Exile on Ninth Street

Most of Walter Mosley’s advice in This Year You Write Your Novel is standard to almost every book on writing or writing class, explaining point of view, going over dialogue and description, and expounding the merits of showing versus telling.

The bulk of the book covers these elements of fiction in brief but useful segments, perfect for reference and reminders. Though brief, they are insightful.

His segment on showing versus telling, for instance, is one of the better ones that I’ve read. Mosley concisely explains why showing is preferable, in most instances, to telling.

I know that there are the sticklers out there among you who will say that everything expressed in words is told, not shown. After all telling is a function of speaking, and writing is nothing but an extension of speech. This is true. But there’s a difference between explanation and verbal action.

For instance, “Call me Ishmael” is the well-known first line of the American classic Moby Dick. Contrast this sentence with “His name was Ishmael.”

. . . .

“His name was Ishmael” is a flat statement that does not, on its own, draw us in. It is merely a piece of information.

The first example shows something to the reader, or, more accurately, it attempts to include the reader by engaging the reader on a personal level.

Besides drawing the reader into the novel’s world, Mosley explains, narrative that shows adds a “human aspect to its repertoire and, in doing so, includes the reader either emotionally or physically.”

Mosley’s book is also one of the first I’ve read that encourages fiction writers — or any prose writer for that matter — to study poetry seriously. Poetry teaches the writer, Mosley says, to appreciate the subtleties of language.

“Of all writing,” he says, “poetry is the most demanding . . . .In poetry you have to see language as both music and content.”

I was also impressed by Mosley’s differentiating between intuitive writers — those who basically plunge in and discover the story as they write —-and structure writers, who know the whole story from beginning to end, and don’t plunge in until they know it.

Some writing books, as Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream, favor one method over the other. Butler suggests to some extent that the intuitive approach is the only approach that will allow a writer to tap into the creative zone necessary to write without restraint and create art.

“The intuitive and structured methods are equally valid,” Mosley says.

Truthfully, Mosley says, there are probably few writers who are strictly intuitive or structured.

One of my favorite sections of the book is a digression on genre. Mosley doesn’t stash any genre into the literary suburbs. It’s a refreshing outlook—in a refreshing book on writing — not always present in other books on writing, which seem to encourage writers to aspire only to literary writing, whatever that is.

“A novel is a novel is a novel,” he writes. “A crime story is a novel. A romance is a novel. . . .No one who is serious about literature would dismiss One Hundred Years of Solitude for being a fantasy. No one would write off The Stranger because of its courtroom or crime details.”

By an overwhelming majority 2-1 vote, loyal readers have elected that I keep up with my writing workshop blog.

Because the people have spoken, I will try to keep that blog running.

As an experiment I have posted two stories of my own — one fiction, one nonfiction — for my loyal readers. Please feel free to drop by the workshop, have a look at the stories and critique them if you’d like (at this point critiques will have to be done through comments, until I can further experiment with the site).

Also, feel free to give me comments about how you might improve the site. I need all the suggestions I can get.

A little over a week ago, I wrote a post about my recent bout with self doubt (maybe bad poetry is my real calling?), and since then have received some great encouragement from commenters.

One commenter, Richard Gilbert, sent me a link to Junot Diaz’s essay “Becoming a Writer” in O, The Oprah magazine, in which Diaz talks about the doubt and despair he went through when composing his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2008.

I had heard about Diaz’s essay in passing and had seen one quote frequently pop up:

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

A very powerful statement. (I have to recommend this essay to any writer, whether you’re struggling with self doubt or not. It’s one of the most evocative essays about self doubt and the writing process I’ve ever read.) But the image that struck me most was this:

While I waited for September to come around, I spent long hours in my writing room, sprawled on the floor, with the list [of other professions Diaz might be qualified for]on my chest, waiting for the promise of those words to leak through the paper into me.

Diaz had gotten to the point of wondering whether or not he really was a writer after working on his novel for five years without success. He was planning to go back to school. He had made a list of professions he was qualified for or might be qualified for. Nothing suited him. And yet his future as a writer was in doubt. What else was there to do but to lie on the floor and look to the void for answers?

While my circumstances are different Diaz’s, I can picture myself with a list of options on my chest (I keep an unsatisfying list in my head) and I can see myself sprawled on the floor looking up to the void to waiting for an answer.

If not this, what?

Part of my anxiety is the dread of doing anything other than writing or editing. I’ve worked in such worlds as retail (a nightmarish experience that awakened me fully to Sartre’s “Hell — is other people”). And while ideally “a writer is a writer . . . when there is no hope,” I sink at the prospect of not writing professionally in a day job (no one seems to want me); I sink at the prospect of having to work outside of  professional writing.

And yet that Sartrean nightmare Reality demands I have an income. In my mind I lay on the floor, looking up, wondering, If not writing, what?

As far as my novel goes, I’ve set it aside, though an inkling of inspiration came to me Saturday after hearing a talk by Elizabeth Berg, who at one point addressed the conflict between the writing life and “real” life, one of the larger conflicts in my life at the moment. I may tinker with parts of the book. There may be some potential in it, yet.

But I’m still fumbling with self doubt. My writing has been sporadic — blog posts, journal entries — as I sprawl on the floor asking, What do I write? and If not writing, what?

Richard Gilbert at his blog Narrative has an insightful post on structuring writing. He notes how difficult it is to weed out the good stuff in our writing.

Weeding out the good stuff is often a matter of structure, and Gilbert examines a Writer’s Digest article on braiding, the idea of structuring a piece by weaving multiple story lines together.

The article addresses a problem we all have of trying to figure out how to braid in backstory and how much backstory goes into the narrative.

I know it’s a problem I’m having as I’m revising my own novel. How to Get On With It  and yet develop my characters and plot fully.  How much backstory, if any, goes into the story without bogging the story down, or confusing the reader?

I’m learning a lot about that from David Michael Kaplan’s Revision, a nice handbook on, well, revision. 

His chief mantra is Get On With It and he offers a process by which a writer can do just that while re-seeing his fiction, or even creative nonfiction.

At times while revising my novel, I’ve come to points when a character refers to something in his or her past and suddenly find myself lost, and having to flip section by section through my manuscript, backtracking to find the first reference to the event. Does the chronology match? How about my character’s attitudes and voice? Why is this past event so important?

When I set out to write the book, I thought I had such questions answered. My characters’ biographies firmly chiseled somewhere in the back of my mind, ready to march forward when called up, just like a computer file. Except, I think I’ve created multiple subfolders and new folders with new tidbits added, sometimes logging in stuff completely contrary to earlier renderings.

Could I have avoided so many different folders and such an information mess had I written detailed character biographies outlining history and wants and needs and desires beforehand? 

As I’ve been reading Elizabeth George’s Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life, I’m beginning to think I should have started out with something like the detailed character analysis she describes. Once you have a name for a character, she suggests you sketch out your characters what amounts to a combination of history and psychological profile.

In the midst of revision, I can see how such an analysis could help, how it might have helped before I even began composing the book four years ago. I avoided writing such a profile for each character, though, because I didn’t want to necessarily get locked into a specific path. What happened if the characters started really coming to life, and had their own directions to go? That, as I understood it, was what literary characters did. They developed on their own, like real people.

But real people have biographies, they have moments in their pasts, events in their past, people in their past, even if the past was just the day before, that fuel their desires and needs. So if characters are supposed to represent in some way real people, why not develop a profile, become their historian and shrink? With some of the problems I’m encountering in each draft I write, I’m beginning to think I should have had something firmer than my mind’s eye filing away bits and pieces.

What do you think? How do you develop your characters? Are they filling your brain’s folders coming out piecemeal, or do you have detailed biographies?

I used to love reading Paris Review interviews, and especially when writers talked about whether they wrote with pencil, pen, typewriter or computer. Back then my inner Luddite smirked satisfactorily when writers said they wrote either longhand or on manual typewriters. At the time I was writing on a Royal manual typewriter and disdained the thought of writing on a computer, except for work. 

I loved the clack of keys against paper and platen and always remembered the essay in GQ magazine by Mordecai Richler, in which Richler poetically praised the typewriter as a writer’s muse. I wish I could find a copy of that essay.

Today I was reading a post by Nathan Bransford in which he asks: How Does Technology Affect Writing Style?

And I thought back to the days (not so long ago, really) when I wrote on my typewriter. Even when I converted to a computer, I sometimes still wrote a first draft of a story or even the first few pages of a story or a chapter on a typewriter. I felt then that my prose flowed better when it splattered out in Courier. 

I’ve gone back and read some of my sketches that I’ve saved, and there are some that seem stylistically better than what I write now. But, then other drafts are clunky, just as drafts I’ve written on the computer read clunky and misshapen and I think maybe the technology doesn’t matter: it’s always the writer.

Although I do have to say that when I go uber low tech and write a draft with pencil, I feel as if I write better, but I tend to rush what I write longhand and get impatient and want to actually be able to read what I’ve written (my handwriting is terrible; I’m a hellbound lefthander if my elementary Episcopal school teachers are correct). I don’t think I could write a draft longer than a few pages longhand: my eyesight couldn’t take it. I also edit better when I can print a draft and edit in longhand.

There are times, though, when I think about the typewriter, and long to pull it out and hear the clack of the keys again. Where’s the ribbon when you need it?

Every time I vow not read another writing advice book, I find one that really seems to tackle issues I’m having trouble with.

Carolyn See’s Making a Literary Life (Random House, 2002) is the most recent advice book that I’ve checked out. Along with chapters on craft, See adds a new dimension: How to make a life as a writer, which delves into relationships, publication, networking and promotion.

To the chapters on craft — plot, characters, revision and scene — See includes an interesting section on geography, time and space, which expands upon more than just setting.

In this section, she emphasizes specifics over generalizations.  She says, for instance, if a writer generalizes too much when trying to be “‘universal” the writer runs “the risk of boring . . .  readers to death. Because the ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in ‘the city’ may be easy enough to write about, but who can stand to read about them?”

The specifics matter. A character’s geography matters, how that character gets around matters, how time influences characters matters. Such things matter so much See suggests using such tools as drawing maps of the town a character lives in, of the place where a character lives. It’s a reminder we should know our characters inside-out as we work out their lives and stories on the page.

Also, as with other writing books, See stresses the importance of commitment to the craft. She has her version of Richard Rhodes’ Knickerbocker Rule — you write by applying your ass to your chair. See’s version of the rule is “a thousand words a day — or two hours of revision — five days a week for the rest of your life.”

There’s no other way around it, kids: to write, you have to commit to writing, you have to take time out and write and write and write, and then write some more.

My favorite sections in this book are about the writer’s life itself, the people around you, and the best people to be around (those who genuinely support your work); your life and outlook (how do you see yourself as a writer? how do you want others to see you?); how do you build a network of writers, editors, etc. (See suggests one charming note a day to a writer, editor, agent, etc.); and how do you manage publishing and promoting your work?

Read more…

I haven’t published a book . . . yet. But that’s my ultimate goal as a writer, and I’m not that sort of person who says he’s writing a book, but never does any writing. My inner Stewie badgers me enough to keep writing.

I do have a book, a novel, or rather a second/third draft — I’ve lost count of the revision. I’ve been working on the novel since 2005, when I began writing it. I finished a second draft, a full rewrite in 2007.

Since then, I had a beta reader read the manuscript, not a professional editor, but someone who might actually read the novel if it were published. She loved it, so I married her.

My next next step in the process — submitting the novel to an editing service — seems to get delayed every year for some reason or another (lack of money for various reasons the main culprit).

Anyhow, I did submit the first few pages for a free sample to one editing service recently, after I corresponded with debut novelist Karen Harrington about the value of using an editing service.

Even just that sample edit has given me valuable insights into the novel, and I’ve begun a third revision, restructuring the novel. Diving back into the process of writing, as I restructure, I’ve developed new insights into the characters, the plot, the whole narrative.

Taking the plunge into the writing process again has, in turn, revived my imagination, my whole drive to write, a drive that had begun to wane almost to nothing last year.

Now my goal is to finish this latest revision, and I want to finish it by April. After that, I hope I can afford to submit the novel to an editing service. From there, I hope to start submitting it to publishers.

Writer Lisa Romeo has a nice post on beginnings and endings, and then a nice piece at Tiny Lights on the same subject.

For me, beginnings tend to come easier (by easier I mean pulling less hair out) than endings, especially personal pieces. When I write feature stories,  I’m usually able to find something that either ties back to the beginning, or something to open up the story.

A lot of times, though, I seem to get stuck with a beginning and a lot of middle.

In Joe O’Connell‘s debut novel Evacuation Plan: A Novel From the Hospice (Dalton Publishing, 2007), a young screenwriter, Matt, goes to a hospice “in search of a good story.” He finds several poignant stories as he interviews the hospice residents, their families, and the hospice staff. In turn, Matt discovers he has to come to terms with his own father’s death.

Told in a novel-in-stories style, the novel draws on O’Connell’s experiences as a participant in a project by visual artists and writers to tell the stories of the terminally ill at Christopher House in Austin, Texas.

You mention in your Acknowledgments that some of the stories in Evacuation Plan date back to when you were a student in the MFA program at Southwest Texas State University(now Texas State University-San Marcos). The other stories originated from your experience at Hospice Austin‘s Christopher House. How did the individual stories begin to merge into a novel?

When I did the Christopher House project—a group of writers and visual artists chosen to tell the stories of the terminally ill in a residential hospice—I wrote poetry about the experience. But I knew I wasn’t done with it. I was later chosen for a residency that allowed me the time to complete

Joe O'Connell

this work, and in many ways I adapted the poetry into the novel, as odd as that may sound! The larger narrative grew from one story, which is the main narrator Matt’s. I just kind of took it from there, figuring out which stories would work where. It was a bit of a jigsaw puzzle that I solved as I created.

You chose to present multiple narratives, a novel-in-stories form. What led you to chose this form?

I read Tim O’Brien’s novel July July, which is about a 30th college reunion, but digresses into the stories of what has happened to different classmates in the interim. I saw here a novel-in-stories structure that would allow me to tell the full story of the hospice. I wanted to make the place itself a character. O’Brien, by the way, teaches in the MFA program I graduated from, but came on board after my time, and I’ve never met him. I do consider him one of our best writers and a major influence.

I do know that the novel-in-stories format is tough for some readers, the same readers who have a hard time with story collections. We’re indoctrinated as novel readers to follow the same characters along the way, so it can be tough when we dip in and out of lives in this manner. But I urge readers to be open to something a little different.

The dough that holds the collection together is Matt’s narrative. How did Matt’s narrative come about? And why did he become the central figure that pulls the collection together?

Matt’s story is part of a novel I started and got stalled on, a coming-of-age story. The relationship he develops with an older man, Charlie Wright, who is dying in the hospice, gets at a lot of what I was trying dig into. This is really a book about family and how death often signals how we must forgive in order to move on. Matt looks to Charlie as a surrogate father in this area, and Charlie is looking to Matt as a scribe, a means of passing on his story.

Why did you choose to make Matt a screenwriter?

Matt also allows me to write a bit about the creative process and to take a broader look at the hospice. The notion is that he is in search of a story for his next script. I have what I call my Black Hole Theory of Writing. When I’m in the zone, anything that crosses my path can get sucked in. In this case, while working on the book I was also preparing to teach a course in screenwriting. Some of that got sucked in. But, again, I’m really into the notion of each of us having a unique story to tell. I wanted to write of those pivotal moments in our lives.

The subtitle for the book is “A Novel From the Hospice.” What do want readers to learn about hospice care?

The oddest review my book has received is that there’s not enough death in it. Exactly! Hospice workers will tell you that 10 percent of what they do is about death. The rest is about life. Hospice is about empowerment. The dying have the opportunity to be in charge of their own deaths and to say a proper goodbye. What else could we ask?

You work as a journalist and as a teacher. How do these professions affect your fiction writing?

As a newspaper reporter I had Saturday festival duty. The reporters would take turns working Saturdays and writing about the rodeo, the corn festival, the train festival—you name it. I learned some strong lessons in fiction writing from this. You can either tell the macro story—a good time was had by all—or the micro story, which uses individual people to tell the story of an event. Character is king, even in newspapers, and the stories of what makes people tick is where it all starts. I’m a free-lance film writer these days for both the Dallas Morning News and The Austin Chronicle. I had a cover story in the Chronicle a few months back about the film industry’s problem in Texas, and the big compliment was when the former state film commissioner said I’d put a face on the film industry. I’d learned that “character” lesson!

As a creative writing teacher, I learn as my students learn. In a sense I get paid to be a student alongside the other students. It does very much help me to continue honing my own craft. I’m inspired by my students, and that’s a great feeling.

You’ve mentioned that Charles Baxter‘s A Feast of Love and Tim O’Brien’s July, July inspired Evacuation Plan, especially its form. How were those novels inspiring?

O’Brien was primarily about the structure, but he is a master writer. Baxter, whom I’ll go out on a limb and call the best short story writer alive today, is about going deep. Fiction writing is tough work, and we shouldn’t be easily satisfied as writers. I talk often about the search for the “little truths” of what it is to be a human being. O’Brien, Baxter and the late Andre Dubus, who was my long-distance mentor while I was in graduate school, do it better than anybody I can think of.

How important is reading to you as a writer?

It’s essential. You can’t expect to be a good writer without reading. My classes always include a lot of reading, which allows me to constantly uncover writers whom are new to me. See? I’m always also the student.

Who are some of your favorite writers? What are you reading now?

Along with the ones I’ve mentioned, I’m a big fan of John Irving, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Updike, ZZ Packer, Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, Flannery O’Connor. Some folks I’ve been reading of late are the essayist Tony Earley and the fiction writer Dan Chaon, who really blows me away. I’m coming late to George Saunders, but his style is a challenge to take chances. Great stuff.

What projects are you working on now?

I’m writing this after a very interesting day. I spent the last couple of days in Jefferson, Texas, talking about my book at the Pulpwood Queen’s Book Club annual convention, Girlfriend Weekend. Today, I traveled to a small town in Louisiana that is home to my mother’s family and their secrets-which supposedly include a couple of murders. She died recently and this morning two of my brothers scattered her ashes in the Pampa River in South India. A few years before her mind faded with Alzheimer’s, she’d asked me to interview her about her life, which was quite remarkable. She wanted me to write her story, and I’m mulling how to do that. The result may be an odd mix of fiction and nonfiction, but the project is very much intriguing me. I’ve also got a completed mystery novel I’m trying to place, and I’m working on a sequel to it that’s set in the “weird” Austin, Texas, that is quickly disappearing.

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Joe O’Connell is an award-winning short story writer, who teaches
writing to graduate students at St. Edward’s University and undergrads at Austin Community College. Evacuation Plan is his first published novel, and is both a Violet Crown Book Award finalist and a Pulpwood Queen’s Book Club bonus selection.