Writing Exercise: Practice Writing a Scene

Which writer has not been advised to turn this or that passage into a scene? The problem is: how exactly do you do that? First, of course, you need the parts that make a scene: action (something needs to happen), actors (somebody or something is doing something), a specific time, and a specific place. Second, the action needs to be important enough to be rendered as a scene because a scene grabs the reader's attention. You don't want to deliver background information in a scene but rather something important that moves the story forward or illustrates an important characteristic or point.

Writing Exercise: Read the following passage (used here with the permission of one of my students) which offers all the ingredients of a scene, yet is written in summary. Use your imagination and rewrite it as a scene so that the reader can experience it. Use dialogue, render the place and time, and let us see and hear the people involved! Feel free to post your scene in the comment section.

• Tuesday, January 25, 2005. Supervisor A shows me my billable hours for the previous day. I had billed only 4.20 hours. She says I will have to get that up to 7 hours per day, OR ELSE! I notice on the sheet she shows me that the charge for my time is $75-$82/hour, depending on the client. I'm getting paid less than $25/hour. What's wrong with this picture? After the scary reprimand and threat, I go into panic mode and do as much as I can today. It seems to be the expectation that you put in a lot of (unpaid) overtime to bill enough hours for the company.

The Fake Memoir

Today I stumbled upon Steve Almond's excellent thoughts on lying in memoir or what he says is becoming a genre of its own: the fake memoir. I love his definition of creative nonfiction: "It is a radically subjective account of events that objectively took place." The point is that they do need to have taken place.

Almond goes on to discuss some of the recent "fake memoirs," the latest being Greg Mortenson's best-selling Three Cups of Tea. Watch this 60 Minutes clip to see what lengths CBS went to in order to disprove the veracity of passages in Mortenson's memoirs Three Cups of Tea and Stones for Schools.

Almond points out something else about lying in memoir: "In all of these memoirs, the fake stuff is utterly, almost comically, cliché. It always involves lurid violence, which the protagonist valiantly withstands or transcends."

This reminded me of how some time ago a fellow writer in a writing class I was taking submitted an essay about how, as an adult, she ran into the former cheerleader who'd bullied her high school. They bumped into each other in their home town, in a card shop. The narrator was back in town visiting her parents. Both narrator and former cheerleader were in their early thirties, and the narrator was shocked to find the cheerleader had morphed into a somewhat disheveled and overweight thirty-something. She ended the story by telling us readers how she had told off this former cheerleader in the midst of that card shop, and had finally released all that pent-up anger from those years of being bullied in high school.

Each one of us readers commented on that ending. Something wasn't quite working there. Well, the writer later confessed that she had made that up, that in fact the encounter had been uneventful except for the typical "Hi, how are you? What are you up to?" exchange, and that she had actually left feeling sorry for her former tormenter. Now that change in feelings would have been the real story! Instead the writer had tacked on that wished-for ending, and all of us readers had felt that something was just not right with that. It didn't ring true for that narrator and that situation. It was cliché.

So: Don't do that. You know when you're making stuff up. That's fine in writing, but as Steve Almond points out, that's fiction. If you're aspiring to write memoir, to tell it how it was, then don't give in to that urge we all have of aggrandizing ourselves.

Writing About Things

I received this poem today as part of the poem-a-day initiative by poets.org.

The Things

By Donald Hall

When I walk in my house I see pictures,
bought long ago, framed and hanging
—de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore—
that I've cherished and stared at for years,
yet my eyes keep returning to the masters
of the trivial—a white stone perfectly round,
tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell,
a broken great-grandmother's rocker,
a dead dog's toy—valueless, unforgettable
detritus that my children will throw away
as I did my mother's souvenirs of trips
with my dead father, Kodaks of kittens,
and bundles of cards from her mother Kate.

I loved this poem immediately. It speaks to the power of things – something I have been thinking about a lot since my mother-in-law died last year, and we had to sort through her things. And then I wonder about my things – what has meaning for me, only because I know the story behind it? How many of her things did we throw out because they had no meaning for me or my husband, and which did we decide to keep which perhaps had very little meaning to her?

Hall’s poem captures exactly this, something I would have to write a whole essay about. Speaking of, here’s a good writing exercise that might inspire you to put together a lyrical essay, or even a poem:

-          Pick three items from one spot in your home and write about each of them. What is the story of each object, and why are they found in that particular spot in your home? Is there a connection between the objects? Can you discover a theme?

Book Reviews on Amazon

Danielle Ofri told my writing group back in January that those book reviews on amazon make a huge difference to a writer, not only in terms of feedback but in terms of sales. So I promised myself I'd post one but of course I promptly forgot. Along came the excellent blog post on Literary Citizenship, and so, finally, as part of my quest to be a better literary citizen, I finally did what I have never done before: post book reviews on amazon for the three memoirs I have read so far this year with my memoir group. Check them out:

     
Now post your own for books you've read recently! It's a small token of appreciation to those authors whose books you enjoyed. Give and take.

Mary Karr on Writing & Memoir

For all of you who weren't able to attend but would have like to: Here are my notes from the Mary Karr Reading @ the Art Institute of Chicago, April 5, 2011, 6 p.m.:

She read from her new collection of poetry, Sinners Welcome. Poems I liked:

Over 50

Poem about death row guy she used to tutor in 9^th grade

Words/phrases she used that struck me:

fishtailing

after all that magnificence was poured down my throat…

a gauntlet of elbows

Writers she quoted:

Ezra Pound: “Poetry is news that stays news.”

Franz Wright (writing to a mutual friend): “Your envy of my work must be terrible for you.”

Henry James: “You get married to continue a conversation.”

Writers/poets she admires:

                Dean Young, poet

                Philip Larkin, poet

                Isaac Babel, short story writer

The best part of the evening was the Q&A after the reading, when she talked about her process and approach to writing poetry and memoir (there were more audience questions on the writing of her memoirs, specifically The Liars' Club and Lit):

Q: How long do you typically work on a poem?

In answer to that she shared a trick that Louise Glück taught her: Keep spreadsheet with the months across the top and then list the poems you’re working on down the left, and draw a line for how long you work on a poem. She said she found that she works on most poems for months.

Q: Do you have any life left to write about?

MK: My problem is that I am happy now.

MK later: Everybody has a whole encyclopedia of material.

Q: How you do know what to write about people and what to leave out?

MK: I write out of love, and I send the pages to people to see if I went egregiously wrong somewhere.

MK later: I try not to speculate about other people’s motives.

Q: How do you manage to write about traumatic events:

MK: You need enough distance so you don’t drag them behind your car.

MK later: We remember in soundbites.

Q: How do you decide what to leave out?

                MK: What’s boring.

Q: Do you like teaching?

MK said many things, mainly that she loves to teach, but she also said: Teaching is like watching little sunflowers open.

Q: How do you know when to start?

MK: Prose starts with an idea; a poem starts with language.

Poem A Day

Reading poetry is a wonderful way to infuse your mind with the beauty of words, and for me April as National Poetry Month is a good reason to get back into my old habit of reading a poem every night before going to sleep. The anthology Poem A Day, volume 2, is my favorite book to read poetry every day, and many of its pages are dog-eared from bookmarking poems I liked. What I appreciate especially about this book is that each poem is also accompanied by a short bio of the poet.

National Poetry Month suggests all kinds of ways to celebrate poetry. I'll be sharing a few of my favorite poems here but I also recommend checking out poetry.org and signing up for their Poem-A-Day email. It's like getting a little serving of delicious hors d'oeuvres every day, without having to do a thing! Plus it provides you with a sampling of poets you might otherwise never discover.

Here's my favorite poem from Poem A Day, Volume 2, by Chidiock Tichborne (1558? - 1586) who had the misfortune of being on the wrong side of the fence during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. It made me realize that I love poems with a back-and-forth rhythm, aside from the fact that poems that capture the dark side of the human condition always resonate with me. Feel free to post your reaction or a favorite poem of yours in the comment section.

His Elegy
     Written before His Execution

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares;
  My feast of joy is but a dish of pain;
My crop of corn is but a field of tares;
  And all my good is but vain hope of gain:
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun;
  And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale was heard, and yet it was not told;
  My fruit is fall'n, and yet my leaves are green;
My youth is spent, and yet I am not old;
  I saw the world, and yet I was not seen:
My thread is cut, and yet it is not spun;
And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death, and found it in my womb;
  I looked for life, and saw it was a shade;
I trod the earth, and knew it was my tomb;
  And now I die, and now I was but made:
My glass is full, and now my glass is run;
And now I live, and now my life is done.