Six Great Books

The Risk of Writing

I am currently writing the emotional heart of my memoir.  The work has been very satisfying and the response from my writing group compatriots has been gratifying.   And I’ve been thrilled that I am able to capture a time in my life that was so meaningful and poignant for me with both accuracy and insight, and I feel that the writing has also been almost poetic in passages.  So, in a word, I’ve been elated with what I see as a major breakthrough in my work.

But there has also been an edge of unease that I have carried around with me these last weeks as well.  Is it the fact that I’m writing about events that are so close to my heart?  I have always abhorred the “Oprah culture” of extreme self-revelation.  Is that what is bothering me?  I don’t think my book is at all exploitative, and there is no rape or incest or other salacious events.  Rather, the book takes what I think (and my writing group members would agree) is an honest and insightful look back at my unusual family struggling with conflict and death, and explores my journey to understand my parents and their histories, in order to understand my own.

So what is bothering me about it?  I think it’s that I’m writing about a time in my life, age 11, that was such a long time ago, 35 years, as if it was yesterday.  And while that makes for effective writing, it also will give a reader a very skewed view of who I am.  And because a memoir necessarily must be a slice of a life, and not a complete accounting of a life, I fear there will not be an opportunity to give readers a true picture of who I have become.

When you grow up with hardship and dysfunction, you try so very hard to overcome it – to become a person who can live a fulfilling life without thinking that everyone secretly can tell that you had a rocky childhood.  I walked around with that feeling for all of my twenties and into my thirties.  But I think I passed that threshold about 12 years ago, when I truly felt healed from my childhood and started to be able to form healthy relationships with other people.  So, it seems ironic to me that I would choose to reveal the dysfunction of my childhood to the entire world – especially when I talk about it so little with the people who are close to me.

Can I do it?  Should I do it?  What are the risks?  What are the rewards?  My hope is that my exploration into my life some 35 years ago and the histories of my parents speaks to larger issues about families, relationships, death, guilt, and the societal pressures that led my parents to make the decisions and choices that they made that led to my family’s situation.  And beyond that, there is certainly tremendous satisfaction in creating art out of an experience, of making sense of a life, and of putting the pieces of a set of lives into a framework of a time and a place – making sense of the puzzle that confounded me for years.  That is why I take the risk.

 

Back to School and Back to Writing

 

                 My summer was more about reading than writing.  Having completed my novel Blind Girl’s Bluff at the end of May, I relished the opportunity to immerse myself in other writers' books for a few months.  My favorites included Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, and T.C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain.  The book my older daughter and I enjoyed together most was Maryrose Wood’s The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: the Mysterious Howling.  Now that the kids are back in school and the literary agents are back in their offices, I need to get serious about seeking representation for Blind Girl’s Bluff.  However, writing query letters is less gratifying than writing fiction, so I have begun my second book, tentatively titled Au Pair Tales.

                 While Blind Girl’s Bluff sprang entirely from my imagination—with plenty of inspiration from the long literary tradition of books about orphans and boarding schools—Au Pair Tales draws upon my experiences as a counselor for au pairs and host families in Washington, D.C.  This will be nothing like the chummy memoir, White House Nannies, in which nanny agency owner Barbara Kline tells the truth about how various political and media celebrities handle their child care needs.  Out of respect for the au pairs and host families I have known over the past six years, I promise not to tell the truth.  Instead, I will invent stories that capture the essence of what happens when working parents invite young women from other countries into their homes to care for their children.  In focusing on the perspective of my main character Eliza (who is not me but has my job), I also want to explore how part-time work-from-home moms position themselves with respect to what the media callously refer to as “the mommy wars,” pitting stay-at-home moms and working moms against each other and implying that every mother is inadequate in one way or another.

 

Music, Mood & Memory

I was recently able to make a mini-writing retreat out of a trip I took for work.  Mind you, this was no ordinary business trip, but rather a research expedition in the Aegean Sea off the coast of Turkey.  I had secret hopes before I left that I would be able to take some time to write while I was on the ship, away from the demands of my regular work schedule and my life as a wife and mother of two young daughters.  So before I left, I made sure to pack my notes for the portion of my memoir that I am working on and my computer, of course.

And then I did something that turned out to be especially fortuitous.  I copied onto my iPod some old cd’s of music that I hadn’t listened to in decades – cd’s that I had bought years ago of old albums that my father, who died when I was eleven, had loved.  And while I was locked in my cabin working on my book, I listened over and over again to the songs that my father listened to – old Simon & Garfunkel tunes like “The Boxer” and “The Only Living Boy in New York” and Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind” and “Carefree Highway”.

And finally, away from my busy life in the 21st century, locked away for hours with only the sensation of a gently rocking sea, listening to music from four decades ago, I felt I was finally able to remember my father accurately and to capture a part of him on the pages of my book – both his positive and negative aspects – something I had been unable to do before this.  It cost about a thousand tears, but hopefully the effort will be evident in the pages I wrote.  And not to worry, every couple hours I took a break from writing and joined my ship mates for meals and/or conversation – and they were completely unaware of the strains of Gordon Lightfoot running through my head.

Memory is an odd thing.  It can be so elusive at times, and then brought to the fore by the most unexpected things – a line of a song, an old photograph, the smell of stale cigarette smoke, the sight of a piece of fabric.  If you think about it though, each person can probably isolate the items that can bring them back to a particular time or place.  A savvy writer can use these as tools to conjure up a particular scene, a snippet of dialogue, or even just a mood.  Make sure you have them handy as you attempt to turn each day into your own mini-writing retreat.

You Write Like ...

I've been having fun with a new website, I Write Like, that will analyze your prose and tell you what famous writer you write like.  As an eclectic reader from early on I've never really been sure which writers have influenced my writing style so I thought this fun little program might give me a clue. I tried analyzing several different sections of my manuscript.  My first comparison was to Stephen King, then Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) then, Stephen King again.  Not bad company - just not what I was expecting.  Have a little fun and see who you write like.

How Not To Query

A few of us in our writing group are in the process of submitting manuscripts and book proposals to literary agents - a nerve racking process to say the least.  No matter how carefully you craft your query, doubts remain.  I came across a very funny blog, SlushPile Hell, that helped assuage my growing fear of literary agents with a bit of humor. The unnamed literary agent who authors the blog replies to queries from the "you can't make this stuff up" file.  Only snippets of the offending queries are offered so I assume no writers were actually hurt in the making of this blog. 

Here's a post from 6/28:

    Writer: God told me to write this book and that it would become a bestseller.

    Agent: I talked to God. He said he was just messing with you.

You gotta laugh - follow the link to read and enjoy.  

So, What’s Your Book About?

Last Saturday our Six Great Books (SGB) writing group spent the day at the 31^stAnnual American Independent Writers' (AIW) Conference in Washington, DC. It was a great day of panels, fiction and nonfiction round-tables, craft sessions and the all important pitch sessions with literary agents. While I benefited greatly from all of the sessions and the speakers (Chuck Sambuchino of Writer's Digest Books and Jill McCorkle of North Carolina State University's Creative Writing MFA Program were spectacular) the conference was my first opportunity to pitch my recently completed novel.

The first question everybody at a writer's conference asks is, "So, what's your book about." If you attend a pitch session with a literary agent it's, Hi my name is (big time literary agent) – what's your book about? You have ten minutes starting now. Go!

Arizona on My Mind

      This seems to be the year of Arizona for me, and I think I know why.  Arizona is one of the locations in my recently completed novel, Blind Girl’s Bluff, but before this April I had not set foot in the state for almost two decades.  In fact, I had never spent much time there in the first place.  A short visit to Sedona had left an impression on me, and a high school acquaintance told me about attending a boarding school in Arizona.  These two distinct experiences formed the imaginative kernel for The Desert Academy, where my blind artist protagonist Lucy becomes a scholarship student.  Long before my year of Arizona, Arizona was on my mind, but it was more of a mirage than a real place in my fictional world.

How Many Hours Have You Written?

I recently finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success.  It offers some interesting insights into success and class and class change in America, which are important themes in my memoir Poor Relation.

Outliers is an interesting read.  One of the concepts that Malcolm Gladwell offers about success in America is the idea that almost anyone who does something consistently for enough hours will become an expert.  While the idea of hard work to achieve success is certainly ingrained in the American psyche, Gladwell goes further by actually quantifying the concept.  Spend 10,000 hours, he says, on anything and you will become an expert, virtually untouchable – world-class among your peers.  Whether you’re Bill Gates, who spent every free moment of his entire high school career on computer programming, easily 10,000 hours, or the Beatles, who as a high school rock band, perfected their act by taking five trips to Hamburg, Germany between 1960 and 1962 to play in the city’s strip clubs.  There, they played up to 8 hours a night, 7 nights a week, for roughly 100 nights each trip before they became an “overnight sensation” in 1964.

Now, 10,000 hours is a long time.  If you work 40 hours a week at something for 50 weeks a year, it will take 5 years to accumulate 10,000 hours.  If it’s only 20 hours a week, it would take 10 years.  And obviously, if you think in those terms, it is daunting to imagine that you have to spend that amount of time to be an “expert” writer, especially when you’re doing it “on the side” of your professional life and in addition to family responsibilities.  Most weeks of late, it’s been a miracle if I can carve out a few hours for writing.

So I prefer to think of Gladwell’s thesis as a reminder that to be good at something, you must practice the craft.  Forget the quantification, and just focus on the reality that the more you write, the better you become at writing.  Since my grade- and middle-school days of writing short stories, through my painful high school years writing poetry and music, on through college and beyond when I typically re-discovered my writing life every few years, I have improved steadily.  And even since I first began working on my memoir, I can readily see the improvement, easily discarding portions of my book that I wrote early on in the process before I had found my sea legs and my written “voice” for this work.

And as the hours of writing are spent and the pages do eventually pile up, I can see the fruits of my labors and know that there is certainly value in the time and effort I have spent.  And that gives me yet more inspiration to carve out as much time as I can to practice my craft by putting fingers to keyboard to WRITE!

Three Secrets

Secret #1

 

Bill sat at the head of the class with his skinny arms outstretched like Christ. 

 

“Fiction,” Bill said, with his milky Southern voice, letting the word linger in the air, as he had a habit of doing. 

 

We waited.

 

We waited some more.

 

Then I noticed a wild sparkle in his eye.  We were all still hanging on that one word.

 

Bill suddenly swung his fists together.  Full speed. 

 

His knuckles crashed into each other, making a loud knock.

 

Our class sat in silence.

 

It was as if someone had slammed a gavel.

 

“Fiction,” Bill said again, louder this time. 

 

He paused.

 

“Fiction.  Needs.  Conflict.”   

 

Secret #2

 

Bill wrote my all-time favorite line of fiction.  First sentence of his first novel.  Goes like this: 

 

God, our lives.

 

That’s it:  God, our lives.

 

Pretty simple. 

 

Bill talked a lot about passion and urgency.  “Write as if you were on your deathbed,” he’d say. 

 

“Write with the honesty the world desperately needs.  Give ‘em the gems.  Leave out the rest.”

 

Secret #3

 

Another thing Bill said that stuck with me:

 

“Most writers,” he said, “are gonna reach a point where they cannot discuss the subject they really want to discuss.” 

 

“Whatever that thing is—that thing they really want to write about, but they feel too scared…that’s precisely the thing they should write about."  

"You cannot fall into that same trap," Bill said.  "You must write it.”

~

- David Bonck

The Schools That Never Were

   Did you ever fantasize about being “sent away” to boarding school?  I did, and books about boarding schools—classics such as John Knowles’s A Separate Peace  and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye among them—fueled this fantasy.  Bad things tend to happen in books about boarding schools, yet something about the idea of trading parental authority for institutional authority captured my imagination.

    British literature abounds with books set in boarding schools.  Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days, R.F. Delderfield’s To Serve Them All My Days, and of course J.K. Rowlings’s Harry Potter series all reinforce the notion that going away to school—even a wizardry school—is a normal thing to do.  We Americans are more likely to think of boarding schools as warehouses of last resort for burdensome children, yet we nonetheless have a certain fascination with them as fictional settings.  This is why a book like Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, whose tale of a Midwestern public school girl making her way through an East Coast boarding school feels strikingly familiar, can be so satisfying to read.  Boarding schools are great settings for “coming of age” novels largely because they are insular worlds where adults recede into the background while adolescents define themselves with respect to the “real world” outside the school.

     The Desert Academy, a progressive boarding school in Arizona, is one of several settings for my novel, Blind Girl’s Bluff.  My fifteen year old protagonist Lucy was homeschooled for most of her life by her anarchist father, Will, who died a year earlier when he bombed the post office where he was a mail sorter.  Lucy, who had followed Will to the scene of the bombing, lost her vision in this explosion, and comes to the Desert Academy as a scholarship student.  It is in this boarding school that Lucy discovers a passion for painting and begins to struggle with the problem of being unable to see, and therefore evaluate, her own work.

    While the Desert Academy turns out to be a very temporary home for Lucy, it is a place that changes her life forever.  This is true of all the best fictional boarding schools, whether they are places of refuge, imprisonment, or both.  Thus, it is impossible to think of Jane Eyre’s trajectory without thinking about her years at Lowood, where a den of pestilence ultimately became a nurturing sanctuary that prepared Charlotte Bronte’s heroine for the likes of Rochester. 

    My take on the Desert Academy pedagogy is rather negative, but the place is mostly a figment of my imagination—with some inspiration from boarding school anecdotes I have heard over the years.  Ironically, in these late stages of revising my novel about a flawed progressive boarding school, I have at last found the ideal progressive boarding school—The Delderton School in Eva Ibbotson’s The Dragonfly Pool, which I just finished reading to my eight year old daughter.  The fantasies about being “sent away” may already be germinating in her brain, ready to surface in adolescence.  I will just remind her that reality is overrated, and that sometimes it is best to experience things vicariously.  Isn’t that why we read novels in the first place?