Philadelphia Stories Weblog

This happens to everyone. You are going along just fine…the story is flowing out like liquid gold. Then, BAM!! You hit a wall. You look around and wonder just where did that wall come from? You certainly didn’t write up a wall. But then, there it is all white and huge. You touch your head and feel bumps that form the words, “You Loose Sucka!” First, you are annoyed because you now have the word “Sucka” on your head and then panic starts to seep in. What is this wall? How long will it be up? How do you get it taken down? You break out in hives and you can’t breathe. You know you will never write again. You look to the heavens and just like that chick in that bad movie “I Know What You did Last Summer or Last Fall or Yesterday” you start screaming, “Why”.

Well, the answer is simple, really. You have writer’s block. Now, there are no creams for it. You can’t just take a pill and the liquid gold will just start following again. Also, it isn’t contagious. But it is, in fact, a very real epidemic that plagues writers everywhere. Although it comes on without warning, we can do something to fix it. Here is just what I do.

First, I try to do simple things. I will go get the mail, grab another Coke Zero, punch Yoda in the face, something and anything to just remove myself from the computer. After a few minutes, I will come back to it and see if I can get the momentum running again. If that doesn’t work, then I will actually leave for a longer period of time. I might even call a friend and make them go to the book store with me or play Find the Mii’s on the Wii (have you played this game? You have to find the look-a-like Mii’s…it is very addicting).

Now, if I come back and I am still having trouble, I will save what I have and either start writing something else, or I might start reading. Maybe if I am really upset that I can’t write, I might turn on the TV and watch full seasons of a show (maybe “Sex in the City” or “Scrubs”) or some movie On Demand. The point is I am trying to think of everything but the story so it has time in my brain to wiggle out the kinks.

If you are having trouble getting started, I have a very good suggestion. It’s what I like to call brain dumping. My former students will recall it as a “free write”. Here is where for about ten or fifteen minutes, you write whatever is in your head. No matter how silly or stupid, just write it down. Your writer’s block is happening because you are simply blocked. So, start spilling.

I would love it if you would all humor me and post your own brain dumping. I will do the same. Here’s mine:

12:32pm

Time…why have you punished me? Why is my coke bubbling? Is there a rat in there? A bet there is. It would be my luck to get a rat in my coke. Surprise…it’s ratatatsic coke. My luck, I would drink the darn rat and not even know it.

I swear I am going to wind up like Emily Dickinson. I’ll be dead and people will find all my writing. She had problems with her thyroid as well. See, another connection.

Ha-ha…I wrote the word Sucka…dance sucka dance suck dance sucka…move sucka movie sucka move sucka….that was a funny movie…Blades of Glory.

Hmmm….nothing in the old noggin. That isn’t true and I know it. There is a least ten pounds of something in my head. It could be cheese. Who likes cheese? Frick…I miss that one.  You don’t call…you don’t write…all bull really.

12:37pm

I only did five minutes because no one should really have to suffer with the inner workings of my brain. But seriously, try it…I have to go get the mail now.

Maybe it is the English teacher in me, but I can’t help it. I really feel that in order to be a good writer you need to be a good reader. I don’t mean to say that if you read 100 books a month you automatically qualify as a good reader. I think you need to be able to read and absorb what the author is not only saying but also how they are doing it. Are they using literary techniques to get their point across or are they just telling you the facts? What do you do in your own writing? Are you a “just the facts” person or are you leaving small clues for your reader?

I’ve talked about my failed attempts at poetry and I really think it has to do with the fact that I didn’t really read poems. Sure, I would read Sexton, Plath, Parker and Langston Hughes…but that is where my poetry education ended. I would rather pour hot sauce in my eyes and poke them with dull needles then read a poem by T.S. Eliot. Why I hate him so much, I don’t know. I think it has to do with the fact that I feel like he tries to throw his intelligence around. Joyce is like that as well. I threw his book down when I read in the introduction that no one will understand his book. Really, I don’t have that kind of time to devote to something he already thinks I wouldn’t get (I know, but I love a challenge…but not from someone who’s opinion doesn’t matter). Because of my stunted education in poetry, I couldn’t really expand as a poet and it showed.

That is why I think reading is so important. Pick your genre and read all that you can from it. You will get so used to reading it and seeing how it fits that it will become a part of you and you will mimic things in your own writing without even knowing you did it. Also, you can learn new words and different stylistic approaches. If you can, form or join a book group. Just as a writing group is helpful, so is a book group. There you will be with people who (hopefully) read the same book you did and you can hear how they saw things. Every reader brings his or her own life into what is read and it is so awesome. I loved discussing literature with my students because I would even learn new ways of seeing something or they would pick up on something I hadn’t noticed before.

Writing and reading, although they are put on paper and it seems like they are stagnate beings, are far from that. Reading and writing are liquid. They change and evolve just as the people who read their stories change and evolve. A perfect example is when I was a high school student; I had to read the book, The Great Gatsby. I wanted to poke out my eyes every time I opened the book and I had no idea Gatsby got shot when I read it the first time. Then, as a teacher, I had to read the book again. I fell in love with the book. Fitzgerald does amazing things in just nine chapters and that book is a pure work of art as it is of genius.

People always stress the importance of reading, but I don’t think they fully understand its importance. We learn so much from books and, as a writer; a book is your teacher and your classroom.

I feel that there are two things any serious writer must do everyday. Of course writing is one, but reading is the second part. 

I’ll start with a confession. Many years ago, I dabbled in poetry. Haiku, sonnet, free-verse. Villanelle. Sestina. Name the form, I tried it.

But today’s world is no place for a poet, at least not for one with skin as thin mine, so I laid my quill aside and, with a sigh, set my sights on more prosaic pastures. My own failure as a poet, however, gives me great admiration for anyone who stays at it, and even greater admiration for anyone willing to provide poets with a venue, an area in which to be appreciated. Caron Andregg and Robert Wynne, the co-editors and publishers of Cider Press Review, have done just that, and their journal is not only a labor of love, but a bastion of hope for struggling poets and poetry lovers everywhere.

The latest issue of the journal opens with a poem titled “About the Type” by Marilyn McCabe. As its title suggests, the poem consists of an imaginary note on the type in a book set in a font called Requiem. Yet Requiem, the poet notes, has fallen out of use. The irony, of course, is that while the typeface is no longer used, it is, nonetheless, the typeface used in the book that the poet imagines. In many ways, it can be argued that this is the state of poetry in the modern world: while the pundits of cultural production and mass media may insist that the poem is a form of communication that is itself “now out of use,” poetry continues to resurface and prove that reports of its death are grossly exaggerated—as demonstrated, of course, by Cider Press Review and other journals like it.

Another poem in this edition of CPR that caught my eye was “Night of Broken Stars” by Brian Lutz. Ostensibly a love poem, this piece takes the conceit of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 into the free-verse realm of a gothic American October. Where Shakespeare finds beauty in the black wires of his subject’s hair and the reek of his subject’s breath, Lutz finds beauty in “the undusted room” and likens it to the “second hand/of working things ticking.”

Overall, Cider Press Review does a wonderful job of collecting the poetry of new and exciting voices as well as that of award-winning poets from around the world. The latest issue is nearly 150 pages long, perfect bound, with a bright, beautiful cover. If you’re a poet, you certainly can’t go wrong in subscribing to this gem of a journal.

Humans are social animals. We like to feel like we belong somewhere and we like to talk and listen to others. Writers are the same way. That is just one of the many reasons I think it is so important for writers to find others with the same passion and join a group. I know that for myself, I need others to look over my work. I want to make sure what I write on the paper corresponds with the image I have in my head. Also, when the rejection letters come in, it is easier to talk to someone who has a pile of their own verses someone who can’t really relate.

Writer groups also spawn ideas. Maybe a character or a setting in someone else’s story triggers a thought bubble for you. Perhaps Joan’s character reminds you of your Aunt Susie who used to talk to birds and eat peanuts. Then the word “peanuts” sparks your mind into thinking about those peachy hard marshmallow circus peanuts you ate as a child. That takes you to that summer day when you and your friends ran to the ice cream man and your one friend “purchased” an ice cream cone with monopoly money. You think about how ingenuous it was for your friend to con the ice cream man out of a free ice cream cone and then BAM a new short story is born.

 Writer groups can also help you make connections. Maybe Mark knows of this great writer’s retreat and tells the group how everyone should consider going to it. Perhaps Josh knows of a great book you should read to help you out of the literary corner you boxed yourself into. It is a group of people with your same interest and they know people you don’t and that can turn into a very good thing for you.

Writer groups give you a sense of family. Sure, it can be more dysfunctional then maybe the Hogan family (yeah, I said it…so what…what are you going to do?), but it is a family created by a common goal and that in itself is a comforting thought. Being a writer can be very lonely. You sit all day with your computer (sure I have my Coke zero and Yoda, but others may not be so lucky) and your characters beat you up and demand all types of things you didn’t even think they would want from you, so isn’t it nice to have a place you can go to sit down and just breathe?

I say you should join as many groups as you can find. Even take classes if you have the means. Try them all out and see which one or ones work for you. As writers, we need to keep ever option open because you never know where it can lead you.   

All writers tell rough drafts aloud, but this was grad school, so we gave ourselves themes: crappiest job, caught-naked scene, best prank, worst party, the moment that changed your life.  It was less like a slam than like dinner theater with a rapt, appreciative audience.  Since that summer, I’ve rarely listened to or told a story that someone didn’t interrupt.  Sad as it sounds to my students, this was entertainment in the age before YouTube.

One night, I told “The Story of Menstruation”, about the sex-ed film the girls at my school were shown in fifth grade.  More to the point:  how, a week before the premier, Danny Favata pulled the pizza-sized reel from the AV closet, threaded the forbidden film through the projector, and wheeled the contraption into our classroom, where we awaited what we thought would be “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”.  Blinds drawn, lights out, we watched as a background of purple velvet appeared on the screen.  And then, letter by white girly letter, swirled just enough of the film’s title to horrify, before Mrs. Grimstead yanked the projector’s cord from the wall. 

This oral draft was really Danny’s; it paid tribute to his status as AV Operator and his bad boy ingenuity.  It was as truthful as memory could make it, and yet it skirted the true story, which I wrote as fiction years later for a ‘zine called Whispering Campaign. 

 “What I wanted was his courage,” my female narrator confesses, “which I could only imitate.”  No wonder.  “The Story of Menstruation”, as we were to discover at a segregated viewing of the film, was full of baffling information and censorious imagery:  a girl cluelessly riding a bike in a dress, a girl collapsing in tears over a tangle in her hair, a girl unhappily showering in an avalanche of ice cubes.  This, we were told, was our story.  And these were our instructions, delivered in a voice — as familiar as a lullaby — from Disney’s “Cinderella”. 

“All this time I thought you were exaggerating,” my friend, the writer Brian Bouldrey, admitted in an e-mail message that arrived yesterday.  Attached was a link to “The Story” on YouTube, where, as Brian says, all that is lost is found.  “Why is nature always called MOTHER nature?” he teased, quoting the film.  Thirty-five years later, the film is exactly as I remember it.  But I’ve spent those years writing a different story.

For me – as a writer and as a reader – the story often hides in the rough draft’s odd image: a perfumed permission slip, a bully’s scabbed knuckles, a classroom arranged in battle formation with boys against girls.  Whenever I read student work or submissions to Philadelphia Stories, I look for these odd images in order to find the writer’s truest intentions.  They are like a treasure map carried across the desert during the long process of revision, instructions creased closed and spread open again and again until the document disintegrates and the gold is found.  

http://elizabethmosier.wordpress.com

The first rejection letter in this batch, I am not too surprised about because I just once again threw out my novel without really preparing it. I always think that everything is a sign, so I think if I am on line and I see this great publisher or magazine, then I should rush my stuff out to them. But, the reality is that although it may in fact be a sign of something I should do, I should send things when they are ready and not just throw stuff out into the world. I misread signs all the time.

So, when my novel got rejected, it was a form letter and I didn’t get upset about it. There was no nice comments or anything, just hey we are passing on your novel. But again, I am fine with it because I knew going in I didn’t put my best finished work forward.

The other rejection letter was a blow to my ego. I really felt that this one was going to work out. Every time I thought about it, I kept thinking that this piece was going to make it. However, I started really thinking about that piece and I think my intentions for writing the piece were a bit skewed. I wrote it as a letter and it was a real letter to a real person. I was apologizing for things that have happened to me and I think that maybe I am not supposed to apologize for those things anymore. Also, I had it in my head that they would finally be proud of me. They would read it and want to come and talk to me again. These are all silly reasons for writing something. Did I really think this person would be proud of me? Was I really that naive to think they would read it and want to talk to me? I can almost guarantee they wouldn’t even read it. I could have probably staple it to their forehead and they still wouldn’t read it..

So, here are a few truths I am trying to learn. The first is, you can’t predict anything. You must go into everything with an honest and open heart. Secondly, we aren’t mind readers. I don’t know why this person ignores me…maybe they do hate me and maybe they don’t. All I have is their actions and their actions show me I am not important to them. I have to learn that not everything we say or do will work out just because we feel it should work out. Lastly, I have to be completely true to myself. When I write, it has to be pure and a true representation of me. I can’t write to make people proud of me, or so they will talk to me, or anything like that. I have to tell my stories with my voice. I have to write from me because that is what separates me from everyone else out there.

Sure, I wish I did get that story published. But as I think about it, I am glad it didn’t get picked up. Maybe I am wrong and that person would have read it and got even more mad at me. Maybe they would wonder why I am still trying to say I am sorry. At the end of the day, things happen for a reason (yes still a believer in signs) and who am I to question the reasons? I just need to learn I can only write for me and I need to put what I think is my best work out there.  

I love reading blogs by writers. Blogs are a place where they are often free to be less “writer-ly” and are able to speak about various things that are going on in their lives, as well as about their writing.

Dawn Friedman’s blog This Woman’s Work is a perfect example of such a writer’s blog. Over the four or so years I’ve been reading her blog (full disclosure; I’ve also been to Dawn’s house and she took me out for the world’s best salty caramel ice cream, so I might be a bit prejudiced), I’ve watched her home school her son, change careers, adopt a daughter, draft a book proposal, trash that book proposal and create another, start two businesses, and pimp her sister’s crafts.

What I love about Dawn’s blog is that she lets you into each and every single one of these events with the same level of openness and genuineness. I feel like I’ve learned just as much from her about open adoption as I have about pitching articles to publishers. Her blog isn’t just about writing; it’s about living a writing life. She talks about the balance of motherhood and career, the societal pressures of raising a mixed race child, and about meeting with a new corporate client–sometimes all in the same entry.

Getting an opportunity to take such a full peek into a writer’s life is rare. Because blogs also feature comments, you are also able to engage with Dawn (and her readers) about all of these subjects, therefore including you in the story.

For me, I’ve found Dawn’s blog not just entertaining but also inspiring. It was with her encouragement that I made the leap into full-time freelance writing. Without her example, I would have never sent a single pitch to a magazine or website (so what if those pitches have fallen on deaf–or maybe blind–editor’s ears? The point is that I SENT THEM). I’ve also found it fascinating to watch her make the change from magazine writer and editor–where she felt she didn’t get to write about what she wanted to–to corporate writer (where she still may not be writing what she wants, but she finds the work easier and better paying). I eagerly perused her business cards for ideas when it came time to create my own.

But it’s not just the business end of writing that makes Dawn’s blog so riveting. Dawn’s stories of her family–particularly her incredible successful open adoption of her daughter Madison–are so open and heart wrenching that you can’t help but feel invested in her family. I’ve never witnessed any woman work so hard at the art of mothering, and her entries as she struggles with her role as mother are gripping. Again, she is inspiring–she’s forced me to look at elements of motherhood I might have never considered without her input.

So, anyway, enough gushing–go read it. You’ll find her blog is easily searchable so you can just read about what interests you, but I feel fairly certain you will end up reading more than you expected.

I meant to write about Dawn’s blog a couple weeks ago, but I was away in San Francisco attending a massive convention of women bloggers–please forgive me! I promise to write about another writer’s blog soon.

Remember in my blog about my first rejection letter, I told you how the person wrote me back and gave me some much appreciated criticism? Then I know you remember how I was going to rework the story and send it again? Well, I did and I think you can tell by my title how it was received.

But just like before, I am not angry or upset. They sent me more constructive criticism and I am really very touched by it. This person has read my work twice and has not said I was an untalented hack who should just find the nearest ocean and see if I float. This person has been kind enough to think about my story and offer advice. Also, I didn’t disagree with any of their points and I think that may be why it is so much easier to handle the rejection.

I did do a major rewrite to the story and that may have hurt me loose my focus on what story I was trying to tell. This new story became one about my vision of how we love people and where we place those that we love. It wasn’t executed well enough because the reader had many important questions that my story should have answered. They wanted to know what story I was trying to tell and I thought about it. I couldn’t answer them because I didn’t know myself. I thought I was telling my story right, but I was forcing the story into the flash fiction genre. Maybe that is the problem.

I think as an artist, we have this constant struggle in our minds and our hearts. Do you write our stories and stand by them regardless of what popular opinion may demand or do we rework it until it sells? Is that called selling out if we create a piece to fit into someone’s book or magazine? Or could we call it being creative because we listened and we were able to rise to the challenge and we created something we didn’t even know was in us in the first place? As artists, we need to answer the question what are we writing for?

 I know that there are plenty of other magazines and maybe I should just give up on this one. Perhaps another reader will love my story as it is and no rewrites are needed. After two tries, all I have is an opinion. But I do like the challenge and the fastest way to get me to do something is to tell me I can’t do it. Also, I feel like because this person is so kind to continue writing me back, I owe it to them to produce something really great. The second story wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t get their advice and I do like the second story a lot and I might try to stop forcing it into a genre and just let it flow. 

So now I will once again go back into my story and try to figure out what I want to tell my audience. I will continue to keep you posted.

It has been almost a year since I last sat down with my first novel. It was the best and worst three days of my life. Meredith (the main character) was really annoying. I would be trying to sleep and she would come and kick me in the shin and tell me to get up and finish writing.

After the three days I had about 200 pages of the first draft of my novel. I was pretty impressed with myself because I normally would write short poems (badly I admit) or maybe a four-page short story. Before that point, I didn’t have the chops to maintain a story. Then Meredith came along and now I can’t stop myself from turning everything a write into a novella.

Meredith’s creation has a funny story. In a previous life I was a high school English teacher. I was teaching a creative writing class and I have always been a big fan of the cliché, “put your money where your mouth is”. If I was making them share their writing with me, it was only fair that I share mine as well. I started class with my writings and we would discuss the piece. Meredith’s story began as a three-page snapshot. She didn’t even have a name. Then, her story sat in my head until the summer. She got her name, a family, a background story and even a boyfriend.

I had my critics read it and they raved. I even tried to send the first ten pages out and tried to get an agent (okay, I sent it to one place and I used the first ten pages to try to get into grad school…neither of the avenues paned out). Then I just stopped. I didn’t loose interest in her, I just felt that she wasn’t really done yet and I wasn’t ready to face her again.

Her boyfriend’s mom needed to be reworked. The ending to the novel was a bit weak. Then there was Max. See, Max is a great character. He is so great that I felt that Meredith was starting to like him a bit too much. I am worried that if I open up the novel again, Meredith might try to go after Max and then I will be really mad because that was not what I wanted to happen.

So I ask you…do I drive back into the novel and start fixing it in the hopes that I can reel Meredith in? Do I go in and just let her do what she wants (which will probably happen anyhow, I mean she used to kick me…in the shin)? Or do I just let the novel remain dormant?

Michael Chabon’s first collection of essays, appropriately titled Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands (McSweeney’s 2008), charts the largely misunderstood, maligned, and unexplored territories of genre fiction and comic books, so it only stands to reason that this volume has itself been largely misunderstood, maligned, and (perhaps) not (completely) explored by those who have reviewed it in the mainstream media. As a longtime spectator of genre fictions, I was personally intrigued by Chabon’s premise throughout the book: that while “mainstream literary” culture (whatever that means) has a tendency to frown upon such categories as the mystery, science fiction, and romance, works written within these genres tend to be the most adventurous and experimental. In other words, despite its bad reputation, genre fiction is what keeps literature alive. (Not to toot my own horn, of course, but I’ve been making the same observation about independent presses since day one of this blog…)

As the subtitle for this book suggests, invention happens in the “borderlands” between established genres. Thus, like e.e. cummings’ Cambridge ladies with their comfortable minds who live in furnished souls, mainstream literary writers have a tendency to write safe literature that reproduces the status quo. By way of contrast, however, genre writers ranging from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Cormac McCarthy manage to challenge the status quo in various ways. Conan Doyle, for example, blurred the line between reality and fiction by having characters like Sherlock Holmes and his assistant, Dr.Watson, insist at almost every turn that they were not amused at the attention lavished upon them by the public as a result of the publication of the tales of their exploits. Along slightly different lines, McCarthy uses the form of the epic adventure (and, perhaps surprisingly, not the sci-fi epic, as many critics have asserted) to plumb the depths of humanity’s will to survive in The Road.

Other “explorers” Chabon profiles throughout his book are comic book visionaries Will Eisner and Howard Chaykin, English writer Philip Pullman (of The Golden Compass fame, and himself. Indeed, Chabon’s exploration of his own creative processes make for some of the most interesting passages in the book. From his childhood in Columbia, Maryland, where the maps of city planners always preceded reality, through to his ongoing efforts at creating his own worlds in novels like The Mysteries of Pittsiburgh, Wonder Boys, and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon’s love for the realms of imagination he has both created and inhabited shines like a beacon. Additionally, Chabon’s exploration of the biographical details surrounding many of his works sheds light not only on the relationship between his own works and real life, but on the relationship between fact and fiction in general. The realm of fiction, it turns out, is a realm that complements our own, a world that adds depth and dimension to the already complex day-to-day universe we inhabit. More importantly, perhaps, it is a realm that has the potential to reshape what we consider reality.