a writer's journal

Thursday, November 2, 2006

The novel, H&H, is getting underway in fits and starts. The plan is for three interleafed (interwoven?) stories separated in time but united by strands of cause and theme. It's form is influenced (I am influenced), obviously, by Michael Cunningham and his masterful The Hours.

The first scene, written to read at The Jazz Factory's Mountaintop Removal fundraiser, is set in present day. I've written into the scene with faith that, since it gets certain story elements onstage, it will ultimately belong. Still, it might not. I'll step away from that storyline for now and start a Civil War era scene. Hopefully it will be both authentic and a meaningful contrast to the unfinished, present-day scene.

The Joseph-Beth reading in Lexington was well-attended, the sound system a bit problematic, but the questions after the reading were great--better than my answers in some cases. A few days later I read at the Carnegie Center in Lexington to a small but enthusiastic gathering. Their new sound system was magnificent. I tried out reading the opening paragraphs of all eleven stories in TKTLB, and it seemed to work. I'll do it with a different flourish when I read at The Jazz Factory in Louisville on November 15.

Velocity Weekly has my serialized short story, "Birds of Providence," live on their website now. Here's a LINK.

Saturday, October 21, 2006

I met Alex Chee this summer at Wesleyan Writers Conference and was mightily impressed by the man and his writing. I frequent his blog now, finding his posts about writing and other subjects both thoughtful and insightful.

A few weeks ago, Alex blogged about how he begins a new novel. His advice includes this:

"One of the first things to get used to as a writer is how the writer's experience doesn't resemble the reader's experience. The reader's experience is of an orderly text. The writer's experience is of chaos, ideas thrown everywhere, broken open, thrown away, surgically manipulated---and then set down into an orderly experience for a reader."

I urge you to read Alex's full post.

This is something I've encountered in writing short stories. As a reader, you don't know the mess a story was initially. You only see the finished piece, all edited and reshaped and polished to its final sheen. The process of writing that got it to that state is unseen. That process is messy. Chaotic. A story (or novel) often tries to be other ungainly things before you find its essence, its artistic identity. Once you find that, you can shape the thing.

Writing is mostly rewriting. What the story wants to be emerges from the act of writing, makes itself known at the keyboard. So you write your way through those crappy first drafts on the strength of your faith in the process.

 

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

The reading at The Jazz Factory went well. The Doolittles sang, as did writers George Ella Lyon, Anne Shelby, and others, and several writers read pieces related to mountaintop removal mining and the destruction it does to the land. My small scene from the novel-in-progress went reasonably well, considering it still needs work, both in the writing and the reading. Had to leave before the evening ended and start the drive to Memphis.

Southern Festival of Books in Memphis the next two days was incredible! There were authors everywhere, a dozen readings (or so it seemed) going on simultaneously. Mine was in the kick-off session Friday noon, up against Sarah Gruen and others. Cary Holladay and I managed to draw an audience of fifteen. The section from "First Husband, First Wife" that I read seems to go more smoothly with each reading. And the response from an audience seems quite positive. With my reading finished, I could sit in other sessions and visit with others there, which I did until exhaustion set in.

Esquire Magazine has a surprise in the November issue, a very favorable mention of Things Kept, Things Left Behind. I've put their words on my book page.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

I'm rushed, so this will be brief. The serialized story for Velocity is finished. I'm expecting the story, "Birds of Providence," to run over the five Wednesdays in November. Tonight I'm reading with the Mountaintop Removal authors and musicians at The Jazz Factory in Louisville, reading a short, just completed scene from H&H.  And tomorrow at noon I'm in Memphis reading and signing at the Southern Festival of Books.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

My schedule is filling up, and I'll need to be careful not to overfill it and squeeze out writing time. They're all good events, though, things I've wanted to do.

The new editor at Velocity, a weekly newspaper out of Louisville, has asked for a short story, something he can serialize in the paper over five Wednesdays in November. It's a new feature he's trying out, a Chris Offutt story in October being the first one. So I've been writing that.

Serializing literary short fiction in a weekly is an interesting idea. It seems to me the story would have to be "plottier" than most, something that works even if not read in a single sitting, which is the assumption for most short fiction. So I'm thinking short serialized fiction needs to be a slightly different beast. Exactly what? I've been wrestling with that for days.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

For the past week I've been filling out forms and writing project proposals and writing cover letters for fellowship applications. That's all finished, the stuff mailed now. Although none of it is likely to come to anything, it turned out to be worthwhile.

I wrote a project proposal for the novel I'm starting, and I pretty much weasel-worded the thing. By committing something to paper at this delicate stage, I worry that the things will melt away. So I fancy-worded my way through most of three pages about the novel, never saying anything specific about it. That was my project proposal.

I passed it by an author who agreed to be a references for me, sent it ahead to him more or less as a courtesy. He called me on the evasions, suggested in bold type that I say what the novel would be and  why I wanted to write the thing. So I did.

The upshot is that by writing it down, it didn't melt. In fact, it became more real, more possible in my mind. So now it's more than a couple loose scenes. It has form. It has main characters down on paper. It even has a title, abbreviated here H&H.

Now what was so scary about that?

Tuesday, September 5, 2006

TKTLB seems to be off to a good start, despite some confusion at stores and on websites about the release date. The original date, October 1, lives on as fact several places. But most places have the book now, it seems to be selling reasonably well, and anecdotal evidence indicates that a goodly number of people really like the stories. Fan e-mails and two appreciative reader fan phone calls. Who'd have imagined it?

I'm tentatively scheduled to read at The Jazz Factory in Louisville as part of a Kentuckians for the Commonwealth fundraiser in October. In writing, I'm jumping ahead to a scene from my current novel project, something I can read at that event. The scene takes place against a backdrop of mountaintop removal and valley fill mining. It should be a good fit. I've never written out-of-sequence like this. Should be interesting.

Yesterday a piece that I wrote about the origins of TKTLB was posted on the M.J. Rose's Backstory blog. It'll be there to read for another day or two.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

In putting together a grant proposal, I've had to be more specific about plans for the novel-in-progress. And faced with that, I may have found the novel's structure and themes. I'm researching two historical times where much of the book will be set, borrowing books from the library and renting DVD documentaries. It's starting to come together, I think.

On the book release front, things are picking up. University of Iowa Press released Things Kept, Things Left Behind on August 21. And today several online retailers began shipping copies. So it's really out there in the world now.

Saturday, August 19, 2006

It's been a busy couple of weeks. I'm wrapping up judging a fiction contest. It's been instructive, seeing things from the other perspective. I've always been on the entrant side before. The quality of entries was high, and in the end, the final choices ended up being quite subjective. And isn't that what slush readers and magazine editors always say, that it's subjective? Okay, now I believe them.

University of Iowa Press sent out several hundred postcards last week announcing Things Kept, Things Left Behind. So word is getting around. Release date is suddenly only two days away--next Monday. I've updated my website schedule page with new events--book fairs, readings and signings, etc.. If you're reading this journal and if you live close enough, I hope you'll come to one. And if you do, be sure to introduce yourself. Okay?

Tuesday, August 8, 2006

Most writers and soon-to-be-writers will tell you that conferences are about meeting other writers, schmoozing, and being part of some globular writing community. Yes, it's partly that. But there are craft nuggets being dropped, too.

From John Casey at Sewanee this year, talking about integrating real world details of how things work into fiction:

"If your character is a novice, your reader can learn along with him." In other words, the flow of new information matches up with the narrative flow, and what the reader must know (not facts unimportant to the story, but essential stuff) will be a natural part of the telling.

"Make your reader want to know, then tell him." It won't feel like a convenience for the author, and it won't feel like it's spoon-fed, if you create a curiosity about the thing in the readers mind first. Yes, you as author know what you want to tell dear reader. But you need to tweak their curiosity in that direction before laying out the information. It is so much more welcome that way.

At the end of his talk, Casey read the drowning passage from Sebastian Junger's  The Perfect Storm. In it, Junger switches, in this highly charged and emotional scene, to a dispassionate, analytical voice. By withholding emotion from the narration, he induces it in the reader, makes what might otherwise be melodramatic a truly shattering reading experience.

I'm thinking about what I heard at Sewanee, processing what I heard two weeks later.

Wednesday, August 2, 2006

Sewanee Writers Conference has come and gone, nearly two weeks of whirlwind workshops, craft lectures, readings (at least fifty, not counting at least that many by participants). Like last year, it was a super experience, so gratifying to spend all those days with like-minded folks. Nothing like it in this world.

And now I'm back to find that Kirkus Reviews has given a 'starred' review to TKTLB. I'm thrilled beyond words. And this afternoon, FedEx delivered the first copy of the finished book, along with a note from the Director of University of Iowa Press telling me the release date would be Aug 21...less than three weeks away. Lots to do before then, getting ready to get the word out. But maybe I'll take an hour or two and sit back and enjoy the moment. A friend offered that advice last week. You know, she's right.

Monday, July 17, 2006

Getting a new story underway has been impossible. These past few days, I've managed to arrange a few things for promoting TKTLB, and I've critiqued work for workshop mates. It'll probably be August, after editing "So Exotic" and sending it out, before I'll get the next story started, whatever that story may be.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

In the midst of something you're writing--a story, whatever--the outside world can pale, at least for a few days. You bump into furniture, you snack, and colors around you fade to bone and sand and a dull dusty grey.

I've finished the "chestnut" story. Okay, it's finished until workshop feedback lets me know where it works and where it needs tweaking to work. But it's essentially done. Ninety-eight percent. Or maybe ninety-six. It doesn't hold sway anymore. I'm in between stories, for all practical purposes, mentally fetching about for the next.

In the green in between, every inspiration is fertile with possibility. Every character charms, every place opens up and spreads wide, every situation or snatch of dialogue begs exploration in some fictional world. It's a marvelous place to be.

Marvelous for three or four days, that is. No more than a week. Then, dithering among all the possibilities you haven't chosen (can't choose yet), and still having not written a usable line, you begin your gradual descent into a mauve-colored, lace-doily dread.

Have you, at last, gone dry? Will you ever catch lightning again? Did you, without realizing, complete your last decent story when you wrote "the end" on that last one? Did you? Are you still capable of cobbling together from all your remnants and trash the beginnings of something new, something worth writing, something that holds together better than an ill-conceived, half awake, pre-dawn journal entry?
 

Monday, July 2, 2006

I'm reworking a "chestnut story." By that, I mean one that's been around on the hard drive for some time, been revised and polished. It's never been submitted, though. "So Exotic" is okay as stories go, maybe even good, maybe publishable somewhere. But on some level, it doesn't quite work.

I'm revising it now. Or trying to. The story was in Things Kept, Things Left Behind, an early configuration of that collection. It didn't carry its weight, and I pulled it as soon as I had a better one. But there are things about the story I really like. So I'm revising it.

My problem is this: it's told by a narrator who is primarily an observer, a conduit for her friend's story. The narrator has no real stake in things, other than friendship with the conflicted character. And to complicate my problem as writer, the narration is first-person, and the narrator a beloved character from an earlier story. Over the course of this story and the earlier one, she's become so solid to me that I'm finding it impossible to change her, add flaws, give her new motives at this late date.

The first change I've made is rewriting to third-person narration, getting some freedom, some distance. Then I'll recast the role, take it away from my beloved character and give it to one who is usefully flawed, one who will have baggage that she drags into her friend's story. She may believe she's just a conduit, a teller of the tale. But she'll end up being more. And that, I'm hoping, will make "So Exotic" a story that works for the reader on another level.

That's the plan, anyway.

Back to the top

Journal Archives

What's new on this site?

- Blogs

Mary Akers

Sherry Chandler

Alexander Chee

Myfanwy Collins

Katrina Denza

Xujun Eberlein

Pia Z. Ehrhardt

Anne Elliott

Seth Fleisher

Jamie Ford

Gina Frangello

Clifford Garstang

Bunny Goodjohn

Susan Henderson

Laila Lalami (Moorishgirl)

Jason McDonald

Maud Newton

Mary E. Preece

Jordan Rosenfeld

Kay Sexton

Felicia Sullivan

Wayne Yang

- Writers Websites

Richard Bausch

Robert Olen Butler

Ron Currie, Jr.

Greg Downs

Pamela Erens

Kirby Gann

Silas House

Jill McCorkle

Andrew Porter

Roxana Robinson

Gwyn Hyman Rubio

George Saunders

Bob Sloan

Lee Smith

Frank X. Walker

Tim Wendel

Crystal Wilkinson

- Of Interest

Backstory

Emerging Writers Network

Five Star Literary Stories

Ginosko Literary Journal

Lit Blog Co-Op

NYT Best Seller List

Poets & Writers

Sarabande Books

University of Iowa Press

Writers Digest

Journal Archives