Posted on July 22, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

It’s been a good couple weeks on the fiction front.

First, though, a confession:  I haven’t written in months – written written, that is.  My work has taken a backseat to wedding planning, helping organize two major moves (fiancé in; nephew out), teaching.  Posting to this blog, as well as to “Good Letters,” helps me from feeling like a writer fake.

But still.  Turning out 700 relatively coherent words in an hour or two isn’t the same as immersing myself in a world of my own creation.  In Rincon.

That’s the name of the fictionalized town in my novel.  It’s as real to me as the noises outside my window as I type these words.  I know the feel of its air on an Indian summer evening, the turns of its meandering streets, the bumps along the road where pine-tree roots have buckled the pavement.  When my agent passed on representing this novel, saying it was “too quiet,” I sent the manuscript to a writer friend in New York.  What do you think? I asked.  Should I scrap it and start a new one? Or is there something here I can do, something I can’t yet see because I’m so close to the material?

Yes, Michael said, there is.  You’ve got the stories reversed.  Your main story is all in the past; your subplot is the one with the narrative drive, the urgency.  Switch them, he said, and I saw with sudden clarity what I used to see when I pushed the depth-of-field button on my thirty-year-old SLR camera:  What had been blurry background leapt into crisp definition.  Michael’s suggestion made complete and total sense.

That was almost a year ago.

So, two weeks ago when my turn came up in writers’ group, I decided to send the first twenty pages of the novel.  After all, I didn’t have anything new.  So I made some quick changes along the lines of what Michael had helped me to see, and I sent it off.  Then I spent a week teaching in UC Berkeley Extension’s Fiction Writing Intensive.

I hadn’t taught a fiction workshop for a few years, and while initially anxious that I’d be off my game, I felt energized, articulate, alive.  The students helped, of course – eager and engaged, they brought in good work and made smart observations.  And the guest speakers who talked each afternoon on craft and process – Laurie Ann Doyle, Ryan Sloan, Jane Staw, Cody Gates – had me whipping out my pen to jot down notes, complete with exclamation points, for my own work.  I was reminded, once again, of the power of community, of the validation and permission and intoxicating possibility that comes out of fifteen writers sitting around a table, wholly present in talking about the arrangement of words on a page.

I felt bleary-eyed and bone-tired by Friday afternoon, and adrenalized.  Fiction felt alive for me again, not just as a teacher but as a writer.  So it felt a little strange to wake up Monday and not have to be downtown, Peet’s in hand, at 9:30, ready to start discussing conflict or methods of characterization.  I missed it.

On Tuesday, my writing group met.  I was beginning to regret having sent the hastily updated pages.  I’d shown so many versions of the novel over the years; was I going to get anything new from showing it once again?

Yes.  My readers – who don’t miss a trick – found plenty to question and critique.  Too much past-perfect slowed down the narrative.  A lot of names to keep track of.  Just where was this Rincon place, anyway?  But, underlying those comments, I heard in their voices energy and interest.  I left knowing not only that Michael was right in his suggestion of “flipping” the narrative emphasis – but that I could and wanted to make the changes.

Yes, it’s been a good few weeks.

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Here’s the Story…

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

Meghan Ward’s post this week on her blog, Writerland, got me thinking.  She asks readers about favorite TV shows, names a few of her own, and mentions how good TV can teach “valuable storytelling techniques.”

When I was in grad school, one of my fellow TAs showed his Intro to Fiction Writing class an episode of The Brady Bunch to illustrate the importance of conflict, crisis, resolution.  I don’t recall which episode it was – Jan’s allergy to the family dog? Marcia’s getting braces?  Greg’s being grounded after driving when Mike told him not to? – but it doesn’t matter.  Looking back on the show I watched every Friday night (what a lineup:  next came Partridge Family then Room 222 and The Odd Couple, and once my parents allowed me to stay up till 10, Love American Style), I remember how tightly those plots were constructed:  the conflict introduced right away (Jan starts sneezing, Marcia gets metal mouth), ratcheted up to a crisis between commercial breaks, and all resolved at the end, Carol and Mike talking it over in bed, she in her flouncy nighty, he in tailored PJs.

Not the stuff of James Joyce or Alice Munro, but a good place to start.  Next week I’m co-teaching a weeklong fiction intensive at UC Berkeley Extension.  I’ve been reading the manuscripts and, intriguing and detailed and full of imagination as they are, considering how best to hone in on the basics every story needs.

In reminding my students, of course, I’m reminding myself.  The essentials of craft – imagery, characterization, setting, point of view – are tools we can sharpen and hone, over time wielding them to best effect.  But as its core, a story needs conflict, and conflict comes from desire.

I learned the word “anhedonia” in grad school, when one of my professors railed against the then- (and still-) popular strain of stories about narrators who thought and spoke and acted, traveled in a specific time and place and made intelligent / ironic / humorous /deadpan / lyrical observations, but didn’t exhibit desire.  They thought a lot – too much – but they didn’t want anything.

That was the point, we who wrote those stories argued.  We were writing true to life, and who didn’t feel anhedonic from time to time?  The story’s point of emotional numbness seemed part of its accuracy, its relevance. We had graduated past The Brady Bunch. We had literary aspirations.

Greg wants to pitch for the Dodgers.  Jan wants to be voted Most Popular.  Greg and Marcia both want the attic room as their own bedroom. The more I’ve taught fiction, the more I’ve learned the helpfulness of what, in 30 minutes (less commercials), can feel a tad formulaic.

Consider the unnamed narrator in Joyce’s story “Araby.”  We know what he wants as soon as he describes Mangan’s sister standing in the light.  Or the “savage brat” whose determination not to open her mouth (and show the doctor her diseased tonsils) fuels William Carlos Williams’ wonderfully taut story “The Use of Force.”  Anders, the world-weary jerk of a book critic in Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” is past all desire at the beginning of the story – ah, but then his cynicism gets him shot, and what beautiful longing opens up, redeeming him and creating one of the most satisfying short stories I know.

If you don’t know these stories, go find them.  Each one will take you only 10 minutes to read, all three in a half hour.  Just the time, come to think of it, of seeing what happens after Don Drysdale praises Greg’s pitching.

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Moving Day

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

I spent the week packing, taping boxes, lifting boxes, taping, …

You get the idea.  So, for today’s post, I’m linking to a recent piece I wrote for “Good Letter,” the blog of Image, a journal of art & faith & mystery.

I’ll be back next week with a full, new post here.

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The little things

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

When I’m in a writing slump, the littlest thing can make me doubt myself.  After a week of moving words around on the screen to little avail, or – more recently – a week of not opening a single writing file, I start to wonder.  Maybe it’s not too late to go to law school?  I get an email announcing a prize given to someone I met once at a conference, and I think uncharitable thoughts about that someone.  I read about someone doing amazing work teaching writing to prisoners or illiterate adults or underprivileged kids and I think I’m not giving back enough.

“You’re so hard on yourself,” I’m often told.  Yep, and in some perverse way I embrace my self-criticism.  As though letting myself off the hook would mark the first step on the slippery slope of Low Standards.  Writers worth their salt push themselves, right? “You’re not a writer unless you write,” I tell my students, and I try to live by those words.  It’s not about how much you publish, it’s about how regularly you sit your ass in the chair and write.

And yet, how susceptible I am to the fortunes of others!  Competition, envy, schadenfreude:  come on down! All it takes is reading about the latest Hot Literary Star or attending a party with the cool writers to feel myself transported back to seventh-grade.  Feeling awkward in class.  Feeling more awkward on the softball field.  Feeling unbearably jump-out-of-my-skin awkward at the school dance.

But here’s the thing:  the little things can cheer me up, too.  A few months ago, after a panel at the Mechanics’ Institute, a woman approached me.  She introduced herself and said she’d loved reading the excerpt on my web site.  I thanked her, and assumed that she had read the first chapter of my memoir. (You can read it, too, by going to my website and clicking on “excerpt.”)

But no.  “Rincon,” she said, and I stared at her. How’d she know about Rincon, the name of the fictionalized town in my unpublished novel?  Had she read my diary, hacked my files?  She seemed so genuine, and friendly, and wore chic eyeglass frames, so I relaxed.  And remembered.

A few years back, I decided to post the first chapter of the novel.  I’d worked on it for so long, and its publication future was looking uncertain; I wanted to do something to put it out there.  And this woman had actually read it! And liked it!

I talked to a few others after the panel.  Unpublished writers, all, but engaged, interested people, whose love for words and the practice of craft was enough to buoy me up.  I felt encouraged about the writerly life, an endeavor that doesn’t elicit much in the way of daily validation.  Buoying ourselves up day after day starts to feel pathetic.  Who doesn’t need some outside validation that we’re doing something right?

Some weeks later, I attended a reading featuring students from classes at the SF Writers’ Grotto.  Having taken Meghan Ward’s class on social media (from which this blog was born), I was allotted a reading space.  I chose a story written a few years ago, and read for three minutes.  I love reading my work to an interested audience, and this audience was fun, engaged, supportive.  But what really made the evening worthwhile for me were the other readers.  Reading as part of a community – listening to other people, some of whom had never read their work aloud – cheered me immeasurably.

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Listening Anew

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

In found pockets of spare time – the five minutes before needing to leave to make an appointment; the fifteen minutes between emails – I’ve been updating my list of books on this blog.  I’m not sure too many readers want to know what I was reading back in 1998, but for me, going back and typing in my notes from that year brings pleasure.  Sort of looking through a photo album from a vacation taken a decade ago:  Oh, yeah, there’s that woman I sat with on the bus!  Or, Huh, I’d forgotten about that blouse.  Except that with books, we’re reminded of whole words:  characters, preoccupations on the page, as well as what we were doing while we were reading, say, an issue of Ploughshares.  So that when I write down Austerlitz and Marie Antoinette (both read in 2002), I recall the puke-green vinyl armchair I sat in for hours as I turned their pages, luxuriating in the quiet of my own studio tucked in an old barn in the foothills of the Blue Ridge while on residency at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  Ruth Rendell mysteries will always evoke Sea Ranch in August and a B & B in St. Andrews, Scotland, in dark-at-4 p.m.-January.

One of the books I read this year was Just Kids. Patti Smith  fascinates me, as does New York City before I knew it, and I admired her direct style in describing love and friendship, even if I felt a little impatient at the end.  Yes, I know she really did hang out with Sam and Janis and run into Jimi outside Electric Ladyland, but it started to feel a tad name-droppy.

My indelible Patti Smith moment, however, came not through the pages of her book, or even through the lyrics of her music but in person last fall, when she played on the Towers of Gold stage at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park.  It was October 4, and she knew the saint for the day.  Appropriate, given the city we were in – but not at all expected.  Patti read St. Francis of Assisi’s prayer, the entire thing:

Where there is discord,  my Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

The audience roared its approval, and I had the uncharitable (very un-Franciscan) thought that most of them probably hadn’t listened.  Really listened.  How judgmental and cynical of me, to assume that Francis’s message, steeped as it is in Jesus’ teaching, wouldn’t be welcomed by the crowd. And then she barrelled into “Because the Night,” the fog rolled in through the eucalyptus, I leaned back into my sweetie’s arms, and for a brief instant – one of those instants you remember forever – everything clicked into place.  Grace at a rock concert, cynicism vanished, and I wasn’t even stoned.  Patti had done this.

Punk had always frightened me during its heyday – the raised-middle-finger aesthetic, the horrific hair, the slam dancing – but I liked enough of the music to entertain something of what a grad-school professor once termed “good ambiguity.”  This appreciation deepened when, maybe ten years ago, I saw a photo of Smith sitting on a twin bed with her teenage son, both of them holding guitars.  They looked cozy, and happy, and gentle.  Smith was smiling, ruffling her son’s hair. (OK, I’m making up that detail, but it speaks to the feeling I recall from the photo.)

I was mature enough by then to know that music tastes mean a lot more than hairstyle and clothing and don’t dictate parenting style.  I did like some Ramones songs, didn’t I?  Punk, seemingly so hostile, had – like all hostility – a seed of brokenness inside, a tender place calling out.  I became fascinated with Patti Smith, the seeming dichotomy of someone termed the Godmother of Punk appearing as a sweet mom.

Yes, I keep a book list partly to remind myself of what I have read so that when people ask I can mention something other than People magazine at the mani/pedi place.  And, yes, to recommend books.  Just Kids:  read it!

But the really fun reason is what just happened this morning, remembering the godmother of punk quoting the gentle revolutionary.  Amen.

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