Work in Progress: New Year's Resolutions for Writers

I’m the kind of person who arrives early everywhere I go, but this post may be a case of extreme over-promptness. Nevertheless, this is actuallywhat came out when I started to write about something else entirely. So, voila: my suggested New Year’s resolutions for writers. I’d love to run more, so please feel free to send me your thoughts on the matter. After all, we’ve got another month before we have to get serious about these resolutions!

1. Read. If you can believe this, recently I was chatting with a woman at a conference reception. I asked who her favorite authors/books were and she said, “Oh, I don’t like to read. Honestly, I have no idea. I can’t think of a book I’ve read lately.” I couldn’t control the aghast expression blanketing my face, so she laughed nervously and stammered, “Isn’t that strange to love to write so much and not like to read?” I went off to fetch more (much-needed!) wine, but, yes, YES. That is strange. It is strange and it is WRONG. You cannot improve as a writer unless you read widely and deeply.

2. Buy the books you read. Okay, you can go to the library if you must. And students may go to used bookstores. And everyone can go to used bookstores to seek out those obscure, odd, out-of-print books that make our hearts sing. But please, if and when you can, support the writers you care about. BUY their books. Instead of passing along your copy of a beloved book to your friend/sister/cousin/mom, BUY a copy to give to them.

3. Subscribe to literary journals. You want them to publish your work, so you have a moral obligation to support them. Plus, reading the journals you want to be published in will help you determine which journals are right for your work (a little self-interest never hurts). Because there are so many to choose from, I try to rotate my subscriptions around: there are some I subscribe to regularly, some I get after entering story contests, and some I’m curious about. If you don’t know where to begin, a few of my consistent favorites are The Gettysburg Review, Tin House, The Iowa Review, Shenandoah, and The Missouri Review. It’s helpful to toss in a good local journal like The Potomac Review or Gargoyle, too. Again, I will take pity on struggling students, who are excused from subscribing if they promise to read these journals at the university library.

4. Attend conferences and classes to improve your craft, NOT to get “discovered.” First of all, it IS likely that classes and conferences will help you improve your craft, whereas it is NOT quite as likely that you will be “discovered.” Second, improved writing is what will catch the eye of that dream agent; no matter how drunk and jolly an agent may be at the post-conference reception, he or she will never be drunk enough to sign up a writer whose work they don’t believe passionately in, whose work they don’t think they can sell. It’s the writers who write well that inspire that passion—in agents as well as in the editors who (metaphorically) sign the checks.

5. Be generous. Help your fellow writers—of all levels—when you can. The writing world is not a pie, only so much to go around. If someone else’s book gets published, that doesn’t mean yours won’t published. Promote others—be happy when your writer friends do well—write notes of congratulation—pass along potential opportunities. It’s a small world out there, and don’t you want to be remembered as a generous, helpful writer? As the T-shirt says, Karma is a bitch.

6. Learn to say “no.” Your time is precious; the creative space in your brain that knows how to spin out a story is valuable. Don’t squander either with social engagements that don’t engage you, with obligations that overly burden you. Yes, you’re allowed to put writing—and yourself—first some of the time!

7. Give yourself a break. Writing is hard. Yes, we all know it’s not like digging ditches…but it’s taxing nevertheless, and it’s hard to keep up morale when your wonderful story has just been rejected by some literary journal intern via a terse, form rejection printed on a scrap of paper the size of a gum wrapper. Don’t constantly beat yourself up for not being good enough/hard-working enough/brilliant enough/lucky enough/connected enough. One of my favorite teachers used to say that for a writer, there is only one question to ask: “Did you write today?” If you did, you’re golden. Doesn’t matter if it’s crap—that’s what revision is for. Just get your words on the page.

8. Write today.

Tomorrow: Cyberquestions with Ha Jin

Writer Carole Burns sends along this announcement:

Ha Jin, who won the National Book Award for his novel, Waiting, will join washingtonpost.com's Off the Page on Thursday, Nov. 29 at 1 p.m. ET to discuss his new novel, A Free Life.

Ask questions now or during the discussion:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/11/21/DI2007112101456.html

Ha Jin joins us in the first of a series of Off the Page interviews to kick off the publication of a book based on these washingtonpost.com interviews: Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings and Everything in Between, edited by host and writers Carole Burns and being published Dec. 10 by W.W. Norton.

A Free Life is Jin’s first novel set in America, and might be his most autobiographical. It not only explores the world of a recent Chinese immigrant (Jin immigrated to the U.S. in 1985), but also examines his protagonist’s desire and struggle to write in the language of his new home.

Please join Off the Page to ask Ha Jin about his latest novel and other literary topics.

Beyond Santa's "Workshop"

If you’re looking for a writing class or workshop, check out the new line-up at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. There are topics, times, lengths, and locations to suit everyone. And if you don’t live in the area, be sure to look at the on-line options (go to “workshops,” and click on “internet” under “venue”).

A New Level of Self-Indulgence: "Valuables"

I know I keep saying this, but truly, THIS will be the most self-indulgent thing I’ve done on this blog. (At least it sets a new bar.) Here is a personal essay that I wrote several years ago that was never published. Maybe there are good reasons for that, but maybe not.

Part of the reason might be that after a certain point this piece felt dated to me, so I stopped sending it out since it’s non-fiction and I can’t change the dates around to suit my writing needs (one of the 10 zillion reasons why I find writing fiction easier than non-fiction).

But I also know that another part of the reason is what we all know: that the business side of our writing lives is always at the mercy of the subjective whims of strangers who may or may not get what you’re saying, who may or may not like the first person point of view, who may or may not like the font you’ve presented your piece in, who may or may not have a killer headache when they slit open your hopeful envelope, who may or may not think the piece you’ve struggled over is any good and who may or may not be right about that two-second assessment.

So, the joy has to be in the process of writing itself, in the desire to find and tell the story artfully. And for me, self-indulgent or not, this is a story that I don’t feel quite right locking forever into a drawer.

(Sorry this is so long—I still haven’t figured out how to continue posts to another page.)

Valuables
a personal essay by Leslie Pietrzyk

My engagement and wedding rings are in a business-size envelope at the bottom of my safety deposit box. I’ve kept them there for about six years, since my husband died of a heart attack when he was thirty-seven and I was thirty-five. I wore the rings for about six months after his death, then one day I took them off. For a year after, a pale indentation circled the third finger of my left hand—sort of a ghost ring—but that’s gone now, though occasionally my thumb reaches to stroke the diamond of the missing engagement ring.

There are no children to pass the rings to. Anyway, these rings are not spectacular. One is a plain gold band, not even engraved with a date or name. The other is a standard mall jewelry store engagement ring: a small diamond solitaire, not worth a great deal of money, though at the time, my future husband cleared out his savings account to buy it for me. Frankly, no one else would want these rings, though they are exactly what I asked for back then.

Recently, I decided to keep my passport in the safe deposit box, and instead of quickly dropping it into the metal box and leaving the vault, I impulsively carried my box to one of the nearby privacy cubicles, which was little more than a short, walled-off area with a hard chair, built-in counter, and a half-door with no lock. Sitting there reminded me of being in a stall in the ladies room, that same faux privacy.

The envelope with the rings was at the very bottom, buried under the car title and computer disks containing my book manuscripts, some photographs, our marriage license, my birth certificate, and the other documents one is expected to keep in a safe deposit box. The bank’s vault is lined with rows and columns of metal boxes, each filled with mortgage pay-offs and appraisals—the things we are told to safeguard against a fire burning down the house, a tornado striking, a flood, someone breaking in like the Grinch and stealing the absolute last scrap of everything. No one expects to need the implied safety of that 3x5x16 inch metal box—in the newspaper or on TV, the houses that catch fire at two in the morning are never ours.

I lift the engagement ring out of the envelope and slide it onto my finger; it still fits perfectly, Cinderella-like; why am I surprised? My finger hasn’t changed. I tilt my hand, trying to make the diamond flash, but the stone won’t catch the fluorescent light. I wonder if there’s security camera surveillance on me—every inch of the bank seems to be under scrutiny—and consider that someone watching me might think I’ve come to the bank specifically to slip on a locked-away diamond ring in the privacy cubicle.

Actually, I hadn’t been thinking about the rings at all. I was just making an ordinary trip to the bank, one of the countless errands to cross off a to-do list, few of them memorable in any way. But here I am, looking down at a ring on my finger. My thumb sneaks inward to touch the diamond, then spins the ring, that old tic apparently not forgotten.

Robb and I were married ten and a half years, together for a total of almost thirteen, which means that right now—six years and these few months—is about halfway to the point where I will have been without him longer than I had been with him. I want to say I catch my breath at this realization, but truthfully I’m not surprised. You don’t want your mind to make these calculations, but it does, trying to make you believe for half a second that life is not as random as it appears—that there actually is a reason to find yourself in the bank, twirling an engagement ring around your finger.

The bank’s interior is tired and dated, everything with a dingy feel, as if dipped in yellow wax. The fluorescent lights buzz, a quiet, insistent, hissy whzz-zzzz. A phone rings softly in the distance, high heels tick across the floor. This is a very secure place, this bank, purposely giving the impression that nothing much has changed since it was built.

Shouldn’t I understand intuitively how a point in time halfway to another point in time is significant—if it is? I stop spinning the ring, place both hands flat on the counter in front of me.

Robb’s gold band is not in this box. When you don’t expect you’re going to die, others are forced to answer those difficult questions for you, like, Do you want to be buried wearing your wedding ring? Of the countless things I suddenly couldn’t imagine, I especially couldn’t imagine Robb’s hand stripped bare of its familiar ring. So I left it on. Some people told me that was the right decision, some said it wasn’t. If I had decided otherwise, his ring would be here with mine in the envelope and I could look at right now. And think what? Feel what? Would a ring make me remember my dead husband better or more clearly or differently?

Then why are my rings here, locked away at the bottom of a safe deposit box? I’m not unique in having rings that can’t be thrown away, pawned, passed along, or worn. The world heaves and overflows with death, divorce, broken engagements—widows, divorcees, girls left at the altar. But my rings are different simply because they’re mine, and I’m remembering my dead grandfather, and that pencil can stuffed with dozens of McDonald’s coffee stirrers that we casually threw away when we cleaned out his house after he died. This? Junk. Gone in two seconds—though it was 1995 when he died, and it’s still vivid to me: that can in the exact center of the dresser, in front of the mirror, precisely where you’d place a trophy.

In the endless week after my husband’s death, I learned that an aunt of his had died unexpectedly, in her early thirties, of a heart attack. No one—including my husband— had ever mentioned her to me, which at the time made me angry. Heredity! Genetics! If only I’d known! Most likely no one had thought of her untimely death as anything other than random misfortune—and maybe her heart attack—and genetics and heredity—have nothing to do with my husband and his heart. Maybe if I had known about the aunt nothing would have changed or maybe everything would have changed.

Is all of it important? None of it? A can of coffee stirrers may not equal a diamond ring. Or it may. Does the ring mean the same thing if I have a jeweler mount the diamond in a necklace? If it sits in a desk drawer instead of a bank vault? If no one knows that here it is, carefully hidden away in a safe deposit box? If my husband hadn’t died and I could have worn it until I was a hundred years old? My brain, so keen to calculate time and assign meaning, is unexpectedly useless at answering these questions. Yet I keep asking, assuming there will be a day when everything makes sense.

I slide the ring off my finger and I suppose this should be a significant moment, seeing my hand once again unimaginably empty. But it’s time to go—that to-do list, a lunch date with a friend…. I drop the ring into the envelope, where it clicks against the wedding band. Then I tuck the envelope underneath all the other papers and disks and things that I’m keeping safe. I open the half-door and leave the cubicle, looking for the bank clerk who will lock up my stuff again.

We step into the vault, heading for Box 628, on the left side of the wall, twenty-two columns in, seven rows from the top—its position could be charted on graph paper. The clerk slides my box into its slot and pushes shut the tiny door. She inserts her key, then my key, and turns them simultaneously. The box is now locked. Who knows when I’ll look inside it again? She sets my key in my outstretched hand and smiles. “Have a great day,” she says.

I will. It’s sunny and bright and blue outside, not too hot. Vietnamese food for lunch—yum. We will always insist on numbers, reasons, answers, logic, because everything is so much tidier that way—six dozen coffee stirrers thrown into the garbage, the aunt who is never mentioned, and the problematic ring—maybe worth about seven hundred bucks—forever locked up and safe in Box 628. His ring, buried. Of course, the number, reason, answer, or logic to any of these things will never exist, but does that matter when flames are racing across the random, dark night?

You Oughta Write Pictures

I sat in on Khris Baxter’s session about screenwriting at the Baltimore Writers Conference, and it was phenomenal. Not only did Khris offer an excellent grounding in the basics of screenwriting, but he also made me think differently (and usefully!) about issues of plotting, characters, and dialogue in my fiction. Now he’s offering a new class at the Writer’s Center. If you enjoy watching movies—even if you have no intention of trying to write a screenplay—you’ll find the behind-the-scenes process of moviemaking fascinating. Next time you’re in the theatre, you can lean over and authoritatively announce, “Here’s plot point one.”

THE ART AND CRAFT OF SCREENPLAY ADAPTATION

How do you take a 400 page novel or the story of someone's life and boil it down to a 120-page screenplay? How do you take a short story and expand into a feature film? How can you bring a stage play to life on screen and make it visually interesting? This workshop will provide answers and offer fundamental strategies for anyone seeking to write a screenplay adaptation. Using examples from "Brokeback Mountain," "The Sweet Hereafter," "Amadeus," and "A Beautiful Mind," we will examine how other screenwriters have tackled the challenges of adapting different forms. This workshop will also include an overview of the conventions of screenwriting: structure, format, and scene development. No previous screenwriting experience is required.

Khris Baxter is a screenwriter, producer, and script consultant. He has sold and optioned numerous screenplays to Hollywood studios and production companies, including "Voyage," produced by USA Pictures. His screenplay, "Outrider," is currently in development. Khris teaches screenwriting at Gettysburg College, The Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD, and at the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at Queens University in Charlotte, NC. He is a member of the Virginia Film Office and a judge for the annual Virginia Screenwriting Competition.

Claudia Myers received her undergraduate degree from Yale University and went on for her MFA at Columbia University's School of the Arts where she graduated as a writer/director. Recently, Claudia directed her script "Kettle of Fish," which won a Nickelodeon Screenwriting Award. The film, starring Matthew Modine and Gina Gershon, premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival and was released in theaters last fall. Her script "Clinical" was a finalist at the 2003 Sundance Filmmakers Lab and she also wrote "Wild Oats," an unconventional buddy comedy that won 2nd Place at the 2004 Slamdance Screenplay Competition. This script has recently been optioned with Claudia attached to direct. In addition to several other screenplays and teleplays, Claudia has had experience as a script doctor and script consultant, as well as teaching private screenwriting workshops.

Saturday, 12/1/07, 10am – 4pm

For more information, please contact:
The Writer's Center
4508 Walsh Street
Bethesda, MD 20815
301-654-8664

Happy Thanksgiving!

I will be away from the blog, focusing on Thanksgiving Dinner—making it today, eating it tomorrow, recovering from the whole experience on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—and will be back on Monday.

For now, I’ll pass along my fabulous stuffing recipe. I view stuffing as the most important part of the Thanksgiving meal (there’s probably an internet quiz somewhere to tell me what that means about my personality)—and this stuffing is the best there can be, despite (because of?) its simplicity. Honestly, it’s such a revered treat that if I’m not making the Thanksgiving dinner myself, I have to whip up a batch of this stuffing sometime afterwards to satisfy my craving.

Secret confession: I have been known to make this (and only this) for dinner!

Cornbread & Scallion Stuffing
Adapted from Gourmet, November 1992
(It’s actually called Cornbread, Sausage & Scallion Stuffing, but in an uncharacteristic nod to heart-health, I don’t put in the sausage.)

For the cornbread:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/3 cups yellow cornmeal
1 tablespoon double-acting baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1 large egg
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled

¾ stick unsalted butter plus and additional 2 tablespoons if baking the stuffing separately
2 cups finely chopped onion
1 ½ cups finely chopped celery
2 teaspoons crumbed dried sage
1 teaspoon dried marjoram, crumbled
1 teaspoon crumbed dried rosemary
½ cup thinly sliced scallions
1 ½ cups chicken broth if baking the stuffing separately

Make the cornbread: In a bowl stir together the flour, the cornmeal, the baking powder, and the salt. In a small bowl, whisk together the milk, the egg, and the butter, and add the milk mixture to the cornmeal mixture, and stir the batter until it is just combined. Pour the batter into a greased 8-inch-square baking pan (I actually use a cast iron skillet) and bake the cornbread in the middle of a preheated 425 F oven for 20-25 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean. (The corn bread may be made 2 days in advance and kept wrapped tightly in foil at room temperature.)

Into a jellyroll pan, crumble the corn bread coarse, bake it in the middle of a preheated 325 F oven, stirring occasionally, for 30 minutes, or until it is dry and golden, and let it cool.

In a large skillet, melt 6 tablespoons of butter and cook the onion and the celery over moderately low heat, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are softened. Add the sage, marjoram, rosemary, and salt and pepper to taste and cook the mixture, stirring, for 3 minutes. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl, add the corn bread, the scallion, and salt and pepper to taste, and combine the stuffing gently but thoroughly. Let the stuffing cool completely before using it to stuff a 12-14 pound turkey.

The stuffing can be baked separately: Spoon the stuffing into a buttered 3- to 4-quart casserole, drizzle it with the broth, and dot the top with the additional 2 tablespoons of butter, cut into bits. Bake the stuffing, covered, in the middle of a preheated 325 F degree oven for 30 minutes and bake it, uncovered, for 30 minutes more. Serves 8-10; fewer if I am one of the dinner guests!

Call for Manuscripts: Sex Ed Stories

Okay, running this announcement will surely add some, uh, interesting new readers to the blog as I imagine “Work in Progress” will now show up in a whole new world of Google searches. And, yes, I actually do expect those people cull through every last match for "sex" in the list of 591,000,000—what else do they do with their free time? (Interesting fact: Wikipedia showed as the number one match in my AOL search, though it was only third on Google.)

Here’s a call for manuscripts forwarded to me by a friend:

SEX ED STORIES: an anthology of experience

Here’s the idea: Maybe you had a great sex ed teacher in high school who showed you how to put a condom on using a banana, or maybe an older sibling explained orgasms to you one night during your family vacation. No matter how formal or casual, righteous or terrifying, some experience along the way shaped your understanding of sex. We want to hear about it.

This collection will illustrate and emphasize the variety in individual sexual education as well as challenge the notion that sex ed only happens in the classroom with charts of STDs and an awkward video. Or that it stops when one reaches a certain age.

Women and men are encouraged to submit, as well as people of all ages, races, ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations, and religious affiliations. We are looking for well-developed, thematic essays as well as shorter, statement-like pieces that get straight to the point. Tell us a lot, tell us a little—just tell us something.

Some possible areas of exploration include:
--School-based sexual education
--Pornography as sex ed
--The role of family members and friends (think older siblings, cousins, aunts, etc)
--First-time discoveries and ongoing explorations in your sex life
--Books, websites, music
--Sex ed as you age

Please send completed pieces (and inquiries!) to sex.ed.stories@gmail.com and include your name as you want it to appear as well as your age, location, and occupation (last three are optional). Entries can be anonymous and all personal information will be kept confidential.

Selected entries will be made into a zine anthology with the expected publication date of Spring 2008.