Writing at the Madeline Island School of the Arts

Dear writing friends:

I’ll be teaching a workshop called The Achievable Climb: Writing the Book-Length Work at the Madeline Island School of the Arts in Northern Wisconsin October 8 – 12th.

The workshop will be useful to those working on either a memoir or fiction project. If you have a manuscript underway, or just an idea for one you’d like to begin, I’ll give you lots of ideas, exercises, feedback, and support. It’ll be a great time to get experienced, constructive instruction from me, to join the company of others “making the climb” who can give you helpful comments, and to have free time to yourself to concentrate on your writing away from the usual distractions and temptations of everyday life. On an island, no less!

We’ll be tackling the “usual suspects”: voice; structure; what to put in and what to leave out; how to find what the book is REALLY about; where to start; how to work through drafts; and how to complete the work.

There will be 3-4 hours of classroom time each day, with exercises designed to help you with various aspects of your project; opportunities to get feedback on your work from members of the workshop; examples of successful techniques to model; and time to work on your book each day. I’ll meet with each of you for an individual conference on your project.

Island time for yourself

If you have questions you can email me at pbalden@aol.com or via my website contact form, or call me at 612-920-1896.

I’m really looking forward to it!

Fall leaves on Madeline

This is the first time I’ve taught a workshop for MISA, but I hear wonderful things about the experience there. Madeline Island, on Lake Superior, will be so beautiful in the fall! It’s about a five hour drive from the Twin Cities, or you can fly into Duluth and drive about two hours from there. You reach the island by ferry–talk about away from it all.

The workshop is limited to 15 students. You can call 715-747-2054 or email the School at misa@chequnet.net to ask questions or reserve your place. The cost for the workshop is $425.00 for non-credit, and $520.00 for 1 graduate credit from the University of Minnesota at Duluth. These links will also give you information about MISA and my workshop. You can also register online.

http://www.madelineartschool.com/

http://www.madelineartschool.com/Classes_detail.cfm?recordno=13&Product_CatalogID=176&ProductNumber=WPBA100812&ProductCode=49&NewProduct=0

Milk House at Madeline School of the Arts

Various lodging is available on the island, including B&Bs, campgrounds and cottage accommodations at the school. Things fill up fast, so do think about booking now.

Please help me get the word out about the workshop. If you know of someone who is working on a book-length work, please forward this information on to them. THANKS! For writers’ groups, there is a group discount if 4 or more sign up. There is also information on my website under “events,” at www.paulettealden.com.

I hope to see you there!

Best,

Paulette

Madeline Island map

Lorrie Moore

If you’re following this blog with any regularity, I’m sure you’re relieved that I’m off my JCO’s A Widow’s Story bender.  I’m “recovering.”  Like they say, one day at a time…

I just had a fun weekend in Madison, which I had never been to.  It is a cool, hip, funky, populist town where everyone looks cool, hip and funky.  On Williamson Street where we were staying, I saw a guy sweeping his sidewalk whose hair was pretty much like a large, flattened broom head sticking straight up on top of his skull, held upright by some spackling substance. Very cool, hip and funky.  Every restaurant listed which local farms its food was from, and every cafe had kombucha on the menu.  Though I am certainly cool, hip and funky, the only reason I even know what kombucha is is because two women in my yoga class, an acupuncturist and homeopathic doctor, make it.  I’ve never tasted it.  For those of you not cool, hip, and funky enough to know, kombucha is an effervescent fermented tea that’s supposed to be good for you.

Being in Madison made me remember Lorrie Moore’s novel, The Gate at the Stairs, which I didn’t find particularly successful as a novel.  I love her wonderful short stories but Gate seemed disjointed, as if she had cobbled together too many things that she couldn’t meld.  Her form might be the short story and not the novel, was what I thought.  The story itself, the plot, didn’t grab me.  And there was a scene towards the end in which Tassie Keltjim, the young university student who narrates the novel, climbs into a coffin with a dead person that caused me to go, Oh Come on!

But Madison made me think about Moore, who has taught at the U. of Wisconsin there for many years. Gate is set in a Madison-like mid-western university town call Troy, “the ‘Athens of the Midwest,’” a hilarious oxymoron in my opinion, pure Lorrie Moore.  When we strolled the campus I kept hoping I’d see her.  Not that I know her, but I thought I’d recognize her from photos or a from a couple of her readings.  It’s funny how that novel, which I hadn’t read since it came out in 2009, kept coming to mind, superimposing itself on my experience of Madison.  When we ate at a nice restaurant there, I heard a faint echo, as if dinner were being narrated by Moore.

One of the characters in The Gate at the Stairs, Sarah, owns just such a restaurant as we dined in.  Tassie, who will become the baby-sitter for Sarah and her husband’s adopted baby, comments on Sarah’s restaurant:

“Le Petit Moulin. I knew of it a little. It was one of those expensive restaurants downtown, every entrée freshly hairy with dill, every soup and dessert dripped upon as preciously as a Pollock, filets and cutlets sprinkled with lavender dust once owned by pixies…I knew Le Petit Moulin served things that sounded like instruments—timbales, quenelles—God only knew what they were…The lowest price for dinner was twenty-two dollars, the highest, forty-five. Forty-five! You could get an oil-and-water bra for that price!”

I had no idea what an oil and water bra was, so I Googled it. They are bras filled with oil and water, believe it or not.  Now I want one.

Tassie grew up in the country nearby, and seeing the landscape around Madison and some of the fresh-faced Wisconsin students on campus brought to mind this passage from the novel:

“I had come from Dellacrosse Central High, from a small farm on the old Perryville Road, to this university town of Troy, ‘the Athens of the Midwest,’ as if from a cave, like the priest-child of a Columbian tribe I’d read about in Cultural Anthropology, a boy made mystical by being kept in the dark for the bulk of his childhood and allowed only stories—no experience—of the outside world. Once brought out into light, he would be in a perpetual, holy condition of bedazzlement and wonder; no story would ever have been equal to the thing itself. And so it was with me. Nothing had really prepared me. Not the college piggy bank in the dining room, the savings bonds from my grandparents, or the used set of World Book encyclopedias with their beautiful color charts of international wheat production and photographs of presidential birthplaces. The flat green world of my parents’ hogless, horseless farm—its dullness, its flies, its quiet ripped open daily by the fumes and whining of machinery—twisted away and left me with a brilliant city life of books and films and witty friends. Someone had turned on the lights. Someone had led me out of the cave—of Perryville Road. My brain was on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir. Twice a week a young professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie, stood before a lecture hall of stunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James’s masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie.” Read More

I just came upon a new (to me) book on memoir writing which I want to recommend: Fearless Confessions: a Writer’s Guide to Memoir, by Sue William Silverman ((http://www.suewilliamsilverman.com/index.htm).  I learned things from it and will use some of her ideas and language in the memoir workshop I’m teaching in Key West in January.   She also has the most amazing bibliography of creative non-fiction books on her website http://www.suewilliamsilverman.com/click_here_to_see_sue_silverman_s_list_of_contemporary_literary_nonfiction__71566.htm

I thought I had read all the books on the craft of memoir, but nooooo. Lately I’ve sort of read two other (to me) new ones: The Memoir Project, by Marion Roach Smith, and Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir, by Lisa Dale Norton.  Of these three, I liked Fearless Confessions the best, but I can’t really do justice or say anything particularly helpful about the other two since it’s been a while since I sort of read them.  You can check them out.  I still like the “classic” Writing the Memoir by Judith Barrington, and also Living to Tell the Tale, by Jane Taylor McDonnell.  I have a memoir writing bibliography under “articles,” and it definitely needs updating.  Let me know if you recommend other guides to writing memoir that I should include.

Sue William Silverman has written two memoirs, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, which received the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction, and Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction.”  I haven’t read either.  She says in the Preface that she initially conceived of her memoir guide “as a way to redeem the notion of ‘confessing’ for silenced women.”  I didn’t realize that anyone felt silenced anymore.  But I’m sure Silverman knows more about feeling silenced and writing about taboo subjects than I do.  She draws on her own experiences of writing about incest and sexual addiction to inform her guide.  I want to make clear that you don’t have to have such painful material to gain from Fearless Confessions.  She personalizes the material so that you feel she’s speaking directly to you, she uses faux-memoirs at times to illustrate points, has writing exercises, and includes examples of others’ essays to round things out.  You may not use all her ideas, but I think you’ll definitely find things here that are useful to you as a memoir writer. Read More

Nov/Dec Poets and Writers

I sat down with the Nov/Dec Poets and Writers magazine to read an article called “A Writer’s Daily Habit: Four Steps to Higher Productivity,” only to discover it was written by Ellen Sussman, whose novel French Lessons I’ve just posted a blog about.  Quelle coïncidence!  I’m always interested in how other writers get it done, and hey, I’ll try anything.  I didn’t resonate with the word “productivity,” but I suppose that’s what it comes down to.  And I liked the promise of four steps.  Four EASY steps, I was hoping… ((http://www.pw.org/content/novemberdecember_2011)

Well, the article got off to a slow start for me, as in YAWN.  There was the old saw about how you have to “claim” (or is it “own”?) that you’re a writer.  I don’t seem to be at many parties period, let alone ones where I’m put on the spot about what I do.  I’m not sure how important it is to actual writing to say you’re a writer.  Hopefully she was just warming up.

Next came “write every day.”  Okay, I agree with that, if you can.  And I was interested to see she sets a word minimum of a thousand words.  I try to do that when I’m drafting, but revising is a whole different ballgame.

She starts her writing day with five or ten minutes of meditation, to calm and clear her mind.  But the next thing was new to me.  She recommended a software program called Freedom that blocks the Internet!  It was actually a relief to see that she shares my addiction.  You can buy Freedom for $10.00 at macfreedom.com and when you sign up, it asks you how many minutes you need to block at a time.  Maybe I’ll try the Freedom thing, since I do find the temptation of the Internet and email quite a distraction.  I remember being so impressed that Jonathan Franzen cut himself off completely from the Internet when he was writing.  But then I remembered I’m no Jonathan Franzen, writing or otherwise.

Now here was what interested me the most in the article.  Sussman calls it “the unit system,” and the idea is based on research into how to help graduate students structure their time while writing their theses.  “Divide your time into units.  Each unit is one hour of time. For the first forty-five minutes of that hour, you write.  You do nothing but write.  You don’t stop writing.  Then, no matter where you are at the forty-five minute mark, you get up from your desk.  You take a fifteen minute break and you do something that lets you think about the work but doesn’t allow you to actually do the work.”

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We're having fun! (Well, one of us...)

Not to horn in on Dorothy Parker’s territory too much, but if you want to hear about the gratifying joys of revision, go sit by someone else.  If you want to hear about my torturous, tedious and ridiculous attempts this week of revising my novel in the North Woods of Wisconsin, come sit by me.

Well, it WAS beautiful up there by Lake Namakagen. I was extremely lucky to have five days to myself at the cottage to dig into my novel, which my agent has not been able to sell, and which I hadn’t read in awhile.  But folks, a 285 page novel is a lot to try to revise in a week.  I worked mornings, afternoons, and evenings, and the more I did, the more I needed to do.  At least I could go out in the 75 degree sunny weather occasionally, with red and yellow leaves falling all around me, and throw a tennis ball like a normal person for the dawg.  I felt like I was chasing a ball myself at my computer all the time.  Fetch, return, fetch, return….

Okay, for starters I felt confused about which draft of the novel on my computer was the latest one.  How this could be, I can’t explain, nor did the helpful Word date that magically pops up clarify matters.  I thought I had the latest version, but then I’d sort of remember having made some changes earlier (but I wasn’t sure) and they weren’t in the draft I thought was the most recent.  I’ve had so many drafts, and named them all more or less the same thing, the title of the novel, with some catchy variation (like “old,” “new,” “revised,” “latest”) and have modified them enough to keep changing the dates.  I found myself constantly switching back and forth between two older versions in confusion as I built yet a new draft—called, cleverly, “Answer revised fall 2011.”  Sometimes I’d copy and paste a chapter from one draft into the wrong draft of another version and then be mystified about where it had gone.  Did I actually have the IQ to revise a novel?

I was further mystified about why I had so much of the novel in present tense, when in fact I now saw it needed to be in past tense.  Is there anything more tedious than changing a few thousand “says” into “saids”?  Plus all that tiny mousing made my right elbow ache and my forearm burn.  I know about find and replace, but I’ve made big messes of things before, when the computer will change words that contain the find letters and replace them in the midst of some different (longer) word, thus creating totally new, incomprehensible words.  But beyond the time consuming chore of changing the tenses, I wondered why I had felt at one time that present tense worked.  What had changed in me, to see it differently now?  It hadn’t been seven years (or had it?) so all my cells hadn’t been replaced. What had seemed so “right” about present tense earlier that now seemed so “wrong”?  Would I be changing it all to future tense next round?

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I read something that’s too rich in too many ways not to bring it to your attention immediately!  Or at least that’s the way it struck me.

I just bought the next novel I plan to read, We Need to Talk about Kevin, by Lionel Shriver.  I’ve known about this novel for several years, and have been afraid to read it for fear it will blow me out of the water as a writer.  I’ve written an (unpublished) novel about the mother of a serial killer, and I knew Kevin was written from the point of view of the mother of a boy who goes Columbine, murdering students and school personnel when he’s not quite sixteen.  I also knew Shriver’s novel won the Orange Prize (though I didn’t actually know what that was) and that it was a huge success.  I’ve been reluctant to see just how much better Kevin is than my pitiful effort.  But now I figure maybe I’ll learn something from it.

Reading the first page did make me feel like…well, you know. It was REAL writing, really GREAT writing…the voice incredibly detailed, vivid and THICK.  The voice of the mother in my book seems depressingly thin in comparison.  Well, it was 11:00 o’clock at night, too late to really read (and be able to sleep, given where I was headed), so I just flipped to the back and saw something called “Failed Novels, Maternal Ambivalence, and the Orange Prize,” so I began to read that instead of the novel itself.

Shriver begins by describing how when she started writing Kevin in 1999, she felt dismal.  “My last novel sat wanly on my C:drive, unpublished.  The previous six had all lost money.  Worse, numerous other authors shared the same leaky boat: with sheaves of nice reviews to keep them warm at night (paper is a great insulator—ask the homeless) but no prospects.  Nuts.  I didn’t even feel special.” 

She goes on to describe how her agent took a month to read the manuscript and then sent this email: “I don’t see how I’m going to sell this…For the life of me, I don’t know who is going to fall in love with this novel….I just don’t think anyone is going to want to publish a book about a kid doing such maxed-out, over-the-top, evil things, especially when it’s written from such an unsympathetic point of view….I can’t go out with it unless I know I can sell it.  It would be a bad business decision for both of us…I’m also extremely fearful of the idea that some kid might read this and get some copycat idea to use a crossbow.  Just imagine how that would feel.”

Don’t you just hate it when agents use language like that: “I can’t go out with it…”  I just hate that.  So self-important. 

Now get this: the agent proposed several “editorial remedies”: “’Allude to’ but never stage the very climactic murder scene toward which the entire novel progressed.  Turn the book into a comedy ‘in that way which ONLY YOU can do.’ Or write about a kid who was a little unpleasant, so long as he didn’t hurt anybody.”

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"Writing as a Way of Healing" by Louise DeSalvo

DeSalvo says every creative project is different, but that they usually involve passing through a series of stages in a predictable order.  These stages do not necessarily occur in lockstep.  You may go back and forth between some of them, but in my experience there does seem to be a progression and as she points out, identifying them and knowing what to expect from each stage can be very helpful in seeing a project through to completion.

The first is “Preparation Stage,” in which you have an idea, an image, an incomplete vision or vague intuition maybe.  She describes it as “partially conscious, partially instinctive.”  You want to write something, and it begins to build and form in your mind.  You might be spurred by something you read, you might do some pre-writing, such as clustering, in which you circle a key word in the middle of the page, and then brainstorm all the associations that come to mind, branching them out in all directions from the key idea or subject as fast as you can, in a right brain way.  You might doodle or make lists or even draw something.  DeSalvo comments that she thinks beginning writers often spend too little or too much time at this stage, which I found interesting.  “Some avoid it altogether and plunge right into working, which can derail our process.”  You’re not ready yet.  Let things build a bit, but determine to move on. 

The next is “Germination Stage,” “during which we gather and work on fragments of ideas, images, phrases, scenes, moments, lines, possibilities for plots, characters, settings.  Sometimes we don’t quite know what we’re doing or where all this is leading.”  I’ll say.  Again, this seems more a right brain thing, where you’re more or less musing and not consciously, rationally, linearly figuring things out.  You’re letting things accumulate and generate and multiply: i.e., germinate.   Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones has a similar idea she calls composting.  “Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil.  Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories.  But this does not come all at once. It takes time…”  The important thing here is not to rush too quickly into writing a first draft, because you may run out of fuel.  In the germinating stage, you’re tanking up and building up pressure (and material) to carry you through the next stage.

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Sometimes when I’m critiquing a piece of writing, I find myself trying to describe the indescribable. There are certain concepts that seem to be totally necessary for the writer to grasp, but I find it hard to put the idea into words. Words, that is, that will be helpful to the writer in terms of advancing his or her writing. “Shape”– both the verb and the noun – is a word that means something to me when I use it, but I’m not always sure I’m able to get it across to the writer.  I might say something like “this material needs more shaping, or “the piece lacks shape.” But what exactly am I saying? I’m left with the task of trying to explain what I mean and how to fix it.

I should make it clear that I’m not trying to talk about structure.  David Lodge describes the structure of a narrative as “like the framework of girders that holds up a modern high-rise building: you can’t see it, but it determines the edifice’s shape and character.”  I think of structure as how the material is ordered and organized in an architectural sense, such as a classic arc or a modular arrangement.  Form may be the same thing as shape, but  is a little confusing (isn’t it all) because it can be used in the broadest sense, such as a poem, story, memoir, etc., is  a literary form, or more along the lines of a piece having found its perfect form, its essence in terms of shape and structure.  For some reason I prefer the term shape to form, perhaps because I think of it as a more active verb.  Whenever I use the word shape, my hands want to make a sphere, something three dimensional in which all the parts cohere into a tight whole.

When I asked a writer friend about shape, she said it’s something that comes well into the process, not early on when the writer is generating material.  She is so right.  It’s not something even to think about until you have a solid draft.  Louise DeSalvo, in her wonderful book Writing as a Way of Healing, has one of the best models for stages of the writing process. I’ll post about her book some time, but for now, she describes the stages as germination; working stage; deepening stage; SHAPING STAGE (“during which we find the work’s order and form”); completion stage; and going-public stage.  She says “It is at the shaping stage that we take a piece of writing and turn it into a work of art.  For it is at this stage that we can finally give our full attention to form, and we can reap the emotional benefits of having turned the seeming chaos of our experience into the order of a fully realized, carefully crafted, highly original work.  The shape of our work will contribute much to its meaning, and paying attention to its form can teach us much, too, about how we’ve come to understand our experience.” One usually has to go through some form of the previous stages to get to the later “shaping” stage.

I think readers have a felt sense of whether a piece of writing is shaped well or not. To me shape is like a centripetal force that you can’t see or point to exactly, but it is what is drawing everything together.  Most writers have had the experience of writing something in which they know exactly what belongs and what does not. Sometimes this happens when the piece is delivered whole from the unconscious workshop where it has been hammered to perfection by writing elves the writer doesn’t even know exist. It seems that the writing itself knows exactly what it wants to do and be, and it comes out fully formed and shaped.  Nothing is extraneous or irrelevant.  Obviously this is easier to achieve in a shorter work than a longer one.  Other times, the sense of a complete gestalt is only achieved over a long process as one comes closer and closer to understanding what one is really writing about.

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In my last blog, One Big (Dictated) Whine, I mentioned feeling stuck on the next section of my novel, and that I needed to wait until a voice started up to begin writing. Writing waiting always makes me nervous. After all, maybe it’s just plain old procrastination or laziness, or horrors, the dreaded writer’s block. Maybe I should just make myself do it. And sometimes that is necessary and works. You just start, and something comes. But I’ve been writing a long time, and struggling with writing a long time, and I have kind of learned when waiting is okay. We could even say that there are times when waiting is the best thing.

These thoughts on waiting brought to mind an article I hadn’t read in a long time, called “The Essential Delay: When Writers Block Isn’t,” by Donald M. Murray, who was a distinguished professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and died in 2006. The essay is in a collection called When a Writer Can’t Write, edited by Mike Rose, which is out of print (though some copies are available on Amazon); the Murray article is not available separately on the Internet.  You might be interested in the other articles in the book but they are more directed towards academic writing and teaching composition. I e-mailed Mike Rose to inquire if he would be willing and able to grant me permission to make the article available to you via a scanned attachment. What a swell guy!  He has an impressive career going writing books and articles on language, literary and cognition; check him out at http://www.mikerosebooks.com/Site/Welcome.html. He wrote right back that I could do with the article as I wished, so if you send me an email, either at pbalden@aol.com, or via my website contact form, I will email you the article as an attachment.

Murray makes a strong case that delay precedes effective writing. The essay is chock-full of wonderful quotes from writers such as Virginia Woolf, Kafka,  Hemingway, and many others, all testifying to the importance of waiting. He acknowledges the anxiety waiting creates, and that there is no certainty that the waiting will be productive.  Yet the experienced writer knows that sometimes you have to wait for something to form, and it seems to me that you can trust this as part of the process.

Murray feels there are five things the writer needs to know – or feel – before beginning to write.  Since I did wait, then began writing yesterday, thank goodness, it’s interesting for me to see how my own experience fits into his five categories.

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I wish one (or more!) of you would tell me how to write a novel. I’m trying to write one, and can use all the help I can get.

This isn’t the first novel I’ve tried to write.  My last attempt, called The Answer to Your Question, is currently with my agent, being rejected, apparently, by every editor in New York.  My agent’s name is Joy and that’s what she brings to me, despite the rejections.  She’s not willing to give up yet on that novel, so she’s going to keep sending it around.  In the meantime, I’m working on a new one, which suits me fine.

Probably writing previous novels does help somewhat in writing a new one. Is it like climbing mountains?  If you’ve bagged Mt. Rainier and then Everest, say, you have some idea of what it’s going to take to climb Mount McKinley.  But it’s a whole new mountain.  Every mountain and novel is so different, it’s hard to extrapolate too much from one to another.  You just know eventually you’re going to have to put one foot in front of the other, one word in front of the last one—for a long, long time.

Those of you who have read about my idea for the new novel (you can scan back through my blog posts to “Here at Hambidge, #3,Willie Earle, etc.” if you want more detail) know it is based on a 1947 lynching and trial in my hometown of Greenville, S.C.  I have a wealth of research material, and I’m about 16,000 words into the thing.  Gee, only 84,000 to go….

I’m the type who needs some sort of scaffolding as I start to build a draft.  I like to know as much as possible going in, tanking up, as it were.  Here are some things I know about this novel: it will have four main characters speaking in first person, telling their stories in retrospect around the main events of the lynching and trial, with the resulting emotional, psychological and spiritual effects it had on each of them. I am borrowing this structure from an amazing novel, The Sweet Hereafter, by Russell Banks, which has four main characters speaking in first person about a school bus accident that killed a number of children.  I admire this novel so much, and I am greatly drawn to the tone, mood, and style of it.  I’m no Russell Banks, and mine will in the end be nothing like his (not nearly as masterful, that’s for sure) but it has helped me a lot as I start to have this template in mind.

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