The Story You Have to Tell: Writing from the Urgent Place

Today I attended a three-hour seminar with author Cheryl Strayed, whose book Wild just finished its third week on the New York Times Best Seller List. The seminar was held at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado. Every session I have attended at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop has been excellent.

It is difficult to summarize a three-hour seminar because I cannot convey all the wonderful examples that were provided to illustrate the points of the author; instead, I will just list the general gist of the session.

Strayed highlighted several points:

• Become the writer that you really are. (i.e., Don’t try to imitate others.)
• Be bold enough to share very weird things that you think/do.
• Trust that the risky, emotionally scary writing that you do is your best writing.

The author led the group through a series of exercises that you may want to try yourself or with your students. We were given about ten minutes to complete each assignment.

• List all the things you want to write about.
• Your story
• What is the question at the core of your plot?
• What is the universal question you want to ask? (Strayed came back to universal questions over and over again. It is the universal questions that allow the reader to identify with the incidents and emotions that the writer relates.)
• What happened?
• What is the meaning of what happened?
• Write a piece where your character shows what he or she is feeling through actions. Don’t explicitly tell the reader what the character is feeling.
• Choose a talisman (see below in bold) and write a piece incorporating that object. Use the talisman to express a universal emotion that is conveyed in your writing without explicitly describing that emotion.

Other points made by the author.

• Find the extraordinary in the ordinary. (Common, everyday occurrences can be used to illustrate very broad themes. I kept thinking about how two things I enjoy—golf and mountain biking—can be used as metaphors for life.)
• While fairy tales usually end with the line “...and they lived happily ever after,” your writing should end with the invisible, unwritten line, “...and nothing was ever the same again.”
• Initially write everything, even the high risk things you probably wouldn’t want your family or friends to know. You can always scale back later. If writing a memoir, there are certain privacy issues you may have to consider, but don’t consider them until you have everything written down.
• Consider your character’s
• Ideal self—the image he has of himself
• Actual self—the true reactions he has to a situation that, in reality, is probably quite different than his ideal self.
• Code—what it is that your character personally thinks or thinks society requires of her. How might that change during the story?
• Talismans—objects in the character’s life that may act as metaphors for a universal question or theme.
• Writing can be a very emotional experience. During difficult scenes, the author often sheds a lot of tears.
• Through the writing process, you may discover much about yourself. You may find that the writing helps you to see emotions and thoughts you have suppressed.

Strayed feels that there are many levels of writing. Beginning writers usually write only about the first levels of writing listed below. As a writer becomes more advanced, he moves deeper and deeper into the story, moving farther and farther down this list.

• What happened
• What it meant (the internal story)
• What else does this remind you of?
• What is the cultural story?
• What is the ancient story? (Relating the writing to the stories and myths of old.)
• What is the generational, racial, gender, etc. story?

Lessons from Oral Storytelling

As a teenager, I remember sitting around a campfire while someone from the group told a ghost story. By the time the story was finished, I was so frightened, I didn't want to move. The thought of walking back to my cabin through the dark forest was terrifying.

In the article The Irish Fireside as a Fiction Workshop,  novelist Frank Delaney uses Irish oral storytelling as the greatest teacher of writing. The tradition of oral storytelling was practiced at Irish firesides for millennia. There are three lessons that he feels can be learned from this.

Lesson one: Dance with the language. The Irish storytellers were “drunk with words” as they painted detailed pictures with their tales.

Lesson two: Work your material. Embellish, embellish, embellish. Don’t be afraid to extend your writing with “back story,” giving your characters a long ancestry.

Lesson three: Believe your story. “Even if it’s far-out fantasy fiction, behave as though it were journalism.”

I like Delaney's ideas. Picture your story being told at the fireside by a roving Irish storyteller, mesmerizing his listeners as he makes fiction seem like a true tale that he has experienced. Read your writing aloud. Is it convincing to you and others?

Start a Commonplace Book for Your Writing

I love the idea of keeping a commonplace book for writing. A commonplace book is a journal used to copy favorite poems and quotations for one’s own enjoyment. Decades ago, I used to write down meaningful quotations from books that I read. I still keep those notes in a file and occasionally refer to them. What I found meaningful about the quotations back then is still applicable to my life now. The quotations are also an interesting study of what is pleasing to my “ear” and mind—what makes the beauty of the sentence flow for me.

As I go forward, I want to create a system for not only writing down quotations, but for keeping a list of interesting vocabulary. With the vocabulary list, I intend to include the title of the book where I found the word, its meaning, and the sentence where the word was included. I love books that have words that are not in my everyday vocabulary and would like to save those words for any piece of fiction that I write in the future to add interest for the reader. The list will also be a record of the growth of my own vocabulary. (I never want to stop learning.)

New Gifted Education Blog Launched

When I first started this blog last August, I stated the following as one of my writing goals:

Joel McIntosh, publisher of Prufrock Press, has given me permission to use the content of the 6 ½ years of weekly blogs that I wrote for Prufrock’s Gifted Child Information Blog. I would like to rearrange that material, eliminate outdated information, and create a “best of” resource for parents and/or teachers. I won’t know quite what format that will take until I play around with it a bit.

After playing around with a number of ideas about ways to use the content from the Prufrock blog, I finally came up with a solution. Today I am pleased to announce the new PeakEducational Resources blog, which will update and redo the enormous amount of content that I have amassed. Most of the information I have is not only still very relevant, but essential. I am eliminating content from the previous blog that is outdated, and updating information when necessary. Both parents and educators will find the resources on the new blog to be very helpful. I plan to add entries as quickly as possible.

If the subject matter of the new Peak Educational Resources blog meets your needs, I hope you will subscribe to one of the feeds. Please note that the blog also has a search option, so if you are looking for information on a particular topic, you can use that feature.

I hope you will help spread the word about this new, rich resource.

Writing Workshop with Andre Dubus III

I recently attended a three-hour workshop led by Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog (which was made into a movie) and several other books.

Dubus had us do a number of writing exercises that concentrated on including lots of sensory detail. This was to illustrate his belief that stories should be character driven, not plot driven. According to the author, there are four methods of creating characters:

• Looks—where the character lives and what is in his pockets.
• Speech—what he says, how he says it, and what is not said.
• Actions—gestures, how the character moves, what he does, and how he reacts to others.
• Interior life—what he remembers and fantasizes about.

Indirectly, characters are developed by

• what one character says about another.
• the narrator telling you what’s happening.

Other things that I learned about the author’s writing techniques include the following. He

• writes five days a week, though he didn’t say how long he writes each day.
• reads poetry before he starts writing—I assume as creative inspiration.
• doesn’t outline his stories before writing. He feels that outlines hamper his imagination.
• feels that the storyteller should not ask what happened, but ask what it is like to be in a situation.

To be a good writer, Dubus feels that you must

• have great curiosity about why man does what he does.
• be emotionally truthful in your writing.
• be comfortable staying in a state of uncertainty.
• be willing to accept whatever comes as your story unfolds.
• be willing to take risks and fail.

Here are examples of some of the writing exercises we did.

• Picture a porch—list everything that comes to mind as you think of this porch. Review the list and then incorporate some of the items on the list into your writing.
• Picture a room—list all of the objects you “see” in this room. Again, review the list and include the important objects into your writing. Remember to include the emotions that these objects evoke.
• List ten people—go back and write at least three sensory images for each of those people. Choose one of the people and write about that person developing the sensory images.

After we finished each of these writing exercises, people read their pieces on a voluntary basis. It was amazing how much we learned about each person from his writing. The writing was so revealing because the participants took Dubus to heart and were very honest with their emotions.

I don’t think any of us experienced writer’s block. In fact, the vast majority of people had a difficult time stopping when it was time.

Choose Your Own Adventure Books for Adults

When my kids were young, they loved the Choose Your Own Adventure Books series. At the end of each chapter, the boys were faced with a decision, usually surrounding the main character. If you think the character should do this, go to page 56. If you think the character should do that, go to page 23. The book could be read over and over, taking different paths each time. Sometimes the ending would be the same, no matter what path the character took, and sometimes the endings would be different.

I've always thought that this would be a great concept for a series of adult books. After all, aren’t we constantly faced with choices? Do you sometimes wonder, what would have happened if I had gone to a different school? If I had inherited a lot of money? If I had shown the good sense to say no to that person? If I had driven down a different street? Rather than providing choices to these questions at the end of each chapter of an adult choose your own adventure, I propose providing choices at the end of each book. Imagine that a single book starts with a student graduating from high school. At the end of the book, that person might be faced with the following choices. Should I

• go to college?
• get married?
• go into the military?
• travel the world?

The reader would then have a choice of four books to read as a sequel. While the first book was written by Author One, the second book might be written by Author Two. The reader could choose to follow a single author through a whole string of books or the reader might choose to go back and read the path taken when a different choice was made.

This could get very complicated (and interesting) if plotted out ahead of time. Choosing several different paths may ultimately bring the main character to the same scenario later in his life or each path might come to a completely different conclusion.

Just think of all the choices we make in our lives as adults about

• education
• relationships
• children
• career paths
• travel
• other interests

The possibilities could go on and on.

I envision this as a well planned series, taken on by a publisher willing to find and coordinate the writers.

With the development of Internet technology, I could also see this as a more haphazard wiki-type of series. One person would write the first piece and pose the choices faced by the main character at the end. Next, writers in cyberspace could pick up on one of the choices provided and write a sequel, again providing a series of choices at the end of that segment. To add extra interest, a cyberspace writer would also have the option of suggesting and writing about a different choice than was suggested by the original author.

Struggling with Time

One of my greatest assets (and greatest challenges) is the number of things that interest me. I love to read, write, practice piano, exercise, participate in sports, travel, attend cultural events, cook, eat at fine restaurants, watch foreign movies, knit, garden, do research on just about anything, etc., etc. The list goes on and on. While I love having all of these interests, I also get frustrated because I have difficulty fitting them all into my life. Right now, I'm a bit frustrated that I have not progressed further with my writing.

Over the holidays, we were invited out for Christmas Eve dinner. At the end of the evening, I asked one of the guests what she likes to do for fun. To my surprise, she told me that she likes to write, has her whole book outlined, and is already on chapter five. How I wished we had started this conversation earlier in the evening! She said that she writes a couple of hours every morning. I was so inspired and returned home, trying to figure out how I could do the same.

My dilemma, however, goes beyond just finding the time. I also have difficulty focusing on one aspect of my writing at a time. As I stated in one of my earlier blogs, there are three types of writing I want to pursue

• reworking the 6 1/2 years of blogs that I wrote for Prufrock Press
• a memoir, using the format of thematic essays
• a novel

Now I think I would also like to write a cookbook and create a book telling about all the family heirlooms that I possess.

I realize that it is not an efficient use of time to want to reach out in so many different directions. I've never considered myself good at multi-tasking. Nevertheless, I have already started each of these projects. The challenge is going to be to finish at least one of them.

I would love to hear how others with busy schedules manage their time so that the writing gets done.