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Favorite Lines & This Month’s Writing Prompt

Saturday marked another hour with my writing friends at the retirement center, reading stories and laughing about gaps of knowledge between generations. There was a story read about a young woman, and letters to a soldier overseas during World War II, and V-mail. “What’s V-mail?” I asked, to which I got the same reaction I gave my niece once when we stood in the library and she dared to say, “what’s a card catalog?” Mouths fell open and someone said, “Oh. You’re so young.”

We have fun around the table.

And, what I love most about meeting up with these folks each month is their excitement at being there, even when, as I found out, last month’s writing prompt proved more of an obstacle than inspiration. Maybe there were too many choices. Maybe the prompts weren’t quite clear. Maybe they just didn’t click. Sometimes prompts are like that, but writers tackle them anyways.

And, that’s exactly what they did: they wrote anyway.

Favorite Lines

One of my favorite phrases came from a woman who’s been writing flash fiction. In her piece, she described an apartment ever so briefly but quite clear: with landlord-tan walls and scuff-board floors. That’s all I needed to see an exact image. Another favorite line came from a different story, written by a gentleman in the group, about a visit to an attic: You knew right away from the musty, stuffy smell, that you were about to reach the third floor destination. That’s immediate recall for me, the attic smell that lures you to the door and begs you to step inside. We talked about that, too, about how certain descriptions like that do more for a piece (and the reader) than just saying something is “old” or an apartment looks  “run down.”

We meet again in September at a time when we will be crossing into Fall, waking up to crisp mornings and watching the sun set a little too soon in the evening. This month’s writing prompt focuses on two quotes, by Natalie Goldberg and Russell Baker, and asks us to look back, then, on the season of summer.

The Prompt

Memoir doesn’t cling to an orderly procession of time and dates, marching down the narrow aisle of your years on this earth. Rather it encompasses the moment you stopped, turned your car around, and went swimming in a deep pool by the side of the road. You threw off your gray suit, a swimming trunk in the backseat, a bridge you dived off. You knew you had an appointment in the next town, but the water was so clear. When would you be passing by this river again? The sky, the clouds, the reeds by the roadside mattered. You remembered bologna sandwiches made on white bread; you started to whistle old tunes.
~ Natalie Goldberg, Old Friend from Far Away

This paragraph from the introduction in Natalie Goldberg’s book on writing memoir not only talks about the way we remember, it also hints at summer. It’s late August. Three hours north of here, the leaves show signs of weathering. The tomato plants in my garden have grown wiry, so that nothing is left on the vine but a few remnants of (what could have been) prime fruit. My kids won’t turn any more tan or earn one more freckle; the sun sits too low on the horizon. Swim goggles have been broken or lost; one last romp at the pool leaves my son red in the eyes and full of heavy yawns. It’s time.

Time to move on to what comes next. We let go, of cool June nights and unbearable July days, of too much time at the pool or not enough days spent at the lake, of excitement in new endeavors and grief in goodbyes to a close friend. We move on, but memory stays with us.

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.
~Russell Baker

Tell us about one summer when the suffering was worth it. Or maybe it was a summer when the suffering ceased.

* Photo credits: alvimann and melodi2 on morguefile.com.

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Ego throws a mean left hook.

Ego is a funny thing.

Sometimes Ego is my driving force that gives me just enough courage to put my work out there. Other times, Ego whispers something that sends me spinning and knocks me out for a few days.

Several weeks ago, I had my eye on a couple of writing contests. I considered submitting a story I wrote, one that got some good feedback. As I wavered, Ego leaned into my ear and said –  all syrupy and sweet – “Oh, it’s good. Just do it.” She was so encouraging. I clicked “submit.”

Days later, I read a different story to a group of writers, my confidence still inflated. I received some good responses, but those weren’t the ones I heard. What I tuned into was one or two critiques that made me question my writing and myself, and then I focused on Ego’s quiet little whisper that followed.

“I’m not sure why you brought in that story anyway,” she said as we exited the studio. “You know they hated it. In fact, I’m fairly certain they don’t even like you.”

Knock out.

Man, she’s mean.

In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg doesn’t call the problem Ego, but she writes about it just the same. She says “Do not be tossed away by your achievements or your fiascos.”

I have to take my successes for what they are: rewards for hard work done on a story. When I feel good about a story, I can relish the moment, even write a post about it, but I can’t play into a false belief that everything I write from that point forward will be perfect.

Then again, as Goldberg says, I can’t let my failures drain me either.

See beyond [doubt] to the vastness of life and the belief in time and practice. Write something else. Let go of your failures and sit down and write something great. Or write something terrible and feel great about it.

The problem with Ego is that, whether the words I hear are praise or a put-down, it’s always all about me. And, when I’m all into me, I’m not into writing. The best way to avoid that pitfall is to take Natalie Goldberg’s advice: Write something else. Through successes and failures, just write.

How do I do that?

1. I Keep it short. If I’m writing a short story or a first chapter (or if I’m knee-deep in a 50,000 word first draft), I don’t want to get stuck on perfecting one scene. I keep it short, get the first draft done, and then share it with writers who know what they’re doing. I can trust that a good roundtable session will help me filter through the parts that need more expansion and bump the sections that don’t belong.

2. I Pull out something old and rework it. I hate looking back, which doesn’t make for easy rewrites. But, after spending some time learning the craft, I might pull out an old story and apply some of those new techniques. That’s the best time to see how far I’ve come in my writing.

3. I Enjoy the process. This is especially important when I’m working through early drafts of a piece. Sometimes a whole page of writing reveals only one gem, but that gem may turn out to be the crux of my story. In a feedback session, I might hear the one suggestion that clears up the whole picture for me and brings that story into focus.

I love Jody Hedlund’s final comment in one of her recent posts, because it speaks to my struggle as well:

Perfection is unattainable. We need to guard against thinking we’re already close to perfect. And we need to guard against thinking we need to be perfect. Instead, we can begin to develop a quiet confidence in our writing abilities—seeing how far we’ve come, but knowing we still have room to grow.

So, whatever Ego mumbles in my ear today, I know what I have to do. Write.
Or, rewrite.
Whatever it takes.

Because, Ego isn’t going away.

*****

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1986. Print.

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Writing with Tunnel Vision

For various reasons, I slowed down a bit with my NaNoWriMo novel this weekend. The decision to take a mini-break was easy, since this year’s NaNoWriMo experience has felt, in some ways, like I’m trudging through six inches of mud. I’m making progress, but it’s slow and sticky and I keep getting stuck.

I turned to Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones again and flipped through my December issue of The Writer magazine. In both the book and the magazine, I found crucial tips or guidelines – or maybe even rules of the trade – that I often miss when I write, whether it’s for NaNoWriMo or just in general.

In The Writer, I saw myself as I read Mary Miller’s “A Case for Plot.” She starts out by saying she never cared much for plot, because she “believed that in order for things to happen in [her] stories, they had to be happening in [her] life.” Like Mary Miller, I keep my life as level as I can, because I, too, am a lover of structure and routine. I prefer logical steps to accomplish any goal and minimal risks. But, when I write with my idiosyncrasies and philosophies in the forefront of my mind, I make it difficult to allow a character in a story to take action or risks.

For instance, in the first 10,000 words of my current NaNoWriMo draft, my main character observes way too much of life’s happenings from behind a window, either the kitchen window or the living room window. Maybe that’s her thing, her own idiosyncrasy. Or, maybe that’s more of me seeing the story through my limited vision.

Maybe my main character would rather step outside and press her nose up against the neighbors window, be more forthright in her snooping. I, myself, wouldn’t be quite so daring. I tend to hide behind the edge of a curtain or to open the slit of the blinds just a smidgen. But, that’s me. I’m only the writer. If I reconsider my main character in her own right, then maybe, as Mary Miller puts it, my main character will “step in and do something, or I’ll get to know her better and her lack of action will feel like a choice instead of just passivity.”

Natalie Goldberg’s chapters “Be Specific” and “Big Concentration,” complement Mary Miller’s article. First, Natalie Goldberg suggests we name things, like a specific flower or a tree, when we write. In naming an object with more specificity, “it takes us closer to the ground. It takes the blur out of our mind” (p. 70). Rather than show the reader a moment in a story from a general distance, naming things keeps the reader present, in the exact moment, and makes the experience more realistic. Second, Natalie Goldberg suggests we widen our concentration on a character and add environmental clues, like a sentence about the temperature or a background noise or even the color of the sky. In this way, we remind ourselves, and our readers, that “the universe moves with us, is at our back with everything we do” (p. 72). It all sounds simple, so simple that I forget to do it.

Each time I force my main character to stay behind the kitchen window (because that’s what I would do) and look straight across the yard to the neighbor’s kitchen window, I isolate her. I force the reader to decipher a story through tunnel vision, and I shortchange the experience. If, instead, I let my main character open up the front door, get hit by a brisk night air, sneak under the dark shadow of a large oak tree, and let goosebumps rise up on her arms, the reader has more to consider and is more vested in the story.  Are the goosebumps from the night chill? Or, are they in anticipation of what she might see once she climbs the front steps and presses her nose up against the cold, glass pane?

Tomorrow, I will have a little more time to spend on the story. By pushing my writer-self to the side and by widening my character’s perspective, I hope to travel easier along the plot line.

***

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1986. Print.
Miller, Mary. “A Case for Plot.” The Writer Dec. 2009: 15-16. Print.