Essays

Nuts and Bolts -- The Horizontal Versus the Vertical

September 17th, 2011

The first draft of Diary wasn't called Diary.  It was called Period Revival, and it wasn't even about a character.  It was about a house.  Actually, the first-first title of the book was Dream Home.

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When You Can’t Find a Writing Workshop…

September 16th, 2011

It never fails.  When you’re stuck at work, doing some mindless task or staring at a computer screen, ideas fill your head and you dream of writing.  Then, when you’re at home with your cup of tea, and it’s quiet, and you have time and blank paper – nothing.  You might have pages of notes and ideas, but there’s dirty laundry to wash.   The phone rings.  Dust coats everything. Why is it so easy to daydream at work or school – then, impossible to do the same at home?

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Learning from Clichés… then Leaving them Behind

September 16th, 2011

This week, a trainer I’ve hired gave me a length of white, cotton string and said to suck in my stomach and tie the string, tight, around my waist.  All day, the string’s under my shirt, cutting into my skin unless I stand straight and hold my abdominal and lower back muscles tight.  Every night, a deep red scar runs around my middle.  The string is the kind you’d tie to a helium balloon.  It’s like the strings that Catholic boys wear under their clothes in high school, “St.

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Talking Shapes: The ‘Quilt’ Versus the Big ‘O’

September 16th, 2011

“The straight line is God-less.” I wish I’d said that, but Tom Spanbauer said it first, almost every week in his workshop.  In response, I’d always say, “The linear story is dead.”

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Textures of Information

September 16th, 2011

On nights in workshop, when no one brings pages, we just talk.  But instead of talking about book and writing, we tend to talk about movies.   This week, someone rented a copy of the documentary movie Trekkies, and I watched it with friends.  It’s still just storytelling.   Almost everything is storytelling in some form.  So, why not borrow the techniques and forms from other, real-world stories, and use those forms to tell our stories?

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Effective Similes

September 16th, 2011

The writer Joy Williams says, “A writer must be smart but not too smart.  He must be dumb enough to break himself to harness.”  In July, those words are especially true.  In summer, most workshops fall apart.  No one brings new pages.  Most of writing isn’t the brainstorming, exciting flashes of idea that come so fast.  Most of writing is the moment-by-moment choice of details that will create your physical reality on the page.

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Talking Shapes: The ‘Thumbnail’

September 16th, 2011

A paradox of storytelling is:  How does a character tell a story, with full knowledge of how it will end, but with the immediacy that keeps the reader in the present moment of the action?  Stories are told after the fact.  The teller has already made the journey, and been changed by the process, but the reader has not.  So, again, how does the storyteller acknowledge the fact she has survived?  She is wise and enlightened.  And how does she revert and tell the story from the perspective of the innocent, unenlightened person who has to go back and make the jo

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Talking Shapes: The ‘Cycle’

September 16th, 2011

In the first few weeks of his writers workshop, Tom Spanbauer used to hold weekend work parties.  Workshop members would show up on Saturday morning, wearing gloves and boots and we’d help Tom clear the littered property around his house in Southwest Portland.  We pulled blackberry vines and hauled rusted metal to the dump for recycling.  We raked up broken glass and bagged piles of garbage.  Tom made tuna sandwiches, and we quit by the late afternoon.  No one was paid, and we still had to pay our workshop dues – back then, twenty dollars per week to

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Talking Shapes: The Rebel, the Follower, and the Witness

September 16th, 2011

Some writers say that story telling is less about inventing stuff, and more about archeology.  So often, the task is not imagining new stories, it’s identifying ancient myths and presenting them in unique ways that still hold true to the original plot.  The stranger the circumstances – outer space or dinosaur park or Middle Earth – the more likely the audience can accept that strangeness if the plot is a familiar classic.

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Nuts and Bolts: Using Your Objects

September 16th, 2011

Let’s start with a true story about Truman Capote.  As a young man, after he’d gone to live in New York and started to write, his long-absent father, Archie Persons, contacted him.  Persons promised to send his son a ring, a family heirloom that was supposed to be some form of legacy.  Capote was thrilled, after all these years, to have this very personal tribute from his father, a man that he’d never known very well.

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