Writing on writing – Marie at 1 Write Way

Using Fear To Write

June 14th, 2013

Here’s an interesting take on “writing what you know.” In the June 11, 2013 issue of The New York Times, author Sarah Jio writes about how one night of abject terror helps her to write about fear. For the first time, in this essay, she writes about that night and goes on to explain how the memory of the terror she felt helps her write about fear that occurs in other contexts.

During most of my writing life, I’ve been given the same advice–“Write what you know”–albeit with a twist now and then–“Write what you want to know.” Jio’s essay now gives me another way to think about writing. I was starting to wonder why the theme of loneliness runs through so much of my writing. It’s an existential loneliness born out of people growing apart or never really being together in the first place. It’s a loneliness that comes from never feeling you belong, no matter your DNA, no matter the size of your family, no matter how many friends you have on Facebook. It’s a loneliness I’ve sensed in other people, sensed to the point where I would want to weep for them. It’s a loneliness that I’ve felt as a child and again as an adult. It’s acute, it’s chronic, it may never fully leave me and it can at times be terrifying.

Like Jio, I only revisit those painful feelings when I’m trying to write about them; otherwise, I don’t want to remember. That is the catharsis of writing: even though I may not want to remember, when I get in touch with those awful feelings and let them flow from my heart, through my fingers, to the keyboard, there is a sense of relief and even gratitude that I can do something with those feelings of loneliness and fear. Writing helps me to make sense of them, to understand how loneliness can drive someone to do things he or she would not otherwise do. Ultimately, writing from those feelings helps me to understand the people (characters) that live in my head. Once I let them go (and out onto the page), I feel lighter in my heart and stronger in my mind.

And, how about you, Dear Writer? Are there events in your life that you turn to over and over again to inform your writing? Do you, as Jio advises, “write what frightens you, haunts you, even”?

8 Things You Need To Know About Character Arcs

May 15th, 2013

This is a wonderful post for all of you currently writing fiction and needing advice/suggestions about character arcs. As I was reading Debbie’s post, I realized that I provided different arcs for different characters in my last two NaNoWriMo novels. That’s a good thing, but I hadn’t put much thought into why I was doing that. Debbie’s post actually gives me an understanding of what I’ve done and (hopefully) how to make sure the arcs worked for the characters.

MOON IN GEMINI

1. Character arcs are not 100% necessary. I’m going to get this out of the way first thing.

This argument is made all the time, and there’s some truth to it. There are some very successful characters that never have a character arc. James Bond is the one most mentioned. While he was retooled somewhat when Daniel Craig took over the role in the movies, the character has never undergone a significant arc. Miss Marple never has an arc, or Hercule Poirot, or Stephanie Plum.

See a pattern here? They’re all characters in a long-running series of stand-alone books. While there are series characters that have arcs (I would argue Indiana Jones is an example) most don’t have them. Mainly because having the characters change would disrupt the series too much.

2. However, not giving your character one can simply be laziness on your part. Just because there are…

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On the fence with Christopher Hitchens

March 2nd, 2013

Seems like one either loves or one hates Christopher Hitchens (http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/02/25/richard-seymour-s-tawdry-christopher-hitchens-bio.html). I was in either camp at different points in Hitchens’s life. My antipathy toward Hitchens had started with his relentless attacks on Clinton during Clinton’s presidency and while Hitchens was writing for The Nation. At first, I was mostly disenchanted, throwing off Hitchens as just a gadfly who liked to stir things up and get talked about. I’m not an apologist for Clinton, but I often felt that Hitchens (and others) were always lying in wait for Clinton to screw up so they could crow and strut about in their righteousness.

His support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the tipping point for me. I wanted nothing to do with him after that. I don’t think I actually believed that he believed that the invasion was a good thing. Rather, to me, he was just pandering. He was a narcissist who would say and do anything to get airtime or his words in print.

And then I heard he was dying and that he wasn’t suddenly converting to organized religion in an attempt to save his soul. I waited for that conversion, but it never came. What did come was his appreciation for those people who said they would pray for him, especially those who said they would pray without attaching any strings. He didn’t slight them, ridicule them for their beliefs. I think he might have actually felt a bit humbled, just as anyone might feel humbled when total strangers with whom you have nothing in common, wish you well, wish that you don’t suffer, wish that you survive. A sadness crept slowly over me as I heard about or read bits and pieces of Hitchens’s last days. I felt uneasy about his illness, his impending death. It’s so much easier to criticize people when they are healthy and you think they are going to be around, annoying you, for a very long time.

And then I read Mortality. A beautiful, slim, tastefully produced volume of Hitchens’ last essays and notes. With Mortality I began to understand that here was one very complicated guy. In his essays for The Nation, he could be such an asshole, throwing ad hominids around as if they were bon mots of cleverness. But in Mortality, his humanity rises to the surface. I could feel his vulnerability, his curious attention to the cancer that would ultimately kill him, his surprise that he wouldn’t be around to see his children marry, his desire to live, his desire that his cancer have a greater purpose than just to kill him (for example, that new treatments could be tried on him and, even if they failed, what might be learned could save someone else). Whether or not he realized it, by continuing his writing and detailing what his cancer was doing to him and how he was surviving from one day to the next, he was in fact giving that cancer a greater purpose.

After reading Mortality, I went on a bit of a Hitchens’ binge. I felt obsessed with him, but something held me back from going out and buying all of his books. A friend told me how she had finished with Hitchens after he wrote an essay for the The Nation in support of 2 Live Crew and the lyrics of their songs. She had been offended by his statements regarding rape, how rape is every male adolescent’s fantasy, wink, wink. I was crushed. There’s nothing funny about rape. I tried in vain to find the essay, to read it for myself, in the hope that I would interpret his words differently and prove her wrong. I did find the context: 2 Live Crew had been arrested in Florida on obscenity charges. OK, so this was a free speech issue, a censorship issue, but Hitchens could have supported 2 Live Crew’s right to free speech without calling their lyrics “poetry” and suggesting that since rape is every male adolescent’s fantasy, we are hypocrites if we are offended by those same lyrics.

Looking for this essay brought me to his other essays excoriating Bill Clinton and Elie Wiesel and my respect for Hitchens did another nosedive.

I had to stop and think. Hitchens was a gifted writer with an incredible store of knowledge, a facility with language that was seemingly innate. But he was a human being who, in my humble opinion, did not always use his gift in ways that were respectful of it. His ad hominid attacks were nothing for him to proud of, no matter how “funny” or “humorous” his admirers claimed they were. People who engage in such attacks are not advancing the discussion, the debate; they are distracting us from it. They are showing off; you don’t necessarily come away any more enlightened about the subject than you were when the debate started. Hitchens was merely being an entertainer and a glib one at that. He was an extrovert who seemed to engage in little if any introspection.

In an interview with Mother Jones (http://books.google.com/books?id=IecDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA12&dq=christopher+hitchens+rap+Jack+and+Jill&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-VYyUe6iMeTx0wGN2oGABg&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=christopher%20hitchens%20rap%20Jack%20and%20Jill&f=false) he claimed surprise that anyone would think he was a misogynist. Best as I could tell, his surprise was genuine. Other interviews with him and his friends suggest he was a great friend to have, very loyal, unless your last name is Blumenthal. Again, I think he was oblivious to how his actions, his words, his language, could do irreparable harm to a relationship that he claimed to hold dear. I don’t think he really meant any ill-will (except, of course, toward Clinton).

Can one be on the fence with Christopher Hitchens? Would he turn over in his grave if he knew that I (or anyone) felt sorry for him, felt that he was a small man with a big gift? I mean small in the sense of him being needy, like the rest of us. We are all needy, but he certainly never wanted anyone to see him as such. Now until his voice was adversely affected by his cancer treatments, did he realize that he was nothing without his voice (and by extension, his writing): “To lose this ability [speech] is to be deprived of an entire range of faculty: It is assuredly to die more than a little.” As an introvert, I have often (and still do) take pleasure in being silent, without a voice so to speak. But that is not Hitchens and, perhaps, that is one reason why my heart softened when I read his words. He was his voice; without his voice, he might never have been as successful (and as polarizing) a personality as he was.

I am still obsessing about Hitchens, clipping articles and interviews into my Evernote account and wondering why he has this hold on me now. What does it matter? I would have meant nothing to him if he had ever met me. Perhaps there’s some envy here: He wrote and said what he damn well pleased. I am constantly censoring my own work to the point that it rarely is viewed by anyone but me. So maybe some envy, and definitely some regret that I didn’t appreciate the man more while he was alive.

When Not Writing is Writing …

December 6th, 2009

In a recent post, Fiona Robyn mused, “Most of the time being a writer is about looking out at the frosted grass, and sipping earl grey, and not writing.” Sometimes I think I do my best writing when I’m knitting or crocheting or sewing, when my hands are occupied with something other than typing. Even playing mindless computer games sometimes brings forth the crucial bit of action to move my story or novel forward (if I can ever pull myself away from the mindless computer game). I grew up with the notion that a “true” writer is constantly writing, at least scribbling in a notebook at every free moment. A “true” writer cannot do anything but write, write, write.

I wonder. Part of what drives me to write is the joy of creation, much the same joy that I feel when I knit, crochet, sew (but not when I play mindless computer games). Writing is like piecing together a quilt, or watching a deceptively simple looking pattern unfold from an eye-crossing knitting schematic. Unfortunately, I cannot wear my writing (except on my sleeve) like I can wear the scarves, shawls, sweaters I create. I can’t even use my writing to cover my bed like I would a quilt (well, technically I could, but it wouldn’t be as warm and cozy). If I were a full-time writer, or even a full-time knitter, crocheter, sewer, this would not be too much of a problem. But I am a writer with a day job, something that has nothing to do with writing novels or stories, or knitting up scarves and shawls, or piecing quilts. Time is finite and I want to do it all — the whole creative process that, for me, starts with the hands (knitting, crocheting, sewing, typing, hand writing) and continues through the mind. However and whenever the words make it to the page, I am a writer. It’s not the frequency of my writing. It’s just the fact that I do write.

Using Writing to Mentor Students in an Online Course

July 5th, 2008

For several semesters I’ve had the privilege of working as a teaching assistant (TA), or online mentor, for a distance-learning Master in Social Work (MSW) program. My primary duty as a mentor is to monitor and provide feedback for the online forums that students are assigned to participate in every week.

Usually, students are assigned to groups and have to complete a group forum (or discussion board (DB)) as well as an individual DB. The number of students range from 12 to 15. At first glance, one might think, “what can be easier than monitoring and responding to online discussion boards?” That’s what I thought when I very first agreed to be a TA.

It’s easy if you all write to the students is “great job” or “good work.” Of course, that’s exactly the feedback that we tell them is insufficient when responding to their classmates’ posts. They won’t get credit for one-liners; they are expected to provide their classmates with responses that show they actually read the posts.

Could I possibly do any less for them? Of course not, but I learned the hard way that writing substantive feedback takes planning, organization, and creativity.

Planning
As soon as I have the syllabus and course schedule, I mark the deadlines for each DB on my calendar, including whether the DBs are group or individual (or both) and if any have multiple parts. I plan to give myself at least an evening or two to write my feedback, knowing that most students won’t get their posts in until the last minute. Still, the sooner I start writing, the easier it will be for me to finish up on schedule.

Organization
Keep a spreadsheet with the students’ names, the groups they’ve been assigned to, and a column for each DB that they will have to complete. Although the course utilizes an online grade book, keeping my own records enables me to stay organized without always having to go online. Including notes such as the student’s location, current job, major life event (just had a baby) etc., also helps to keep you oriented when a student starts slipping in their assignments. Most of my students are working professionals, with children, and major life events tend to be common.

Creativity
I developed five general precepts for providing feedback to students’ DB posts.

1. Address the students as you would if you were in a traditional classroom. Rather than write individual responses to the individual posts, I wrote one feedback for each group and/or individual forum, and then email my feedback to the whole class, including the instructor. The whole class then has the benefit of learning from each other’s efforts without having to go back to the DBs and slog through individual posts. The instructor has the benefit of judging both the students’ and my performance on the DBs.

2. For group posts, highlight a line or two from each group’s post in your feedback. Help them learn the kinds of responses you’re looking for in the DBs by providing these highlights and integrating them into your feedback.

3. For individual posts, select a few of the best and integrate them in your feedback, giving kudos to those students. You shouldn’t try to acknowledge every student in each feedback you provide. Rather, use this technique to highlight a few students at a time. This way you can encourage those students to continue to do well and stimulate the other students to work a bit harder in the hopes that you will eventually single them out for kudos.

4. At the same time, don’t leave any student out. Even the most taciturn student will eventually get acknowledged in my feedback. In my most recent class, I had students who wrote posts of no more than three or four lines while a few students wrote five-paragraph essays. I made a point to always find something positive to say about anyone’s posts.

5. Do not name students or use direct quotes from their posts to illustrate “bad” writing. Sure, there were plenty of posts that were hard to read because the students didn’t spellcheck or proofread before hitting the submit button. There were students who didn’t always complete all parts of the DB assignment. But public criticism would only alienate these students and their classmates. I usually include a general statement in my feedback, reminding all of the students to write and edit in a word processor first and then post their response. And if certain students still don’t get it, I just email them directly and see if they need help in using the online discussion boards.

If you want to be an effective mentor for an online course, plan to do a lot of writing. Writing is what links you to each student. Writing is how you demonstrate what they need to do to be successful in the course. Writing is how you show them that you care about their success.

So, have you ever worked as a mentor for an online course? Besides your own blog, have you ever used your writing as a mentoring tool?

Category: Writing on writing

Using Fear To Write

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8 Things You Need To Know About Character Arcs

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On the fence with Christopher Hitchens

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When Not Writing is Writing …

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Using Writing to Mentor Students in an Online Course

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