Make it Fascinating, Part 2

“Creative writing classes require scrupulous attention to a range of textual clues: stray connotations, sound, textures, and all other extra-denotative factors. Students learn to approach the craft of writing as if it were sculpture, where language becomes concretized.”

-- Chad Davidson and Gregory Fraser, “Out of the Margins: The Expanding Role of Creative Writing in Today’s College Curriculum.” The Writer’s Chronicle, Volume 42 Number 3

Word Count for the Novel: 118,031 (1049 words added)
Page Count for the Novel: 443

What can I say? I had to add a new scene. Sometimes ghosts show up and you must write them in.

In my last post, I explored how Graham Greene harnessed scene and Lisa See, summary. With the guiding principle “make it fascinating,” a writer can also alternate between scene and summary in a hybrid paragraph, such as this character description of Albert in Eudora Welty’s story, “The Key.”

“He looked home-made, as though his wife had self-consciously knitted or somehow contrived a husband when she sat alone at night. He had a shock of very fine sunburned yellow hair. He was too shy for this world, you could see. His hands were like cardboard, he held his hat so still; and yet how softly his eyes fell upon its crown, moving dreamily and yet with dread over its brown surface! He was smaller than his wife. His suit was brown, too, and he wore it neatly and carefully, as though he were murmuring, “Don’t look—no need to look—I am effaced.” But you have seen that expression too in silent children, who will tell you what they dreamed the night before in sudden, almost hilarious, bursts of confidence.”

The first detail is metaphor: the man is equal to knitting, a wifely project of rough, homespun stuff. Who is the narrative voice giving us this equation? We don’t know, but we’re being told the man is “home-made.” He is pinned by this summative adjective and then the evidence follows immediately with an original metaphor. Then Welty snaps a direct shot of Albert, drawing us into the more objective camerawork with “a shock of very fine sunburned yellow hair.” Summary becomes scene, and then summary: we’re right back with the narrator who says, “He was too shy for this world, you could see.” By calling out to the reader, the narrator softens the blow of the generalization. We realize someone is in charge here but we aren’t repulsed by something as clunky as “He was a very shy man.” The narrator retreats behind a simile—the hands like cardboard—and resurges with “how softly his eyes fell…,” ending in an exclamation point. The narrator is carried away with emotion for her character, and this raises a reader’s interest. Back to the facts—Albert’s size relative to his wife, the color of his suit—but blending into summary again with two adjectives and then a speculation about his supposed speech. The narrator gives her mute character voice: “I am effaced,” as if he might generalize about himself. Then the analogy of the “silent children” appears, a comparison anyone can understand, and now we are standing back alongside the speaker contemplating the man through the pitying, analytical lens.

An excellent writing exercise is to try a character sketch following exactly her alternating pattern. As we get to know our own characters, we’re given to frequent generalization, a normal part of the drafting process. Might as well weave it in—you can always remove it later if it clunks—but weave it in with the goal of making it sing as loudly as sensory, action-packed scene detail.

Readers demand a lot. In between texting and twittering and general delusions of multitasking efficiency, we squirm at being told what to do and what to believe. If the writer chooses a telling voice, he must make it compelling. She has to bring the hard evidence, Law & Order style, somewhere on pages preceding or following. Authoritative tone and rich diction usually aren’t enough; I love it in Dickens and Austen, but if someone calls a story modern, I assume it will have the clout of forensic files and the whiff of TMZ—too much of train wreck to turn my eyes away.

Time to summarize about summary. Here’s a writer’s checklist from these last two posts of strategies that keep our summary significant:

• Is the subject intriguing?
• Is the summary chockfull of evidence (specificity)?
• Is the summary figurative?
• Does the summary address the readers’ need to be told something?
• Is the summary well-timed?
• Does the summary explore a universal truth?
• Is sensory description close at hand?

If you can’t meet most of this checklist, write the scene in the moment and see what trouble your characters get into.

In my next post, I’ll give a sample of how I revise to keep summary from being dull generalization that muddies the story.


Works Cited

Welty, Eudora. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. Harcourt, Inc. Orlando, Florida. 1994. p.30.

Writing Goal: 150,000 – 170,000 words for the novel and a complete fourth draft ready by the AWP Award Series deadline. I’m also reviewing copy edits for the next NCTE book in my differentiated instruction series, Teaching Julius Caesar: A Differentiated Approach, forthcoming in 2010.

Writing Prompts: Please note that writing prompts should always be pursued in emotionally-safe environments with the supervision of someone who interested in encouraging good writing, self-awareness, and reflection. A wonderful resource is Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and With Others.

© Lyn Hawks. Writing prompts for one-time classroom use only and not for publication in any form elsewhere without permission of this author.


Elementary Prompts

• Pretend you are making a movie. Your words are like the camera, and they must capture everything you see. You are watching two people argue over something or a scene where a woman’s purse is snatched on a busy street. Describe what happens: what the people do and what they people say. Describe the setting and what the camera sees. The only thing you can’t describe is what is going on inside the characters’ heads.
• Now rewrite the scene from the point of view of one of the people who is telling us what really happened.
• Then write the scene from the point of view of the other person who is also telling us what really happened.
• Which version do you like better? Why?

Secondary and Adult Prompts

• Write a scene where two people are fighting. Write the scene three different ways: from third person objective (fly on the wall, film camera perspective), then from third-person limited (through the lens of one character), then from omniscient (through the lens of both characters and with any other editorial commentary that the godlike narrator chooses to comment). Which scene works the best? In other words, whose story is this, and why?
• Examine a piece of writing you’ve done. Highlight in yellow all the places where you show what happened: sensory description, dialogue, details, facts, and examples. Then highlight in blue all the places where you tell what happened: adjectives, adverbs, abstract nouns, generalizations, and opinion. Does your writing tend to be more showing or telling?

Remember From Whence You Came

“…the writer is the instrument of a mysterious gift—like a hollow bone through which it passes, as the late Lakota Medicine Elder, Fool’s Crow, would say. Or it’s as in Coleridge, ‘the royal Harper, to whom I have so often submitted myself as the many-stringed instrument for his fire-tipt fingers to traverse’; or in Plato, ‘that which follows God best and is likest to him lifts the head of the charioteer into the outer world.’”

-- Douglas Unger, “On Inspiration: Thomas Wolfe, Jorge Luis Borges, & Raymond Carver.” The Writer’s Chronicle. Volume 42 Number 2.


I don’t feel quite real these days since I was told I won the fall Orlando Short Fiction Prize from A Room of Her Own Foundation. I have been doing the proverbial pinching. Recognition: do I deserve it? Why did it come to me? Is my work truly worthy?

A chastising voice chimes in: How dare you, modern woman, doubt thyself? Look what thou hast wrought! It’s absolutely divine!

The pendulum swing from self-deprecation to arrogance; a correcting mechanism in history and in hearts. I see this swing in me, a woman born in 1968, still finding herself in 2009.

The Japanese maple outside my window is fiery with the end days of fall, shaking leaves stained blood-red orange. The wind wrestles with tree limbs, and everything outdoors tremors, save the deep layer of damp leaves, sodden with three days of rain. When the house shudders, the wind surges through me, too. I am that hollow bone.

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. John 3:8

Suddenly, I remember where I came from. It isn’t me who did this.

It was my parents. They surrounded me with books and museums and good conversation. They surrounded me with love. My mom read a draft and then gave advice about ratting hair and July flowers.

It was my sister. She delighted in our word play and laughed in spite of herself at the thousand bizarre nicknames I invented for her. At 10, I demanded she spell “simultaneously” when we played school; at 13; I told her we had a “plethora of toast”; at 15, not to “usurp the sink.” We were partners making up stories and magazines and Christmas plays. Today she produces plays, and together we still talk literature and theater and film.

It was my English teachers: Donna Dunckel, who let my play become the class project, and Angela Connor, who challenged me with Macbeth and Mockingbird, who shepherded my obsessive leadership of the school paper.

It was my college fiction professor, Ehud Havazelet. He told me when my stories paled, dodged, and dragged, and he made the whole process of critique and revision funny. It was John L'Heureux, my advisor, who told me to give my writing time and let it find it's "moral vision." That it was okay to not have one yet, and that honestly, my writing wasn't ready for advanced fiction writing courses back in 1990. How precious and rare is such honesty.

It was my writing group members: those I used to meet with in 1994 San Francisco; then the group I shared with Delia and Mary Michaels; Peaceniks David and Nancy and Bob and Cornelia and Courtney; and now Marcia, Beverly, Susan, Laurie, Katie, and Carol, who search for sacred moments to write and celebrate what we create. My sisters (and you know your full name) heard a snippet about my character Ronalda and how she got her handle. Bob is my blogger partner in crime and Nancy, my cheerleader via email, and I'm thankful to them about the ongoing conversations about writing and submitting.

It was Chip and Nancy, my college buds whose honest and supportive critique of my novel in progress has kept me at it and believing I’ll wrest a living thing from stone eventually.

It was Doris Betts. She saw the “forward momentum” in my novel and told me to keep going, yet not to race to the finish either. She created a writers' haven that summer at Peace College (Elizabeth Daniels Squire Residency), sponsored by the North Carolina Writers' Network, and left us thrilled to be alive and writing.

It was Greg Hawks, who heard the very first draft of the story, a tentative tale not sure of its reason for being, just a lot of characters barely colliding. He advised me on the early days of punk rock. He gave me space to shut my office door and write, write, write. He doesn’t care if there are tumbleweeds of cat hair or cold burners sans dinner; he’s got his own art to make, and he gets why I go underground.

It was Ruth Moose. She edited the story and helped me find the crisis and plumb the characters’ backgrounds. She handed me the title right out of my own prose.

It is Hope Clark's weekly encouragements to press on and her listing of contests and opportunities. Don't stop, she counsels. Keep at it. Believe. Persist.

It was women I know whose lives have not been easy, whose dreams cooled over twenty, thirty, forty years, while others’ burgeoned; who washed the clothes and scrambled the eggs and bought the clothes so their boys and men could “do their thing.”

I know I’m forgetting someone in the proverbial village that grew this child.

And then, the Spirit, that which surges through me soft as breath and strong as wind. I didn’t make me, and I’m not responsible for love of words, desire to revise, and dreams of speaking truth. I am energy, and I am soul after the body crumbles and the dust dissipates. Try to put a label on That and Who and What made me and now What I am. Divine indeed.

It’s not all about me, and thank God for that.

Make it Fascinating

“The scene is dull. Tell him to put more life into his dying.”
-- Samuel Goldwyn

Word Count for the Novel: 116, 982 (1356 words removed)
Page Count for the Novel: 438

It doesn’t matter whether your storytelling is scene or summary; just make it fascinating.

When I coach other writers, I draw attention to where they use scene versus summary. In early drafts, many writers are more successful with scene: they capture my interest with the dialogue and sensory description, those cinematic strategies that put us right in the moment. When they launch into long passages of summary—generalization designed to move the action forward, encapsulate several years, or express a theme—they do that “telling” thing rather than “showing.” The effect can sometimes be analogous to a 9th grade essay, an unsure voice that’s lost the prior scene’s momentum, and so plain you’re begging for salt. Or, it can repulse a reader who doesn’t want the telling tone, that 9th grade teacher’s voice relaying information, explaining how you must interpret this story. Huck Finn is a picaresque novel where a young man confronts the racism of his society. “Daffodils” is about the Romantics deification of nature. Ugh—I didn’t come here to read the critics’ interpretations. Give me story!

This type of unfocused telling is normal for early drafts. My nascent stories overflow with it. To me it’s a required part of the process where author tells self, Here’s what I’m trying to do. Make this character a jerk, so I must tell everybody: “Many considered Joe a jerk.” Make that character’s upbringing tragic, so I tell everyone it’s a “tragic childhood.” We weave these “notes to self” throughout the manuscript, notes that eventually must be either recast or deleted.

Telling isn’t wrong as long as we make it interesting. The masters know how to write their summaries such that we can’t avert our eyes.

First, let’s clarify what I mean by summary’s other half (I won’t call it opposite, since they overlap so much in any paragraph and must partner together): “scene.” Think sensory immersion and play-by-play action, to the point where we trot breathless alongside those characters experiencing the moment. Graham Greene gives us a pure nugget of scene at the opening of his novel, The Heart of the Matter, and the reader can infer much from what is shown.

"Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork. It was Sunday and the Cathedral bell clanged for matins. On the other side of Bond Street, in the windows of the High School, sat the young negresses in dark-blue gym smocks engaged on the interminable task of trying to wave their wirespring hair. Wilson stroked his very young mustache and dreamed, waiting for his gin-and-bitters."

Critic James Wood, who quotes this passage in his Introduction, writes, “It is a celebrated opening: a Flaubertian precision of detail refracted through a cinematic lens; we know at once why Graham Greene called himself ‘a film man’” (vii). Wood then does a masterful job of analyzing every element of this brief paragraph to show its stunning craft:

“In a few lines, Greene establishes the terms of his locale as usefully as any movie’s opening tracking shot. He does so with considered authorial reticence, in homage to the notion that fictional narrative should show and not tell. But what, then, is shown? First, the Bedford Hotel and Bond Street. These canonical names, with their pale loyalty to the originals, tell us that we are likely to be in a British colony. Wilson’s shorts tell us the same thing, too, but they have a deeper connotation: schoolboys wear shorts. So this pale young colonial overseer, who looks down on what he rules, is less a master than a child, the white negative of the black schoolgirls he can see on the other side of the street. Indeed, Wilson’s childish knees are pressed ‘against the ironwork’ of the balcony as if confined by the ironwork of a heavy school desk. Or perhaps more sinisterly confined? It sounds as if these absurd knees might be imprisoned” (vii-viii).

Some other interpretations I make from this tiny yet incredibly dense bit of description are the voyeurism of Wilson, watching girls dress while “stroking” his mustache, even though later we find that he’s not truly moved by them, setting up his distant stance toward women. There is also the fact that we don’t know by paragraph’s end what this man dreams except that his dreaming is done while waiting for his alcohol. He is dependent on this drink, and ironic that this yearning should be noted while the Catholic Church rings its bells for Mass.

Note how Wood says Greene “tells” us through showing details. No doubt a writer deep in the trance of creation is not thinking about what his details show; he’s merely rendering whatever comes to him. But no doubt Greene stepped back at some point while drafting to ask himself, “If I begin with such a scene, what does it show my reader?” That critic’s role is one we must all play to ensure our details whisper the same themes in readers’ heads. Check out the Penguin Classic Deluxe Edition of this novel, because the Introduction alone is a wonderful welcome to Greene as author and a teacher to those of us who would want to add more riveting scene to our work.

Some might argue that showing and telling are of a piece—that it’s splitting hairs to say that a detail isn’t a direct choice to tell us something by the mere fact another detail wasn’t chosen. Yet if I conflate the two strategies I will never learn; I must separate so I can note the same strategies apparent or lacking in my writing.

In contrast to the undiluted essence of Greene’s scene, there is the hybrid storytelling method, scene and summary mixed. Some writers sew more explicit telling throughout moments of scene, like stitching patchwork quilt pieces, and when it’s well done, it’s virtually seamless because the tone and narrative voice are so pitch perfect. Summary can be a phrase or a sentence in this case, but let’s define it as clearly as scene: at its core it’s a bundle of adjectives, adverbs, and abstract nouns that generalize. This sort of diction gathers ideas and events under an umbrella, what I call a “hovering understanding” of how I as reader should comprehend the story. It is the narrative voice speaking up, raising its hand, seeing things via biased lens, whether omniscient, third person limited, etc., guiding readers to think a certain way about the characters and events.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See is a book that balances summary with scene, and here’s why it works: who isn’t fascinated by foot binding, domestic violence, and “bed business”? I can’t turn away when someone starts discussing these subjects. In addition, when a topic is foreign and exotic to me, whether how men beat their women in far-flung places or the right methods for gutting a possum, many readers are willing to sit back and take direction. Tell me how it is; I’m listening.

Summary also works when the subject shares a universal truth. The bias of the telling voice doesn’t irritate when the moment can be experienced anywhere, such as a child realizing her mother doesn’t care. Note how the protagonist, Lily, describes the relationship and keeps us riveted:

Even now, after all these years, it is difficult for me to think about Mama and what I realized on that day. I saw so clearly that I was inconsequential to her. I was a third child, a second worthless girl, too little to waste to time on until it looked like I would survive my milk years. She looked at me the way all mothers look at their daughters—as a temporary visitor who was another mouth to feed and a body to dress until I went to my husband’s home. (12)

Generalizations abound here: “it is difficult for me to think” and “I was inconsequential.” The protagonist reduces herself to adjectives. I am riveted because it hurts to see a four year-old ignored.

The subject isn’t the only reason for this summary’s success: See uses specificity in generalization, seemingly oxymoronic yet required of the art. The third sentence is a series of specifics: “a third child, a second worthless girl, too little to waste time on until it looked like I would survive my milk years.” Three examples in a row to prove the unimportance of this girl. I am convinced by what is essentially a thesis statement (who says what our ninth grade English teacher taught us was wrong?). I don’t question the narrator, Lily, because her evidence is in. Summary does here what scene can’t: tells us birth order and age as well as cultural status, briefly and neatly.

Then, the excerpt closes with an effective analogy: “temporary visitor who was another mouth to feed and a body to dress until I went to my husband’s home.” Analogies, a type of figurative language, generate an immediate image. Like the cinematic strategy of scene, analogy flashes a picture at us. The reader is satisfied that this all is true and trustworthy.

This kind of summary keeps me reading. I don’t even realize I’m getting the blurb rather than the full scene where I could see the mother fully reject the daughter.

I also buy it because guess what? Prior to this summary, there was a brief scene where the mother doesn’t notice Lily’s efforts to help around the house. More evidence confirming the narrator’s argument. Seamless stiching. See could have given us only the scene, but summary is necessary to work in tandem with her camerawork. Her subject is unfamiliar to a modern American reader with different cultural assumptions about the treatment of girls. I need some telling from the professor. Sock it to me; I won’t be offended.

Tastes in reading differ widely, but for me, the writing of See and Greene fascinates. Whether it’s the cinematic immersion of Greene or the show then tell style of See, I’m in. The challenge for us as writers is to make both scene and summary happen as the story demands, and the only way we come to that understanding is by drafting, drafting, drafting. With careful attention, the truth of how each moment will be rendered floats to the surface.

Stay tuned for the next blog, where I condense these points to a checklist of what makes great summary and show how I apply these standards to my own writing.

Works Cited

Greene, Graham, and James Wood. The Heart of the Matter. Penguin Classics: New York. 2004. pp vii-vii.
See, Lisa. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Random House: New York. 2005. p 12.

Writing Goal: 150,000 – 170,000 words and a complete fourth draft ready by the AWP Award Series deadline. I also will be reviewing copy edits for the next book in my differentiated instruction series with NCTE, called Teaching Julius Caesar: A Differentiated Approach, forthcoming in spring 2010.

Writing Prompts: Please note that writing prompts should always be pursued in emotionally-safe environments with the supervision of someone who interested in encouraging good writing, self-awareness, and reflection. A wonderful resource is Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and With Others.

© Lyn Hawks. Writing prompts for one-time classroom use only and not for publication in any form elsewhere without permission of this author.


Elementary Prompts

• Pretend you are making a movie. Your words are like the camera, and they must capture everything you see. You are watching two people argue over something or a scene where a woman’s purse is snatched on a busy street. Describe what happens: what the people do and what they people say. Describe the setting and what the camera sees. The only thing you can’t describe is what is going on inside the characters’ heads.
• Now rewrite the scene from the point of view of one of the people who is telling us what really happened.
• Then write the scene from the point of view of the other person who is also telling us what really happened.
• Which version do you like better? Why?

Secondary and Adult Prompts

• Write a scene where two people are fighting. Write the scene three different ways: from third person objective (fly on the wall, film camera perspective), then from third-person limited (through the lens of one character), then from omniscient (through the lens of both characters and with any other editorial commentary that the godlike narrator chooses to comment). Which scene works the best? In other words, whose story is this, and why?
• Examine a piece of writing you’ve done. Highlight in yellow all the places where you show what happened: sensory description, dialogue, details, facts, and examples. Then highlight in blue all the places where you tell what happened: adjectives, adverbs, abstract nouns, generalizations, and opinion. Does your writing tend to be more showing or telling?

Be a Fan

"Take time to be a fan."
-- Greg Hawks

Today’s Word Count for the Novel: 118,090. (248 words removed)

Page Count for the novel: 440

Thanks to my husband, I'm remembering why I got into this writing thing.

Reading.

He reminded me this weekend that spending time with the art you love is good for the artist's soul.

Sometimes the urge to spend every spare moment producing something is almost like a disease. You have to fight off the urge to do with the need to be.

I just finished Olive Kitteredge by Elizabeth Strout, and scenes still pulse through my head. What an amazing novel. I love the concept of 13 stories, through various points of view, to tell us Olive's life and how as we follow all her meanness, sensitivity, passion, we find her as complex as any of us.

On my nightstand is Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See. Historical fiction, one of my favorite genres.

How wonderful it is to love stories, and to have so many stories to love.

This is Just to Say...

"...I have eaten the plums

that were in the icebox...

"

-- William Carlos Williams, "This is Just to Say"

Today’s Word Count for the Novel: 118,338. (1508 words removed. Prepping for this blog post motivates!)

Page Count for the novel: 440

I just decided that if I could just cut "just" from my writing it'd be just great.

I spent ten minutes the other day getting rid of "just" and saved myself 49 words. Imagine all the space I'll save by obliterating tiny excesses. And I'm only on page 161.


All writers have tics. My two favorites are "just" and "that." In my first drafts I fully explain everything, over and over, as if my audience were preschoolers and I might lose out to paste and Elmo. I also love a lot of he said, she said in my dialogue, as if the reader might not know who's talking. I call this word removal editing.

Some days editing feels like the softer side of writing, proof I'm working when my faint heart and foggy brain can't bear to convert summary to scene or can't abide killing the dialogue darlings. There's definitely a satisfaction to this easy destruction, kind of like squashing bubble wrap, when technology is your servant (the search function) and you can kill off one word, over and over, without any deep thought expended. 


Technically, editing is much, much more -- the laborious process of adherence to standard English and grammar where necessary. It's not revision, which is deep-sea diving, excavating, and lots of detonating. Revision forces you to face global concerns -- that the whole enterprise is sadly wrong or wonderfully right, that five pages right in the middle need to start page one, or that the point of view needs to be a secondary character instead of the protagonist -- decisions that make you reel. Revision is every other writing step recurring as many times as needed -- brainstorming, drafting, rewriting, repeat as needed. Editing is supposed to come after this long process of transformation: that confident and final clean-up where you put the microscope to each sentence. But then there's me, who stops and edits all the time.

The human brain loves to slice up life into a pizza pie of categories. Perhaps that's why writing as a process is now gospel truth in most every English Language Arts program. We must convert the creative act into stages, procedures, and sequences. Writing as a process does ensure kids actually spend more than ten minutes on an essay, but where we go astray is teaching each stage is discrete and part of a set, linear sequence. Editing sometimes needs to happen right after brainstorming or whenever the spirit moves you.

I read somewhere Cynthia Ozick can't move beyond the first word to the second word until the first is perfectly right. It's as if all writing stages fuse into every moment of the process. Lately when I see my excess words cluttering a first-draft sentence, I cut right away. Earlier and earlier it's starting to happen (though don't judge this blog as proof; it's only a third or fourth draft!). I like that editing has entered my first phases of composition.

But now there must be a confession. Editing can be a detour, keeping me from serious revision. I think I've accomplished something and then I fixate on the little cuts. I skip between the tweaks and removal of whole scenes, which I would call true revision. This back and forth is right now the only way I can wrap my head around this draft. 440 pages feel manageable when I prune them word by word. Maybe when I see what's left on the trunk, I can better graft some of the 300-plus deleted pages back in (now are you scared?), and only those that will take. My hope is to have 350 instead of 440 when it's time to bring the two sections together.

Those excess words are like those frozen plums William Carlos Williams coveted. They tantalize me with their sugary highs but leave cavities in my mouth, AKA little black holes in your manuscript.

But they're just so tempting!



Writing Goal: 150,000 – 170,000 words and a complete fourth draft ready by the AWP Award Series deadline. This weekend or next I will submit my essay to Hope Clark's Invisible Writing contest. I am also writing a new short story for the Stanford Magazine Fiction Contest, due November 5.

Writing Prompts: Please note that writing prompts should always be pursued in emotionally-safe environments with the supervision of someone who interested in encouraging good writing, self-awareness, and reflection. A wonderful resource is Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and With Others.

© Lyn Hawks. Writing prompts for one-time classroom use only and not for publication in any form elsewhere without permission of this author.


Elementary Prompts

• List your five favorite words. Then start a story with one of them.

• List five words you always say, at least every day. Which one is the most important? Why? Which one could you stop saying and you wouldn't miss it?

• Finish this sentence by writing a poem or a story: "This is just to say..." or "I'm just saying..."

• Imagine that there are only 25 words left in the world to use for a story. Write a story with those 25 words. You can re-use those 25 as many times as you like and make the story as long as you like.

Secondary and Adult Prompts

• Write about writing as a process. What's your process?
• Write about your bad habits and guilty pleasures when it comes to writing.
• Finish this is sentence by writing a poem or a story: "This is just to say..." or "I'm just saying..."
• Imagine that there are only 25 words left in the world to use for a story. Write a story with those 25 words. You can re-use those 25 as many times as you like and make the story as long as you like.

Grist from Grisham, Writing Down the Bones with Reichs, and Grace with Anna Deavere Smith

At the NC Literary Festival this week, John Grisham told stories to a packed audience of how often A Time to Kill was rejected, about his long slog through libraries selling his first edition, and how fast he works to crank out a book -- sometimes less than 70 days.

Kathy Reichs of Bones fame shared how plots came to her while conducting exhumations, while investigating mass graves, while studying maggots. She spoke of dark and humorous moments reading the codes left behind by calcium. She showed how these experiences elicit questions and ideas that lead to novels.

Then a writer came to the microphone and said, "Hi, this question is for John Grisham. I began writing this year, and I think my novel has potential. If it's not too bold, I wonder if you'd look at my manuscript and perhaps share it with an agent..."

You should have heard the murmurs through Memorial Hall. Most of us squirmed, unbelieving someone had the gall. What rang in my ears was, "I began writing this year." Maybe the questioner heard Grisham's stories about working quickly and nothing else; maybe he didn't add up all the years Grisham worked so hard to reach success. Maybe the questioner figured success was easy as writing a first draft that's not even finished.

You can guess Grisham's response: how about you finish that novel first.

I've been writing since 1976 and used to think myself quite good at it, especially when I was a child and up through my thirties. But when I look back, I believe I didn't really start working at writing till the year 2000. A combination of life experiences, book projects, and a new comprehension of sweat needed for revision lifted my writing to the next level. And while I've improved, every first draft still needs time and seasoning, and always more than a face lift. I accept 10 drafts of a short story as a matter of course, the starting point, and as I chip away at the fourth draft of my novel -- or is it the fifth? -- I find part of the joy of writing is rewriting.

I don't think the guy who asked Grisham the question gets that.

I disliked him immediately for wasting our time, just as much as I disliked the person who brought the baby to tonight's performance by Anna Deavere Smith, and the college kids in front of me who couldn't keep from clicking, punching, discussing, and fondling their bright and flashing phones. Checking up on tech took precedence over hearing what Deavere Smith had to say.

Then I remembered what Anna Deavere Smith taught us tonight: the importance of grace.

In her performance, she embodies many people she's interviewed about grace and about survival -- reverends speaking to Harvard congregations, doctors stranded in a hospital during Katrina, and refugees trying to make sense of the horrors they suffered in Rwanda. She takes on personas and reads their souls to us, a storyteller with incredible compassion who can communicate a person's energy. She walked barefoot, saying that she believed in walking in others' shoes.

I believe one of a writer's greatest strengths is giving grace to each of her characters. We must do so in our daily lives, too, but since that's sometimes too hard thanks to pride and selfishness and narcissism, sometimes my only hope is to love and forgive on the page. When I refuse to reduce character to caricature (because I am not in the business of satire); when I refuse to write only for revenge (because I am not in the business of Rants R Us); when I refuse to see only with my white, female, raised upper middle class eyes -- that's when I can give some grace. I may not know another's pain firsthand, but I can try to imagine. I can try to appreciate. I can try to learn.

Anna Deavere Smith was asked how she gets people to open up in interviews. She said she was once taught three questions that will get a person talking.

Have you ever been near death?

What were the circumstances of your birth?

Have you ever been accused of something you didn't do?

Maybe I will ask my characters these questions while I write. Maybe I will think more gracefully of those who annoy me in a public forum, stumbling along just like me, awkward in a world that is impatient, loud, and as Anna Deavere Smith says, "winner take all." This is not a race toward efficiency, perfection, and fame. The world is nothing without what Studs Terkel called "the human touch."

He didn't mean iTouch. He meant looking each other in the eye and saying, "Sorry," or "I forgive you," or "Isn't that hilarious."

I was that confident greenhorn once thinking I'd not have to do too much to get my words out there. I assumed everyone wanted to hear what I wanted to say and how I said it. Now, let me give my writing the grace and space to make it worthy of consumption by others at just the right time.

That's the grist, bones, and grace of it all.

Writing Prompts:

Have you ever been near death?

What were the circumstances of your birth?

Have you ever been accused of something you didn't do?

Invisible Writing

"My book was born of inner conflict and frustration, and an urgent need to be vocal, to have a voice. I needed to put on the page the stark details of this illness, and the stories, questions, insights, desires and debates that had careened through my mind for so long. I needed to restore the image of myself as a person in the world, to find my place after having been displaced. If the work of illness is restoration, in the case of a contested illness like ME/CFS, it is also the work of illumination, of making visible what has been unseen: the struggling body, the faulty enzymes and T cells, the medical myths that have erased this illness."

-- Dorothy Wall, author of Encounters with the Invisible

Today’s Word Count for the Novel: 119, 846. (669 words removed.)

Page Count for the novel: 443

Hope Clark, who has lately become my writers' guru for encouragement and writing opportunities, has a contest about Invisible Writing.

I know something about that. Writing was what I didn't accomplish these last few weeks.

Perhaps we'll consider this blog a rough draft for the contest. Invisible Writing is what stays in my head and can't emerge when Life strangles me with other things.

We've all tried, over and over in a day, to get something done and it just won't. Not for lack of trying, but for simply stumbling over a new crisis or road block every time you turn around.

You might be the mom managing a posse of toddlers, and you just sat down at the computer, thinking nap time is well underway. Lo and behold, a fight breaks out in Crib Land. There is no one around capable of adult conversation; there is no one to protect Writing Time. The future looks bleak with endless years of diapers, educational videos, and carpools. Parenting leaves you feeling like a failure, which leaves you exhausted and not exactly jazzed to write.

You might be a member of a family where the arts aren't valued. If you dare say, "Today I wrote," you get funny looks and even laughs. You get, "Since you're not doing anything, could you help me...?" Writing Time is a meaningless term to most people who love you as best they can; they indulge your idiosyncrasy, or they ignore it. You must seek way beyond your circle of contacts to find someone who is a peer or a mentor.

You might be the person toiling in an office 40+ hours a week who's carved out Sacred Writing Time, but when you show up to the page at the crack of dawn, late at night, or on weekends, your spirit is so crushed by politics you can't even lift your hands to keyboard. Instead you find yourself surfing jobs on the Internet. No one who supervises you values your writing when you use it for work purposes, and no one cares if their bad choices bleed stress into your writing time.

You might be anyone who tries to write but is mired in grief and stress over the illness or death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, the move to a new place or job.

These aren't excuses in my book. These are life events that hurt so much you can barely squeak out your pain or find enough sanity to focus.

I'm a Virgo, so I'm almost OCD about organization, and I'm dutiful to a fault. I'm also a talker and a purple prose writer (why say it in 2 words if you've got 200?) So it takes a lot to shut me up and slow me down.

These last two weeks, Life has left me speechless on the page. Oh, I've been sad and I've been angry in the moment, and people have heard about it. But even the pages in my journal can't get written. This blog is a breakthrough. And still, I wonder what words might have been written if life didn't intervene. Those invisible, lost words.

Stephen King warns in his book, On Writing, that life shouldn't serve art. How often I want it to. I place the writing task before people. I escape into the task.

There's the other rub: how to love your passion without it enslaving you. Sometimes I fight so hard to find the time that I lose sight of what's most important. You have on your warrior's helmet to make that writing as visible as possible, and in the process, you lose someone or something along the way. Family, friends, colleagues, happiness -- all lambs to the slaughter.

Today on my altar of writing no one awaits my knife. This moment is safe for writing and everyone in my circle. I abandon no one for it. In the moment, writing appears, like a glimmer of fish surfacing, then darting back down. The faint swish of fins through water; the bright yellow eye. See how it gleams.

Writing Goal: My ultimate aim: 150,000 – 170,000 words and a complete fourth draft ready for hard-copy editing by December. I am also writing a new short story for the Good Housekeeping Short Story Contest, due September 15th.

Writing Prompts: Please note that writing prompts should always be pursued in emotionally-safe environments with the supervision of someone who interested in encouraging good writing, self-awareness, and reflection. A wonderful resource is Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and With Others.

© Lyn Hawks. Writing prompts for one-time classroom use only and not for publication in any form elsewhere without permission of this author.

Elementary Prompts

1. What's invisible in your life?
2. What do you wish wasn't invisible?
3. What would you do if you were invisible?
4. If you could make something invisible, what would it be?
5. Imagine that you are someone who must write a very important note in invisible ink. Who are you? What are you writing? Why? Write that note in your own code and fold it up several times. Secure it with tape, staples, ribbon. Will you deliver it?

Secondary and Adult Prompts

1. Write about invisibility. Do you ever feel unnoticed? Like you don't exist? When?
2. List all the things you would make invisible if you could. Pick the most important one and explain why it should disappear.
3. What makes your writing disappear?
4. What would you do if you were invisible?
5. Imagine a career where you must wear a cloak of invisibility -- special intelligence, witness protection, military, or any other work where you must be careful to protect yourself, others, or information. Describe that career and why you would or would not want to pursue it.
6. Watch this short film about moments of life. Write about invisible moments.

And Now For Some Satire

The nurse left work at five o'clock.

Outside the hospital, real Americans rushed her carrying signs that read HANDS OFF OUR HEALTH CARE and DEATH TO DEATH PANELS. They plodded after her, white as snow and heavy as glazed donuts, bellies jiggling, shouting, "Miss, miss, don't let the government take over your job!"

She stopped and said, "This is a state hospital."

The protesters screamed, "They'll dock your pay!"

"They'll let foreigners take over the ER!"

"They'll kick the hard-working Americans out of beds!"

The nurse said, "What's new?"

****

Friends, Republicans, Countrymen, I dare you to finish this prompt.

I just submitted a different version to NPR's Three Minute Story Contest -- satire of a different sort. James Woods of The New Yorker will be judging. We'll see how I do. I know this much: writing a good story with a given first line -- The nurse left work at five o'clock -- and given only 600 words -- required me to marshal some creativity. A great exercise.

Going Global

“There are at least three kinds of ‘global’ revisions before the writer gets to the happy stage of pointing the prose. (That is, just as a mason ‘points’ a hearth by carefully filling in mortar around all the joints of the cemented bricks of stones, leaving clean edges and a finished look; at this state the writer fills in all the gaps between words, solidifies the grammatical joints within sentences, smoothes out the transitions between sentences, and makes the whole artifice look straight, clean, and beautiful.) Global revision takes in the following points: 1. Revising for structure (integrity of whole, transitions, integrity of parts). 2. Revising for story (narrative stance, text, and theme). 3. Revising for quality (clarity, tone, emotional impact).”

-- Philip Gerard

Today’s Word Count for the Novel: 120, 515. (1024 words removed.)

Page Count for the novel: 442

Back from a writers' retreat, you'd think I'd be glowing with the progress I made, but I'm not. I'm suddenly aware of what I can and cannot do. I can pick apart a manuscript till it bleeds, down to the very syllable, but I can't seem to read globally. Why is that?

By "read globally," I mean curl up in a comfortable chair and let the pages slip by, sans judgment, pen hidden, editor brain turned off. Reading to get a sense of scope, the overall structure and arc, the momentum -- or lack thereof. Stand on the mountaintop, breeze stirring your hair, and look down at what you hath wrought over these several years and gaze upon it like a beloved creation still in need of molding. That wisdom of how ye shall shape it floats your way like a revelation, and ye shall return for an eighth day of shaping....

It just ain't happening.

Maybe it's the manuscript? Perhaps it's so clunky, I can't help but stop every sentence and edit? In From Where You Dream, Robert Olen Butler talks about twangs versus thrumming....if your story had a sound, you'd definitely want it to be a thrum-thrum-thrum -- a machine finely oiled, graceful and smooth.

There are clunks and clangs and squeaks but it's not the manuscript that's unreadable. I'm guessing this problem reflects my type-A, workhorse personality that believes it's a sin to sit and read and not do something. The intensive editorial scrutiny works just fine if your story is 25 pages or less, but the problem is, mine is more like 600-700 pages when done. Right now it's not even that, as I've not allowed all the pages on the cutting-room floor back in, but I'm banking on the final count being at least 600. So I must read globally if I ever hope to understand this hefty tale.

Reading is enough in itself; why can't I see that? Doing what my reader will eventually do -- living in the moment of the manuscript and see where I'm tempted to skim with heart-racing pleasure or drop it, I'm so ready for a nap -- that is exactly what an artist must do with her work. See it as the audience will.

So maybe my God metaphor was way off; it assumes a) omniscient wisdom and b) a pedestal above the fray and all us artists have a word for that: bullpuckey. I just need to be a reader. Then maybe I can get at what Philip Gerard advises in the quotation above -- a tripartite process that demands its own kind of careful scrutiny.

The other day I made a rule for myself. I must read for at least 30 minutes, pen down, before I can pick. (I imagine those who counsel people out of bad habits might say it's too hard to go cold turkey.) I woke up this morning sure of my purpose; that I must read this way. Then I got out of my chair and decided to blog. Blogging is doing something; reading is not.

You see my problem?

Let's go back to the retreat where I struggled to honor global revision. I was blessed to be with five other women who walked softly between rooms, who spoke gracefully and humorously at meals, and who both love and hate to write for all the reasons I speak of. It was a glorious retreat and I thank them for their inspiration and companionship. It’s not often one can find such kindred spirits!

See? I can sometimes step back and get a global view of an experience. Next up: my novel. May all my pens disappear at that moment when I find my reader's chair...

Writing Goal: My ultimate aim: 150,000 – 170,000 words and a complete fourth draft ready for hard-copy editing by December. I am submitting a story today or later this week to AROHO’s Orlando Prize for Short Fiction contest, and I am also writing a new short story for the Good Housekeeping Short Story Contest.

Writing Prompts: Please note that writing prompts should always be pursued in emotionally-safe environments with the supervision of someone who interested in encouraging good writing, self-awareness, and reflection. A wonderful resource is Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and With Others.

© Lyn Hawks. Writing prompts for one-time classroom use only and not for publication in any form elsewhere without permission of this author.

Elementary Prompts

1. Write about your bad habits. Let a Bad Habit tell a story. Give it a name and then let it tell you some things. How did it get here? How big and bad is it? How long does it plan to stay?

2. Write about a favorite character in a story and his or her bad habit. Does the character try to change it? Does it get the character in trouble? What do you think of this bad habit?

3. Write a story or poem that begins with this first line: Hey, Habit, how are you?

Secondary and Adult Prompts

Write about a habit of mind. What ways of thinking -- thinking that leads to action -- do you find your common practice? Or what ways of thinking have you worked hard over the years to cultivate?

Write about a character from a favorite story who has a bad habit. Describe the habit and discuss: a) the effects of the habit on the character and others; b) how much the character is aware of it; and c) how you think the habit might influence the outcome of the story.

Write this character a note (email, text, letter, tweet) about the habit. You can take one or both of two approaches: a) empathize by describing one of your bad habits, and/or b) encourage the character to overcome this habit using your best logic and emotional appeals.

Write a story or poem that begins with this first line: You see, I have this little habit…

Patience

"(she) pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. . . .
(II.iv.111–114, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night)

Today’s Word Count for the Novel: 121, 539. (Little movement since last post; see what else I've been doing below.)

Page Count for the novel: 443

I don't imagine anyone in my immediate circle would dare accuse me of patience, but something about turning 40 has forced me to slow things down.

Let's not get excited and call it a habit. Sometimes, just sometimes, I'm able to wait and see.

I used to hate it when my mom would say that.

"Can we go to Great America?" (The best amusement park when I was a kid.)

"Let's wait and see." (Actually, we got to go about twice a year, very generous of my folks now that I have a back and neck in chiropractic care and wouldn't dare subject myself to the havoc those rides make with your bones. My poor parents.)

Wait and see turns out to be the healthiest approach when you don't hear back from an editor, a magazine, or a contest. It's important to check in eventually to see if you're still in the running, but it's also important to let go. Publication is pretty much a "meant-to-be" scenario. Sweat makes the writing, and sweat makes the initial contacts, but sweat while harassing an editor weekly does not make for publication. In other words, we do well not to nag and stew. We do well if we go back to creating and revision.

The average waiting time for good news to arrive is anywhere between six and twelve months. A friend and fellow writer, Nancy Purcell, just shared with me that Chicken Soup for the Soul accepted one of her essays after a yearlong wait. In 2008 I wrote a short story that's been a finalist for Glimmer Train and Stanford Magazine contests and got a nod from Missouri Review, but it has yet to find a home. I'll soon submit it to the AROHO contest. This orphan passed from foster home to foster home did lead an editor to ask whether there was any nonfiction behind the fiction. I pulled the memoir threads and created something new. It's been three months since that submission and last week I heard that it would be published in January of 2010.

In the meantime, I've had two stories in the critique cooker; a novel on a low, low simmer; and a second manuscript in a series for NCTE -- Teaching Julius Caesar: A Differentiated Approach -- in heavy edits. Yesterday I submitted one of those stories to the Esquire Contest, and after this weekend, I hope to send in Caesar. If these hands go idle, the devil of impatience and fear grips them. I say to myself, "What have you done lately? You have nothing to show."

This product-driven society insists that we produce something perfect immediately, to show for all our sweat. At home I hear my husband counsel his music students who fall into a "green and yellow melancholy" when they can't sound like Guitar Hero after the first practice. One student who showed excellent aptitude in the first lesson hung his head and teared up. Greg said gently, "What's wrong?"

The boy said, "I just want so bad to be good."

Greg doesn't say this to everyone, but he could with this particular boy whom he already knew well. He said, "Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?"

The boy's eyes widened, and Greg began to explain the path ahead for someone who truly wants to be good -- a lot of hard work. If you understand that it takes a while to be good, then you will need to focus on the moment of practice rather than the pressure to be good right away.

I can see tender-hearted parents cringing at the "harsh realities" Greg shares with a 12 year-old, but here's the thing: if you share them gently and kindly as he does, and in between honest and not invented compliments, you prep the young musician or writer to succeed. The first step is understanding that talent and success are never handed to us. Well, maybe to some, but eventually a lack of sweat will catch up with you. The years it's taken for Greg Hawks to become Greg Hawks on the guitar, and mandolin, and banjo...Greg only referred to those years in a brief sentence, since a preteen can't comprehend a quarter century of practice. Greg instead gets the kids playing music they love and talks a lot about persistence.

A like melancholy does settle upon the child inside a writer who hasn't heard anything about her work. I "pine in thought" over what I haven't yet done. Writing for many venues and anticipating responses from many places soothes the itch. I write for an educational nonprofit by day. In my spare time, I write essays, fiction, and a novel.

This week I will head to the beach with a great group of women who struggle like me to find time to write.We joke about how hard we are on ourselves, expecting that we do it all -- be the perfect partner, parent, and of course, writer. All of these relationships must bear recognizable fruit, right? We need to see everyone around us beaming while simultaneously getting our names in print.

Where'd we get that idea? Haven't we just crawled out of the slime of the twentieth century, where a room of one's own was victory enough?

In the blessings of sand, surf, and sunshine, let me open my arms and embrace the stillness of the universe, there for the tasting if I would just stop once in a while.

Writing Goal: My ultimate aim: 150,000 – 170,000 words and a complete fourth draft ready for hard-copy editing by December. This August retreat will allow me to consider part of the novel in a few days, to really get a glimpse of what I've done thus far and whether it meanders too much. I am also writing a new short story for the Good Housekeeping contest.

Writing Prompts: Please note that writing prompts should always be pursued in emotionally-safe environments with the supervision of someone who interested in encouraging good writing, self-awareness, and reflection. A wonderful resource is Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and With Others.

© Lyn Hawks. Writing prompts for one-time classroom use only and not for publication in any form elsewhere without permission of this author.

Elementary Prompts

Persistence Makes Perfect?

Option A: When have you tried very hard -- and kept trying without giving up? This is called persistence. What did you do? How did you feel at the end? How did other people react when they saw what you did? Would you do it again? Why or why not?

Compare trying hard to a color, a shape, and then something in nature (plant, animal, or something else). Explain why you make this comparison.

Option B: Do you think you are a persistent person? How do you know?

Option C: Do you think people should try to be perfect at something? Why or why not?

Option D: Finish this sentence (write until I call time): Nothing could make me give up except...

Patience

Option A: Who do you know who is very patient? Describe this person and describe some times when you saw this person be very, very patient.

Option B: How patient are you? If "1" is very impatient and "10" is "very patient," where would you put yourself? Tell a story about being very impatient or very patient.

Option C: Finish this sentence (write until I call time): I waited and waited for...

Secondary and Adult Prompts

Persistence Makes Perfect?

Option A: When have you been very persistent? What did you do? Why did you stick with things? Were you ever discouraged or told not to continue, but did anyway? Why? How did you feel at the end? How did other people react when they saw what you did? Would you do it again? Why or why not?

Compare persistence to a person, place, or thing. Explain why you use this metaphor.

Option B: Define persistence. Think of a time when persistence has really helped you or could help someone else you know. Write an advertisement -- a public service announcement -- for persistence.

Option C: Do you think you are a persistent person? How do you know? Do you believe this about yourself because of your accomplishments or what others tell you? If you don't believe you are very persistent, who is someone you admire for their tenacity?

Option D: Do you think people should try to be perfect at something? Why or why not? Does persistence lead to perfection, or something else?

Option E: Finish this sentence (write until I call time): After hours of trying I couldn't believe I...