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Searchlights
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What
Book(s) Made You a Better Writer?
November
2002
This month: Elizabeth
Hannon, Maggi Sullivan Godman, Betty Winslow, Rodney Lewis
Merrill, Jane Merryman, Ken Rodgers, Susan Bono, Christine
Walker, Sandra Soli, Jodi Hottel
I
entered first grade at the age of five, after clearing the
hurdle of circling the clothespins in one picture which were
alike and those in another which were different. Somehow this
odd puzzler (who cared about clothespins, hell if they stuck
a sheet to the line we used them!) qualified me for school
without the preparatory role of kindergarten. I was labeled
"a good reader" from the start. It became a pattern to press
ahead with words, circling the adult stacks of the De Pere
Library hoping to dodge Mrs. Butell, braids coiled tightly
round her head, holding in her thoughts except for those about
"what is appropriate for a girl your age to read." By 8th
grade it was "The Autobiography of Malcolm X", "The Hobbit",
handed to me with a knowing look by my mother, and anything I could sneak past the hawk nose of Mrs.
B.
All
books, even mysteries, which my mother put in the same category
as daytime soap operas, "not for us", created a backdrop
of images, characters, triumphs, catastrophes, love and loss,
evil, grace, transcendence, failure, possibility that
helped mold this writer's heart. If I could read about something
there was the chance I too could move into a wider world than
the one I saw from the backside of a frontage road in small
town America. Anything
was possible, anything. To be a good reader seems an
essential element, baking soda in the cake mix, for any writer.
Given
this, two books demand a bow on this stage. Marquez's "One
Hundred Years of Solitude" and "The Last Report of Miracles
at Little No Horse" by Louise Erdrich. I have written, "It
is fitting during a time of tumult and terror to open a book
by Louise Erdrich and be reminded of the beauty of the natural
world and the thin membrane, which holds the human heart."
The same applies to Marquez whom I read while on a weeklong
adventure in the Boundary Water's Wilderness Area.the more
than 300 lakes that mark the border between Minnesota and
Canada. I took Marquez
at dawn to the water's edge so we both could watch the fog
lift from Lake Saganaga and be gifted by the sight of twenty
or more loons fishing communally, the mothers carrying small
fluff-ball babies on their backs. I felt as if Marquez stood
beside me gesturing with a sweep of his arm, "see, it's all
true, all you hold in imagination."
Both
these books taught me, forced me to unravel any falseness
within my writing, just find the bum thread and pull. To be
a better writer, they whispered, you had to risk knitting
a sweater for a loon, or you yourself turning a red eye to the lifting sun and feeling your
crazy webbed feet running on water, running on water before
ever opening wings.
Elizabeth
Hannon
Santa
Rosa, CA
When
I discovered Natalie Goldberg's "Wild Mind", I knew
I had struck gold. For years, I'd struggled with the question
of what to write about, followed by what to say, once I'd
decided on a topic. Natalie solved that problem for me with
her rules for writing practice: "Keep your hand moving;
don't cross out; don't worry about spelling and punctuation;
go for the jugular--if it's scary, it's full of energy."
I
read the book, read it again, tried some of the topics in
my new notebook, using a fast writing pen. Wow! I thought.
It works! I kept doing the ten minute writing practices. I
started talking to people who were writers or were interested
in writing. Soon we had formed a weekly writing group, where
we wrote, read aloud, then wrote some more.
As
the notebooks stacked up, I noticed that some of the timed
writings looked like the beginnings of stories or memoir or
poems. So I began to thumb through the pages, pulling out
bits and pieces that looked promising, and revised, rewrote,
polished.
Sending
work out for publication felt daunting, but hey! what
did I have to lose? So the next book, the one to start on the publication process, was
"The International Directory of Little Magazines and
Small Presses," edited by Len Fulton and published by
Dustbooks. Talk about a wealth of information for the
beginning writer! "The Wall Street Journal" has called the
Directory "The Bible of the Business!" and it's
true. It's a wonderful resource, complete with both a regional
index and a subject index for ease of use.
I
haven't finished a novel yet, but I've had some success in
publishing creative non-fiction and poetry, and best of all,
have learned how much fun it is to
hang out with writers. And Natalie and Len, you were my inspiration.
Thanks to you both.
Maggi Sullivan
Godman
Sutter Creek, CA
maggisg@cdepot.net
I've
read many books that have helped me become a better writer
- Writing Articles About the World Around You (Marcia
Yudkin), Creative Writing For Those Who Can't Not Write
(Kathryn Lindskoog), WriterSpeaker.com (Carmen Leal),
Write His Answer (Marlene Bagnull), Writing.com
and The Writer's Guide to Queries, Pitches, and Proposals
(both by Moira Allen) all come to mind - but I'd have to say
the book that has helped me the most has been the Bible.
I
see myself in its stories about mankind, in all my pride and
sin and selfishness, and I see the Lord in all His glory and
grace, and each time I read it I come away with more of an
understanding of His love for us and His longing for our love,
as well as His desire that each of us lay down our ways and
follow His, not because He is a tyrant, but because He is
our Creator and He knows better than anyone how we should
live.
And
with each reading I am more determined to be a better writer,
so that no matter what I write about, the joy of living, the
wonder of the world around me, and the love I have for God
come shining through. Writers can't just write, they need
to live. I have shelves and shelves of great books that teach
me how to write, but only the Bible teaches me how to live.
Betty Winslow
Bowling Green,
Ohio
wife, mother, writer,
K-8 school librarian, and head-over-heels-in-love Christian
Carol Bly's The Passionate, Accurate Story:
a
book that changed my writing forever
If
I am not mindful of it, my writing can turn quite repulsive.
Then people react to it as they might a vomiting baby: they
are sympathetic and really want to help but they can no longer
bear to look at it. The problem, I think, is bitterness.
Before
reading Carol Bly's book, The Passionate, Accurate Story,
bitterness was the only context I had for childhood memories.
Bitterness, I've discovered - largely by reading my own writing-is
a self-centered, hostile resistance to reality. I've also
discovered that what you most resist most persists.
Such
stories gave me momentary satisfaction but seemed to fuel
the pain. I became more bitter, more hostile, and further diminished with each
telling. The reason, I think: bitter outpourings stimulate
pity in listeners when an emotionally wounded storyteller
most needs acceptance and understanding.
While
re-writing my essay, "Baking Powder Biscuits" for the zillionth time, I found Carol Bly's book,
The Passionate Accurate Story. From it, I learned
that the darkness is best appreciated when set against the
light. My childhood was, in fact, not all darkness, but also
light and shadow. A telling of this story that aspired to
more than whimpering had to account for this larger truth.
Conceding
the contradictions of reality, I remembered that the stepmother
who brutally beat me also discovered now and then that she
loved me and with few emotional resources, did her best to
show it. I remembered that the stepmother I feared and hated
was also the mother I cherished and loved.
That
"Ma" was more to me than her misdeeds was a life-altering
revelation for me. This realization allowed me for the first
time to place her within her own life, to regard the facts
of her existence as they acted upon her: one whose
starry-eyed childhood dreams had matured into a bleak corporeality
of relentless poverty, brutality, and impersonal alcoholic
sex.
This
is (Carol Bly might say) the passionate, accurate story. None
of it excuses my stepmother's brutality. Nor does it diminish
the suffering that brutality inflicted on myself
and my brothers and sisters. It only replenishes the color
missed and depth lost to the monochromatic film and astigmatic
lens of a melancholic memory. It simply adds a drop of compassion
to a too bitter cup. It merely confesses that, however few
and fleetingly, small resplendent moments of love and grace
do visit even the most wretched life.
I
do not recant my wretched childhood. I did go hungry.
I was severely beaten. I was degraded and wished unborn.
And I was terribly scarred by such treatment. But, other
things happened too. Wonderful, sacrificial,
redemptive things. And that's the point.
Re-writing
"Baking Powder Biscuits" with the help of The Passionate,
Accurate Story has taught me
that there is a vast difference between tending to your wounds
and merely picking at them.
Rodney
Merrill
Astoria,
Oregon
Sometimes I wish
I could write like this author or that one, but wishing doesn't
make it so.
What writer has
influenced me?
When Hafiz tells
me that
Today
the vegetables would like to be cut
By
someone who is singing God's Name
and
Listen:
this world is the lunatic's sphere,
Don't
always agree it's real,
Even
with my feet upon it
And
the postman knowing my door
My
address is somewhere else
and
that
You
are a divine elephant with amnesia
Trying
to live in an ant
Hole
I am reminded to
lighten up and see the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Jane Merryman
Petaluma, CA
I hike; therefore
I am.
Re: books: I don't
think any of them helped. Lots of beer and whiskey with a few joints thrown in. That's
my notion.
Ken Rodgers
Sebastopol, CA
One
of the most helpful books in my collection is the one I resisted
the longest: Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise
DeSalvo. A few years ago, my friend Laurie insisted on loaning
me her copy saying, "I know. You think this
sounds like a therapy book, but it's not like
that." Smart woman, that Laurie,
but I still didn't quite trust her.
So
the book sat in one of my piles until she called to ask me
when she could have it back. That provided the incentive to
take a peek, and what I found there shocked me and changed
the way I think about writing.
I'd
long held as my ideal the image of the wild-eyed, disheveled
writer willing to forsake family and friends for art. I'd
even used the belief that I wasn't excessively passionate
enough to explain why I wasn't writing more often. From the
very beginning of the book, DeSalvo systematically trashed
that notion.
"We
must not use our creativity to create chaos by working in
a frantic, undisciplined way. Nor should we use it to separate
ourselves from the people we love. Rather, we use our writing
in the interests of our stability, which often means balancing
our responsibilities to ourselves and to others. It sometimes
also means making compromises. It never means giving up our
writing or the people we love."(pg. 100)
I
had read plenty of books that exhorted me to find time to
write every day, but no one had ever told me to make sure
to stop on time, useful if laundry and dinner are also
on the schedule. This was one of DeSalvo's many suggestions
for cultivating a discipline that allows writers to balance
all aspects of their lives. When I am more conscious of the
need to honor my inner and outer selves, I am happier, more
productive.
Since
then, I have failed to heed her solid advice many times, but
each time I return to her teachings, I know them to be absolutely
right for me. I have since come across other books that are
grounded in this philosophy of developing a safe writing environment
and a strong writing practice. The one I am enjoying now is
Finding What You Didn't Lose: Expressing Your Truth and
Creativity Through Poem-Making by John Fox, CPT. These
writers, when I listen to them, are like kind friends keeping
me on the path by whispering encouraging reminders in my ear.
Susan Bono keeps
marking her calendar in Petaluma, CA.
The
title of the book beckoned; the subtitle confused. It was
"The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers." At
48, did I qualify as "young?"
I
had started writing a short story that refused to be contained
within thirty or even ninety pages, and was surprised and
scared to realize I was writing a novel. I had never aspired
to do so. I became possessed.
My
husband thought I'd manifested a separate personality. A strange
woman was sleeping in his bed, or rather mumbling to her characters,
scribbling in the dark, getting up at four in the morning
to pad to the studio in her flannel slippers, and staying
on the computer long until noon everyday for two months. In
the afternoon and evening, I was too sleep-deprived and caught
up in my fictional world to be of much use to anybody. My
first draft flowed, and I rode the current, but eventually
I longed for a boat and rudder.
Miraculously,
a cheap 1985 paperback edition of John Gardneršs classic was
on our bookshelf (had it been there for a decade and I hadnšt
noticed?). I fanned through its amber-edged, crisped pages
seeing chapter heads such as "Aesthetic Law and Artistic Mystery,"
"Interest and Truth," "Common Errors," and "Fiction as Dream."
I sat down with it and read into the night.
Gardner
describes the vivid and continuous dream, that goal of writers
and hope of readers. He tells us it is the business of the
writer to make her readers "see and feel vividly" what her
characters see and feel. He says that "discovering the meaning
and communicating the meaning are for the writer one single
act." He cleverly illustrates errors, such as careless shifts
in psychic distance and imparts lessons in technique, such
as the enlightening admonition that "fiction is made of structural
units: it is not one great rush." To a new novelist, young
or older, he hands the key, then he kicks the door wide open.
I've
read it now more times than I remember. The pages are notated
and tabbed with Post-its. During the past six years, I've
completed two novels and amassed a shelf full of excellent
books on writing, but I'm still mining Gardner's wisdom and
appreciate more than ever his humor and humanity. He may be
rather old-fashioned in our thrill-seeking times to profess
that the "primary subject of fiction is and has always been
human emotion, values, and beliefs," but I can't think of
a better way to spend a writing life than pondering those
very things, even if the musing keeps me up at night.
Christine Walker,
Sebastopol, CA
Author of "A
Painter's Garden: Cultivating the Creative Life"
Her website is
www.compozarts.com.
(It covers painting, writing, and husband Dennis' music--click
on to hear a snippet of his nature & music compositions,
or their children's songs, or Chris reading from A Painter'
Garden, or see her newest monotypes and paintings.)
Becoming a Writer
by Dorothea Brande, One Writer's Beginnings and
The Eye of the Story by Eudora Welty.
My favorite book
is OWB by Miss Welty. With chapters "Learning
to See," "Learning to Listen," and other commentaries,
she gives us insight into her own vision and passion for language
as well as sensible, workable advice for our own vocation.
Sandra Soli,
Poetry Editor
Byline Magazine
www.bylinemag.com
I
wish I could name a haunting novel or a brilliant essay that
has influenced my writing, but nothing leaps to mind. I've
often wished I could write like this one or that one. However,
wishing doesn't make it so.
Recently
I picked up a work-a-day, how-to book that has changed the
way I write: Getting the Words Right: How to Rewrite, Edit
& Revise, by Theodore A. Rees Cheney. He got my attention
when he advised to eliminate all forms of the verb to be,
or try really hard to. I went back over a piece currently
on the front burner and yellow highlighted all those forms.
Shocking how many lit up the page. Eliminating them meant
finding real verbs, with strength and flavor, and sometimes
rewriting, which always came out better.
Just
for fun I took the highlighter to an essay by M.F.K. Fisher.
In some paragraphs she has veritable logjams of was
and were. Still, I wouldn't advise her to change a
thing.
Jane
Merryman
Petaluma
CA
I
hike; therefore I am.
As
I peruse the shelf where I have set aside my books about writing,
my eyes are constantly drawn to the books of three writers
in particular. All three write with passion and intensity
about the art of writing. All three are able to express the
ineffable about the craft of writing in metaphoric language.
All three observe the world in idiosyncratic, fascinating
detail. And all three are able to offer valuable advice about
the craft of writing without using formula or prescription.
Annie
Dillard's The Writing Life is uneven reading for me,
but no one else can imitate her wry perspective or her far-flung
insights. I doubt I'll ever be able to meet her enthusiasm
and curiosity for the inchworm (p.7-8), but I certainly am
awestruck by the workings of her mind and want to emulate
her writer's eye for burrowing detail.
Maybe
my recommendation of Stephen King's On Writing is surprising,
maybe not. Whenever I mention it to fellow writers, someone
invariably gushes in agreement. I was very much taken by King's
honesty, humor and guilelessness. Autobiographical material
conveys his odd journey as a writer. What buoys me up as a
writer, though, are his words of encouragement to others practicing
the craft.
Mary
Oliver's two guides to poetry, A Poetry Handbook and
Rules for the Dance, are my greatest inspirations.
I want to write like her. She makes me believe that anyone
can write nobly, if one is dedicated to writing. Even if you
aren't really a poet, I still encourage you to read ch. 17
"Then and Now" in Rules for the Dance. It's less than
three pages long. She writes, "No poet ever wrote a poem to
dishonor life, to compromise high ideals, to scorn religious
views, to demean hope or gratitude, to argue against tenderness,
to place rancor before love, or to praise littleness of soul.
Not one. Not ever." (p.104)
Jodi Hottel
Santa Rosa, CA
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