Friday Fridge Clean-Out -- Links for Writers, April 10, 2015 Edition

> This will be useful to many writers: "How to Use Lyrics Without Paying a Fortune or a Lawyer". 

> Seems half (or more) of the writing world is at the AWP Conference in Minneapolis this week. I'm not (and NJ has been just as rainy, grey, and chilly as Minnesota!). I'm eagerly awaiting the slew of posts I know will begin appearing around the web soon from conference goers, like this one at Assay Journal (covering a panel on "Trauma, Memory, and Reimagined Pasts").  I'll round up and pass on some others next week.

> You can follow a great deal of the action, including folks posting live from panels and presentations, over on Twitter, using #AWP2015  (and, for a bit of grumpy woe, there's #NotAtAwp15 !).

> The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers 400 free downloads of art books via its MetPublications division (scroll to the end of that Open Culture post, for a link to the Guggenheim's similar offer).

> I'm so pleased to see 20 new opinion writers have been hired by the New York Times for their rotating online roster, including Roxanne Gay, Adam Grant, Mimi Swartz, Jennifer Weiner, and Molly Worthen.

> Speaking of NYT: hankering for a byline in the travel section? This Q/A with a Times travel editor offers advice.

> I let you know a few weeks ago that Literary Hub was about to launch, and it has. So far I've been intrigued by the daily link list that comes via email newsletter subscription.

> Earlier this month, on the first day of the month to be exact, The Paris Review revealed a secret (and very funny) project for young readers.

> Finally, some fun ways to display books. And this: sometimes the Google alert for my name shows me something interesting another Lisa Romeo is up to. Like this woman, who's taken grief over a brother's death and turned it into something that serves the sport he loved.

p.s. My spring newsletter will go out in two weeks. You can sign up here, and you'll hear from me about four times a year (often with a special offer for newsletter subscribers only).

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Have a great weekend!

Image: Flickr/Creative Commons - Travis Wise

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers, August 9, 2013 Edition

> Do literary agents go to Google to check out a prospective client? You bet. The Write Life, a new site bulging with good advice, asked agents. They answered. 

> Over at Southern Spines, Allison Law has some questions for Charlotte Pence, author of The Poetics of American Song Lyrics, about song lyrics as literature.

> Memoir writers will want to check out Beth Kephart's new book  Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir; she sums up a few of her tips here.

> I love finding essays in different forms, and while the numbered list isn't exactly new, how about 99 of them? All on writer Daniel Nester's blog, and collectively titled (and listed as) 99 Days of Notes.  (hat tip Erika Dreifus)

> Lots of folks have been wondering what her next project might be, and now we know. Jennifer Niesslein, a co-founder of Brain, Child magazine (which was sold last year), is launching Full Grown People. And essayists -- she's looking for submissions.

> Looking for a daily writing prompt to get you through the month of August?  Try the list here at Middlesage (scroll down).

> Or, find inspiration aplenty with the glorious images from the winning entries of the 2013 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest.

> I feel better just looking at this writer's room-of-her-own. 

> Finally, Riffle brings you the literary names you probably don't want to give a child. 

Have a great weekend!

Reading (Way) Outside My Comfort Zone

I like to read outside my comfort zone from time to time, and when I do read a book, or even part of one, which I wouldn't ordinarily pick up, I always learn something.

Readers of this blog know of my interest in song lyrics and the people who write them. While waiting for my son to finish a chess club event at our library the other day, my eyes fell on Decoded by Jay-Z.

In the book, the rapper and hip hop star offers analyses of his own lyrics, interleafed with anecdotal reminiscences of coming of age in the Budford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. I'm pretty certain Jay-Z had a ghostwriter, and she's kept the star's voice on the page (for better and worse, depending on each reader's taste).

I read the first 40 pages in between doing a zillion other things – one of which was compiling a lecture on nonficiton writing that involved working with memories that seem elusive or incomplete. One of my points is that in many cases, it's often more interesting to the reader – and certainly more honest – for the writer to put our own misgivings about the quality of our memory right on the page, to write the memory holes into the prose. I know I have many examples of this on my bookshelf.


But before I had a chance to look for them, there, on page 4 of Decoded, I stumbled across one example of working with a fragmented memory. Jay-Z is describing the first time he saw a rapping rhymer in action, on a street corner in his rough-and-tumble world (bold mine):

"...Like the day I wandered up to something I'd never see before: a cipher – but I wouldn't have called it that; no one would've back then. It was just a circle of scrappy, ashy, skinny Brooklyn kids laughing and clapping their hands, their eyes trained on the center. I might have been with my cousin B-High, but I might have been alone, on my way home from playing baseball with my Little League squad. "

He can't remember who he was with or where he was going, so he shares that with the reader, suggesting likely scenarios based on the activities he does remember doing frequently (being with B-High, walking home from baseball). He didn't know what to call the thing he'd come across, though later he learned the word (cipher), but he tells the reader about his ignorance at the time of the incident. Both are better decisions, sharing with the reader what the author doesn't know, than either skipping the incident altogether, or fleshing it out with details he can't stand behind or couldn't have known at the moment.

As for the book in its entirety, I may not get to page 317. I know only a handful of Jay-Z's recordings, so I can't comment on whether his meditations on, and explanations of the lyrics, jive with what I thought the lyrics meant (or if I really want to go there). I don't have an opinion on whether hip hop lyrics are a new and important poetic form. Or even if I like the guy.

I'm only saying that when I read outside my comfort zone, it makes me think. Sometimes, I read more carefully. That's always a good thing for a writer.

Readers, what have you read lately that's outside your comfort zone?

On writing revisions and craft, Cash is on the money

I've mentioned once or twice, my utter fascination with, and interest in, the craft of writing song lyrics. (Not, mind you, that I think I'm going to be doing much of this myself, but a girl can dream.) This past weekend, I had the delicious gift of two afternoons poolside, and tore through the new memoir Composed. It's written by Rosanne Cash, an accomplished lyricist, composer, recording artist and performer, and previously published short story writer and children's book author. Cash's somewhat elliptical structure appealed to my stubborn nonlinear inclinations, and her sometimes lyrical (sorry, there's just no other word for it) prose, anchored in clear-eyed story-telling, made it a pleasurable read.


In several places, and particularly in the final chapters, she discusses how her craft evolved over time as life experiences piled up alongside creative confidence. Here, she talks about the "hard earned craft of songwriting," but I think her point travels well across literary genres.

"…as I get older I have found the quality of my attention to be more important, and more rewarding, than the initial inspiration. This maturation in songwriting has proven surprisingly satisfying. Thirty years ago I would have said that the bursts of inspiration, and the ecstatic flood of feeling that came with them, were an emotionally superior experience, preferable to the watchmaker's concentration required for the detail work of refining, editing, and polishing. But the reverse is proving to be true. Like everything else, given enough time and the long perspective, the opposite of those things that we think define us slowly becomes equally valid and sometimes more potent. I have learned to be steady in my course of love, or fear, or loneliness, rather than impulsive in its wasting either lyrically or emotionally."

Which to me means, more or less, that the more intimately you work within your craft, the more you work at "refining, editing and polishing," the better your writing will be, whether that's songwriting or fiction writing, or memoir writing. The part about coming to this knowledge after a certain number of years elapse, while certainly true for most artists, doesn't mean we all have to wait that many years to learn this lesson.

[Disclosure: Before I could act on my own to-be-ordered book list, I received a complementary copy of Composed from the book's publisher, Penguin.]

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers, July 16th Edition

►At The Paris Review blog, poets review songwriters. Or is that like saying poets review poets?

► Do you puzzle over when, how and whether you should use cultural references in your work?

► Blogs worth checking out: Work in Progress, a new blog from the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux; author Allegra Goodman's; and freelance writer Kelly James-Enger’s Dollars and Deadlines (hat to Erika Dreifus for the latter two).

► Writer Jesse Kornbluth’s Head Butler offers sometimes offbeat reviews of, and other musings about, music, books, movies, writing and more.

► At the Nieman Storyboard (which is always full of great material), Peggy Nelson looks at how short attention spans and technology may be affecting narrative.

►The literary journal Ploughshares has a good blog. I liked this guest post by Aimee Nezhukumatathil – with lots of photos – on the spaces where writers create.

► The Colorado writer who blogs at A Writing Life is sharing her experiences in a workshop with author Pam Houston, like this one, on Houston’s advice about that “analytical bitch in the closet.”

► Finally, if you haven’t seen it yet, Dennis Cass’s quietly funny Moby Award winning best performance by an author in a book trailer. Procrastinators, Luddites and lazy authors who would rather write than promote books will love this.

Have a great weekend.

Today's writing diversion: song lyrics. Muse or madness?

For a little while yesterday, while northern New Jersey turned white and my husband and sons ran the snow blower and shoveled, I took a break and cracked open a book I picked up, sort of on a whim – The Art of Writing Great Lyrics by Pamela Phillips Oland.

Did I mention that, when I was 16, my piano teacher asked my mother to let me stop lessons? That my husband – who has a lovely voice and once sang in a major choir – thinks I'm tone deaf? That when I watch American Idol I have no idea weather the contestants are pitchy? (I wait for the judges to weigh in and then just nod sagely.)

And yet, I bought the book. Song lyrics intrigue me. I love the condensed nature of the storytelling. When I hear what I think of as a great narrative lyric, I want to ask, "Hey, how'd they do that?"

I am completely aware that most lyricists have musical gifts; indeed that perhaps the best lyricists are also songwriters and trained musicians.

Still.

Halfway through the first chapter, I was excited to learn that there is a means to differentiate poetry from lyrics, that purchasing a rhyming dictionary only sounds childish, that a chunk of what I understand about prose narratives is directly related to lyric writing, while the little I thought I knew about lyric writing is completely off the mark.

If I never write a single line of lyrics, I know already that I'm going to enjoy this book and any lyric "writing" I attempt. I seem, periodically, to need some form of literary craft experience from way outside my writing comfort zone, to shake me up and re-energize my writing – or perhaps I should say my feelings about writing. Last fall, I took a four-week online fiction writing class. Yes, it taught me a lot about setting scenes, building backstory, and dialogue, all of which carries over to nonfiction, but more importantly, it seemed to challenge me: Oh, you think you can write? Well here, try this! I did try. I may never publish a short story, but something shifted.

Now a few chapters into the lyrics book, I'm getting that buzz writers get when we discover something new about words or language or syntax or vocabulary or rhythm (prose-wise, not music-wise!). Plus, I'm coming across some great tips about writing titles, uncovering hidden hooks, and other writing advice that cuts across genres.

Chances are, I'll probably never write lyrics that get set to any music, except maybe for the notes I hear in my head (which are likely out of tune anyway). That's okay. We writers are such a strange species. We persist in places we have no business. We go down dark alleys. We waste time on things which seem to come from nowhere and don't promise any payoff. But something leads us. Lately, I just follow.

What about you? Are you going in any new writing direction lately you never anticipated? How's that working out?

Writing Time-Out: Movies, Milk-Duds, and MJ

"I don't care what they say. Ain't nobody's business..."

In some shots it's a body double. The production company is milking a dead man's profit-generating popularity. Parts of some songs are dubbed with old tracks. Too much movie-making craft obscuring the real story. It's all a hoax, he's living in an Eastern European castle, pulling everyone's strings. All hype, no history.

Say what you like (and the Internet is saying everything possible), I'm still going to see This it It, the Michael Jackson documentary film made from concert rehearsal footage. I'm fascinated by creativity, by the energy and process behind a multi-talented artist, by what occurs behind the scenes of any major event, and by film-making in general.

I don't think, as the conspiracy-theorists do, that it's a convenient coincidence there was so much high-quality rehearsal footage available, for the same reason I'm no longer shocked to discover that an author's 350-page award-winning novel has a backstory involving an unused 100,000 words, 4,000 pages, and 18 drafts.

To my mind, it's not so much about the "real story" of the run-up to Jackson's cancelled London concerts, but an opportunity to glimpse how the work of so many artists -- including musicians, choreographers, lighting technicians, dancers, etc. -- comes together to transform the original creative impulses of the singer/songwriter into a carefully intended experience for a particular audience.

Because isn't that what writers try to do every day (okay, maybe without pyrotechnics) -- to leave an audience (of readers) feeling differently than before?