A Friday NO-Fridge Link to My Post on How (one) Lit Journal Editor Thinks

It's been a busy travel week for me (complicated by my wrist still being in a cast), so instead of the usual Friday links of interest to writers, there's just one this week; as it happens, one of mine.

Like, I suppose, a lot of writers who send work out via Submittable -- the seamless interface that facilitates easy submissions to thousands of literary and (increasingly) mainstream publication venues -- I was not aware until recently that there's more to the site than submissions. 

Their blog, for example, houses articles on many aspects of the creative life, including guest posts from a diverse cadre of artists. 

While exploring the site, I was coincidentally thinking about writing an article on demystifying the editorial process at a literary journal. Since I can only speak for the one where I edit the Creative Nonfiction section, Compose Journal, that's what I did.

This week, the Submittable Blog editors published "Want to Know How Lit Journal Editors Think? What One Issue's Accepted Work Can Tell You."  In it, I walk the reader through the CNF pieces in the Spring issue of Compose, talk about why a piece was chosen, and give some behind-the-scenes tidbits about the editing process.

I hope you will read it, and then consider exploring some of the blog's other offerings.

(FYI - for my readers who also occasionally write about the writing life, the Submittable blog pays for accepted guest posts. And, the editors were a pleasure to work with.)

The Top 20 Writing Posts of 2015

Here are the top 20 posts on the blog from 2015, based on reader traffic. Among them once again are fabulous guest bloggers and author interviews. I'm in their debt for offering excellent advice to other writers, and sharing personal stories of their writing lives. (The list doesn't include any of the popular, regularly appearing Friday Fridge Clean-Out posts, rich in writer resource links. Find them here.)

Thanks for reading!

Sandra Hurtes on How a Writer Stays Committed With No Promise of Success 

Laraine Herring on The Baby Story Monkey 

What Not to Say in Your Cover Letter to a Literary Journal (or possibly, to any media venue, ever) 

 

Anna Whiston-Donaldson on a Paperback Release after the Hardcover

Donna Talarico on HippoCamp2015, A Conference for Creative Nonfiction Writers

Listen In: Storytellers Summit Presents 20+ Creative Conversations (including little ole me)  

Publication Venues Everywhere, How's a Writer to Choose? 

Guest Blogger Lisa Alber on Hope After (Traditional Publishing) Rejection 

Kate Walter on Finding the Narrative Arc for Your Memoir  

Vincent J. Fitzgerald on That Writing Thing I Always Wanted to Do  

Linda Sienkiewicz* on her Debut Novel and the Twisty Road That Got Her There  

The Mother's Day Essay I Didn't Write  

Adam Boretz on BookLife & PW Select Editor  

My Husband and I Didn't Have a "Meet-Cute" Moment. So of course, I wrote about it.  

Where Essays Begin: Sudden news, old friend, odd lyrics, far away 

Reading in Small Chunks, Taking in Big Wisdom from Abigail Thomas's New Memoir 

Linda K Sienkiewicz* on Lessons from AWP on Book Promotion for Anxious Authors 

Lisa Lenzo on her short story collection, Strange Love 

Of Writing Goals, Hope, the Old Year, a New Year, and One Word  

Lucy Ferriss on Why She Had to Learn to Write Badly 

*Both of my friend Linda Sienkiewicz's 2015 guest posts are on the list, which means you probably want to be reading her blog too!

Image: Flickr/Creative Commons - Paul Inkles the UMF

Writing Inspiration Redux: 15 Posts Writers Keep Reading

In case you missed a few, and before we move on to all new material, here are the 15 most trafficked posts from 2014 (exclusive of the Friday Fridge Clean-Outs). I'm pleased so many are guest posts from my valued contributors. (And yes, I know "Top X" lists should be published before the new year begins; this is what happens when you schedule a post in advance for December 30, 2016). 

1. Saloma Furlong on Old Fashioned Virtues in a Digital Age: Perseverance and Networking

2.  Donna Baier Stein on Rejection, Writers of a Certain Age, and the Persistence of Hope

3.  C. Hope Clark on Why Writing What You Know Doesn't Mean You Know How to Write

4.  Alison Strack on Attending the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy

5.  Beware of What You Wish For (and What You Don’t): My Teaching Writing Update

6.  Kim Ablon Whitney on Writing Niche Novels, Writing What You Know

7.  Why Thank You is the Creative Nonfiction Writer's All-Purpose Response to Critics and Admirers Alike

8.  Nancy M. Williams on How Claiming Her Passion Transformed Her Writing Career

9. Janna Marlies Maron on Nonfiction, Art, and Publishing Under the Gum Tree

10.  A Reading, A Writer in the Family (no, two), A Coincidence (or not)

11.  Of Print, Pixels, and Publication

12.  Faye Rapoport DesPres on Combining Individual Essays into a Cohesive Collection

13.  Jennifer Walkup on 11 Ways Publishing a Book is Like Having Kids

14.  Acceptance After (Multiple) Rejections: It Only Takes One Yes, One Editor, One

15.  Banish the Inner Writing Critic? Maybe Not so Fast.

Thanks to all my readers!  And by the way, I'm now scheduling guest posts for the first half of this year; let me know if you have an idea.

Image: Flickr/Creative Commons, Kevin Dooley

Guest Blogger Laraine Herring on Ghost Swamp Blues: The Journey into a Novel

I once reluctantly sat in on a presentation about how yoga could help one's writing. About midway through, something clicked; not enough to send me to yoga class, but later the same day, I bought a book off the conference sales table titled, Writing Begins with the Breath: Embodying Your Authentic Voice. It seemed in sync without being too touchy-feely for pragmatic me. Since then, I've read and reread it, recommended it to others, used chapters in my teaching, and, to my great delight, struck up an online friendship with the author, Laraine Herring.

Laraine directs the creative writing program at Yavapai College in Prescott, Arizona, and teaches workshop at the Omega Institute (Rhinebeck, NY) and the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health (Lenox, MA). She's also an award winning short story writer, Pushcart nominee, an interesting blogger, and with the publication of Ghost Swamp Blues this week, a novelist. She's stopped by to let us in on her journey to that novel.

Please welcome Laraine Herring.

"As a writer, I am obsessed with secrets. Where there’s a secret, there’s energy, both the energy of the secret trying to escape and the energy of the secret-keeper trying to keep it contained. You can’t help but have tension when you’ve got a secret. All the characters in Ghost Swamp Blues have secrets. I wanted to explore the power hidden in the things we don’t tell each other. I wanted to look at my own family history in the context of a flawed human condition. And, I wanted to tell a ghost story that wasn’t cheesy. I wanted to experiment with time and point of view and I wanted to see if it was possible to dramatize regret.

I also wanted to pull people into the landscape of the book, much like the landscape pulls and ultimately swallows my characters. The first image that came to me was a pink-feathered hat floating on a swamp. That image raised many questions: Whose hat is it? What is it doing in the water? Those questions started to pull me into the setting of the book, Alderman, North Carolina, a fictional town based loosely on Wilmington, North Carolina.

The next influence was my grandmother’s death. She was a Southern matriarch, rich in contradiction. Her racist worldview, dominant in many Southern whites born in the early twentieth century, combined with the come-to-Jesus dunkings of the Southern Baptist Church raised a lot of questions for me. How do these two diametrically opposed viewpoints exist under the same skin-shell? What has to be denied for that to occur?

My desire to try and understand her better provided the fuel needed for the long journey of a novel. Even though the events in the novel are not based on events from my family’s life, the concepts explored are very personal. I think to make it through the ups and downs of a novel’s creation, there has to be a burning personal question as well as the burning question of the text itself. They can be the same or not, but they both need to be there so the author has the stamina to keep going. If the author isn’t invested in the exploration of the book, then the reader surely won’t be.

In the novel, Lillian Green, one of my protagonists, witnesses her older brother Tommy lynch a black man, Gabriel Wilson, in 1949. She remains silent to protect her brother, and the novel is about what happens to her and those around her as a result of her keeping that secret. Her driving question, “How far would you go to protect someone you love?” grew out of my attempt to reconcile the many contradictions of my grandmother. As a Southerner, I couldn’t help but absorb and observe the schizophrenic racism in my community. For example, when our family moved to Arizona from North Carolina in 1981, our former next-door neighbors built an orange fence between our houses when they found out we had sold our home to a black couple. I left the South with the question: Why did they feel so much hatred towards people they’d never met? I think everything I’ve written in my life deals in some way with this question.

This manuscript for this novel landed me my agent in 2003. Since then, we've sold other books together, including Writing Begins with the Breath: Embodying Your Authentic Voice (Shambhala), and Lost Fathers: How Women Can Heal from Adolescent Father Loss (Hazelden), but not the novel, which was a hard sell. Too literary for popular fiction. Too contemporary for literary fiction. All sorts of reasons why it didn’t fit anywhere, why it wouldn’t work, but we kept trying. I kept revising. I paid attention to the comments from editors who took the time to write more than the “I just didn’t fall in love with it” standard rejection. It has gone through nine complete rewrites – changing everything from point of view to audience (I wrote one draft as a YA novel) and many more edits.

I honestly did not give up hope though. My characters wouldn’t let me let this book go. They’ve helped me to grow, which is reason enough for writing. I’ve lived with them for a decade. We persevered. We waited. We grew. Now, it’s time to set them free to join the imaginations of others."

Note from Lisa: We are giving away a signed copy of Ghost Swamp Blues. To be entered in the random drawing, leave a comment on this post by midnight Saturday, June 19. There must be a way for me to contact you by email to obtain your U.S. postal address. You may also ask Laraine questions, and she'll stop by periodically until then, to answer (also in comments).

Writing and Kids: Not so mutually exclusive

Just the other day I was passing along tips to some writing class students who have school-age children and were explaining (that is, complaining) how little time this leaves them to write. Then today I came across this tough-love guest post, by Louise DeSalvo, over on my friend Christina Baker Kline’s excellent writing-advice blog. If you write and have kids, please go read DeSalvo’s post. To her advice, I’ll just add a few of my own tips; some are different, and some amplify what she advises:

NO (more) volunteering for school activities that take more than an hour or two a month. Or how about just: NO.

Accept that you will have a dirtier (or at least a messier) house than you probably would like – OR hire someone to clean it.

Write anywhere. A lot of my stuff has been rough-drafted on the bleachers at baseball games, in the car waiting for kids to finish up at an activity, on the patio while the kids (when little) were playing nearby, even in the ladies room at insufferably long school and family functions!

Decide what you can slice out of your mom life in order to get a writing life. Five years ago, when my youngest was in first grade, I decided I could do without the daily chats with other moms while waiting for our kids at pick-up time after school. I still had to arrive 15 minutes before the bell rang to get a parking space, but I decided to sit in my car and write – bingo, an extra hour or so a week.

As DeSalvo says, ALWAYS call it "work." I realized this important distinction when asking a non-writing relative to watch the kids; and get the kids used to that terminology too. Mom’s working. Period.

Break free of the idea that you always have to write...at the keyboard, in your office, seated in that great armchair, with your favorite pen.

Get a writing accountability buddy – another parent writer who will exchange daily emails consisting of just one line about how many words or pages you each wrote that day; no venting allowed.

Now - what are you still doing here?

Getting Started, courtesy of Lorrie Moore

By now I'm pretty sure everyone knows that Lorrie Moore has a new novel out this week, A Gate at the Stairs. I haven't read it, but I expect to. That's not really what today's post is about, though. This morning, I was having trouble getting started on a new piece (not news, really!), and so I was idly clicking around and reading about new books, which led me to remember the following piece which I wrote at the request of Susan Bono, editor of tiny-lights: a journal of personal narrative on the topic of how writers can get started. It originally appeared in her in the December 2008 issue.

How Do You Get Started?
by Lisa Romeo

Assignment: 500 words. Deadline: Tomorrow. Topic: How Writers Get Started

You begin. You stop. Start. Stop. You remember Lorrie Moore*.

First, you do something, anything, else. Crochet. Sing. Sing while crocheting. Start something else - a different story, a post. You tweet. You fail, miserably.

Start a draft. Inner critic laughs, tears it (figuratively, metaphorically?) into a million pieces, shouts Lies! Critic is thinking of unwritten review due yesterday, stalled book proposal, 128 unanswered emails, the unfinished teaching prep.

Think about beginnings. You start, in your head. Dismiss lines, words, syllables.

Tell spouse you are writing about how writers get started; spouse laughs.

Next day, you start.

Tell your mother you are too busy writing to talk on the phone.

You start. You write of the importance of keeping small notebooks everywhere - car, bathroom, gym bag - for thoughts, images, ideas. Of having a writing notebook, a three-subject 120-sheeter, where everything, anything happens. Of the time you once misplaced it, and how no one could start homework or eBay invoices or dinner until it surfaced.

You are warming up. You write about rituals, like fingering a bookmark with the George Elliot quote about never being too late to start over. He-he.

You think about centering your computer in the window, the thoughtful writer framed in glass.
Writing is lonely, you need illusion.

You do have advice: Don't answer the phone unless it's the school nurse. Only answer emails from editors. Don't answer the door to your oldest friend even if she is carrying a bakery bag.

Later, spouse asks how essay/story/poem/article is going. Glare. Explain that "supporting" your writing precludes asking how it's going.

Start again. Shut the door, turn on music, though you prefer silence.

You send emails one flight down to spouse, indicating that essay/story/poem/article is not going well and so you cannot stop; or it is going so well that simply you cannot stop. You are unavailable for dinner prep, or dinner.

You start, re-start, continue to start. Remind yourself this is the creative process. Always. Starting. Again.

Now, something is on the page. You are happy. You reread, and see that all you have written is a failure.

Start again. Replace coffee with white wine, reserved for when you have started badly, or maybe have started too timidly.

There are other methods.You read writers who matter. You read junk. You stop reading because another writing voice is becoming too loud in your head. Anyway, while reading is important, vital, you must eventually stop. And, start.

You wonder what you ought to write about. Not, what was the assignment? But, what do you care most to write? You limit these thoughts to five minutes or, risk cerebral anemia.

Do something, anything else -- day job, night job, weekend job. Jot down what you observe and overhear. You are not procrastinating, not in denial. You are paying rent, paying dues, paying attention.

Push loved ones away, pull them closer; you can't write with them here, or with them gone.

Eventually, you have a beginning or, beginnings. You read them. They are terrible. You reread them. They are fine, really fine.

You start again. On revisions. Rewrites. Middles and endings. In endings you find, always, beginnings.

You cook, walk the dog, cat, guinea pig. You meet friends for coffee and one asks how writers get started, that blank screen, that blank page. Isn't it hard, they want to know. Oh no, you say. Oh, yes.

You reach for the small notebook you carry in your purse. You write something down.
~~~*
c- copyright 2008, Lisa Romeo

Readers, if you have not read Lorrie Moore's, "How to Become a Writer Or, Have You Earned This Cliché?" from Self Help, or if you simply haven't read it recently, please treat yourself. You can find it here. Also, Narrative Magazine has a new interview with Moore on their site today (free registration required).