Ready for a summer writing reboot? Crayons optional!

This week, I dropped off a shiny new backpack full of notebooks, paper, pens, pencils—and crayons--for my church’s annual school supply drive. It made me want to go back to school. OK, not to go back to the boring parts of school. Just the parts where you show up for awesome instructors, in classes full of wonderful people who are all excited about the very same thing – writing!--that excites you. Maybe even with a fistful of bright new crayons in hand!

August 5: Writers in need of readers? Writing Workshops Dallas offers a seminar this Sunday, 3-5:30 p.m., on how to build a wildly-engaged readership (with more joy and less stress!), led by multiply-published author Mary DeMuth. Cost is $60 ($45 for current and former WWD students), at Writing Workshops Dallas. Oh, you’re out of town and don’t want to travel to hotter ‘n’ hell Dallas for a writing class? Check out the live stream option to beat the heat. 

Want more classes about writing? Check out the Writing Dallas Workshops site for August and fall classes for all stages of writing in fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting and more! 

August 7: Wondering about the SMU Writer’s Path program? Registration for fall classes in the program opens August 8, but in the meantime, check out a free information session next Tuesday, at 7 p.m., in Room 115 of Dallas Hall on the SMU campus. See the site for registration.

image: pixabay

August 11: Rail Riders -- Deep Ellum Blues. If you thought writing classes were only for kids, adjust your attitude. Here’s one with a minimum age requirement – 21 years. This is a reboot because the first Rail Riders (August 4) sold out so fast. Hop aboard Dallas’s DART rail as poet/singer/teacher Lisa Huffaker guides a group of writers through the complex history of Dallas’s Deep Ellum neighborhood. 

Participants will venture on foot into Deep Ellum’s cafes, bars and cultural venues, tour its visual art and historical locations and more, while writing poetry and performing impromptu readings. This Dallas Writer’s Garret event is free, but space is limited, so sign up now at Writer’s Garret. Rail Riders are responsible for buying their own tickets, food and drink expenses. Meet at the Mockingbird Station (5307 E. Mockingbird Lane) promptly at 3:30. Additional questions? Call 214-828-1714 or contact Emmy at gen@writersgarret.org.

August 24-26: OK, this is not a class, but it’s definitely bookish – Dallas Public Library’s semi-annual sale. Billions and billions of books. Or at least, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of books for all ages, audio and visual materials, and more from the library’s vast warehouse. Hours are 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Friday, August 24; 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. August 25 (Saturday); and (Friday), from 11 a.m. – 6 p.m., August 25 (Saturday); 1-4 p.m. August 26. At the library’s Central Branch, 1515 Young Street, Dallas. 

August 25-26: Take your book-length story from premise Story 360, with author/editor/instructor/agent Lorin Oberweger. Early bird pricing now available: one-day (August 25 or 26) $139; both days, $249. Sorry, Dallas, readers, you’ll have to travel for this one, at eConsortium Offices, 2401 Fountain View Dr., Suite 920, in Houston, Texas. Classes run 10 a.m. -4:30 p.m. daily. Cost includes lunch and all workshop materials. For registration and additional information on this and other Story 360 workshops, including September’s Breakout Novel Intensives in Tampa, Florida, and San Antonio, Texas, see the Free Expressions site. 

October 13-14: Wait – that’s not still summer, is it? Officially, October is fall, aka, State Fair season, but don’t wait too long to get your tickets to this year’s Writers in the Field, a hands-on research opportunity for writers. At the Amber Inn Academy of the Arts, Mansfield, Texas. Cost of a weekend pass is $65 (fully refundable through August 13). See the Writers in the Field site for details.

Wordcraft – The end is nigh – make way for the beginnings

It’s almost time to say goodbye to 2016 – what a long, strange year it’s been! And as it gallops furiously toward its close, I’m also facing endings – and some new beginnings. This past weekend I answered an email from beloved Dallas literary institution, the Writer’s Garret, to help it move out of its present home and into a new one. This will be its second move of the decade, and the end of its space-sharing partnership with independent bookstore Lucky Dog Books (previously Paperbacks Plus) as the building in the Lochwood neighborhood of Dallas that has been the two institutions’ joint home is under new ownership.

Writer's Garret moving in!

It’s not the end for either Lucky Dog (which has two other locations in the Dallas area), and certainly not for the Writer’s Garret, which has new digs in at Metropolitan Press, 1250 Majesty Dr., in Dallas. Metropolitan Press is a commercial printer which also describes itself as “passionate about helping nonprofit organizations.” In addition to housing ArtSpace, a revolving gallery for local visual artists, it houses the offices of Shakespeare Dallas and – beginning January 2, 2017, the Writer’s Garret. The new space looks great, and includes use of a shared meeting room and kitchen/dining area.

As the illustration for this post shows, there’s still a lot of unpacking and rearranging to do before the Writer’s Garret opens in its new location. And believe me, there’s a lot more stuff still at the Lucky Dog location. The Garret will continue operations at Lucky Dog, 10809 Garland Road in Dallas, until December 17, closing temporarily for the last two weeks of the year to put the finishing touches on its new home. I hope to keep readers posted about the transition, with a peek at what the new space looks like with everything in place, early next year.

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And then there’s NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month organization whose aim is to prompt writers to put 50,000 words of their novels on the page (or screen) each November. But November has ended, hasn't it? Not quite. My local Dallas-Fort Worth region has a final event scheduled for 2016 – “Commiseration and Relaxation,” a time for writers to read excerpts from their manuscripts and celebrate their accomplishments. Drop by the Nicholas P. Sims Library, 515 W. Main St., in Waxahachie, Texas, this Saturday, December 10, between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. to meet some of the 1,891 novelists who collectively wrote 28,535,801 words during this past month. (My contribution was a modest 13,047 words.)

And then prepare for the “Now What?” months of January and February when all those words get edited and revised. See the site for details of upcoming “What Now?” events and use these long winter nights to browse some of the material. (I’m looking at “5 Ways to Keep Me Reading Your First Chapter,” in the NaNoWriMo blog section.)

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My blog at this site will also undergo some endings and some beginnings. The Adventure classics portion of this blog will come to an end on the last Friday of 2016 (December 30) to make room for more reviews of current books in 2017. The Wordcraft portion will effectively continue, with regular updates each Tuesday, beginning January 3, 2017, but without its subtitle. Although I’m keeping Tuesdays as the anchor day for posting, I hope to publish additional posts during the week as time and material permits, without committing to further scheduling. I hope this will allow me to post some of the reviews authors have been requesting, as well as keep readers posted on current literary events in a timely manner. When great stuff happens at a convention or festival, I intend to post about it not only on Tuesday, but Wednesday and Thursday as well, maybe even Friday, instead of holding it all in until the next week.

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Finally, speaking of literary events, I couldn’t resist the lure of the last two “Dear Lucky Agent” contests of 2016 from Writer’s Digest blogger Chuck Sambuchino. My last Tuesday’s post was about writing memoirs, which are known to be hard manuscripts to impress agents with. How great would it be to get feedback – maybe even land an agent – for our memoirs, and do it all for free? Through December 31, 2016, we can, and all it costs is two mentions in any form of social media. There’s nothing to lose!

Oh, and for writers of historical fiction – like me! – there’s a sister contest. Again, two social media mentions. Sambuchino even provides sample wording for those mentions. Easy TinyURLs to use are http://tinyurl.com/j4d3kqz for memoirs and http://tinyurl.com/zodcsgo for historical fiction.

A literary agent will judge each contest. The top three winners in each will receive a critique of the first 10 pages of their manuscript from their agent/judge and a choice of Sambuchino’s two literary marketing guidebooks coming out in September 2017. See the sites for details.

Wordcraft – Are we ready to WriMo now?

I’m writing about NaNoWriMo – the national (although now international) novel writing month – of November. And no, I haven’t flipped the pages of my calendar too fast. Because NaNoWriMo is now virtually a year-round event, and the warmups have already begun!

To bring WriMo newbies up to speed – NaNoWriMo is designed to get writers off to a running start on a novel by asking them to put 50,000 words down in a single 30-day period, from November 1-30. The point is to juice up our creativity and turn off our nagging internal editors – those voices in our heads that tell us what we’re doing doesn’t make sense, our spelling/grammar/plot structure are terrible, that we’ll never, ever be able to write an entire book. Instead, put those voices to work spitting out words so fast our fingers can barely keep up with them.

You say you don’t hear voices in your head? Sure, you do. You’ve just been afraid to admit it. Until now.

So join the hundreds of thousands of participants yearly who make the NaNoWriMo pledge to make those voices earn their keep, starting today (October 25) at the free webinar, “How to Push Through to the End, with We Need Diverse Books,” from 11 a.m. – noon Pacific Daylight Time with authors Adam Silvera and Stacey Lee. Log into the website for details.

Yes, a free webinar. Because everything is free at NaNoWriMo, a bona fide nonprofit organization. (Although they love donations. Not to mention purchases of cool merchandise advertising the event!)

Then keep looking to the site for events with actual people in your region. In my part of North Texas, the Dallas Public Library’s central branch will host members of the DFW Writers’ Workshop, ready to provide help with outlining our books, creating characters, finding time to write, or whatever's bugging potential writers. Suitable for teens and adults (must be at least 13 to participate in NaNoWriMo), in the third-floor Conference Room B of the library, 1515 Young Street, Dallas, from 6 – 7:30 p.m.

Still in North Texas, the DFW Rhinos will host a potluck lunch from 1 – 3 p.m. this Saturday, October 29, at Hurst Christian Church, 745 Brown Trail, in Hurst. Then on Halloween, Rhinos hold a midnight write-in from 8 p.m. October 31 to 6 a.m. November 1, also at Hurst Christian Church. See the DFW Rhinos Facebook page and the “regions” button at the NaNoWriMo site for more events.

Want more help? It’s OK to go outside NaNoWriMo. The Writer’s Garret, 10809 Garland Road, Dallas, has some in-depth workshops great for novelists. Consider “Developing Characters,” November 1, from 7-10 p.m. with writer Sanderia Faye (The Mourner's Bench) and/or “Never Let Me Go: How to Craft your Chapter’s Beginning and End,” November 13, from 1-4 p.m. with writer Weina Dai Randel (The Empress of Bright Moon).  For each workshop, the early bird cost for Writer’s Garret members (through October 30) is $45. Regular price is $60 for members, $75 for nonmembers. See the site to join and/or register for classes.

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You're probably wondering: is there life outside of NaNoWriMo? Strangely enough, yes, but some of it is moving along quickly. Today, October 25, (at 11:59 p.m. CDT) is the deadline for the Writers Guild of Texas flash fiction contest. See the WGT site for details and entry fee for non-WGT members.

Today is also the regularly-scheduled last-Tuesday scene read for the Dallas Screenwriters Association. Although only DSA members may bring scenes, the reading is free and open to the public, at Half Price Books, 5803 E. Northwest Highway, Dallas. Castings start at 6 p.m., readings about 7 p.m.

Finally (for now), I was excited to see that the Writers League of Texas from Austin will bring its Texas Writes programming to a couple of small-town libraries in the deep Piney Woods of my native East Texas in the coming year. Librarians interested in bringing a free half day of presentations and panel discussions by accomplished writers to their communities of less than 12,000 people may contact the WLT for an application. 

Wordcraft – A hardscrabble life, beautifully remembered

Running on Red Dog Road

by Drema Hall Berkheimer

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One spring day in 1940, 29-year-old West Virginia coal miner Hursey Lee Hall went to work as usual. Wearing his carbide lantern helmet, carrying his dinner bucket in his hand, he said goodbye to his wife and three children, the youngest a five-month-old infant named Drema. His family would never see him alive again. In compensation for his death, the mining company paid his widow one thousand dollars. It also ordered her to clear out of the little company house the Hall family rented, because on the third day, the family of the miner who would take Hall’s place was moving in.

In Running on Red Dog Road: And Other Perils of an Appalachian Childhood, the memoir written by the Halls’ youngest child, that infant with no memory of her father who would grow up to become Drema Hall Berkheimer, there’s no indication that the young widow protested the coal company’s treatment. Awareness of the injustices of life was a lesson the likes of the Hall family learned early in the coal mining country of West Virginia.

Instead, Mrs. Hall, born Iva Kathleen Cales, used the $1,000 to buy a house on a road paved with the waste product of coal mining, the mix of burned trash coal and shale. “The heat turned it every shade of red and orange and lavender you could imagine.” It was hard and sharp. It was the stuff the locals called “red dog.”

Over the years, that house on a red dog road would be home not only to the Halls and to Kathleen Cales Hall’s parents, the Grandma and Grandpa of Berkheimer’s memoir, who cared for the children when Kathleen went to New York to take a Rosie the Riveter-type job during World War II, but to other members of the Cales family as well as a stream of itinerant preachers and missionaries of the Pentecostal sect the elder Cales believed in so fervently.

Seen through the eyes of the child Drema, the life lived there was idyllic. The adult Drema gives readers a between-the-lines look at life in one of America’s poorest regions, in a decade barely emerging from the economic chaos of the Great Depression. There’s a brother left permanently deaf by the meningitis that nearly took his life, a succession of gypsies and homeless tramps, none of them ever refused a meal by the Cales. There’s the beloved grandfather returning to the coal mines despite lungs already blackened by coal dust. And there are more deaths, of people who face agonizing ends medicated only by prayer and a few sips of dandelion tea. (Grandpa Cales, dying at last of cancer, refuses even the meager solace of a patent medicine because its alcoholic content offends his religious convictions.)

In some hands, this milieu could be depressing. In Berkheimer’s lean but luminous prose, it is transformed into a transcendent masterpiece in miniature, a small story exquisitely told.

The young Drema (and perhaps the adult Drema as well) can juggle such contradictions as that of revered matriarch Grandma Cales’ belief in a compassionate, all-knowing God with the same God who would allow terrible suffering. A God about whom, “No matter how many times He let her down, Grandma could always find something good to say. . .”

(Even Grandma Cales, however, draws the line at accommodating a snake-handling sect the family encounters. As Berkheimer reports of Grandma, with a figurative wink, “‘The Bible says if you have enough faith, you can pick up serpents and not be harmed, but I don’t think God’s going to be offended if I don’t take Him up on it.’. . . Grandma always knew what God thought. She and God were on real good terms.”)

I was lucky enough to be a member of the Dallas Writer’s Garret critique group when Berkheimer shared several sections from the manuscript that would become Running on Red Dog Road. No matter how much we begged her to post her writing ahead of time to give us a chance to relish it, it always emerged at critique sessions already revised and changed. Always better than we could have hoped for. I cherish those memories as well. For those less lucky, or who want to refresh our memories, check here for more about this remarkable writer.

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Does having been saturated in Berkheimer’s gorgeous prose have anything to do with one of my own minor accomplishments – emerging as a winner in the 2016 Writer’s League of Texas manuscript contest? My work in progress, The Ugly Man, was a winner in the WLT’s thriller/action adventure category as well as a finalist in its science fiction/fantasy category. See the site for a complete list of winners and finalists.

Wordcraft -- Promises to keep, not enough sleep

I planned to write about Dallas native Lawrence Wright’s return here to talk about the latest of his wonderful books, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief. Instead, I went home after lunch with my daughter and her family, took a nap, and missed the whole thing.

The lapse isn’t all bad. It gives me the latitude to write about some things that haven’t fit into the schedule, including a chance to keep readers updated on my writer’s resolutions for 2014 (“Resolutions for writers, in brief,” December 30, 2013.)

Resolution number one was to urge writers to get a library card, because we can’t write without reading. I already have a Dallas Public Library card, but as of this week I’m proud to say my grandchildren now have their own library cards from the Richardson, Texas, public library. Admittedly, they got the cards because they wanted to play math games simultaneously on the library’s computers instead of having to take turns like they do on their family computer. But a library card is a library card.

Resolution number two was to read, read, read. As of today, I’ve logged forty-four books read. The last an audio book of Mignon Fogarty’s Grammar Girl series. I finished it at 11:22 p.m. Saturday, which may partly explain my need for a nap. I hope you’ll also notice improvements in my grammar!

Resolution number three was to keep a record of milestones. So here goes. This is the 552^nd post on this blog, with 34,710 page views, not including my own. Thanks to all of you readers for around the globe for checking in! I’ve submitted fifteen short stories in 2014, had four acceptances, with four stories still pending response from editors. Yes, that still leaves a lot of rejections. But today’s rejection may be, with more polishing, tomorrow’s acceptance. I’ve also sent twelve queries to agents about my novel. I’ll include them all as milestones, although a rejection from one agency landed in my inbox while I was still typing the next query. (Ouch!)

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Other things that need to be said, but don’t fit the regular format:

The deadline for the young authors short story contest for this fall’s FenCon XI science fiction/fantasy convention has been extended to September 20. This contest is for writers in grades 3-12. There’s no entry fee, and winners can receive cash prizes as well as publication. For details, see www.fencon.org/youngauthor.html/.

Also for young writers, the Kids’ Zine Camp offered through the Dallas Writer’s Garret, July 28-August 2 gives tween and teen authors ages 10 - 19 the chance to create their own online magazine. See www.writersgarret.org/ for information.

The Pandora’s Box Poetry Showcase in Fair Park is scheduled for tonight, July 21, at 8 p.m., in the Margot Jones Theatre in 1121 First Avenue. I’ve heard poets at the Writer’s Garret workshops rave about performances in this intimate theater. See “July Edition: Pandora’s Box Poetry Showcase” on Facebook for details.

And finally (for now), there’s book review life after the Rejebian series ends this month. Rejebian’s sibling series, Authors LIVE!, resumes August 6, with John Dean’s The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It. For details, see
www.hpumc.org/authorslive/.

Wordcraft -- Hot off the presses -- live & local in Texas

The 2014 SMU LitFest opened last week to a full room in the DeGolyer Library as five local editors discussed the state of literary publishing in North Texas. The participants were Matthew Limpede, editor of Carve magazine; Will Evans of Deep Vellum, a press publishing English translations of foreign authors; Ronald E. Moore, a poet and composer whose Baskerville Publishers is expanding its repertoire from biographies of opera stars to poetry; Mark Allen Jenkins, editor of the newly renamed Reunion: The Dallas Review, arts and literature magazine of the University of Texas-Dallas; and Joe Milazzo, co-editor of the experimental literary journal (out of nothing).

Dallas Writer’s Garret co-founder Thea Temple opened the discussion with a question to the panel about the role of technology in the future of publishing. The revolutions spawned by the Internet, print on demand technology and electronic publishing, all agreed, have made a wider variety of literature available. But in themselves, these won’t keep small presses running unless they can provide the quality of writing communities of readers expect.

“We started (out of nothing) as an ezine because there was no overhead,” Milazzo said. “But that was not a good enough aesthetic reason.”

“When I took over Carve in 2007,” Limpede said, “I decided to go to a quarterly format,” seeking quality of writing over quantity. And although still publishing online, Carve has taken the retro-seeming step of publishing a paid subscription premium print edition with added content, in the hope of nurturing an emerging literary community. Make that, a twenty-first century print edition also available on iPad.

For Evans, whose Deep Vellum press is sponsored by the Writer’s Garret, being able to communicate with translators over the Internet has been key to his dream of establishing a Dallas-based literary press. “Previously, I would have had to make contacts at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Now, Frankfurt is a place to get together, after signing rights to texts. Independent publishers have much more power than they used to have.”

And what about the logistics of getting volumes printed and in customer’s hands, Temple asked?

Goodbye to the worries of not only publishing thousands of copies, but of finding warehouses to store them and locating distributors to get them into readers’ hands, Moore said, the worries that previously forced his Baskerville Publishers out of the literary fiction market. Now with print on demand publishing, he only needs to order copies he already has distribution orders for, enabling him to broaden his press’s niche.

So what does the future look like, Temple asked. How do small presses, which by definition don’t have larger readerships, expect to grow? And not only grow but engage in the larger issue of restoring reading as a respectable activity?

“We have to think about things like branding, aesthetics as much as text,” Limpede said. “Social media has turned out to be more powerful than I expected. Every press has to make their own definition of what’s okay for them.”

“What’s your definition?” Temple asked.

“For me, doing okay is getting my first book out,” Evans said.

“For us,” Limpede said, “okay (may) mean having a part time job, even a full time job, but it’s about finding your own community. For literature there’s no easy formula.”

“What ‘okay’ means,” Milazzo said, “has everything to do with readership. The reader completes the artistic endeavor.”

For more about reading--and writing--for these publishers, see http://carvezine.com/, www.baskervillepublishers.com/, www.outofnothing.org/, http://deepvellum.org/, and www.utdallas.edu/ah/reunion/.

Will Evans (l) & Matthew Limpede

(Next Monday, Dallas does readership, reaching every high school student--and more--during April’s Dallas Big Reads. But don’t wait until April 1--stay tuned for guerrilla early bird book distributions at local transit stations.)

Wordcraft -- Our imaginary friends talk back

Last week, I let Dallas writer and editor Joe Milazzo walk us through a recent class on developing fictional characters sponsored by the Dallas Writer’s Garret. But of course, characters are no dummies, no matter what their IQ. Whether based on people we know or dredged from the deepest recesses of our own minds, they don’t just stand around waiting for us as writers to put words into their mouths. In fact, they seldom stand around at all.

“There’s a concept in theater called blocking -- where you’re aware of the actions taking place around the actual dialogue,” Milazzo said.

With that in mind, he led class members through exercises designed to build character development through dialogue.

But first, we had to make our characters move. Why put movement first? Because, “even in a purely auditory work, like radio, there’s a sense of blocking.


So he asked each of us to write a list of gestures or facial expressions we felt were particularly communicative. With other people in the class, jotting ten or a dozen gestures was simple. If, like me, you often write in public places, take a minute now to glance around the park, the café, the bookstore. How about making notes of the people you see while waiting to be called for jury duty, during class, in a doctor’s or hospital waiting room? Waiting for the bus, in shops, at the gym? Just don’t be intrusive -- you want to notice how people look and move when they don’t feel on stage.

Once we had a list of gestures to refer to, Milazzo provided a scene written entirely in dialogue, the speakers unseen but overheard by the principal character, and asked to imagine seeing the speakers and inserting their gestures, expressions and movements. This exercise would also work using plays, especially classics available online.

For now, I’ll use a few lines from Milazzo’s example, the scene on pages 336-337 of Degrees by Michel Butor, in the English translation by Richard Howard. This is available in the Dallas Public Library system.

“Say, isn’t tomorrow Uncle Pierre’s birthday: Mother want to know if we’ve done anything.”
“Done anything?”
“Jacques and I haven’t, but you’re his pet. . .”
“Are we celebrating tomorrow night?”
“No, he’s coming to lunch?”
“Lunch? Why didn’t he tell me?”
“Does he tell you everything?”

“By adding blocking and gesturing, you are remaking things about that character that readers can use to get to know your characters,” Milazzo said.

Some of these actions can be used instead of speech tags -- “he said, she said” -- to indicate the speaker as well as the action occurring. The emotional content of gestures lets readers discover facets of a character’s life without exposition on the writer’s part. Use of movement and gesture also slows the pace of dialogue, if needed for the story. Although it’s often advisable to keep action and speech tags to a minimum, even to the point of eliminating them completely from portions of dialogue, knowing where they underlie the speech will keep our characters grounded.

For more about Milazzo and his work, see www.slowstudies.net/.

For more about the Dallas Writer’s Garret and its programs, visit www.writersgarret.org/.

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Today, August 12, is the last day to reserve a seat for Dallas author Ben Fountain discussion of his National Book Award finalist, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. To sign up, go to www.dallasnews.com/benfountain/. I’ll follow up on Fountain’s appearance next Monday. My biggest what if -- if Fountain could satirize the poor old imploded Texas Stadium, what couldn’t he have done with the Cowboys’ new billion dollar digs in Arlington?

Wordcraft -- Asking your imaginary friends out to play

This is the post where I ask you to hide your screen from your co-workers’ view. The post where we talk about those voices you hear in your head, the conversations you try not to carry on in the hearing of the other people on your commuter train. It’s time to get serious about character development in your writing. Make that, specifically, in your fiction. Because Aunt Betty is also serious about cutting you out of her will if you report any more about her kitten hoardings in your memoirs.

With Aunt Betty’s threat in mind, and because I like the slight degree of objectivity I get from writing fiction instead of purported real life, I went to this past week’s class, “Getting Your Characters from Thought to Action,” taught by author-editor-lecturer Joe Milazzo at the Dallas Writer’s Garret.

What makes a memorable character -- one that readers, we hope, will remember long after they finished our story, our book? Do we base them on other people or on versions of ourselves? Milazzo leant toward considering them versions of our own existence -- “as though you’re in touch with parts of your mind you don’t use in your everyday life.“

“One of the novelists I studied with when I was an MFA,” Milazzo said, “thought that a certain character was for that novel, and when the novel was over, that character would go away.” The writer ended, instead, by writing another novel for that relatively minor character, “because he didn’t believe she had told everything she had to tell.”

But how do we introduce yourself to the people who’ve been living, rent free, for who knows how many years, inside our heads? How do we give them permission to tell their stories?

One of my first assignments in the first creative writing class I ever took, asked for a character sketch. Listing my character’s height, weight, age, gender, and hair color seemed pointless, so I gave the instructor a scene of her in action. Still not sure that’s what he wanted. But he seemed grateful somebody at least turned in an assignment.

By the time I start writing a character, I’ve already talked to her enough to know her name and how bad a reputation she has back wherever she came from. Or why he’s hiding out, ready to do anything in the world except go back to the people who knew him before. Doodling through a few scenes where the characters can kick butt or get their kicked helps.

You can write your character’s back story -- and yes, I’ve don’t pages and pages of those. Or you can be, just the facts, ma’am, with your character and corner her into giving you an interview, like the one outlined on the character questionnaire Milazzo handed us.

First the name, of course, as much an indicator as “Honey Boo Boo” of where your character comes from. Milazzo’s questionnaire added such tidbits as “what would you like to be remembered for after your death?” and “if your features were to be destroyed beyond recognition, is there any other way of identifying your body?” (Hope that means something less obvious than DNA and dental work!)

Less morbidly (or not), how about this item from the questionnaire -- “on what occasions do you lie?” and “what kind of threat do you present to the public?” And my favorite -- “you are awake at 3 a.m. How? Why?” (I’m thinking about characters -- what did you expect!)

One of the questions on the list was “What do you save or collect?” For myself, I could have answered, I collect ways to build a character -- I’ve probably got dozens from writing classes and favorite books. Google “character questionnaires” and find some to suit your needs. Or try the Gotham Writers’ Workshop,  www.writingclasses.com/InformationPages/index.php/PageID/106/.

Next Monday -- How does your character speak? And where?

Wordcraft -- Every picture tells a story

A recent workshop at the Dallas Writer’s Garret included both University of Alabama professor Michael Martone and author Robin Hemley, who co-edited the short story anthology, Extreme Fiction. I wrote previously about Martone’s half of the workshop. This week, it’s Hemley’s turn.

For his portion of the workshop, Robin Hemley asks us to bring family pictures. Since Hemley is known for his book, Turning Life Into Fiction, I suspect we will use these tangible objects as writing prompts. And, well, he doesn’t say the picture had to be of our own families -- so I raid my father’s stash of World War II-era photos of families of New Guinea natives. Aren’t other people’s stories more open to interpretation than our own?

Hemley tells us not to show our treasure trove of objects to other members of the workshop. The prompt: To write a description of our actual picture, and a picture wholly imaginary. He challenges the group to determine which description is of the “real” picture, which one fake.

Strange to say, we often find descriptions of the imaginary pictures more compelling, more evocative than the real ones. Is this because the actual picture limit us too strongly to the realm of “it really happened this way”? Are we emotionally tongue-tied at describing things too close to our hearts? At any rate, the imaginary pictures often evoke more complex descriptions. After a few tries, the degree of detail becomes a clue to which is real, which unreal.

“What do you learn?” Hemley asks.

“That memory has a different lens,” a participant says.
Writing instructors often advise us to choose “telling” details for our descriptions. But, Hemley say, “the (telling) detail could be different for me than it is for you. . . There is the emotional memory, but even when you think you’re describing it, you’re still recreating it. . . We think that fictionalizing is a taint, but we can’t help fictionalizing.”

It’s a view science supports. An interview in the March 2013 issue of Discover magazine suggests that, far from being fixed, our brains revise memories every time we remember them. In fact, one participant is slightly embarrassed to see, after looking again at her “real” picture, that she didn’t remember what it showed. She remembering a picture of Disney character Goofy when in fact, it’s a picture of Yogi Bear.

But whether we’re writing fiction or nonfiction, how can we use these photographs to enrich our writing?

“It really works to frame memory in terms of a photograph,” Hemley says. “Consider creating a kind of tableau where you extract the memory within the photograph. Thinking about the photograph is a really poignant way to extract memories. It forces you into a
real world relationship with the memory, so you‘re able to rein habit the episode.”

Even in a fictionalized setting, imagining a scene as a photograph gives us an opportunity to visualize a setting and the characters within it. “If this were a photograph, what would it be?” Hemley asks.

Already, some participants frame their photographs, both real and imaginary, as before and after versions of the same scene. Hemley applauds this for “giving the reader a sense of ambiguity but also of history before this story,” but urges us to move beyond the scene within the photograph’s frame.

“I often think,” he says, “what are the secrets the characters have? Not only the secrets they keep from others, but the ones they keep from themselves?”

For more about Hemley’s work, see www.robinhemley.com/.

For Martone’s portion of the workshop, see “A new word for writing critiques” and “New critique technique, part II,” at this site.

For more about the Dallas Writer’s Garret, see www.writersgarret.org/.

(Next Monday -- Wordcraft looks at a book built from pictures, Mark Doty’s Lost Dallas.)

Wordcraft -- New critique technique, part II

Blame my lateness this morning on the Superbowl -- and I didn’t even watch it. But after writing late at night while keeping an ear open for the grandkids I was babysitting, the computer ate my post. Really.  Stay tuned anyway, for the conclusion to last Monday’s discussion of a recent Dallas Writer’s Garret workshop with University of Alabama professor Michael Martone.

His portion of the two-part workshop introduced us participants to a method of critiquing writing new to most of us -- the cross-section approach. While the classic American (actually University of Iowa) writing critique looks at writing samples, one after another. The cross-section looks at a small portion of the whole array of writing brought to the group, for instance, all the titles, then all first lines, all first paragraphs, and so on.

Because this method was so unfamiliar to what we’d used previously, Writer’s Garret co-founder Thea Temple held a followup session last Saturday to explore its implications further. I’ll insert comments from that session as I finish this post about Martone’s method.

After looking at the layout of our pages, Martone launched a discussion of titles and their importance, urging us prose writers to think of titles as short poems rather than prose in themselves. The prose, whether essay, memoir or fiction, then becomes, he said, “a commentary on the piece of poetry that is the title.”

In Temple’s session, we looked at our array of titles, searching for those that invited further reading. The hardest part, as at each step of the cross-section critique, was to prevent ourselves from launching into discussion of the rest of the piece. What intrigued us most? Titles that worked against our expectations, that implied a reversal of expectations, as in the title of memoir, “Raising My Father.” We found ourselves wanting titles capable of tying a story together, without being heavy handed. Perhaps Martone would have said, we wanted poetic titles.

Martone next discussed first sentences. “Another thing that the title does is pivot to the first line,“ he said. “It’s almost like a virus. You want it to infect the readers.”

But how fast should the infection spread? In Temple’s session, we found ourselves facing the difference in pace between first sentences of short stories and those of book length works, whether novels or narrative nonfiction such as memoirs. The opening sentence of a long work may need to develop enough sympathy for a character to propel readers through the level of conflict involved in a novel-length plot. The first sentence of a short story, in contrast, often must be an immediate conflict.

Because several of the participants were writing memoirs, Martone concluded his
workshop with a discussion of plot structure, particularly its effect on nonfiction works. To be a story in most senses, the main character’s initial state of being -- her ground state -- must change through the course of the work, ending on a significantly different ground.

A fiction writer can isolate a train of events that will produce this change. But how can a memoir writer, still immersed in her own evolving life, determine when she has achieved a different state of being?

“In memoir, one of the strategies is to draw a kind of ‘fake’ parentheses around the life,” Martone said. This is often done by limiting the memoir to a particular period or event in the writer’s life, such as a memoir of childhood. His parting caution -- “You start a story with a coincidence, but you can’t end a story with a coincidence.” Memoirists beware -- the conclusion you draw must be your own.

(Robin Hemley asked us to bring a family photograph and a series of small objects to his half of the workshop. Next Monday, I’ll tell you what we did with them.)

Wordcraft -- McCarthy’s six-gun gothic, part II

(Guest blogger Jim Dolan concludes his discussion of Gothic elements in the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road and No Country for Old Men, among other works. Jim Dolan is a prize winning poet, a fiction writer, moderator of Writer's Garrett Stone Soup All Genres group in Dallas, occasional film actor, a psychotherapist in private practice and passionate bicycle racer. He is a lifelong resident of Oak Cliff Texas, where he lives with his wife, Karen. He regularly blogs at www.coach4pros.blogspot.com/. )

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I first discovered Cormac McCarthy in the early ’90s. I completely believe that McCarthy's abilities with English are Shakespearian, and the experience began a two decade engagement with everything McCarthy has written, some titles two or even three times through.

Last week, I discussed the Gothic fiction elements of “an ancient house” and “the implication of the supernatural” in McCarthy’s novels Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men. Today, I’ll apply the Gothic criteria of horror, menace, dread; the grotesque front and center; and an absolute concern with good vs. evil, with evil the likely winner.

Is there a mood of horror, menace, dread? Readers of McCarthy will know there is no writer more capable of establishing this tone than he. Is the grotesque present? In No Country for Old Men, the grotesque is present in climactic peaks; in Blood Meridian it is on every page. Check.

McCarthy gives us death on every page, either actual, impending or long since. We are forced to confront the Dark Angel.

He asks us to look at what we should not see. And we are never able to not look at it. We are forced to see ourselves and every human creature as both angel and devil

His novels take place in the created, Biblical world of the Western God, but it is a world from which that God has fled, and as when children are left alone too long, a deadly mayhem is the result. The world is off the chain, and when the Sheriff in No Country for Old Men wonders if now he is seeing 'a new kind', he points a finger to that time in the near future when the moral center has collapsed and we all plunge into the abyss.

And it is into this abyss that the world has plunged in his last novel, The Road. There, a boy and his father wander the wasted world, their only goal survival. McCarthy is so successful at depicting a world where not only God seems to be gone, but the natural world appears to have died as well that I may never be able to bring myself to read it again, so devastating is that atmosphere. But in the end we are given the faintest ray of hope.

I take it that in posing this world, McCarthy is asking me, you, himself, What in the name of God are we going to do about it?

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Writing workshop note: Today, June 18, is the last day to register for the writing workshop at the Austin, Texas, ArmadilloCon. If you write science fiction, fantasy or horror, and want writing advice from the likes of Elizabeth Bear, Julie Kenner, Scott Lynch, Cat Rambo, Jeremy Lassen and more, see http://armadillocon.org/workshop.shtml/ ASAP.

Wordcraft -- McCarthy's six-gun gothic

(Today’s guest blogger, Dallas-area writer Jim Dolan, discusses the Gothic elements in the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road and No Country for Old Men, among other works. Jim Dolan is a prize winning poet, a fiction writer, moderator of Writer's Garrett Stone Soup All Genres group in Dallas, occasional film actor, a psychotherapist in private practice and passionate bicycle racer. He is a lifelong resident of Oak Cliff Texas, where he lives with his wife, Karen. He regularly blogs at www.coach4pros.blogspot.com/. )

When I first discovered McCarthy in the early 90s it was by reading All the Pretty Horses. I had not had a prose reading experience like that since discovering Vladimir Nabokov when I was much younger- a sense of envelopment in prose that was sensual, almost tactile, like eating chocolate or the best focaccia bread with red wine. I discovered that my pleasure in the text was multi-leveled through an engagement with character, setting and story but also through the encounter with the palpable qualities of the language itself. I completely believe that McCarthy's abilities with English are Shakespearian. But I mention this as a way of saying that All the Pretty Horses began a two decade engagement for me with everything McCarthy has written, some titles two or even three times through.

I recently led a panel discussion for the Writer's Garrett where we discussed his Western novels. The point of the discussion was to see if we could establish why it is that these texts are frequently referred to as Gothic. Of course, I had to go and find out what elements are present in the classic European Gothic texts, and discovered the following:

-- An ancient castle, an old manor, a family home is occupied by the protagonist's generation and is in disrepair; there are unexplained events that happen in the environs

-- The supernatural is presented or implied

-- The supernatural occurrences are related to an ancient curse upon the family, stemming from some massive wrong-doing long ago

-- There is a mood of horror, menace, dread

-- The grotesque is front and center

-- An absolute concern with good vs. evil, with evil the likely winner.

Looking at the McCarthy Western novels through the Gothic lens, we can see that the Border Trilogy is really just good old fashioned Western Romance told in divine prose. We can take those out of the discussion. This leaves us with Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men. Today, I’ll apply the first three Gothic criteria -- an ancient home, the supernatural, and a curse stemming from massive wrong-doing.

In Blood Meridian we are presented with a novel unlike any before or since, an unending bloodbath with no detectable moral center, something No Country for Old Men does possess in the character of the Sheriff. Do these two qualify as Gothics? I think so. We can begin by substituting the Old West for the ancient house in which the spirits of the dead shriek for revenge in the persons of the Comanche Hordes come to slaughter Captain White's platoon beginning on page 51 of Blood Meridian. In No Country for Old Men, Moss has penetrated the mystery house of Mexico and stolen $2 million from the scene of a drug deal gone wrong. Again, cause for an exacting revenge, in the person of Chigurh, the vastly more powerful counterpoint to the waning Sheriff.

(Next week: Guest blogger Jim Dolan continues his discussion of the Gothic in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, with the criteria of horror, menace and dread. Leave a light on!)

Wordcraft -- Writer's Garret: readings & a new home

Is it possible to find “evidences of grace in a mental hospital ward?” Dallas writer Tom McClellan asked the crowd last weekend at the Writer’s Garret.

His own answer was yes, in abundance. The Garret paired readings from his published essays with a sweet and saucy side of memoir from UNT professor Bonnie Friedman for the first public reading at its new home in the Lucky Dog (formerly Paperbacks Plus) bookstore at 10809 Garland Road in Dallas.

McClellan, a Dallas teacher and writer, chose two essays from his book, Reflections from Mirror City. His writings, described as “Thomas Merton interpreted by Hunter S. Thompson,” by Washington Spectator editor Lou Debose, have appeared in publications as diverse as D Magazine, The Texas Observer, and Christian Century.

After a friendly tussle with Friedman over who would read first, McClellan allowed his wife Carolyn to read for him because of his emphysema. His selections dealt with the ironies of finding grace in the midst of illness, death, and disaster; McClellan spoke with both frankness and humor about his personal struggles against mental illness.

At the end, he took the lectern for the final words himself, concluding an essay on the death of a friend met in a psychiatric ward: “Say these things so your hope will grow, your charity increase.” (For more about McClellan and his writing, see http://reflectionsfrommirrorcity.wordpress.com/.)

The second writer, Bonnie Friedman, comes to Texas by way of the Bronx. Her first book, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life, was a Village Voice bestseller. Now an assistant professor in the University of North Texas’ creative writing program, she chose excerpts from a work in progress for the audience.

Despite the differences in background between Friedman and McClellan, their writings harmonized on the theme of grace: hers included a minutely-observed description of her elderly mother, in her words, -- a “sheitel jew” with the mien of a Russian aristocrat. (And enough chutzpah to outface a revolution.)

“At the age of eighty-five,” Friedman began her reading, “my mother lost her job and started running.”

Not running away from anything, of course. Instead, running “for her health” -- a regimen of pre-dawn shuffling up and down the halls of her apartment house that first entangled her and her elderly husband in a lawsuit and ended by charming her persecutor.

A listener, laughingly aghast at Friedman’s vivid descriptions, asked what her mother thought about being the subject of her writing.

Her mother, she assured the audience, has given her permission to write anything she pleases (although without reading the words herself). “I hope she would like it,”
Friedman said. She travels back to New York frequently to keep in touch with her parents (and perhaps to gather more material). For more about Friedman’s works, see
http://www.bonniefriedman.com/.

The Garret will sponsor its next public readings in April. For information about the Garret and its programs, see www.writersgarret.org/. Some online information still references a previous address, but please note the current address is 10809 Garland Road, in Dallas.

Wordcraft -- Resolution number 2: Join other writers

It’s still December and you’re already making your second writing resolution for 2012. Feel proud of yourself as you join a writers’ workshop. And then faint from terror.

I’ve been a fairly regular member of a workshop, at the Dallas Writer’s Garret, since 2007 and can honestly say that by the last couple of meetings I’ve been able to resist the urge to lock myself in the restroom before my turn came to read. Because putting your work out there is scary. It’s amazing that we writers hope for publication, when our work may be seen by thousands of people, but fear putting it before a dozen.

But those dozen, of course, are the ones you see face to face. The ones who say things about your writing that ring in your ears. That’s the terrifying part, but it’s also the helpful part. I’ve heard unpublished writing at conventions, and the stories from writers who attended writers’ groups were better than those who hadn’t. It’s hard to be objective about our own work. We need to enlist the eyes and ears of others as well.

(There are online groups as well, but nothing quite beats the physical presence of other group members.)

After I had tried writing fiction for about a year and family members started to avoid me for fear I’d ask them to read my stuff, I realized I needed to find other writers. But how? An internet search turned up some possibilities, but for those of you in North Texas, I’ll list some I can vouch for from personal experience.

-- The Dallas Writer’s Garret. Moving from its current East Dallas location in January, but check www.writersgarret.org/ for the new place and times. 
The late Texas Poet Laureate Jack Myers and his wife Thea Temple founded the Garret, which has its own education program as well as sponsoring writing workshops. Attendance at the workshops (called Stone Soups) is free for first-timers, $3 thereafter. Garret members also enjoy unlimited free attendance.

-- DFW Writers’ Workshop. Meets every Wednesday evening at 508 Simmons Street in Euless, Texas. Non-members may visit twice a year to observe but reading and critiquing is limited to members. Dues are $100 annually, prorated quarterly. DFWWW also sponsors a convention I’ll say more about in a later post. See www.dfwwritersworksho.org/ or call 817-714-6573.

-- North Texas Speculative Fiction Workshop. Meets the second Saturday of each month except December at the Hurst Barnes & Noble Bookstore, 861 NE Mall Blvd., in Hurst, Texas. DFWWW member Pat Hauldren (Alley) is the founder and moderator. It was free when I attended a few years ago and I that’s still the case. See www.ntsfw.com/   This group (and several others) are also on
www.meetup.com/

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Contest deadlines -- December 15 (tomorrow!) is the deadline for the first short story competition from Short-Story.me. Contest fee is $5. See the site, www.short-story.me/ for details. (And check out my fantasy story “Shaman” from 2010 while you’re there.)

Also due December 15 -- Entries for SheWrites Young Adult Novel contest, whose proceeds benefit Girls Write Now. See www.shewrites.com/ for details (even if you’re a guy).



(Next Wednesday: Resolution number 3 -- find homes for your stories.)