Tuesdays with Story

January 14, 2010 by Cathy R.

“I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.” — V.S. Naipal,  A House for Mr. Biswas  

Writing Friends 

Found something lovely beneath our tree last month. A hard-cover treasure for the person who loves wondrous characters and silly predicaments: The Complete Peanuts: The Definitive Collection of Charles M. Schulz’s Comic Strips (1969-70.)

It was meant for my young son (nine), but I’m reading it now, too. Why not?

Schulz had a way with words, to put it mildly. Legendary newsman and Schulz admirer Walter Cronkite once described the cartoonist as a writer of  “tight discipline” who used genius to create with a few short lines “a panorama of life’s experiences.” Italian novelist Umberto Eco has said, “The world of Peanuts is a microcosm, a little human comedy for the innocent reader and for the sophisticated.” Modern illustrator and award-winning animator Mo Willems is also a big fan.

An example (minus those great drawings):

SALLY: (Walking into a room where big brother Charlie Brown, seated, watches television) Do you want to hear my report on Abraham Lincoln? 

(She starts to read from a piece of paper in her hands): Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Who you may ask was Abraham Lincoln? Okay, I’ll tell you…Abraham Lincoln was our sixteenth king and he was the father of Lot’s wife…(Looking up, in deep thought) Do you think I should mention about his picture being on all those pennies?

CHARLIE BROWN: (staring, blank faced) That might be interesting.

SALLY: (proud, gazing at her work) Do you think I’ll get an “A?”

CHARLIE BROWN: (turning back to the screen) Do they give out “Zs?”

On to Business

A reminder: Weekly meetings again take place at Barnes & Noble unless otherwise mentioned, after holiday events at the bookstore sent both groups elsewhere at times.

A correction from last week’s news: author Josh Henkin’s Letter to an MFA can be found on the website joshuahenkin.com

Special Appeal to those in 2nd & 4th – hey gang, we need some volunteers to do the weekly newsletter! Can’t let 1st and 3rd have all the glory! I hear it’s fairly easy – training is available! If you can be caretaker of the newsletter for just a few weeks, it would be appreciated! Let us know if you can help. –Carol

Importantly, we’re all busy updating our bios for the website, right?

Last Meeting

Five folks gathered at Barnes & Noble (many after a stop for warmth and caffeine from Starbucks. . . mmm, coffee and tea. . . ) to critique five pieces. Here’s what happened:

Annie Potter presented a story about Papa and Mama Lang, the second in her series of memoir-stories. Papa and Mama clearly didn’t have children, but suddenly half-way through the first page there’s a child – be sure to establish the narrator’s relationship with the couple. The mice were great. Be careful about overusing “I”. Also clarify the passage of time. The stories connect and are showing patterns. Could lead to some interesting themes. An outline might be helpful, but the important thing is to get the stories out on paper first.

Patrice Kohl read from her family history, “Welke Farms, Inc.” Annie was surprised to learn that Patrice didn’t grow up on a farm – the important facts are all in the story, as if written by someone who knew the life well. There are lots and lots of repeated words and phrases – go through and trim out or find different words to use in their place. Use more quotes to make it more personal, and be sure to balance the work and problems with what makes farmers love farming so much. Get the good things in there.

Jack Freiburger’s Path to Bray’s Head continued with the reappearance of Lester, always a fun character. Good details, good humor, funny the way Lester lets so much time lapse before suddenly answering Sean’s question. Clarify who is in shock in the first line – reads like Sean but it’s Amy’s father. Couple of long sentences, get clumsy toward the end.

Holly Bonnicksen-Jones delved into juicy territory with her rewrite of the party scene from Coming Up For Air. It’s kind of flat, though. Jack, the lone male at the table, stated that a lot more male-bashing from the gaggle of women at the party was needed. Set the scene up front – how many people? Find places where Liza makes connections – what does she need from this party? There’s room for a lot of great one-liners. Really let loose and let some of the partiers shock Liza. People at divorce parties don’t act like they do elsewhere. Not a good place for the teenage daughter, either. Her presence tames it too much.

Carol Hornung is nearing the end of Asperger Sunset. Russ has a quiet moment in the church before being interrupted by the bad guy. Make the interruption more violent, more descriptive, more jarring. Patrice liked the rhythm of the sentences, said it flowed well. Need some more detail in setting up the scene. Engage the senses. And, as always, clear out the excess Russes. 

 Who’s Up Next

January 19 (First-and-Third) Alicia Connolly-Lohr (Lawyer Lincoln,) Amber Boudreau (chapter 6, YA novel), Judith McNeil (short story), Jerry Peterson (???), Clayton Gill (chapter 7, Fishing Derby.)

January 26 Second-and-Fourth) Holly Bonnicksen-Jones (Coming up For Air,) Jack Freiburger (Path to Bray’s Head,) Patrice Kohl (Wild Foods,) Anne Allen (memoir from December,) Annie Potter (memoir piece.)

February 2: Send details to editor

From our Writers

Millie Mader reviewed Nicholas Sparks’ latest novel, The Last Song, set in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. (See below.)

Sparks writes about family dramas and his stories are often set in the rural South. His novels have sold millions. Some became movies—The Notebook, Message in a Bottle, Nights in Rodanthe. In a recent interview Sparks explained that he chooses the settings and time periods for his books with great care to highlight the themes he wants to address and not detract from their messages. His 1999 novel Walk to Remember, about the innocence of first love, for example, took place in the 1950s for a specific reason, he said.

“I saw a list once of what teachers back then regarded as the biggest problems in school. Number 1 was chewing gum, number 2 was running in the halls. Because I wanted to write a love story, and not a story of what it’s like for a teenager in high school nowadays, I set the story in the 1950s.”

Millie writes:

“I was beginning to think that Nicholas Sparks’ books were getting a bit saccharine and predictable. Not so with his latest, The Last Song. It can easily compete with the Notebook in its real life drama and heart-tugging tale of a family in crisis.

Our protagonist, Ronnie, is a rebellious, sarcastic seventeen, reaching out madly for eighteen and freedom. Children of divorce, she and her younger brother are sent from Manhattan to spend the summer with their dad in his beach home in North Carolina. “A vacation is a couple of weeks, not a whole summer,” Ronnie thinks with disgust. She hung out—mostly snuck out—in disreputable clubs with friends of the same ilk, in her beloved New York. On the drive with her mother and brother down to North Carolina, she speaks little except to mumble “whatever” to her mother’s attempt at conversation. The purple streak in her long, chestnut hair caused stares when they finally arrived. The beach house was little more than a shambles, but it sat right on the ocean. It intrigued the brother and totally repulsed Ronnie.

This story is a dramatization of “For Everything There is a Season” as it turns, chapter by chapter, through a summer. There are several stories embodied in the text. They are tales of growing, redeeming and finding true love. The reason for the children spending an entire summer with their dad is revealed, and Ronnie matures into a caring and responsible human being. It’s not chic lit, and I would recommend it to both sexes. It will draw you in and hold you.

I think it’s already being made into a movie, starring Miley Cyrus as Ronnie.” 

Words & Language

Paul McFredries at WordSpy highlights an appropriate one for word fiends, mystery writers and those busy thinking up topics for TWS upcoming Fifth Tuesday at Booked for Murder in March:

Wheredunit: n. A murder mystery or detective story where the location of a crime plays a central role. 

Example citation: “In some mystery novels, the wheredunit is as important as the whodunit. The local, rather than merely serving as the backdrop to the plot, is an essential ingredient that lifts the story out of the ordinary, providing an ambience found nowhere else. – Robert Wade, “Blood flows in the wilderness as fast as it flows in the city,” The San Diego Union-Tribune, September 19, 2004.

In the News

The New York Times reports a grisly trend in case you hadn’t noticed—the merging of literary classics with zombies and/or vampire horror-type themes.  Due to be coming out in 2011: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a work said to “parody the great man style of popular history,” by Seth Graham-Greene. It’s written like a presidential biography, editors say, in the “vein of Doris Kearns Goodwin or David McCullough” with vampires added where appropriate.

Last April, Quirk Books in Philadelphia published Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, turning the 1813 Jane Austen classic into a modern tale with real violence, not just Austen’s biting parlor wit. That book spent eight months on the New York Times’ bestseller list. A specialist in 18^th-century literature, Brad Pasanek at the University of Virginia, declared this mash-up not really much of a stretch, since “Austen’s prose sublimates satire, anger and pain into polite exchange” already.

Is Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing iPod next?  

More News

Self-publishing is another option: As the economy limps along, traditional publishing houses continue to lose editors and make cutbacks. As a result more authors are looking to online self-publishing companies like iUniverse, according to a CNN story by Elham Khatami. One author, Lisa Genova, believed in her novel Still Alice, about a 50-year-old Harvard professor with Alzheimer’s disease, so much she pursued that route—with great success. Originally self-published and later picked up by Simon & Schuster, the book debuted at Number five on the New York Times best-seller list.

Khatami’s story can be found on CNN by searching for her name, self-publishing and the title Still Alice. Or try here (this link doesn’t always work):

cgi.cnn.com/2009/…/print.on.demand.publishing/index.html

Read a feature story about author Genova, of Massachusetts, and her writing life here: http://www.capecodkidz.com/news64.htm

Publishers go Twittering. A past newsletter noted how Twitter, despite skepticism in some circles, is gaining ground with writers and publishers. By consulting the official “Directory of Book Trade People on Twitter” then calling up one of the many publishers listed, you could find a whole lot of thoughts on a sample day. Here, January 12. Decide for yourself if this mix of hot news, teasers and hard-to-decipher abbreviated chatter is a helpful or sustaining form of communication for people who love books and writing:

AAKnopf: @booklounge 59 Seconds author @RichardWiseman predicts your resolution success w/ a quiz: http: http://www.resolutionnquiz.com…chicagotribune scooped us on Scandanavian Lit! What can we possibly add? Why are Nordic mysteries so satisfying?…Read our review of “Cutting for Stone”–one of our top favorites of 2009… 

Graywolf Press: GHOSTS OF WYOMING is the February pick for the MPIBA “Reading the West” program!…I’ll be giving away 2 scholarships to the Backspace Agent-Author Seminar & Conf in May. Stay tuned…A belated and hearty CONGRATS to (M) on the arrival of her lovely baby boy in December…Currently accepting manuscripts! This year’s big change is that we’ll accept them electronically.

Scribepub: Have you read the ALR blog that flags some highlight books for 2010?…We in the office are rueing the size of these $5 milkshakes/iced coffees.

Writer’s Resolutions, perhaps.

Beat poet and author Jack Kerouac probably wouldn’t be asked to speak at a writer’s conferences these days to share his List of Essentials for writers. However, you might get a kick out of his free-spirited advice.  Kerouac, called a literary iconoclast and progenitor of America’s Hippie movement, was a Massachusetts native who died in 1969 at age 47 after a battle with alcoholism. He famously wrote his successful autobiographical road trip adventure On the Road, published in 1957, on a 120-foot continuous sheet of paper, made of individual sheets of paper he personally taped together so he wouldn’t have to reload his typewriter during the writing process. Could his ideas help cure writer’s block?

Belief & Technique for Modern Prose (fifteen of the thirty):

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel with find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teacher of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

From Nathan Bransford

Wondering if your novel or work-in-progress fits into the adult fiction or the young adult fiction (YA) category? Agent Nathan Bransford says the difference in his view between the two genres is not primarily thematic, but rather pacing and presentation: 

“When you read a YA novel the pace tends to be quicker, the books tend to be shorter, and things happen in a more straightforward fashion. While of course there is a ton of variation and exceptions, things tend to unfold on the surface to keep a younger reader interested and engaged. In an adult novel, even an adult novel about high schoolers, things unfold more slowly, there tends to be more subtlety and ambiguity. Things happen beneath the surface and they can be more challenging. In other words, I think the YA/Adult split is more about the telling than the characters and the themes.”

One of Bransford’s clients is Jennifer Hubbard whose debut book The Secret Year (Viking) came out this January 7 to great reviews. See a review at bookpage.com/reviews-10002078. Read about her at http://www.jenniferhubbard.com/ 

Start Planning Now for spring and summer conferences

The UW-writing center will hold its 21st Writers’ Institute conference in Madison April 23-25, 2010. Expect workshops, critiques and agent pitch sessions and meetings. Agents attending include Erika Storella, Gernert Company; Katharine Sands, Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency; Marlene Stringer, Stringer Literary Agency LLC; Molly Lyons, Joelle Delbourgo Associates, Inc. To register contact Rita Mae Reese, director, at rreese@dcs.wisc.edu. 

Great Writing, Magazine Style

An example of fluid writing from a recent edition of National Geographic magazine shows why this publication remains a repository of fine writing. The December 2009 article by writer Rob Dunn is about a small subject—pollen—rarely romanticized in rapturous fashion. But Dunn brings this topic to light through smooth word choices and a provocative presentation. Before you read the full story, imagine how you’d entice readers to jump into an article on the history and function of the stuff that makes us sniffle. Then go to the library and find the December issue, or go to National Geographic magazine online, and see how Dunn worked it out. The accompanying photographs, done in color-enhanced electron microscopic details, are sublime, too.

Last words

“Be disciplined about the word. I use the B.O.C. method: Butt on Chair. Five hundred words a day.” –Gary D. Schmidt,
Lizzie Bright and the Buckminister Boy