An earlier version of my post incorrectly stated that Chuck Sambuchino was in charge of this one-day workshop in Indianapolis on Oct. 24. In fact, he was subbing for another volunteer. The workshop was actually coordinated by Jessica Bell, of Writing Day Workshops
. I thought folks might appreciate learning about this organization, if they aren’t already familiar with it. It hosts a range of workshops at different locations around the country, and will definitely be on my list of possible conference options.
Tag Archives: writing
Correction to 3 Lessons, 4 Resolutions from the Indiana Writers’ Workshop
3 Lessons, 4 Resolutions from the Indiana Writers’ Workshop, October 24, 2015
It’s unusual to find a conference that changes the way I think about my novel and about myself as a writer. This one-day conference, less than a day’s drive away, did just that.
The Workshop featured presentations by Brian Klems, online editor for WritersDigest.com. The basic fee covered four all-group presentations by Klems and a “first-page” critique by four agents of randomly selected submissions. Participants could pay extra for ten-minute pitch sessions with up to six agents and for a personal query-letter critique by Chuck Sambuchino, author of a number of books and blogs on writing as well as humor books.
Klems’s presentations covered a huge amount of nuts-and-bolts information most valuable to writers who had not attended many conferences or mined the web for information on the business of writing. The pitch sessions were well-coordinated; all three of the agents I queried were generous listeners. The published schedule did not build in meals or receptions for the social networking that many writers find rewarding.
So what made this conference so productive? Two things: Sambuchino’s critique of my query and the “first-page” session, at which some 20 or so of the first pages submitted were thrown down and stomped upon.
First: Query-Letter Critique
I didn’t receive Sambuchino’s comments until the Thursday night before the conference, and Friday was hectic, so it was evening before I could settle into my motel room to digest the veritable armada of comments he had supplied. Everyone reading this can probably empathize with my stomach-twisting lurch when I realized that the back-of-the-book blurb I had workshopped over and over with multiple audiences was No Good. Basic questions—what is Michael’s wound, his need? What is at stake? How does this event lead to this one?—still loomed. Sambuchino wanted A LOT more information than any back-of-the-book was going to accommodate.
The feeling of utter inadequacy that settled over me produced a complete rewrite. Was that the right strategy? All I know is that when I sat across from agents and talked from the notes they were glad to let me use, not one broke in with a confused frown to tell me I wasn’t making any sense. (Believe me, this has happened.) There’s no experiment that could tell me whether my response to Sambuchino’s comments made the difference. But I do know that when I revise my query letter, the pitch itself will look a lot more like the one I wrote Friday night than the one I have now.
Lesson learned? First let me talk about
First Page Armageddon
Note to Self: Four Editing Rules to Follow THIS TIME!
Do you have rules for your own self-editing sessions? Can you suggest some I ought to apply?
Editing a manuscript that I wrote some time ago has actually turned out to be quite a bit of fun. The story’s there, almost solid; now it’s time to make sure nothing in my style, my pacing, my voice, keeps it from getting across. Line-editing this novel is a lot like cleaning out a closet and finding out which of my old treasures really are treasures and which ones are junk.
And the thing that’s great about cleaning up the text of your novel: it’s not quite as likely as a closet to get cluttered again.
Actually, “self-editing” is a little bit of a misnomer. A lot of what I’m doing as I revisit the manuscript of my long-shelved “Sarah” novel is responding to the comments and suggestions of my wonderful Green River Writers critique group (see here, for example, to learn more about how and why they’re wonderful). But at the same time, coming back to my writing after a hiatus changes the way I see and hear it. Distance makes the heart grow smarter? Or am I just hearing myself through other people’s ears now?
Since those of us who want to be read (and published) need more than anything to know what we sound like outside of the wind cave of our own brilliance, I hope I’ve assimilated the collective wisdom of my writing group, in which people just plain tell me when I’ve made them start checking the number of pages to see how much more of my brilliance they have to take.
Here are four editing moves that give me consummate pleasure. Who would have thought that slashing a big X across half a page or a black line through a sentence could be so fun? Continue reading
How Much Grammar Do You Need? Part IV
Here are some “grammar” rules you DON’T need!
That is, rules that aren’t even really rules. And even if they were rules, they’d fall into that category Joe Williams created of “rules” that are more noticeable and disruptive when they are followed than when they aren’t, because they’re alien to the way most of speak and write.
Of course, if you could see into the innermost grammar hearts of all those agents and editors to whom you direct your missives, you would find people who cringe every time you fail to observe one of these mythological rules. My point is that convoluting your prose to avoid them, or obsessing over them to the point that your creativity begins to ice over, is counterproductive. In these cases, let your natural ear as an English speaker rule.
Here they are (I’ll probably come up with others and invite you to submit your candidates):
Beginning a sentence with “because.”
Williams says that there’s no sign of this prohibition in any handbook he ever saw, and I echo that. Yet, even thirty years after Williams debunked it, my students would still cite this “rule” to each other in their peer reviews.
In my view—a pure hypothesis, I admit—this instruction arose from some teacher’s worry that clauses prefaced with “because” all too often were never connected to the necessary independent clause and thus end up as fragments. We do talk this way: “Because I said so.” “Because I don’t want to.” “Because I like it.”
It’s a fact that the minute you put the word “because” in front of a sentence, it becomes “dependent,” in need of a crutch to make sense. In conversation, the missing information is already present in the ongoing conversation. In formal Standard Written English, the missing components should be supplied in an independent clause attached to the “because clause.” “Because I like it, I often swim in the lake in winter.” (Or because I’m a glutton for punishment.)
It’s probably more natural to reverse the clauses: “I often swim in the lake in the winter because. . . .” But there’s nothing grammatically wrong with starting with the “because clause.” It’s a stylistic choice, not a grammar/moral-fiber choice.
Ending a sentence with a preposition.
I was startled years ago when, at my university, the speech communication people presented the writing faculty with a list of the things students ought to be learning in first-year writing, and the list was just a bunch of grammar “rules,” this one prominently among them. Honestly, I thought anyone teaching writing in college would have a more nuanced idea of what “writing” consists of than that list.
In order to follow this supposed rule, you have to become so rigidly formal that your efforts wave and shout from the page. “Who were you talking to?” becomes “To whom were you talking?” Or say you’re synopsizing in a query and you need a sentence like, “His daughter was the only person he’d confessed to.” Is it really better to write, “His daughter was the only person to whom he’d confessed”? It depends entirely on how “formal” you want to sound. Personally, I’d probably find a way to “write around” this conundrum, but I’m making a point. (We’ll get to the who/whom issue soon enough.)
There’s a very famous example of the preposition-at-the-end issue often attributed to Winston Churchill. Supposedly he responded to an editor’s efforts to eliminate terminal prepositions with a note: “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.” (My dad loved to quote this at me.) For a lively discussion of this supposed quote, see this post by Geoffrey K. Pullum at The Language Log. This post claims, from a reputable source, that the rule that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition “was apparently created ex nihilo in 1672 by the essayist John Dryden.” The post gives several other examples of smart choices in which the preposition stays where it wants to, including a discussion of the kind of English verb that includes words generally defined as prepositions, such as “put up with.” Separate these at your peril.
Splitting infinitives
I’m old enough to remember expletives fired at the epithet for Star Trek as it shifted into warp speed: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” Eeek! Split infinitive—separating the “to” from its partner, “go,” which together create the “infinitive” form of the verb, which in English is created exactly this way: a main form of the verb plus “to.” To eat. To see. To write. If you’ve ever taken a foreign language, say Spanish or French, you also learned about infinitives, the more-or-less “base” form of the verb: estar, hablar, manger, sortir.
You’ll note that these infinitives belonging to “romance languages” (not because they’re sexy but because they come from “Roman” or Latin ancestors) are one-word infinitives, not two-word infinitives as in English. At some point, some upmarket grammarians decided that Latin was a more “advanced” or “noble” language than English; English needed to be elevated by becoming more like Latin. You can’t split an infinitive in Latin, for obvious reasons; so you shouldn’t split one in English either. I guess you’ve noticed how much better English sounds as a result of this rule.
Or does it? Does “To go boldly where no man has gone before” really sound better? Not to my ear. One of the reasons the revised version clunks is that the original, “to boldly go,” is in “iambic pentameter,” the poetic meter most natural to English—in fact, the one used by Shakespeare. Here’s a nice account of the rule and advice about (not) applying it.
The upshot: listen to your sentences. Put the adverb (the “boldly”) and the preposition where they most want to go.
Send me your candidates: Rules we don’t need!
Filed under correct grammar for writers of fiction, Editing your novel, Finding literary agents for writers, grammar rules for writers, Learning to write, Myths and Truths for writers, punctuation for writers of novels, self editing for fiction writers, style for writers, Teaching writing, Writing, Writing and teaching writing
Why Writers MUST Read
A wonderful perk of being retired from teaching is rediscovering what it’s like to read fiction for pleasure. I assume I don’t have to convince any writers of the pleasures of a good book!
But my new reading experience has reminded me why writers MUST read. True, we know we have to read in our own genres. After all, we have to be able to tell agents and editors we query how our own work fits into a landscape with which we had better be intimately familiar. But we need to read—we MUST read—more widely than that.
We need to know, we must know, what works for people who are not us. In my lifetime of reading fiction, slowed but not terminated by my years of teaching, I have always been surprised to discover what other people consider good. I hope I’m not the only reader to roll my eyes once in a while and wonder, “Who’d’a thunk anyone would publish that?”
But “that” turns out to have five-star reviews on Amazon, enormous followings on Goodreads, and thousands of Facebook likes. I’ve moved from “I’d never do that!” to “What can I learn from this?” For example, from watching how different kinds of writers win over readers, I learned the importance of the “pet-the-dog” scene. The protagonist you want your readers to stick with has to do one small “good” thing somewhere, somehow, in the book’s opening moments. Related: the “stop-being-mean-to-her” scene, wherein your protagonist is being treated unjustly. I didn’t learn about these strategies from reading Shakespeare—although I assure you, he does them, too.
In other words, there’s some reason a lot of people like the books you hate. There’s gold in figuring out what that reason is.
We need to know, we must know, that the kinds of books we love do exist, sometimes in the most unexpected places. I read so much about the fall of publishing, about the sheer inability of those of us who might once have been indulgently called “midlist” authors to persevere. I hear so often that unless you’re already a celebrity or a world-renowned expert, you only have two options for your quiet, literary, sort-of-mystery-but-sort-of-not: either self-publish it or stick it in the drawer.
Yet over and over I take a chance on a new book only to discover wonderful writing still bubbling up out there. I don’t say it necessarily gets shelved face-out at Barnes & Noble or makes it to the top at Amazon. I’m reading a terrific book right now that will probably never do either (Mary O’Dell’s Cyn, from Turquoise Morning Press). But good writing gets noticed, and it gets published. And I get to read it by opening myself to that chance.
More to the point, I get the reassurance that continuing to grow as a writer is worth the effort. I can’t write as well as the great writers I admire, but I can learn to write better than I do now, and it’s because I find these great writers out there through reading that I have the faith to soldier on.
We learn what we forgot to do in our own books. This is a little different from the strategies in point one above; it’s not about devices, it’s about fundamentals. Writing every day, deep in a story, we get into habits and patterns that, in my case at least, lull me so that I forget something vital I should be attending to, something I’ve left out. Often it’s something that doesn’t come naturally to me, that I need to work at. For example, the other day I went to our local bookseller (Carmichael’s) to redeem a gift card. The book I wanted, Ben H. Winter’s World of Trouble, was out of stock, but I did find a discounted copy of The Girl on the Train.
I expected some sort of mystery/thriller, not too far from my genre. I expected one of those bang-up openings that set me on the edge of a cliff, teetering. Instead, I found myself in a tranquil, slow-moving country, listening in on the placid observations of a muted soul.
I thought of all my anguish trying to make my opening pages electric. Here I was holding a bestseller whose author saw no such need. Then, slowly, I began to understand what she was doing—something I struggle to do enough.
This was/is a classic, masterly demonstration of that single overriding rule for all writers of fiction: show, don’t tell.
From what this character noticed and how she reacted to what she noticed, she slowly let me build for myself a rich, nuanced sense of a soul in deep trouble, a world alight with danger, if not the guns-and-daggers kind (not yet, at least). A soul in trouble, a soul in danger: the classic “it” that a story either has or doesn’t. And all without ever shaking a finger at me to tell me what I was supposed to see or know.
That night, I got out my notebook. Above one column, I wrote, “What I want readers to know about Sarah.” Above the next column, I wrote, “What she does to show it.” I sat for an hour, working my way out of that all-too-available strategy of having Sarah tell readers how she was feeling, what she feared, worried about. What does Sarah do to let readers sense her danger, understand how she got here, so that they’ll be shouting at her, “No, no, don’t do that! Do this!” and sweating (I hope) to see if she does.
It’s not that I didn’t know this basic rule. But inside the walls of my own imagination, I had lost sight of it. I didn’t even miss it, until I wandered out into other landscapes and saw another writer doing it—when I picked up that book and read.
I’m venturing into self-publishing …
I’m venturing into self-publishing ….
From brittneysahin, who reposted it from Nicola Prentis. When you click through Brittney’s site to the full piece (Prentis), BE SURE to follow her link to the Dean Wesley Smith argument for self-publishing over traditional publishing. I’m really rethinking all this. I think we get caught up in the fantasy of that six-figure advance, when the reality is going to be much different. And just having retrieved the rights to my earlier novels from Bantam, I’m appalled at the “Life-of-Copyright” language that Smith says is now standard in contracts. If so, that’s a deal breaker, and it should be for us all.
Rules for First Lines of Fiction: Rule 1
Rules you don’t actually have to follow 🙂
But for fun. . . .
Now that I’ve looked at four examples I found compelling, I feel emboldened to draw some generalizations.
As I do so, I realize I’m starting to wander into territory already pretty well covered by eons of literary, narrative, aesthetic, and rhetorical criticism. I’m not about to chase down citations. I’m going to talk about the pieces of this theorizing that have resonated with me, maybe not as theory (so Don’t Panic!) but as just what seems to work for me.
Rule 1: I already said I thought compelling first lines must make a promise. But what kind of promise? For me—and this goes as far back at least as Sophocles—a promise of a world overturned.
In other words, I want to sense that I’m about to enter a place where my day-to-day expectations will be thwarted. Things WILL NOT go on as usual. I will see, traverse, a new landscape, one with volcanic fissures I must be careful not to stumble into. This rule holds even for novels that are not mystery/suspense. A Visit from the Goon Squad takes me into a disquieting place, a hotel bathroom, where what is “usual” is decidedly not going to be “usual” for me.
We read to enter alternate realities (duh). This is true even—especially—for those of us who may read the same authors, enter the same worlds, over and over. We enter that foreign world again and again, by choice. Is this escape, then? Not necessarily. I learned of many new worlds in Americanah. But these worlds were not so much worlds where I could escape my own (though I guess I did quite a bit), but rather where I could see my own world slant, in Emily Dickinson’s image: upset, overturned. That can be an unsettling experience as opposed to one that lulls.
So I want the promise that I’m going to see slant. That I’m going to have to reconnoiter to know where I am. That I may just have to get the shotgun if things get out of hand. But that in the end, I will be a native of a larger landscape than before.
Do I need a promise that order will be restored? We enter here the classical territory of the well-wrought form, where the world is purged of the scapegoat entity that disrupted it and dust settles—NOT a metaphor/clichĂ© of abiding peace: dust is detritus, no? Indeed, I read with a firm sense of the artifice of any endings I’m going to encounter. In most mysteries, things settle, but only until the next body is discovered. In Americanah, Ceiling is invited in, but to what? More of the messiness we all experience in trying to live with each other.
As I look at that Dickinson poem, i will posit that reading fiction does “tell all the truth but tell it slant”: tell it in such a way that it’s bearable. That’s the meaning of “vicarious experience.” We experience disruptions in a form that offers the (false?) possibility that they can be resolved, that artifice is powerful enough to adjust all disproportion, smooth all curves. We enter a work of fiction with hope that, even if at the end all is still chaos, our minds can create a unified whole, a “reading.” The need for such a “reading,” a “making sense” of even the most inchoate flotsam, seems built into us—at least, into me.
I do think that such artifice is built into the first lines I find compelling. I note that each I’ve looked at is ironic, containing both the disrupted world and the world that was, but will not be possible to return to. The old days. A quiet rural county. A gymnasium. A hotel. Each of these used-to-be’s is attached to something that pokes a hole in it. I see both, side by side.
So Rule 1 for me: stand me on a cliff and let me feel the ground under me begin to crumble. Let me look down and see myself slide. Promise me a chance to build something out of the rubble, even if it’s only my own feeble creation.
That’s my Rule 1. What’s you
Filed under Learning to write
Great First Lines, Part IV
It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.
—A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan
To me, this is the most subtle first line of all, in the promise it makes, and it’s the only one of the four examples that is not, on its face, a novel of violence, mystery, or suspense. Yet, despite receiving no promise of violent conflict, I remember this as one of the most arresting first pages of a novel I had ever read–arresting and disorienting. In both those ways, this sentence is a fitting start to this arresting and disorienting book.
I say disorienting because Egan does not give us a straightforward narrative experience. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a collection of loosely linked episodes in the characters’ lives. This method is not unfamiliar to modern readers, but it still demands a relinquishing of expectations and an understanding that whatever narrative thread emerges has to be one we, as readers, invent ourselves.
The construction of this first line invites us to do some such construction. This construction is not uncommon in fiction, memoir, history. In such syntax, we are promised that we will soon know what “it” is, and what the “usual” way is. Yet there’s a hint in this grammatical choice that what we are about to be given is not unfamiliar to us. The narrator (the character? We don’t know yet) confesses to a history of experiencing whatever “it” is often enough to have a “usual” expectation of what is to follow. We’re invited to imagine that this history is somewhere behind us as well, so that we have this hint of an expectation of our own. We share a history with a character who has not yet been named; we cannot name this person, yet we share a “usual” history, and somewhere low in our souls we feel we should know what “it” is. And this is a history that involves bathrooms in hotels. Continue reading
Filed under Writing and teaching writing
Contest! Contest! Contest!
Green River Writers 2015 Writing Contest
Green River Writers 2015 Writing Contest. Two Grand Prizes and 14 other categories, including fiction, non-fiction, & poetry. Over $1700 in prizes. Grand prize categories- $3 each entry for GRW members; $5 each entry for non-members. All other categories- $2 each entry or $12 maximum for GRW members; $3 each entry for non-members, but they may join GRW and receive the member rate. Â Deadline: August 31, 2015. Details: http://www.greenriverwriters.org/
Will Lavender, the NYT-bestselling author who recently honored us with an interview, will be judging the “Novel First-Chapter” category I’m sponsoring. If you have a novel in progress, enter your first chapter!
BTW, if you’re in the Louisville area, Green River Writers is a wonderful community. I don’t know what I would do without my monthly GRW group!
Filed under Interviews, Writers' groups, writing contests
Great Novel First Lines: Part 3
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
This one’s harder to analyze. Yet I think it qualifies as a terrific opening line for a haunting, even painful novel. I’m interested in how it does the work of leading me into such a book.
Two things stand out. First and simplest, “had once been” tells us that normalcy is endangered. Something staid and familiar is no more. Gymnasiums, those places that for me signify high-school PE with its silly short jumpsuits and sweaty-sock smells, Friday-night basketball games with their creaky bleachers and more sweaty smells, assemblies and pep rallies with their innocent pom-pom dances showcasing the popular girls: all no more. I see in my mind’s eye a building clawed at by vines and surrounded by crumbling brick, toppled trees, things that rustle in the overgrown grass.
There’s no reason, necessarily, to see the gymnasium this way. Except for “[w]e slept” there. Now, when do people sleep in gyms? After disasters, when the gym opens up as a shelter. So there has been a disaster, a loss. But not a recent, temporary one. In that case, the sentence would have read, “We slept in the gymnasium.” Because even after a hurricane, the gym will supposedly go back to being a gym. No, “what had once been” cuts off that line of speculation. This gym is done.
Do I think from this line that gyms in general are done? There’s such a hint, again from the fact that “we slept” there. This is a world in which people, this “we,” need a place to sleep and this is what they are given. A gym. Hard floors, cots at best, echoing barracks-like atmosphere. Moreover, we’re asked to compare this world where people sleep in gyms with a world in which “the gymnasium” is a familiar environment that doesn’t have to be explained. We all know what a gymnasium is. But “the gymnasium,” that fixture of every high-school and college campus, is not a place where people sleep.
So why do they sleep there? The novel’s promise is to tell us. What disaster of what magnitude is conjured by “had once been”?
The word “once” does work of its own: “Once upon a time.” Loooonng time ago. Once there were trees and a river (apocalyptic 1961 song from the Limelighters). All by itself, the word “once” used in this time sense speaks of things long gone and not coming back, except in dreams.
It conjures mythology as well. A time when monsters and gods roamed. The “once” referred to in this sentence, though, is not the time of gods and monsters; this “once” is ordinary time. Yet, that hint of myth gently infuses the sentence: perhaps there will be gods and monsters—if not then, now.
“We” is easy. I am teased into wanting to know who “we” are. Will I see myself in that “we” at some point? There will be a lot of us; it takes a gym to accommodate us. Alternatively, “we” could be a couple of vagabonds who have sought shelter on this ruined campus. Or “we” could be a platoon of soldiers on the march. Either way, “we” are not reposing on satin pillows, under silk sheets. We are not here by choice; the gym is not Club Med. I sense a stop along the way to somewhere more permanent for this “we,” and I both fear and want to know where the next stop will be.
It occurs to me that the word “gymnasium” and not “gym” hints at foreignness–a time with which I am not all that familiar. A time when calling things by their formal names may offer some touchstone, some anchor, in a world where expectations are adrift.
That this sentence is so short, that it doesn’t explain itself, also adds to its accomplishment. It’s a bald statement of fact that the speaker accepts. There’s no protest, no sign of a need to “show” lurid details. I’ve made the case that there’s nothing mundane in this situation, yet the speaker’s revelation could not itself be more ordinary: There was this former gymnasium and that’s where we slept. Not dozed, rested, napped. Connotations held at arms’ length. As in the first line from Paris Trout, it’s in the ordinary that we’re promised doom.
And it’s in the way the ordinary is dropped without context into this most nebulous “we” and “once,” both untethered, that the unsettling contrast emerges.
I note that I’ve been focusing on first lines of novels of suspense and mystery. That says something about my own preferences, of course. But I wrote a paper in grad school arguing that all fiction is ultimately mystery, and certainly it’s all suspense. There’s always something that has to be found out, by the characters, by the reader, and whether or not it’s found out in time is what we read to know.
But for next time, I have one that’s not a mystery/suspense novel.
What are your candidates for “best first lines”? Why?
Filed under Learning to write, Writing and teaching writing
Just Can't Help Writing 