Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers -- February 19, 2016 Edition

> Write It Sideways has been redesigned and is flexing renewed vigor, providing great advice for writers. One new series is "101 of the Best Fiction Writing Tips." Start with Part One.

> At The Rumpus, Sari Botton returns with another installment of her interview column, "Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me," this time with the wonderful Anne Roiphe, on the topic of writing about loved ones (and being the one written about).

> Literary Hub's podcast, A Phone Call From Paul, most recently featured a two-parter with Jhumpa Lahiri. And check out the full list of cool lit folks interviewed in the last few months.

> Allison Williams, at Brevity, nails it with a sobering post about what she learned via a years-long,unsuccessful quest to get a manuscript published. The honesty begins with the title: "Turns Out the Problem is Me."

> Diana Urban offers "98 Book Marketing Ideas" to help authors bump up sales.

> Interesting post at The Missouri Review's blog, by John Nelson on falling into a nonfiction writing niche (in his case, birds), and why he likes it.

> Finally, I meant to pass along this one four weeks ago, but...the title of Adam Grant's article explains it all: "Why I Taught Myself to Procrastinate." And he means it. (Here I just thought I was growing more mature lately, taking time to think before acting...but not, it's good old fashioned procrastination, and turns out, it's a good thing!

Have a great weekend!

Image: Flickr/Creative Commons - Boston Public Library

The Short Answer when Writing a Long Essay

Occasionally, when I'm working on what is revealing itself to be a long and involved piece of nonfiction narrative on a complicated topic, I worry I may never finish it. I get lost in revisions and rewrites, buffeted by new thinking or memories, and wonder if all the tangents and digressions and bits of backstory really matter. Sometimes the meandering route to a long piece includes questioning why I am even writing it in the first place.

What helps at a time like that (besides dark chocolate, wine, and whining), is to move away from the developing piece, and to purposely write a much shorter version of the story, to pare away and get at the center, the heart of the piece. To figure out what's driving it in the first place.

Usually, I'll write a micro essay, sometimes in a very different form (second person, a list essay), or a poem. And sometimes I like what I've done in the abbreviated form enough that I work on it a little bit more, shine it up, and send it out.

That's what happened last fall with a 690 word essay, "Gray," which eventually garnered an honorable mention in the Our Past Loves 2015 contest. It's a small capsule, culled from the still-accumulating pages (and pages and pages) of what will someday be a long look at my teenage relationship with a boy of another race.

Here's a short excerpt from "Gray":

…I want to say Brant's color did not matter, but it did. I was drawn to different, trained on years of family travel where my father emphasized befriending people of different cultures, seizing local experiences, seeing not exactly past color, class, and religion, but rather seeing and not pretending not to see. Coming of age in hotels and exotic locales, my early experience of attraction was not just to to the opposite sex, but to opposites. Brown boys. Jewish. Poor. Black boys.

            Home, though, I was expected to date white, Catholic, Italian, middle- or upper-class boys…

If you'd like to read the rest, hop over to the Our Past Loves site, and scroll down.

Meanwhile, I'm curious, does anyone else ever take detours like this? Write the mini-version?

Image: Flickr/Creative Commons - grepsy

A Reading and Writing Gift, Courtesy of Contests Not Won and Journals Finally Opened

You don't enter a lot of writing contests, because you're frugal (okay, cheap) and entry fees deplete your meager annual marketing budget, and because you're not competitive by nature. (Perhaps you are convinced you used up your competitive mojo inside the horse show arena years ago, and that once winning a television and later a bicycle was the limit of your blind luck.)

When you do enter a writing contest, you're usually enticed by a theme you're already interested in writing something about (or have already started), or by the allure of publication in a journal or by a press you like. You try not to even consider the prize money (see above, re: not competitive/all luck expired).

Results from the recent Rose Metal Press CNF Chapbook Contest

Still, over the years (okay, decades), you've managed to rack up a few finishes in the tops three, and in competitions that whittle the field down first, occasionally been on finalist lists (most recently, in the Rose Metal Press Creative Nonfiction Chapbook contest). You've always tried, when awaiting contest results, to think of it as no more or less meaningful than a regular submission (okay, you lie to myself).

One of the "consolation prizes" of not winning a contest with an entry fee run by a print journal is often a complimentary subscription. So, you get rejected one way or another (alas, even a finalist finish is still a rejection...), and then at some point later on, an issue of the journal lands in your mailbox with a thud.

Do you read it immediately, eager to delve into the stories and poems and essays by writers who weren't as unlucky as you? Or do you let it sit on your desk or coffee table for days or weeks or months, avoiding the words of others who were luckier (okay, more skilled) than you?

You do both. Depending on mood, available reading time, the phase of the moon, the artwork on the journal cover. 

Then, on a blistering cold winter Sunday, when you really should be working upstairs in your home office, instead you build a roaring fire in the living room (okay, your husband builds it for you; it's Valentine's Day after all and he wants you to be comfy so he can sneak off to watch sports on TV), make yourself a big mug of coffee, cuddle under a quilt, and see what there is to read on the coffee table.

There is the winter issue of The Missouri Review. You open it, scan the table of contents for nonfiction pieces, find two, and read them, at first grudgingly, then with building interest, then hungrily. They are both so good. 

First, the one that intricately and seamlessly (and incongruously, but ingeniously) combines mistakes made in bird watching and the fallibility of eye witness testimony in criminal cases. 

Then, the one about the lousy family dog that keeps eating the children's pets, which seems like it would be a lousy idea for a piece of narrative nonfiction, but paragraph by paragraph convinces you once again that any subject, in the hands of a skilled and honest and witty writer, can become an excellent essay.

You finish your coffee, put the kettle on for tea, grab some cookies, stoke the fire and add more wood. Your husband is still in the family room watching a rerun of his beloved Giants winning the 2008 Super Bowl, but you interrupt, and wave your teenage son over and read them a terrifically funny line from the essay about the horrid dog, and the three of you laugh together.

Then you take your tea back to the living room and read the one about the bad dog all over again, and notice things, so many things. Then you read the one about birding and witnessing again and notice more things. And even though these are not the exact pieces that won the contest you entered many months ago, and instead of feeling as if these other writers are luckier than you, you simply are grateful for the chance to have read them.

And then you find one of those writers on Twitter, and tell her how much you enjoyed the one about her awful dog, and soon, the two of you are tweeting back and forth, and later she says that your praise of her writing has made her week. And suddently your day is made too.

Soon, you feel as if you didn't get a consolation prize at all (okay, maybe a little.) But you eventually go back upstairs to your office and for a brief moment you wish you had a horrible, no good, very bad dog to write about, but then you smile and pull out something you've been working on. And it all starts again. 

Stuff My Writing Students Say, Part 19

"Why do I have to outline?"

You don't. Not if you don't want to. But sometimes, you should.

I got this question quite a few times over the last two weeks when I was requiring that my MFA students produce a "crappy outline" for a longish piece of literary journalism they are being asked to write this semester. Many balked.

Probably I would have balked too, when I was a graduate writing student. Then of course, I would have done it anyway, maybe grumbling the whole time.

Here's the thing: I am not a huge fan of the outline. Use one. Don't use one. Whatever works for you. Writers of all stripes and all skill levels can do with or without one, mostly according to personal preference, habit, past experience (good or bad), or complexity of the writing project before them. 

But as an MFA faculty mentor, who in one particular course, in one particular semester, is asking--pushing--writers to write in a form, and with a skill set, that isn't familiar to some, I'm insisting on an outline of some kind.

Those last words are important: an outline of some kind. Of any kind, really.

By this I mean any kind of document/form that helps in organizing one's thoughts. You like the Roman numeral kind we did in high school? Fine. (Though most of us hate that format, and I see very few of those.) 

Maybe an outline is a list. An organized compilation of notes. A linear (or not) progression of ideas. 

One of the best outlines I ever saw from a student was a word collage, fitted onto the shape of the letter W, which for her articulated the double narrative arc she envisioned in the piece. Another outline that rocked was a video montage of the places that would figure into the piece, with background music snippets that spoke to the emotional landscape each location evoked in the writer. Another student wrote what she envisioned to be the beginning sentence of each of about 12 pages. Someone else created a storyboard.

Once committed to producing an outline of some sort, the results often rock. But first, there is usually grumbling, usually connected to the idea that outlining, or advance planning and/or organization of any sort, will stifle or even kill the creative process.

I'm not buying it.

Outlines, organization, planning activities can co-exist with whatever you think of as your unbridled creative urges:  free-writing, meandering on the page, nonlinear drafts, metaphorical or lyrical language, collage or segmented bursts. 

Preparing a *crappy outline* doesn't suggest that you then abandon all the intuitive ways in which you bring a story to the page. It merely asks you to communicate -- mostly to yourself, and sometimes to someone else (usually an editor or instructor) -- some cogent thoughts on what direction you may be heading, what could be included and why, and how you might organize either the material, your time, or your research efforts.

In the end, I believe the best use of an outline is often simply the ACTION of writing it. Something happens in your head as a result of spending the time in thought, in imagining how the piece might develop.

Many times, I've written a crappy outline for a long or complex writing project -- and then put it away, never to truly interact with it again. But the act of doing so had an important effect on my thought process and helped propel me forward with some sense of confidence and curiosity.  

As with many things I am asking of my MFA students this semester, and which writers anywhere might wish to consider: if it makes you uncomfortable as a writer, do it anyway. Writers grow in the discomfort zone.

You can read the other 18 posts in the Stuff My Writing Students Say series here.

Images: Flickr/Creative Commons - npslibrarian; Venn diagram chart - terriem; folders - enoch.

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers -- February 5, 2016 Edition

I've been away from the blog for a bit due to a hectic, rather sad month, so thought I'd get back with an extra long list of links this week. Enjoy!

> Lit Hub asked a bunch of authors who also teach, to share some of the books on their MFA syllabus reading lists.

> I intend to read Paul Lisicky's new memoir The Narrow Door, which has been getting a ton of well-deserved attention, and lest I put it off too long, this beautifully written essay of his is a good reminder to keep the book near the top of the TBR pile.

> In separate Behind The Prose podcasts, essayist Sharisee Tracey discusses how she landed bylines all over the place, and Salon editor Kim Brooks talks about how she selects and edits essays for the website's Life section.

> Nieman Storyboard asked five discriminating writer-readers to weigh in on five well-loved nonfiction pieces, to answer the question, "Why's This So Good?"

> Jane Friedman offers a comprehensive guide to query letters for nonfiction books.

> So, writer-parents, what would you say if your child came home with a handout suggesting that "said" and "asked" were too boring for most dialogue writing? (The sound you hear is fingers on a chalkboard, no?)

> Used bookstores - yay or nay? Do we love shopping in them, but aren't thrilled that they produce no income for authors? Either way, they're making a "comeback," according to The Washington Post.  (I put comeback in quotes because speaking for myself and I believe, many other readers, I've always been able to find one just about anywhere.)

> HippoCamp16: A Conference for Nonfiction Writers, scheduled for August in Lancaster, PA, is offering one fully-paid scholarship.

> Four conference scholarships are up for grabs for (undergraduate or graduate) writing students, to the River Teeth Nonfiction Conference in June, in Ashland, Ohio.

> Department of brag (about my blog): Once again, I'm very pleased to be listed at The Write Life's "100 Best Websites for Writers 2016" (#80), and in the Feedspot's "Top 100 Writing Blogs for Authors" (#86). And, the NOT-brag part: take a look at some of the other great resources listed at one or both places.

> Department of brag (about someone else): My former student Vincent J. Fitzgerald was recently published in Longridge Review, and he's also joined the team of readers for Compose Journal, grappling with the creative nonfiction submissions queue. At Compose, we're just beginning to read (in all genres) for the Fall 2016 issue.

> Finally, Ploughshares has some fun predicting "The Next 11 Literary Scandals."

Have a great weekend!

Image: Flickr/CreativeCommons - Boston Public Library