The Integrity of a Story

Every story develops its own integrity. There are things that belong in it, and things that don’t. If you’ve worked on it for a while, it will take on a life of its own.

I was reminded of that again the other day when, in the midst of overhauling my book length manuscript, I was going through a chapter about a trip to Israel, and I felt I had to add a section about a visit to a Chasidic site in the Golan Mountains. So I wrote that in, and then later I was reviewing previous material from that chapter that I had saved in a “parking lot,” and what did I find? A paragraph about that very same Chasidic site, which I had taken out months ago. I had cut it, and I didn’t remember it at all, but the story knew. It did belong because reading through that chapter, I felt it was missing. I had messed with the integrity of the story, and it was reasserting itself.

I first learned about the beauty of this phenomenon in a writing class many years ago. A classmate submitted a story about running into the woman who’d bullied her in high school – the former cheerleader was a disheveled thirty something on her third marriage. Everyone in the class remarked on the ending of the story where the narrator tells off the former bully. Some said “Good for you,” others were surprised to see the narrator do this. After the workshop round, the writer confessed that she’d made up that ending. The truth was that she had not told off that former bully, but had felt sorry for her, and their meeting had been rather uneventful. She had violated the integrity of her story in the worst possible way: by making something up. But the point is that we readers could sense that. We didn’t know it wasn’t true until she told us, but we all had something to say about that ending. It didn’t sit right.

Writing Rituals: Check in with a Buddy

Another writing ritual that keeps me going is checking in with my writing buddy Harriet. Every Friday we e-mail each other to report how many submissions we sent out, what rejections we received, and how much writing we got done. We’ve been doing this for more than two years, and I must say it has helped me tremendously in keeping a regular pace.

Having someone to check in with on a weekly basis makes me do stuff. It helps me with submitting my writing to literary journals. Submitting is mainly an administrative chore, and thus more likely to be pushed off the to-do list, but since I’ve got to report to my buddy on Friday, I’m sure to have at least something to report. Very often this had me scrambling late Friday afternoons to get at least one submission out the door, and invariably that scrambling put me in a bad mood because I was tired from the week, and the kids were home from school and wanted attention, and I had to get dinner on the table.

So this year I switched submission day to Monday. Early Monday morning I check my submissions log, and usually I manage to get at least one, if not two, submissions done before the family morning begins at seven. It sets the right tone for focusing on writing for the week, and it ensures that I have something to report to my buddy on Friday!

An added bonus of the buddy system is that I feel we’re in this together. Harriet is always one of the first people I notify if I receive an acceptance. After all, she’s been part of the game all along. We commiserate, and we cheer each other on. Thank you, Harriet!

Writing Rituals: Keeping a Log

Yesterday, during a trial run for an authors’ roundtable, I was asked about my writing rituals. Did I have any habits that keep me writing? I do.

One is my writing log. I’ve been writing the date and what I worked on that day in a lined notebook I bought in a drugstore close to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. This was when I first embarked on my book project during my first residency at the VCCA. Initially I emulated Hemingway’s habit by logging how many words I’d written each day; my minimum goal was 500. That worked well when I was writing first draft. Now I am in revision mode, and so I log what chapter I worked on. I get an odd satisfaction from looking at my penciled notations. The log gives me a sense of having worked, and it also makes large gaps in writing all too apparent.

Bluestem is looking for nonfiction

I found this call for submissions on Brevity, an online journal for brief creative nonfiction that I respect very much, and although I didn't know Bluestem before, I must say that any journal asking to get more CNF submissions sounds attractive:

The editors of Bluestem are hungry for good writing. Our name is new, but our magazine is not. Formerly known as Karamu, Bluestem has been publishing continuously since 1966. Olga Abella, Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, welcomes Roxane Gay and Lania Knight to the editing staff at Bluestem. With their assistance, Bluestem has moved into the digital age, launching an online quarterly in December 2010 in addition to the annual print magazine. To accommodate this growth, we need more submissions. Our creative nonfiction slush pile is painfully thin at the moment. Please send us an essay or two.

Our next online issue is March 2011, and our next print issue will be released in the Spring of 2011. As we move forward by introducing online offerings to the fine work we have always published, we are looking forward to working with new writers and reaching new readers. We are currently reading for the online issue as well as the 2012 print issue. Read some current selections online, peruse our guidelines, and send us something tasty!

Danielle Ofri on Memoir vs. Biography

In January, my Advanced Memoir Workshop at StoryStudio Chicago was fortunate enough to host Danielle Ofri for an author Q&A session via Skype. Danielle Ofri is not only a doctor at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, she is also the editor-in-chief of the renowned Bellevue Literary Review, and the author of three memoirs, most recently Medicine in Translation. She was kind enough to answer our questions about writing her first memoir, Singular Intimacies, about becoming a doctor at Bellevue. I will be sharing some clips of our discussion on this blog. Here she talks about the difference between memoir and (auto)biography.

A Snow Route as a Metaphor for Writing

Walking along the snow covered lakefront, where the blizzard left its plentitude, is very much like writing. On my walk this morning, the path initially was clear, not down to the asphalt but to about an inch of snow, sporting the footprints of those who had gone before me. But suddenly my way was blocked: The plow had left the wall of snow it had been pushing in the middle of the path, and had not gone any farther. How very often am I writing along and everything is going well, when I suddenly reach an impasse? When I have to look around to see how others tackled it? Many footprints had trampled on over the wall, so surely I could do the same.

After that I followed my snow-treading forbearers up the pedestrian bridge over Lake Shore Drive. The bridge’s concrete surface was oddly visible and clean until I noticed that it was also icy, slippery. OK, careful, I thought, I’m on dangerous ground here. On the other side of the bridge: Slush, then another wall. And then the glorious lakefront, blanketed in snow, the trees black against the pale sky, and another plowed path. But here the plow had gone off the asphalted path: the yellow line peeked through some of the footprints but it should be in the middle of the path, not on its side. With no snow route markers, how would the plower know where exactly the path was? He would just know the general direction. That reminded me of the old saying that novel writing is like driving at night: You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can cross a whole continent that way. And it reminded me of what my writer friend George Ellenbogen’s said when I told him that, as I was revising, I felt as if I were driving a bulldozer through my memoir manuscript:

“Can you see the ground?” he asked.

“Yes, I think I can see the ground” I replied.

“As long as you can see the ground as you’re driving that bulldozer, you’re fine,” he said.

So, the snow plow had seen the ground and there was a path along the lakefront. There was no path, however, out to the Point, the peninsula into Lake Michigan that’s usually part of my walk. The plow hadn’t gone there, and I wasn’t wearing my tall snow boots so I couldn’t go there. I had to take a different path. How often do we come upon a section in our writing that we know we’d like to tackle, but the timing isn’t right? Or we have to write our way around it? Or we have to get the right equipment, do the research to fill in the missing data? Or we might decide that no, we’re just not going there. Some areas are off limits.

On along the plowed path I went until I reached my usual turnoff, the underpass to get back to the other side of Lake Shore Drive. The plow had continued on the lakefront, so the underpass wasn’t plowed, but the snow wall to reach it wasn’t that high. And then oddly, the underpass was full of snow. Passable, but still I had to stomp through. How often do I run into a passage that I think will be easy and it’s not?

On the other side of the underpass: No plowed paths whatsoever. Just several footpaths trampled through the snow by those who had gone before. Which one to take? There I went with the one closest to my usual path, all the while watching my step because sometimes there’d be a hole, deep as a boot, where someone had sunk in. Even when you can see the ground, there can be holes!

And then the way home – my building in sight, but mountains of snow where the sidewalk usually is, and again, several footprints to follow. The bad news: there will always be unexpected obstacles; the good news: people have gone before you, and they’ve made it. You just have to follow.

Blizzard in Chicago

Sometimes, pictures say it all. My favorite is the one of the plows at O'Hare.