I’ve heard a lot of writers say that when they’re working on a novel, their characters are always with them. Their characters ride around on their shoulders, whispering in their ears until their stories are down on paper. It’s a good reason, they say, to make sure you’re writing characters you won’t mind living with for a few years. Even when you’re not expressly working on the book, they’ll be at the corners of your mind. I’ve often doubted this would be the case with me, I suppose because I imagined this kind of absorption as a constant longing for the pen or the keyboard, an unending flow of ideas. I’d written a “novel” before–a disastrously autobiographical string of words written by the enforcement of quotas and deadlines that is now in a box under my bed where the cat has most likely puked on it–and I never felt that way. I had to force myself to write more words, not because the story needed them, but because I was determined to write a book-length work. My characters were my family members, thinly disguised, and the only one who seemed to follow me around was, predictably, based on me.

Now that I’m a more experienced writer and committed to a novel that is 100% fictional, I understand what those writers mean. Read more »

It’s 1986. Mickey Shaw is a thirty-five-year-old female New York cop who mostly works behind a desk, answering phones and filling out paperwork, processing masses of drug dealers, prostitutes, and domestic disturbers passing through. Being a woman, she is often asked to make coffee. She usually ignores the request. She is a compulsive knuckle cracker, and every morning before work she hits the gym; her favorite workout is boxing. She is a bit of a worry wart, always thinking, never shrugging anything off unless you count her husband, Stanley, who is a paper pusher but still earns more money than she does. She and Stanley have been married for fourteen years, and he isn’t as fun as he used to be, worn down by his job, plus he spends so much time alone in his office that he’s become increasingly clingy. He calls her several times a day, both at work and at her friend Olive’s apartment, where she spends one evening a week playing Trivial Pursuit with her high school friends. She quit drinking a few years ago and so is usually the only one of them fully sober, and often finds her friends heartless in their criticisms, but that’s just the way they are, and she accepts it. After all, she’s known them longer than she’s known her husband. She’s not one to throw friendships away. She walks with her hips wide, toes pointed slightly outward, shoulders square. She carries her gun in her purse at all times, though she’s never fired it outside a shooting range. As a kid she was addicted to Gunsmoke. She moves quickly, with purpose, but doesn’t always look where she’s going. Her effort/shape (a description of how she moves through space) is sinking, widening, out, bound, quick, strong, and indirect. She leads from her hips and her toes. Read more »

I popped into a coffee shop a few nights ago while waiting for my husband to pick me up from rehearsal, and it happened that one of my former creative writing students was leading a writing group. I didn’t recognize him right away. I didn’t notice him at all until, over the general chatter, I heard his deep, distinctive voice. He and his group were discussing the best way to get their stories to each other. Gmail, one group member said, was notorious for stealing content, and email in general lacked security. Someone suggested Facebook, and a discussion about the thieving Mark Zuckerberg ensued. Another suggested exchanging pieces via flash drive, which was quickly vetoed because flash drives could have viruses. They discussed exchanging addresses and using the postal service, but again, there was the concern that their stories might be stolen, plus there was the cost and environmental impact. This led to a general discussion of the problems with paper, and how the chemicals used to treat it are a much greater problem than deforestation, etc (we live near a paper mill here–the smell alone could make one want to go paperless).

Maybe this makes me a jerk, but I chuckled a little at their concerns. They had worried the small issue of exchanging stories into a major problem. And while some of their concerns were valid, I was struck by their copyright paranoia and the fear that their work might be stolen, especially because when their group leader was in my class, every piece he turned in had a giant copyright notice at the top of the page, even after I told him that it was not only unnecessary, but slightly insulting, as it insinuated that he thought his classmates or I might steal his work. I told him, if he was concerned, that he should put his name in the header or footer, by the page number, and that that would suffice. Apparently that didn’t ease his concerns. Read more »

As an undergraduate, I knew a girl who liked to say that fiction writers have a god complex. She would make this decree in the snottiest voice possible, even when surrounded by fiction writers, each of whom could have (but never did) kicked her butt. She loved to dismiss us as control freaks, as if writing fiction were a character flaw.

I hate to agree with this girl on any level–if she were to tell me snow is white or grass is green, I’d be inclined to argue–but I’ve recently had to admit how much I like to control my own art. It’s not, as this girl might have suggested, that I like to rewrite reality by fictionalizing it, or that I get any sick pleasure from controlling my characters when the rest of the world is uncontrollable. It’s that as a writer (and this is true of poets and nonfictioners, too, except those few who somehow write books in pairs or by focus group/committee) I am the sole author of my work. Editors might come along and tweak things at certain points, but for better or worse, I am the one who writes my stories. I make all the choices, from sentence structure to plot points. If I want to cut a line, I can act unilaterally. My work is not a group project.

I have long taken my artistic autonomy for granted.

Read more »

I will write about that person or place or thing (you know the one I mean) I keep meaning to write about, even if I do it terribly and show no one.

I will write about a robot, humanoid or otherwise, at least once.

Happy New Year, happy you.

I will learn to sit and type ergonomically, because without working wrists and fingers, writing is awfully hard, and voice recognition programs are a feign plain bane pain in the but butt.

I will keep a box of scratch paper and actually use it, even if it means defiling page three of the second draft of my favorite story, which I never needed to print, with a shopping list.

I will stop printing things I don’t need to print.

I will use those beautiful journals people are constantly giving me for my birthday/Christmas, and stop telling myself they are prettier than any words I could possibly put in there.

I will try writing longhand before I type.

I will read every day, and not just blog posts and street signs, but books.

I will give e-Readers a chance.

I will try to learn a new fact every day.

I will ask for advice.

I will remember that animals might not be people, but they can be characters.

I will make up my own words.

I will try to write a play.

I will make time to people-watch.

I will persist.

How to drink wine.

How much to drink.

How to remove stains.

How to be fashionably late.

How to dress your hostess gift.

How to start conversations.

How to introduce people.

How to handle conflict.

How to dress a wound.

How to cure a hangover.

A tea towel, embroidered by my husband's grandmother + a cookbook I found at the farmer's market = a story waiting to be written

It’s that time of year when the world thinks of things, of gifts gifts gifts gifts, the over-commercialization of Christmas, bells that jingle and fully-decked halls. Physical items start to seem more important than they do the rest of the year: the bike you wrote to Santa for, the ornament your daughter made in second grade, the divinity candy you have to make though only you and your dad really like it because Grandma used to make it every year. Every string of lights or holiday platter bears memories, or the promise of memories yet to come. These things are artifacts of Christmases past, endowed with meaning that accumulates like dust as the boxes sit in the garage, far enough out of sight and mind to make them seem that much more important come December.

It seems the longer we leave an item alone, the greater the emotion it carries. This can make for some pretty interesting stories (if you’ve written one, Hayden’s Ferry Review is accepting submissions for their “artifact” issue right now). Dawn Raffel explores her relationship to items from her past in a series of short essays, quite a few of which appeared in Willow Springs 67. Each essay is titled for an item that carries a story–”The Prayer Book,” “The Bride’s Bible,” “Garnet Earrings”–and uses these objects as windows into Raffel’s past. Read more »

I went into reading Chang-Rae Lee’s newest novel, The Surrendered, with some pretty high expectations. The man teaches fiction at Princeton, for goodness’ sake. He’s won numerous awards, including the PEN/Hemingway award for his first novel, Native Speaker. Now, I know that past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future performance, but get this: The Surrendered won the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was a nominated finalist for the Pulitzer. Thankfully, I was unaware of the latter two accolades as I read the book, or my expectations would have gone through the roof. I’m not sure the book could have lived up to them.

The Surrendered starts out focused on June, an orphan of the Korean war, and her struggle to get her younger siblings to safety, but quickly jumps to Hector Brennan, whose history is woven together with June’s through a preacher’s wife and an orphanage where they met. I am fascinated by how Lee weaves the varying perspectives through this book, how he peels away layers of history without my feeling manipulated as a reader, and how well he shows the world through each of his chosen lenses. This book flowed smoothly for me, despite the fact that Lee is quite fond of his big words (the man successfully used “uxorious” in a sentence), a habit I often find pretentious. He pushes pretty hard on the metaphor of hunger throughout the novel, paralleling June’s hunger during the war with her lack of hunger due to stomach cancer, which bothered me a little, especially in addition to Hector’s thirst, but then I would get absorbed into the story and stop worrying about such storytelling mechanisms.

But here’s the one thing that really bothered me about the book: Brennan is a man who can drink like he’s lined with charcoal (his own form of hunger) and fight like Tyler Durden, plus he’s got “movie-idol good looks” to boot. Read more »

Warning: Excess typing may cause finger cramps, tendinitis, qwerty syndrome, or spontaneous combustion.

Truman Capote famously said of Jack Kerouac’s writing style, “That’s not writing, that’s typing,” and while my incessant attack of my keyboard through the month of November was really nothing like Kerouac’s fevered sessions of transforming his life experiences into novels, there were times when I thought, Gee, Truman would not approve of me now.

First, let me say that I was a NaNoWriMo cheater. I used a novel idea that I’ve had for years now, the first fifty-six pages of which I submitted to a novel workshop during my struggle to attain my MFA. This is, technically, against the rules. You are “allowed” to have outlined your novel, as detailed an outline as you want, but you are supposed to start fresh, not adding words to an existing project, because then you wouldn’t technically be writing a whole novel in a month. Me, I figure that 50,000 words is not really a novel, so even if you are a magically talented writer who can write a coherent, complete 50,000 words in a month, it’s going to be more of a novelette, or else it will be missing an ending. So my 50,000 words started around chapter four, and while I’d started it several times before (the workshop pages were not my first attempt), I had not managed any sort of outline of my novel, except for a detailed history of one character who ended up not feeling very important to the novel as a whole. Instead, I wrote my outline as I went–if you count those words, I probably wrote more like 60,000–and used the project as what I liked to call a very detailed brainstorm. My main goal was to find a solid shape for the finished product, which would (will) then be entirely rewritten, chapter by chapter, including very little of the actual text written during November. Read more »

Shakespeare A to Z by Charles Boyce: This is the ultimate companion to every single Shakespeare play. Don’t understand a word? Need some insight into character? This book has it. It helped me so much during my years in the theater, making Shakespeare more accessible.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: This book is like comfort food to me. It was on my thesis book list, and I kept feeling guilty as I reread it, like I wasn’t actually getting work done. As a kid, I loved to pretend I lived in nineteenth-century England, and Wuthering Heights brings back all that lovely make-believe.

Ellen Tebbits by Beverly Cleary: I read this book about six thousand times in elementary school, especially around third grade. Though I’d been writing stories since I could wield a pen, this was the book that really got me thinking about narrative, to the point where, when I was bored, I would narrate my life, pretending I was Ellen.

The Shadow Box by Michael Cristofer: I hadn’t heard of this play or author before I auditioned for it in the early ’00s, but after being cast as Agnes, it became quite dear to me. Of course it did: I didn’t just read it, I acted it. Not just that, but it was the first time I ever got reviewed, and it was a good one.

Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne: I can’t begin to count how many happy hours I’ve spent in the Hundred Acre Woods, and though I do own a Winnie the Pooh Christmas movie, I don’t mean watching it on TV. There’s something so gentle and sweet about Pooh and his friends that never fails to cheer me up and make me feel like a child again. Read more »