markets. Benn's www.gospelcom.net/guide/benns.html is used by advertising agencies in helping them set their media budgets but also can help writers find markets. It is costly. Some good libraries may have it. If you have an area of expertise besides writing, it is worth it to get the schedule of a magazine in that field and think of articles that will make the editor want to assign the topic to you.

Fiction: This is the hardest to advise on whether someone should write for the market or write what they feel. Robin Cook's first novel was not a great success. He studied the market and developed the formula for the medical thriller based on criteria for other thriller categories.

On the other hand Frank McCourt wrote ANGELA’S ASHES from the heart. He had tried writing it, but at one point put it aside and then went back to it. When he finally published it memoir was at a peak. I know that's not fiction, but sometimes after we write our work, we hit the "in" form. However, if we try to follow fads, we might spend two years writing a book, only to find the genre has gone out of fashion or changed.

Some of the Asian writers are complaining that they are trapped within their genre of cross-cultural Asian-American writing. As a reader, I would have been really sorry if Amy Tan hadn't written THE BONESETTER’S DAUGHTER but at the same time, how much more would I love another type of novel from her? Probably a lot.

Short stories represent a much less heavy investment than novels in time and energy although some writers spend months getting a short story just right. Canadian writer Isabel Huggan author of THE ELIZABETH STORIES told about being uncomfortable with one of her stories for months and fiddled with it and fiddled with it, until she discovered what was wrong was the music she mentioned. And although there are not a lot of paying markets as there were in the days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, there are a respectable number of literary magazines, often sponsored by universities where a writer can submit. Again there are a number of directories, plus the web to research potential markets.

However for creative writing the best work is that which passionately engages the author. If we don't care why should any of our readers?

My personal feeling is to divide commercial and creative writing. My news articles are agreed upon in advance. I am lucky enough to have established a good relationship within the credit union industry that provides me with a fairly steady source of work, which I find interesting and enjoyable.

My creative work, however, is based on what my heart wants to write - subjects that I want to examine. The results may or may not be commercial, but I have found that if I do my really best to tell the story, a good amount of my work will find a home. They may be rejected many times, but eventually, someone will see the same thing I saw when I wrote them.

Rejection is a big part of any marketing attempt. Any number of writers says they always circulate more than one submission. Then when a rejection comes in they don't feel that everything is lost. Another says that they always have all their work in circulation, and another package of that same work ready to go when a rejection comes in.

Writers new to marketing often ask about double submissions. There are three schools of thought.

1. No. Editors don't want to go to the work of reading a work that another person might be accepting.

2. Yes. Some magazines/publishers can take years to respond. Some never do. A salesman would never make only one sales call for a product if he wanted to be successful. Get the work out to as many potential buyers as possible.

3. Maybe. Send the work to as many potential markets as you want, but keep track of where you have sent it so you can withdraw it if someone offers to take it. The other is to give a source three months and if you've heard nothing, send it elsewhere. Follow-up letters are seldom successful

One writer friend reports that she devotes one Sunday a month to marketing.

The person who requested this topic stated that making a decision was difficult. Whether on the web or in directory, most magazines give some guidelines. If they say we don't accept science fiction, don't send them a science fiction piece.

Most important send your work out. As a new writer, a publisher will not knock on your door and say, "I heard you were writing a short story (novel, play, song or poem), please give it to me." Once your piece is the best you think it can be, after it is free of typos, after it is on clean paper and double-spaced with proper margins, you need to be aggressive. Get it into the email or snail-mail - over and over until someone says yes. If it is really your best work well written, sooner or later someone will see the merit. While you are waiting get back to your writing. Once it slips into the mailbox or cyberspace, there is nothing more you can do. It's like sending your child off to university. If you have been a good parent, it will succeed in the world.

SAMPLES

"From somewhere in my memory, either amateur hour TV or the boardwalk in Venice, I remember a sideshow act called plate spinning. The object of this entertainment endeavor is to rotate plates balanced on thin wooden dowels. The practitioner gets several pieces of supposedly good china spinning at once and then must quickly move from dowel to dowel, keeping everything spinning and aloft. Particular attention is paid to the plate in the middle of the formation. By virtue of its position, it is the most important of plates. If it goes down, it invariably takes several other plates with it and you have broken china all over the ground and an empty tip bucket.

In my mind I often liken writing a book to spinning plates. There are many, many different things you have to keep up and panning at all times…" (Michael Connelly from WRITING MYSTERIES edited by Sue Grafton. He was talking about plot elements in mystery, but it also applies to what we writers must do to keep our balance between creativity, commercialism and marketing.)

Here's how Maxine Hong Kingston juggles her work.

"I have almost finished my longbook. Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of a the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem. Poets are always happy. I want to be always happy. No plotting and more plots. For the longbook (about the long wars in Vietnam and in the Middle East) I sacrificed time with my child, grown and gone, and my husband and family and friends, who should have been loved more. The long book has got to be done soon, and I'll be free to live. I won't be a workhorse any more; I'll be a skylark. (From TO BE A POET to be published by Harvard University Press this month. The excerpt appeared in the Women's Review of Books in July 2002.)

EXERCISES

1. Set aside one day a month to research markets and after you purchase the relevant directories or find them in libraries, web, and magazines.

2. Have a list of what you've written (or want to write) and compare that to the sources.

3. Develop a database to track what you are doing. This can be done on file cards, databases or on spreadsheets.

NOTES

If anyone wants to share comments , ideas, information about special conferences, retreats, etc. please let me know. We had a great number of letters this month in response to the silence newsletter as well as the letter that inspired this month's topic.

1. Inactivity has forced me to spend time looking for help with my writing from sources other than real live people. I discover that, whereas for academic work, I would have no difficulty, I'm having trouble - not to say that I seem to be paralysed - when faced with doing a market study on the web. I have found a couple of interesting e-zines, but seem unable to analyse what I'm looking at in such a way as to determine whether : what I write will interest the editor, or whether (how) I might adapt my idea so that it is likely to interest him/her.

Apart from word count, and general style (more or less narrative, more or less dialogue ...), I don't really know what sorts of things I should focus on. At the moment, I'm not bothered about being paid. Just getting something into print would be nice. So, I was wondering whether you have thought of giving help with this sort of thing in Wise Words on Writing? If you can help, that would be great. Thanks. And if you can't, thanks anyway for taking the time to read this.

2. . I am rather old, but at this point my ambition for writing is to get to know myself better and to put my history of a feeling life into a concrete form so that I can examine it.

My "real" life with my family, husband, work, chores, travels, and household moves keeps me from writing more.

I write a little and still have hope to write more. But when is a question that can't be answered yet. Thanks again for the newsletter about this problem!

3. Thank you for the inspiring message and technique. This is just what I needed. Your writing reminded me I'm not alone and to keep the focus where it belongs.

4. Thanks for this great message. I have on many occasions gone to cafes where I thought I'd be able to sit quietly and write. But the silence, and concentration, are shattered by the constant din of tinny music, and by the sense that they want the chairs revolving with new customers. So, one continually looks for a quiet place, particularly when you want to get out of the apartment for a while. It would be so great to find writing cafes, where there is a bit of silence, but not solitude. It is also good to know that the classic writers went through self-doubt. This is very helpful, and comforting.

5. I sat in my peaceful kitchen at 6:30 am last week - by 7:45 am the dog had ripped the curtains, the washing machine had flooded (twice), and the cat had brought in a huge frog. I remember thinking 'I bet Jane Austin didn't have to deal with this!' On the other hand, it's something to write about...I look forward to your letters each month, especially as we are starting a new evening writers' group in October. I wonder if you could incorporate any tips about writing ghost stories for our winter gatherings? (By the way, I rescued Froggy)

No 9. Writing Through the Silence

THEORY

A bit of background to this month's topic…

The train trip was more than a ride to my "nest" in Argelès in Southern France near the Spanish border. It was an escape from Geneva's workload. The landscape changed from forests, rocky ledges to miles of sunflowers and finally to a light that shows itself in Impressionist paintings. Whenever I am in Argelès, I am bien dans ma peau that wonderful French phrase to express well being.

The village itself has existed from the time of Charlemagne. My "nest" is a fourth floor studio loft in the grenier of a 500-year old house. (Pictures will be on my website eventually). I wake mornings to the sound of street cleaners and the smell of baking bread from the boulangerie around the corner.

My first stop after buying fresh vegetables and fruit from the many stands was my friend Barbara's. As a former anthropologist her views and actions still reflect her training. She now runs a used English bookstore, sells African art and clothes that she designs herself. When Barbara hugs me I know, no matter how bad the world is, safe havens exist.

Our talk was of families, work, politics, friends, anything that the world offers. She handed me a book. "This came in. I didn't want to sell it, until you saw it." It was SILENCES by Tillie Olsen. The pages were yellowed from this 1978 edition of a 1965 publication. I first read it in Boston when I was still asking, "Can I write?" Reading it had showed me whether I wanted to be or not, no matter what the world said, I was a writer because I wrote. I couldn't not write.

I took the book back to my nest and reread it cover to cover and realised that what Olsen said then was as relevant to writers today and decided to share some of her ideas in this month's W3.

The silences that stop our writing are not just the internal blocks we turn against ourselves. Nor are they the external demands of earning a living, raising a family. They can be more. The market can silence us. A book we are writing does not match the genre. A political opinion is not acceptable. Our work is devalued by those that make other demands on us. "Why are you wasting your time?" or worse, "How much will this make you?"

The greatest reassurance was that all the doubts I had and have, and probably most of you have, were shared by the great writers. How many of us know that Thomas Hardy stopped writing novels after the critics savaged Jude the Obscure? Hardy said they "killed all his interest in this form."

Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins finally had to break his vow that he would not write poetry. He had kept his promise to himself for seven years as he followed a religious life. His silence may have been self-imposed, but as any writer knows, the impulse and the words break through no matter how hard we try to suppress them.

Olsen discusses censorship, something that is still going on and not just in dictatorships. Think of Michael Moore's fight with Harper Collins to publish his now best seller Stupid White Men. Censorship is not always political. There are the words engraved in stone, I suspect, in every publisher's reception area: "There is no market for this."

Olsen talks about "Virulent Destroyers: Premature silencers" alcohol, drugs and other self-destructive habits. Many successful writers fell victim, Poe, Capote, Thomas. Some may argue that their addictions helped their writing. There is no way to test what they would have produced if they were not addicts. No one writes about how more writers are not chemical-dependent.

Not all of us can, like Rilke, refuse to support our families for our art. Rilke would not attend his daughter's wedding, nor would he break his work for a quick visit from her and her bridegroom immediately after the ceremony. Rilke's writing may be important, but other writers have been able to produce work while living in the real world. At what point does the real world silence us and at what point do we as writers need to silence the real world?

In Olsen's book one could feel overwhelmed by the uphill battle writers face to first get their work on paper, then get if published and finally to get it accepted. However, for all the battles each of the people she mentioned did all three. If acceptance was denied in the beginning, time exonerated the writers. They broke through all factors that tried to silence them. Can we do less?

SAMPLES

All quotes are taken from Tillie Olsen's SILENCES.

Balzac compared writing to real life and what it takes to break through the silence of creation problems. "To pass from conception to real life, to bring the idea to birth, to raise the child laboriously from infancy, to put it nightly to sleep surfeited, to kiss it in the mornings with the hungry heart of a mother, to clean it, clothe it fifty times over in new garments which it tears and casts away, and yet not revolt against the trials of his agitated life - this unwearying maternal love, this habit of creation -this is execution and its toils."

Hemingway commenting on the life of Scott Fitzgerald, a classic example of the addict-writer. "He had destroyed his talent himself - by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, by snobbery."

Virginia Woolf wrote about a person who could have silenced her. "Father's birthday: He would have been 96, 96, yes, today; and could have been 96, like other people one has known, but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books…"

Sherwood Anderson wrote about the silence imposed by the necessity of earning a living. "Eight hours a day I have paid by working as an advertising writer the last five years while trying to save nerve force and courage enough to admit other writing. It has cost me dearly in rare projects gone wrong. "

Joseph Conrad wrote about how self-doubt could silence him. " I am not as the workman who can take up and lay down his tools. I am so to speak, only the agent of an unreliable master."

Jules Renard wrote about frustration of critics: "Literature is a profession where you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none."

EXERCISES

Find your silence and silencers.

1. Out of silence comes truth, but silence is rare. We are battered by TV ads, the demands of our family and friends, the car breaks down. Try and find a place where there is silence, a small wood near your house, a lake, a walk by the sea at midnight, your kitchen at dawn. Listen to the few sounds, because unless we are deaf, we never have total silence. Sit on a stump, the sand, etc. Try and make sure you are relaxed. Listen to whatever is around, the waves, the trill of a bird, the ticking of a clock, whatever. Your silent time may only be a shower with the bathroom door locked. Use that time to clean your mind of distractions. Forget the broken dishwasher and the phone that needs recharging. If all else fails sit in your car in your garage.

2. Make a list of everything that is keeping you from writing. Try and eliminate at least some of them: a TV program, a household chore (dust will wait).

3. Fear of failure. Do you think you will fail if your work doesn't make the best seller list? Maybe the goal is creating your own silencer. Writing should bring internal pleasure when you know you've made it the best it can be for now (maybe next year you can rewrite it better). Tackle your writing in workable chunks. Today I will produce one paragraph and perfect the paragraph I wrote yesterday.

NOTES

Grammar questions? mary@grammarlady.com She has a newsletter which is helpful for those who are still having grammar problems.

Looking for markets? http://www.writersweekly.com Also has a list of places that renege on payments.

No. 8 From the Other Side -- Interview with a Publisher

THEORY

This month's W3 is a double issue and a slightly different format. I had a chance to interview Zoe King, editor of the UK literary magazine BuzzWords. The web site is www.BuzzWordsmagazine.co.uk. I made a decision to share with my readers what life is like from the editor and publisher's point of view. BuzzWords for Zoe is a labor (or labour since she's English) of love.

W3: What made you start a literary magazine?

ZK: The truth is, I've always had a yen to go into publishing. When I looked at some of the other magazines around, I began to think, I could do this! In fact, I could do better than this! Far too many magazines I was reading were cliquey, publishing the same people over and over, on the name rather than the content. I wanted something braver, something more adventurous that would also offer newcomers a way in. I was a beginner once, and I have never forgotten how it felt to see my first published work in print. All around me were people complaining about how difficult it was to get work accepted without a track record. To some extent, that's still true today, but there's no question, small press IS having an impact, and more and more beginners are realising the value of approaching them because many are open to new ideas and will consider work from previously unpublished writers.

W3: How do you select what goes in?

ZK: The selection procedure has become more and more difficult because we attract so many international submissions, thanks to our web site. Essentially, we look for new and fresh voices, which paradoxically, doesn't necessarily equate with 'new' writers. For instance, we took a chance on a story in our latest issue in the sense that we knew it would bring in a heavy postbag. It's by a relatively established American writer, Stephen Hoadley. In spite of, or perhaps because of, its liberal use of 'bad' language, it has tremendous energy. Most of the mail we've had has been very positive I'm glad to say. One or two people have said it was a little over-the-top, one suggested that some of the bad language was gratuitous, which if I'm honest, I'm inclined to agree with, but the whole thing was so 'of voice', that it succeeded. The only really negative response was from an American, who said that this sort of thing had been done before, and done better by other US writers, and that it had become a cliché. Well, I've always argued that one person's cliché can be another person's fresh and new. And so it was in this case.

What I'm saying is, work which has bite, which is perhaps a little brash, which is different, which shows inherent skill and imagination is what we're looking for, in both short fiction and poetry. I love stories that give an insight into other cultures, hence our publication of so much international work. With specific regard to poetry, my tastes are eclectic. I read a lot of poetry, and while I greatly enjoy modern poetry, that which makes up its own rules and challenges the boundaries, I also enjoy work, which demonstrates a firm grasp of traditional forms. So with regard to submissions, almost nothing is taboo.

W3: What is the hardest part of doing BuzzWords?

ZK: The sheer graft of printing, cutting, mailing out, etc. is probably the 'hardest' part in physical terms. All our printing is done 'in-house', because we simply can't afford to pay a printer. Perhaps harder still though is sifting through work, which almost nudges its way in to the magazine, the time taken to write to authors who clearly will make it if they persevere. I said when I started BuzzWords that no-one submitting work would receive only a rejection slip. I've always found them something of a cop-out and absolutely no use at all to would-be writers. However, I'm having to admit that the time taken to respond individually to every submission is eating into my own writing time, so I may have to start being more realistic in the future.

W3: What is the greatest joy in publishing BuzzWords?

ZK: That's a hard one, because there are so many. One of them is the knowledge that we at BuzzWords have given a promising writer their first break. That's a wonderful feeling. Another is receiving thanks from those whose work we have had to reject, but with whom we've worked, in the sense of offering real critical feedback, designed to enable them to bring their work to publishable standard. Both David (the fiction editor) and I work extensively with authors whose work shows definite promise, and because we're human too, it is nice when our efforts are appreciated.

W3: What advice would you give writers who are submitting material (not just to BuzzWords)?

ZK: Adopt a professional approach.

1. Buy and read at least one copy of your target magazine. If that isn't possible, make sure you read whatever web content there is, so that you get a true understanding of the kind of work the magazine is publishing. Support small magazines by taking a subscription. Small press is a two-way contract - they can publish your work while they exist. Far too many are folding because the sums simply don't add up.

2. When submitting work, make sure you've read the submissions guidelines, don't submit work that is clearly beyond the remit of the target magazine in the hope that the editor will be so dazzled by it that s/he'll take it like a snap. That rarely happens. At BuzzWords, we don't publish science fiction. End of story, yet still we get submissions of SF and fantasy.

3. Although many people don't see it as necessary, I regard it as common courtesy when submitting to add a few words by way of introduction. There is something about receiving five or six pages of poetry or prose with no 'supporting notes' I find decidedly off putting. It doesn't need much - 'Dear Editor, I'm enclosing a submission of poetry/short fiction which I hope you'll consider for publication.' Then, include a brief bio-note about yourself and your work. Don't be tempted to be precious about this, and argue that the work needs to speak for itself, it will anyway. That initial contact between two human beings helps oil the wheels.

W3: How can people subscribe?

ZK: For those who can supply sterling cheques or postal order made payable to 'Calvers Farm' and mailed to :

Calvers Farm
Thelveton, Diss
Norfolk IP21 4NG, UK

BuzzWords is published six times per year. UK subscriptions cost £18 per annum, overseas £23. Very shortly, overseas readers will be able to subscribe using a credit card on the web site, via Paypal.

W3: What is your background?

ZK: My own background is in journalism, although I now write short fiction, and have recently been looking at writing a novel. I started writing at 16, and haven't really stopped since. During the early years of my writing career, I wrote for a variety of UK magazines, Practical Gardening, Amateur Gardening, and the like, Women's Review, Spare Rib etc. I also wrote regular business features for three UK magazines for a number of years. With regard to editing, for ten years, I edited a small local newspaper, then moved into freelance editing, which I still do. In recent years, much of my work has been short fiction, which I've had published in the UK, Canada, America, and New Zealand. I also teach, and will shortly start teaching an online course on short story writing.

W3: BuzzWords has a short story contest. The rules are below.

FIRST PRIZE	£300 (or equivalent) + publication
SECOND PRIZE	£100 (or equivalent) + publication
THIRD PRIZE	£ 50 (or equivalent) + publication
RUNNER UPS	FREE subscriptions to BuzzWords

CLOSING DATE: 30TH SEPTEMBER 2002

Judges: BuzzWords Fiction Editor David King, and Prize Winning Short Story Writer John Ravenscroft

NO ENTRY FORM IS REQUIRED

· Entries should be typed double-spaced on one side of A4 paper, and should be accompanied by an A4 cover sheet bearing the author's name, address, and email address where possible. No identifying marks should appear on the manuscript itself. Stories should be no longer than 4000 words. Entry fee is £5.00 for the first story, £3.00 for second and subsequent stories. Please send your entries, together with a cheque, postal order, or

· International Money Order, made payable to: 'Calvers Farm' to: BuzzWords Open Short Story Competition, Calvers Farm, Thelveton, Diss, Norfolk IP21 4NG, UK. Or, enter online at: www.BuzzWordsmagazine.co.uk using your credit card and Paypal.

If you would like confirmation that your entry has been received, please include a suitably worded postcard, or your email address. Please also enclose a stamped addressed envelope if you would like notification of results.

No entries will be returned. The judges' decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

NOTES

Zoe made a good point when she said small literary magazines need our support. None of us can buy every magazine we submit to, but it is good to subscribe to a few not just to make sure we have a market but to see what other writers are producing. Small literary magazines are one way for new writers to build credits that prove to agents, publishers and editors that other professionals think we can write.

Traveller's Tales is a great market for travel essay writers. Check out their web site at http://www.travelerstales.com/ The published books are fun to read either to live old memories of places visited or to dream about your next holiday. They are looking for manuscripts with specific themes.

No 7. Method Writing

THEORY

Probably you've all heard about Method Acting, where actors really try to get into the hearts and souls of their characters. There are legendary stories about actors not breaking character between scenes in a movie or for weeks at a time, which really must be hard on the people they live with.

Actress Shelley Mitchell wrote about one of the Method's guru's Lee Strasberg and said, "Strasberg operated on the premise that he could teach anybody how to act. He taught that acting was an extension of being human and believed firmly that his techniques could help actors and non-actors lead a more fulfilling life. The "Method" is the pursuit of authenticity...An attempt to understand and quicken the human psyche in relation to our truth, and with that gesture to touch upon our psychological and spiritual potential."

This is not much different from what we try to do as writers. We pursue authenticity in our writing. If we don't understand the human psyche while defining it in relation to our own personal truths, our work will lack depth. The only difference is we search for the authenticity with a pen or keyboard instead of on a stage or in front of a camera.

Here are some of the techniques used in Method Acting that we can convert to writing. For more information look about Method Acting see www.theatrgroup.com/methodA/

Relaxation: If we are too tight, too worried our work suffers. When we find ourselves with sore muscles and in state of anxiety about our progress, we need to stop. Walk the dog, walk the pretend dog, meditate, go for a run, whatever it takes to bring back our sense of equilibrium.

Concentration: We need to get into what we are writing. See the room, see the people, see the action. Feel them. Smell them. Because I had a job for several years where my interruptions were interrupted by interruptions that were in turn interrupted, I found it carried over to my personal life including my writing. I'd make half the bed, wash a couple of dishes, water three of my seven plants, fluff a pillow. I'd write a paragraph of a story, play a game of Shanghai, write a page, start a letter to my stepmom. I needed to concentrate on concentrating. It took about three months and a new day job to solve the problem. I applied mental exercises when I wasn't writing. I would force myself to count back from 100 to 0 meditate, finish a chore and most importantly pretend my hands were glued to the keyboard and could not come unglued until I finished whatever writing goal I set. I also took all the computer games off the computer and put the disks in my closet and told myself they were guarded by a kachina doll that would slash me if I opened the door before I finished my daily quota of writing.

Magic If…Actors ask themselves a question. What would I do if… They then place themselves in the head of their character. It is an excellent trick for writers as well. Would you as the hero really hit your mother? Would you as the child throw a tantrum at that moment? Would you hide when your house was invaded by a burglar or would you attack first?

Objects: According to the web site given above "An object can be anything, imaginary, physical or fantasy, upon which the actor has chosen to concentrate." It can be a vase or a room.

Picking an object in our stories add depth. Imagine a room is perfectly furnished. Nothing is out of place. Make that perfection your object of concentration. Develop your story around the way that perfection causes your characters to act. People might sit on the edge of their chairs, wipe their feet before entering and speak more softly, all in reaction to the object (perfection).

Private moment: This is an exercise that method acting students are asked to do. They are required to show a private action their character would only do in private and would stop doing when others appeared. Go into your characters head and imagine him doing something that he would never dream of doing in front of someone else: drink wine from a bottle, masturbate, pick your nose. Your character will have a new dimension whether or not you use the private moment in your work.

Moment to moment: When we write we need to deal with the now of the scene we are creating. We cannot leave lose ends. In a play where method acting is not used an accidentally spilled drink will be left without any reacting. In a good story every action needs to be accounted for UNLESS ignoring it is part of the plot. A current action can trigger a flashback, but there has to be some connection for it to make sense to the reader.

Justification: An actor will ask why his/her character does a certain thing - sit down, get up, smile, frown, turn his/her back, lash out at his lover. When we write each action our characters need a justification as well. I find in a lot of the work of beginning writers that I edit, their characters smile and grin to a point that you want to wipe that stupid smile off their faces. Physical actions need logical reasons. Decisions need a reason. We won't write. "Here is the justification that Susan started throwing everything in her suitcase," but we might show all the things leading up to the decision either before or after the event.

Method actors work hard practicing their techniques to help them delve into the motivations of the people they are portraying to get the authenticity, and the people we create deserve no less of us.

SAMPLE

This sample was taken from THE HOURS, The Pulitzer Prize winner and the Pen/Faulkner Awards in 1999, written by Michael Cunningham. He is writing from Virginia Woolf's point of view as she is creating Mrs. Dalloway.

"Clarissa Dalloway, she thinks, will kill herself over something that seems, on the surface, like very little. Her party will fail, or her husband will once again refuse to notice some effort she's made about her person or their home The trick will be to render intact the magnitude of Clarissa's miniature but very real desperation; to full convince the reader that, for her domestic defeats are every bit as devastating as are lost battles to a general.

"Virginia walks through the door. She feels fully in command of the character who is Virginia Woolf, and as that character she removes her cloak, hangs it up, and goes downstairs to the kitchen to speak to Nelly about lunch."

Woolf is so into Mrs. Dalloway she cannot really separate the two. She feels her disappointments, her pain.

Woolf in the story is practicing Method Writing, although I'm sure Cunningham didn't think of it this way. He was more likely attempting to understand and quicken the human psyche in relation to his truth and what he thought was Woolf's truth, and with that gesture he hoped to touch upon the psychological and spiritual potential of his readers.

EXERCISES

1. Invite all your characters from whatever you are working on to dinner (or lunch or breakfast). Set up a meal (it's okay to only cook for yourself unless you want to wash extra dishes). Choose food they might like to eat. Treat them as you would any guests. Have them sit around the table and pretend what their conversation will be. Better to do this when witnesses AREN'T around.

2. Pretend you are one of your characters and go for a bus ride as that person (or visit the mall or walk down the street). Try and dress as your character. For example, change makeup if you're a woman to look older or younger. Try to see the world through the eyes of your character. If s/he is depressed, ignore the sunshine, wonder if a man is about to steal something, etc. Don't see the bright sunshine or the mother hugging her child. Look for the overflowing garbage or whatever is appropriate for your character.

3. Pretend you are a serial killer. Decide on your pattern, then go out and pick out your next victim. (Do not act beyond the selection of the victim.)

Notes

My newsletter on research brought two letters. One pointed out that I misspelled Grasse leaving off the final "e". I should have added a paragraph on double checking things like that. Thank you to the spotter.

The second is from my writing mate. Her collection of short stories, The Past Present, can be ordered from Amazon.

Dear DL,

Your two scented examples were very timely as I'm working on a piece similar to the one you use as an example. Actually, it was from our early conversations on research and you telling me about what went on inside the perfume factory that got me going. Now your tips on how to use that research have come at the right moment as I revise the piece. Before I do my final revision, I really must get down to Grasse and see, or rather smell, for myself. But I will be careful to not put in everything I learn there.

Thanks for your great tips, and keep 'em coming.

No 6. Research - Truth in Fiction

THEORY

Write what you know.

I first heard this phrase in my senior year of high school in Reading MA. I was writing a short story for my favorite English teacher, Mr. D'Orlando, the first person to make me think critically by over using the word "why." The story I was doing was about a train in Germany. Naturally, never having been further than Boston and never having ridden in a train, I got it all wrong. Mr. D'Orlando had passed the story back with the suggestion to write what I know. When I moved to Germany years later and rode on my first German train compartment, I saw where I'd failed.

However, if we wrote only what we know, we would write about ourselves. That can get very boring. As writers we want to explore new ideas, places, cultures, etc.

Most writers have limited resources. I'm sure few of us could afford to jump on a plane to check out what a German train is like. But there are ways to research to give a feeling of truth to our fiction.

Today, more than ever, research is easier, especially with the web supplementing the older methods: books, newspapers and articles. An advantage of the web, there is often a contact that will get back with more information. A webmaster recently came back to me with more details than I ever wanted to know on vipers in the Pyrenees. He even forwarded photos and told me where I could buy the little darlings. I said "merci" for the info, but passed on the purchase option

The interview is something that many writers forget. Do you want to do a short story about adoption but grew up with your natural parents? Interview adoptees. Have a character who is a policeman? Go to your local police station (we won't discuss the suspicious looks that I got when I went into a French police station to ask about French gun laws). Most people are more than happy to discuss themselves, their work or special interest area.

There was one story I was working on about a journalist who crossed the Sahara, where I've never been and probably will never go. Luckily I had a friend, an anthropologist, who had crossed that desert several times. As, I treated him to a dinner of Boston Scrod, he told me about a bus driver that he had ridden with, the number of times the bus had broken down, how they'd propped the bus up on boards to change a tire, the different types of sand they'd seen and the food they'd eaten in villages too small to be on any map. His information led to several plot twists. Best of all he happily looked over my manuscript to correct any inaccuracies. The result was another person who had made a similar trip, called me to get together so we could share experiences. I confessed I'd never been there, and it took a little convincing until I revealed my wonderful source.

Our settings don't have to be as exotic as the Sahara. We can easily get caught up in everyday details that show we don't know what we are talking about. In my writing group's critiquing session, a friend questioned my knowledge of horses. I'd mentioned a horse's soft tongue. My friend, an accomplished horsewoman, informed me that horse tongues were anything but soft.

We sometimes can test activities in our writing. I had a character move a body wrapped in a blanket uphill. Two of my test readers asked if the heroine were strong enough. My poor daughter, who is bigger than I am, was pressed into service. Some neighbors watched from their balconies as I tugged her uphill wrapped in a pink blanket. She did a great job as a dead weight. I changed the uphill part of the story to downhill and shortened the distance from the original version. Only one neighbor asked why, although I suspect many would have liked to.

Time research. When I lived in Boston I loved going to the Boston Public Library to look at old Time and Newsweek magazines. If I set a piece in a period, I always thumbed issues from the year I was writing about. It showed me what was happening in the news, the ads, the clothing, what music was popular. My Australian writing mate has a wonderful book which is a timeline through history that she generously shares.

Barnes & Noble put in an annual agenda featuring writers a great chart where you could tell which day of the week any date in history appeared on. I keep a copy taped to the side of my desk. Not pretty, but I can find it easily.

The information is out there. The important thing is to look for it to make sure your fiction is "true". That's another way about writing what you know. Learn about it.

EXAMPLES

Giving examples of research isn't as simple as other topics W3 has covered.

There is a danger that writers should avoid called If-I-learned-about-it-I'm-going-to-show-my-readers-everything-I-learned-even-if-it-breaks-the-rhythm-of-the-story syndrome.

Example 1

Christine decided to tour the perfume factory in Grass, a town in Southern France where perfume is made. The villagers grow flowers on the surrounding hillsides perfuming the area with their scents. These flowers are picked and distilled in copper vats then mixed in a laboratory until the right balance is created. Grass is about a half hour drive from Nice.

The perfume-making lesson is author intrusion.

However, research can be incorporated far more subtly as in the next example.

Example 2

Christine stopped her little car in front of the brick building with the sign saying, "Tours" almost hidden by ivy. She glanced at her watch. Why not? Her husband would be tied up in his meeting for hours, and she had escaped the confusion and heat of Nice.

Road signs had pointed her to the town of Grass just as the concierge had said they would. He'd told it was the world center for perfume, and if the flowers that hid the hillside as she climbed that twisty little road, were any indication, he was right. At least she wasn't going to spend this entire trip to France a prisoner in a hotel waiting for her husband to finish this or that deal.

A woman with a white lab coat greeted her at the door. "Do you want the tour?" she asked.

Christine nodded. The woman led her to a room with a long table and hundreds of bottles each with a white label with the name of the scent handwritten in blue ink. "This is our mixing room," the woman said. As the woman talked Christine kept trying to remember what was so familiar about her.

In this example the elements of the research about the French city of Grass are interwoven into the story. They are used as mixed with elements of the plot about the less than happy wife.

EXERCISES

1. Interview someone about their work, holiday, etc. than use that information for a short story. Make sure you know nothing about the subject before you start.

2. On the web look up a newspaper in another area and research a local political scandal or event. Then find a map of the area and photos. Find out some statistics about population, the local cultural life, the number of hospitals until you have the feel of the area.

NOTES

Last month as I sent out the newsletter, I realized how international my readership is. I found readers with email addresses from Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and the USA.Many of my readers are writing in English in a country where their mother tongue is not the main language. This can be both enriching and frustrating. Writing is a lonely pastime at best, but language isolation (even if we speak the host country's tongue) adds another dimension.

No 5. Details, Details, Details

THEORY

Details give color and music to our prose. Or should I say they make writing red and jazzy.

Name it, name it, name it, name it. It's not a flower - it's a rose, a petunia, a skunk cabbage. It's not a tree, but a pine, palm, or oak. It's not a car but a Ford, Toyota, or Fiat.

Equally important to being specific in details is what you choose as the detail. If a teenager listens to Bach we have a different impression of the kid than if he were listening to U2. Either music tells readers more about the kid than saying the teenager was in his room listening to a CD. A man who buys a new racing bike every year is different from a man who rides a rebuilt Schwinn Bike from the 1950s.

Here's a real life example on how details change the mood. At the end of the Gulf War I was living in a small Swiss village that had 600 people and 6000 cows. I watched the war on CNN, BBC as well as the French and German stations. I thought they were covering different wars. The day it ended, I did my usual station flipping and what I saw brought home to me the importance of a chosen detail.

The Germans, who didn't participate, mentioned the war was over. There was almost no visual coverage, just a still of tank behind the anchorman.

CNN showed American soldiers being cheered, lifting children onto their tanks and hugging babies.

BBC showed the caskets of British soldiers being flown home.

The French stations showed the devastation of war, burned out buildings, a body here or there, the pain in people's faces.

Which details were valid? Probably all of them. They signaled the editorial perspective. But none of them told the full story. Maybe newscasters can do a better job at presenting unbiased news, but as fiction writers bias is good thing. You can help your readers form the pictures you want to place in their minds with the detail you select.

The earlier you give the reader information, the better. There's nothing more frustrating to read a man brought his wife flowers, and imagine roses, only to be told two pages later they were wildflowers picked from a field on his way home.

Details are more than details. They are the colors for your canvas, the scent for your perfume, the counterpoint for your melody.

EXAMPLES

1. "He swilled down the cold dregs of his tea, drowned his cigarette end in the mug and ambled back to his office to half-heartedly rake through the pile of paper in his in-tray."
   R.D. Wingfield WINTER FROST

Now imagine that Wingfield had written "He drank his drink, finished his cigarette and went back to his office to work."

The second example isn't as visual. Frankly it's BOORING. We don't see the movements of swilling, drowning, ambling or raking through papers. All three "detail" verbs in Wingfield's sample convey a meaning that's missing in my sample. My favorite verb from the selection is raking, something I'd like to do with the papers I'm ignoring on my desk. It implies a less careful attitude than "studying, dispensing, considering, etc." A pile of paper implies undone work, especially if there is enough to rake through. Also we know he is doing paper work, not making phone calls, typing on his computer or filing.

A mug gives a different feeling than a teacup, especially one with a saucer. I conjure up a different social status when someone puts a cigarette out in a mug. I can hear the quick spit as it hits the cold dregs of tea. I can almost smell that nasty odor of wet cigarette butt. Details trigger your reader's imagination beyond what you tell them.

2. "They made me go to dancing class. Ballroom dancing. Can you imagine that? They wanted me to be a proper gentleman. My father used to wear a jacket to dinner. He even painted in an old paint-smeared corduroy jacket. We went to the ballgame and I'd wear my baseball cap and he'd sit beside me in his sport coat, with one of those porkpie hats on.
   Ann Beattie LA PETITE DANSEUSE

Now imagine that Beattie had written, "I went to dancing class because my father wanted me to be a gentleman. He tried to be a gentleman no matter what he did." I find it hard to imagine Beattie writing anything that flat, because she is excellent at selection of detail.

The emphasis of being a proper gentleman obviously was important to the narrator's father. The author shows that the father exhibits his concept of being a gentleman by always wearing a jacket, even at times other people might not. He even has a paint-smeared jacket for when he paints. However do real gentlemen paint? Don't they hire painters? That's when the rest of the world wears a sweat or T-shirt. Beattie even told us what material it was - corduroy, not seersucker, not tweed, not wool.

The young boy might be allowed to get away with a baseball cap, but the father wasn't going to give in to such informality even at an informal event like a baseball game (reminds me of French President Jacques Chirac in a suit at the World Cup or Presidnet Nixon walking in a suit along the beach).

The father didn't wear a baseball cap like his son but wore a porkpie hat. The different style of hats allows Beattie to draw a large contrast between the informal son and the more formal father. If she hadn't specified a pork pie hat, we might not picture the father as out of place. Because she places the two characters besides each other the contrast is even more striking.

EXERCISES

1. Take the following quote from Amy Tan's THE BONESETTER’S DAUGHTER and change every detail you can to create different mood.

"She stood in the Cubbyhole, a former pantry that served as her home office. She stepped onto a footstool and pushed open a tiny window. There it was, a slice of a million-dollar view: The red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge that bifurcated the waters making bay from ocean. The air was moist and antiseptically cold against her face. She scanned the sky, but it was too light and misty to see any 'ghost bodies' burning up. Foghorns started to blare. And after another minute Ruth saw the billows, like an ethereal down comforter covering the ocean and edging toward the bridge."

2. Go into your bedroom or anyplace that is very much personally yours. List all the things in it that are representative of you and you alone. Now do a character sketch of yourself using those items to reveal your personality.

LETTER FROM A READER

Ian Watson, a reader, wrote this response to January's issue about finding time to write.

"As Jeffrey Archer is currently demonstrating, the way to get to write full time is to get sent to jail for four years - for making up rather too many stories."

No. 4 Making a Scene

THEORY

My mother used to shush me and say "Don't make a scene" whenever I got too emotional. She was a writer too, and created great scenes both off and on paper.

In writing prose we need to think in terms of scenes just like scriptwriters do. We all use location, set, props, movement and characters. We need to think of what happens off camera, off stage or off page as well. Imagining our prose on the stage or screen is another way to help us to fine tune our work.

Location/set: So many American sitcoms "ground" where the scene takes place by showing a building. The visual works, although by now it is overdone. We must show our readers know where they are located without ever saying "Monica's apartment". It helps if we know the geographic region. Place can change our characters. In a play you might show people dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, a pine paneled room, with a cactus viewed from the window. In a short story, we draw the same scene with words.

Novel and short writers need to describe their "sets" for scenes but can often do it in a few words: "The room was stark, looking as if the owners had turned it over to an interior decorator who had a white fetish." The reader certainly wouldn't put lots of Early American braided rugs, maple furniture and chintz in this scene. We don't need to be like the Victorian writers who often described their sets in such detail that the action of the story got lost.

In theater we see every piece of furniture on the stage. Sometimes sets are so elaborate that nothing is left to imagination. Other times, a few pieces of furniture are all that are used. The audience is left to imagine the rest. In A. Gurney's play Love Letters, a man and a woman sit at two desks reading their letters from the time they were in school until one of them dies several decades later. The audience sees them go from naughty school children to lovers, to friends until one dies. The desks never change, but our imaginations carry us through the decades with them.

Props: Have you ever noticed in soap operas there always seems to be ice in the ice bucket? I owned an ice bucket for 15 years before selling it at a garage sale because I never used it. The ice bucket was also a prop in one of my short stories about a couple getting a divorce and selling their ice bucket at a garage sale. A pair of bickering newlyweds bought it. Objects in fiction can act as symbols or can just add depth to the scene. If a man polishes his bowling trophies we know he bowls and is proud of his success. We might also imagine the case he keeps them in.

Movement of plot: Movie and TV scenes move a plot forward. Novel and short story scenes need to advance the plot as well. I recently read a wonderful scene with a man and woman talking in a bookstore. Unfortunately it added nothing to the story and the conversation was repetitive of an earlier scene. Unlike scriptwriters novel and short story writers have the luxury of describing what else is going on in the scene. In script writing the dialogue and physical actions have to carry the plot.

Movement of people: In scripts we might write, "Hero enters stage left". In prose we would never do this, but we do need to be aware of how our characters arrive, leave and move around a scene. If we've described a room as crowded it might ring untrue to have a long, leggy hero striding across the room unless he bumps into furniture.

Less is more. A mistake many beginning writers make is to give too much detail on a character's movement. "He stood up, walked across the room, picked up the telephone and dialed." All that is necessary is for the character to dial. Of course we can't have written earlier that the only phone was in the kitchen while the character calls from the bedroom.

Off camera: In Shakespeare an actor might do an aside, coming out to tell the audience additional information. I suppose this is theatrical equivalent of a flashback. Too many are annoying and break the action.

Off camera…some things happen off stage. In Barefoot in the Park the young couple live several stories up in a New York apartment. They do not have an elevator. We hear the bell ring from the street, then a long time goes by. Finally their guest arrives, panting from the exertion. We don't need to see the person struggle upstairs. It works on stage. Sometimes we want to have our scenes reflect something that happened. A woman answers the door. A policeman stammers out her husband has been killed in an accident. The crash scene is never written. But be careful. Too many off camera scenes ruin dramatic tension. Carefully selected, they build it.

EXAMPLES

Mrs. Sen's is a short story from Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitizer Prize wining collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies - Stories of Bengal, Boston and Beyond.

The plot is simple: A young boy whose parents are divorced is baby-sat by a homesick Indian woman who has trouble learning to drive. Lahiri, however, writes scenes that are so vivid that they are worth examining. She casts out little tidbits, building our picture of the story behind the story. Mrs. Sen's would make a wonderful mini-drama.

1. Scene one explains about the two baby-sitters before Mrs. Sen.
2. Mrs. Sen's flat. The set is designed as a university apartment "with a row of mailboxes marked with masking tape or white labels." The dialogue moves the plot with talk of driving lessons.
3. Mrs. Sen's kitchen where she is very precise in cutting her vegetables. The knife is a prop and a symbol.
4. A scene where Mrs. Sen gets a letter from home. We are shown her homesickness.
5. A fish market at the seaside. Fresh fish are very necessary for her sense of well being. Her trying to duplicate the food from home shows us that she is not adapting at all to the new country where she has been forced to live.
6. A driveway where she practices driving.

The story is only 24 pages, but each scene is so crisp and so distinct that we live the story along with the characters. Dialogue is used to tell the young boy about how things were different in India. It is neither an aside nor a flashback, but by talking about her past we understand Mrs. Sen's present unhappiness.

EXERCISES

1. Tape a movie, play or sit-com. Using one file card for each scene, note the set, the props and the major actions
2. Take any of your stories and make a file card for each scene. Describe the setting, the props, the dialogue and note how that scene advances the plot. This is an ideal exercise if you wish to reshuffle the order of our scenes. If something is done off camera ask why and would it be more effective if it were written in "real time".
3. Take a scene from any of your writing and draw it out on paper. Place where the furniture is, where your characters are and move them around. One of my students did this using her daughter's Fisher-Price doll house people.

LETTER FROM A READER

I teach writing at the college level, and I appreciate your thoughtful article on including details in both fiction and non-fiction. Instead of "telling" us about "show, don't tell," you "show" us. Bravo!

I do, however, think your readers should know that when including trade-marked names, it is important to respect that distinction with the correct spelling and the TM or Registered trade-mark symbol. Also, trade-mark protects the company's integrity, and you should be careful how that name is used. Presenting it in a potentially damaging light could result in the kind of writing time my friend Ian Watson referred to in his letter about Jeffrey Archer. (Published in February W3)

Dorothy Helms

Editors Response : a special thanks to Ms. Helms for this letter. I should have thought of it since, I go by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) several times a week and as soon as I finish this newsletter, I'll walk a guest dog with Nandita, the little girl down the hall. Her mother works for WIPO. It also made me double check the spelling of Fisher-Price in the exercise section. I found it both hyphenated and unhyphenated. When I added Inc. to my search the company web site came up with a hyphen. Next month we'll discuss research and this type of issue.

No. 3 Finding Time to Write

THEORY

In an advice column appearing in the English publication, Writers News, Jeffrey Archer told aspiring writers that they should give up everything to concentrate on their craft. Archer was later described on NPR, a US radio program, as "a best-selling author and serial idiot."

Very few writers can chuck jobs and family to devote 100% of their time to writing. Creditors abound prohibiting full-time writing. And even those not employed full time, have family and social demands.

Few successful writers were able to write fulltime until after they'd been published. John Irving taught at Phillips Exeter until he established himself. John Grisham was a lawyer, not just a writer about the legal profession. Jake Lamar (Biloxi Blues) was a reporter at Time Magazine. He now lives the writer's life in Paris that most of us dream about.

Ursula Hegi has a novel called INTRUSIONS that is really two novels in one: the main story and the author's life as she writes the novel. The narrator shows her rewrites, her characters rebelling, children interrupting and happenings at work. Most of us can identify with her when she says. "The first draft of this chapter was written with eight interruptions." This is probably closer to most of our lives.

Finding writing time is about making choices. Erica Jung does it in her poem WOMAN ENOUGH, where she remembers the clean house of her grandmother and baking, which Jung loves to do. She says:

I sit at my typewriter remembering my grandmother & all my mothers, & the minutes they lost loving houses better than themselves - & the man I love cleans up the kitchen grumbling only a little because he knows that after all these centuries it is easier for him than for me.

Dr. Barbara Hagaman, an anthropologist, who did all three degrees with a husband and three daughters, was talking to a group of women who said they would like to go back to school. Dr. Hagaman asked, "What are you willing to give up?" The women looked at each other. "Dinners out? Television? Parties? Shopping? Reading anything but your textbooks?" Anthropology or writing, when we go for a goal it all depends on the price we're willing to pay.

However, as writers we can choose not to do dishes or mow the lawn, but we can't decide to ignore loved ones indefinitely or not to show up to work. There are things we can give up for precious time at our computers or pads and pens. How to we make these decisions?

EXAMPLES

I talked to some writers to see how they do it.

Sylvia Petter (THE PAST PRESENT) was happy to talk with us. Petter works full time, is married and the mother of a daughter. When she began writing the first thing she found she needed was space in which to work. She turned a small room in her house into her "souk". However, instead of being able to spend after-work hours at her computer, her family wanted her with them. Compromise was the answer when she discovered the ability to tune out the television as she sat in the living room with her husband. She jotted down rough drafts on paper. Later she'd enter them in the computer.

Petter is an expert in finding time. Some of her best first drafts came from when she walked her dog, Reglisse, French for Licorice. Then there was the time she was talking into a recorder as she drove to another town. A friend did mention passing her on the highway to her husband and asked if she were all right because she'd been talking to herself.

Another writer, still unpublished, was fortunate to be able to walk to work. He used this time to "write in my head". When he changed jobs, he took up jogging. Although he only could steal a half-hour at night, he is coming to the end of his first novel using the morning thinking, evening writing method.

For those who can't find time here are some things that work for different writers.

· Get up an hour earlier - good for morning people, terrible for night people.

· Stay up an hour later - great for night people, terrible for morning people.

· Eat at your desk during working hours and write.

· If you commute by train, take your laptop and write. The laptop method might also work in the parking lot of the supermarket, etc. If you don't have a laptop, use paper and pen.

· Bargain with your family for time off. A stay-at-home mom can demand X-time to herself. One mother sets a timer, finds an activity for her daughter and each go to their separate rooms. They only come out when the timer buzzes. One couple, both retired refuse to lunch together, giving the man time to write. The wife also enjoys the freedom to plan her day without him underfoot.

· Trade baby-sitting time with a friend. Two single mothers switched children every other weekend allowing both time to write all weekend during their free Saturdays and Sundays. Certainly not as good as having time every day, but one has produced a chapbook and the other has been able to write several short stories that are now circulating to small literary magazines.

· Sit in a café with a notebook or laptop. J.K. Rowling spent hours in an Edinburgh café writing Harry Potter and kept her promise to make them famous if she could. She took television reporters to the café during a recent interview shown on British television.

EXERCISES

With a diary marked in hours, jot down how you spend your time for a month. (This will work if you do it for a week, but not as well).

Mark each entry with a code.

• NC = Necessity e.g. work, fixing a plugged drain.
• OP = Optional

Then give them a second Code

• L = Liked or loved
• N= Netural
• D= Disliked

Analyze by grouping them.

• NC = Liked
• NC = Neutral
• NC = Disliked
• OP = Liked
• OP = Neutral
• OP = Disliked

This is not a quiz like those in Cosmopolitan Magazine that can assign points. How you decided to use your time is very personal, but if you are spending a lot of your energy on things that are necessary that you dislike, you may want to see if there are alternatives. Maybe someone else in the family can take over that chore. Or if you live alone, can you hire someone to do it? If it is something like dirty windows, maybe you can learn to live with them as is.

Now go to the optional. Look at those activities you really dislike such as having lunch with coworker who is a back stabber. Those activities you can cancel and pick up the time. If you're neutral think why you're neutral. Maybe you can drop some of them.

If you really like something, continue. Doing things we enjoy gives us energy, but think about how much time you're spending on these activities. For example, I love computer games, but I could easily waste several hours a day on Alchemy or Free Cell. Now, I use it as a reward after I've done my allotted writing.

The exercise does answer the question "Where did the day go?"

No 2. Creating Characters

THEORY

When I was doing an M.A. in creative writing at the University of Glamorgan, I wrote this great scene where Jane, a timid American, arrived in Paris to visit her much more sophisticated friend Diana. Jane discovered she had crabs, a gift from her unfaithful husband. Diana had to rush off to work, leaving Jane to explain to the pharmacist what she needed. Since Jane spoke no French and the pharmacist spoke no English, the scene with her trying to describe her problem was funny.

However, my mentor Siân James, a Welsh writer, didn't like it. Siân and I had had many a battle on what she felt was too blatant sexual. She looked at me and said, "I know you think I'm being prudish, but my dislike has nothing to do with the subject. Diana would never have left her friend in a situation like that. Even if it's funny."

Siân was right. The scene might have worked as a short story, but it was part of a novel and it didn't ring true because Diana was acting out of character.

Alice Walker said that while she was writing The Color Purple her characters giving her back talk about how they should or should not act.

So how do we as writers develop believable characters? We can't always wait until one sits on our couch and rebels by saying, "I don't care how you write it, I ain't doin' it, no way, no how."

Some writers create complete biographies for every one of their characters: birth date, siblings, report cards, first sexual experience, wardrobe, job history, height, weight, medical history, birthmarks. Only when they know more about the character than the character would know about him or herself, do they set pen to paper or finger to key board. Others wing it letting their character develop with the story.

However, whether you develop the character completely or partially, they do have a life beyond your use of them. Writer Kim Edwards says, "For a character to be convincing, what's on the page must somehow evoke knowledge that extends beyond what's strictly visible." It's like when we meet people at a party. This may be our only contact with them, but they have existed before we meet them, and they will exist after they leave.

We can define characters in many ways.

Clothing - There's a photo of Richard Nixon walking on the beach wearing a suit and tie. Anyone else would be in a bathing suit or at least jeans and a sweater. I suspected Nixon slept in his suit and woke up with his trousers creased.

Place - A man working on a farm will have a different character from a man stuck in a corporate cubby.

Time - If your story is about a sixties hippie in 1969, he would be reacting to the War. If he is still a hippie today, he might have sparse gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. If he'd gone corporate, he might be in a three-piece suit and drive a Miata.

Speech can reveal education and age. And sometimes it can show much more. Think of Laertes's speech in Hamlet. "Neither a lender or a borrower be…" it shows him as a pompous man much more than a wise man. The contrast between his character and words is a classic.

Speech needs to be education specific. A person with a doctorate might use slang, but a person with an eighth grade education would probably not give a lecture on comparative economic systems. Slang also needs to be time specific. "Stoned gas" would work for the 60s and "Been there, done that" for the 90s.

Actions

- This is where I messed up with my scene in the French pharmacy. The rewritten scene shows Diana talking to the pharmacist herself and claiming she had the crabs. Their actions matched their character in the rewrite. Not as funny, but it did helped cement their friendship even more. Had I wanted to allow Diana to go so far out of character I would have to explain it in someway, not just to keep Siân happy, but to be true to Diana.

EXAMPLE

Within seconds of walking into her house Karen tore off her navy blue suit, kicked off her heels and shook out her hair. As she padded into her bedroom, she looked around. A pile of dirty clothes stood in the corner. She sniffed the sweatpants she'd worn the day before. Good enough for a quiet night at home. A whole weekend alone awaited her. Yes. Her colleagues were headed for the pub for yet another Happy Hour. She'd OD'd on her law firm. She'd pleaded an engagement, not wanting to tell anyone, that her fondest dream was to do the laundry, put on the CD she'd bought at lunch and let Bach's harpsichord provide a background as she attacked the canvas waiting for her. Two whole days without having to listen to any husband trying to do his wife out of her share of their joint assets.

From these details what do we know about Karen's character?

1. Karen is working as a lawyer. She needs to escape from her work.
2. She lets her clothes pile up, so she isn't a total neatnik, but she does do laundry.
3. She likes classical music.
4. She probably lives alone and likes it.
5. She doesn't reveal herself to her coworkers.

EXERCISE

Create two men by the following methods:

Formal: This a 32-year-old man. We want to know the following

Background

• Name
• Birth date
• Birth place
• Parents occupation
• School history including grades and activities
• Description of childhood home
• Siblings and their ages
• University, Armed Forces, drop out whatever is appropriate to the above list
• Good or bad relations with parents and siblings and why

Tastes

• Favorite color
• Favorite foods
• Favorite sports -- play or watch or both
• Preferred style of address as a youth, adult
• Preferred music
• Other pastimes
• Reader and if so what?

Love life

• Age of first sexual act and with whom under what conditions
• First love
• Current relationships

Jobs

• including high school jobs if any

Habits

• Smoker? and if so what brand
• Drinker? and if so what
• What does he like to eat?
• What does he read if he reads?
• Other habits that show what he is like

Physical

• Height
• Weight
• Hair color and if he is losing it
• Eye color

Current living situation

• Marital status
• Parental status (if he has kid what kind of parent is he)

Philosophical considerations

• Political party if any
• Religion if any
• Attitudes toward life in general

Environment

• Describe where he lives and where he works
• Neighborhood

Informal:

A man is about to take his eight year old son fishing and the phone rings. Write two paragraphs that show the man's character clearly.

No. 1 Show Don't Tell

THEORY

Arghhh! New and not-so-new writers often fall in the trap of depriving their readers the subconscious pleasure of discovering the story by telling too much. When we tell, we limit our readers.

Telling is the lazy way out, but when we show our readers, we engage their senses and mind pulling them into our words.

Writers also sometimes make the mistake of telling - then go on to show what they just told their readers.

She was angry. She threw the glass at him. His shirt was stained red from the wine.

"I paid $85 for that bottle of wine," he said.

It is sure that people don't throw glasses of very expensive (or inexpensive) wine at someone if they aren't angry. This combination of telling and showing can make a reader feel patronized. Cut the words,

She threw the glass at him, staining his shirt red.

"I paid $85 for that bottle of wine," he said.

A good way to test ourselves is to reread what we've written to see what facts we give and then rewrite to show those facts.

Showing involves details, description, dialogue, sounds, smells, sensations. Let your readers experience them.

EXAMPLES

Example 1

Told: The Richards were poor.

Shown: No matter how Bill Richards tries to stretch the family budget he can't. He looks at the piles of paper stacked on the kitchen table. Should he pay half the rent or half the heating bill? Or all the rent. and nothing to the oil company. No, last winter when he did that, they refused to deliver oil and his family huddled in blankets until their next payday. Just lucky the pipes hadn't frozen. Now the first snow is due. He can't risk that again.

The difference: For poor Bill Richards, how poor is poor? Some people might feel poor if they can't go on holiday. For others it means not eating. For a family in Nigeria, Bill's poverty represents great wealth. The second example never uses the word poor, but we have no doubt that the Richards family is exactly that.

That is because the details show that he needs/wants to stretch his budget, that he doesn't have enough to cover everything, and that he has had to make choices, we get an idea of the level his poverty. We know he doesn't own his own house but rents. We know that his money troubles have been going on for at least a year, because he had problems last winter. We also know that winter is coming again, although we haven't been told it directly. The first snow is the detail that lets us in on tyranny of the calendar. We also can imagine/feel how cold the family was without heat.

Example 2

Told: It was spring.

Shown: Violets peppered the hill side. The sun no longer set before dinner but stayed around a bit later. Children ran with their coats opened, calling to each other. Baseballs replaced hockey pucks. There was the smell of damp earth.

The difference: We each have our own idea of spring, tulips, come up, the snow melts. However in the told example all we have is the fact that it was spring. However the second example engages our senses: Violet is a color for our sight. There is the special smell of spring dirt. We hear the voices of children, but we are also aware that it is only warm enough to unzip their jackets, not warm enough to take them off.

Example 3

Told: She didn't believe him.

Shown: "You've got to be kidding." She shook her head. "You must think I am stupid to fall for that."

This is a good example of dialog showing us what the character is thinking. It also shows her as a person not willing to be fooled and willing to challenge the man by accusing him of thinking her stupid.

EXERCISES

1. List five ways to SHOW that a young girl of five is happy.
   List five ways to SHOW that an old woman is happy.

Hint: There are age appropriate characteristics that also can reveal something about the person. For example if your old woman jumps up and down, it would say more than if she clapped her hands.

2. An office is ruled by a woman with an iron hand. Her employees are unhappy. Show the tension in the office but don't say they are unhappy and don't say that the woman is a tough boss.
3. A man has a mistress. His wife suspects it. Show how she puts her suspicions together. Don't use lipstick on his shirt or a change of his routine to include more night work.

Hint: avoid clichés in showing.