Back In the (Blog) Saddle

Posted on November 8, 2013 by Lindsey Crittenden

I know.  I’ve posted this before.  And no one likes an excuse.  Tedious, really, and ultimately who cares?  So I’ll just say:  I’m back.  Thanks to Meghan Ward (of Writerland), I’m sitting down this Friday morning to post here.  “Are you still blogging?” she asked me yesterday at lunch at the Writers’ Grotto. “Every time I go to your blog, it’s the same post.”  (She said this in the nicest of ways, really.)

It is, indeed.  Imagine having a friend repeatedly drop by for a visit and never being there!  That’s a little how I felt.  Plus, I realized that Meghan’s question had reminded me how much I enjoyed blogging before I stopped.  I didn’t mean to stop.  I just did, because too much else was going on.  Oh, wait, no excuses, right?

So here we are.

Now I just need a topic.  (And don’t worry, I won’t go on for 600 words without one.)  I’ll grab at what feels foremost right now:  Gratitude.  That’s right.  It’s an overused concept, and not in the right way.  By that, I mean:  it’s all over women’s magazines, self-help books, polished rocks carved with inspirational words.  But the real thing?  How much of it do we see, feel, embrace?  We can all use more, right?

I am grateful to Meghan, for the nudge.  To The Grotto, for community and laughter and Fred’s damned good coffee and Stephanie’s loaning me The Goldfinch and Ethel’s wonderful reading last night and several people’s support in a tricky, potential icky professional situation.  For Ethel Rohan, for writing Goodnight Nobody.  To Monica, for being excited about teaching a class with me next winter.  For K, too, a student who worked hard on his manuscript and placed it with a national literary magazine. For my nephew, who just left a voice mail asking for the details on Grandma’s (that is, my mother’s) Brussels sprouts–do you brown the butter before adding the nuts and sprouts?  For Leslie, for inviting four of us to Mexico with her for her 50th birthday.  For my husband, C, who tells me how much fun he has with me—and for, after three-and-half years of sharing love and life with him, the fact that I actually believe him.  It’s not that he’s not believable; it’s that the lifelong pattern of being told I can be something other than fun has taken its toll.  For the fun we had last month on the Circle Line boat tour of Manhattan.  For visiting a national park during federal shutdown and not missing a thing.  (We took ranger on his advice:  “Just be smart.”)  And for each one of you who reads this.

It’s good to be back.

Lady Liberty from the Circle Line:

Lady Liberty from the Circle Line

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Stealing

Posted on August 2, 2013 by Lindsey Crittenden

As you can tell if you regularly read this blog — and if you do, you have my undying gratitude! — I’ve been remiss in my posting.  Vacation; a week of teaching; deadlines…and well, here we are in August.

I’m gearing up for my first Grotto class this weekend, What We Talk About When We Talk About Stealing.  The name, of course, is stolen from Raymond Carver’s classic, and I’ve had such fun re-reading it (again) alongside Nathan Englander’s masterful “WWTAWWTA Anne Frank.”  And revisiting gothic retellings of Red Riding Hood and Bluebeard in Joyce Carol Oates’ and Angela Carter’s stories. 

What makes a successful steal in writing as well as on the infield, of course, involves stealth. Yes, the best examples make their homage clear—by title or obvious re-use of a line of dialogue or character situation.  And then they move past mere stealing to make a new point of their own with resonance and originality.  We’re not talking about plagiarism here.

It’s difficult to steal.  I’ve tried, for years, to write a late-20th-century version of Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever.”  How closely do I adhere to what transpired between Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley?  Or is just the situation–two women in a foreign city with a secret between them–rich enough?  I made headway when I could use the “staging” of the original but infuse the friendship with a tension particularly to my characters and not Wharton’s. 

What fun to plan a new class!  And yes, how anxiety-making, too.  But it’s the “good kind of anxiety,” as a therapist friend calls it.  You know, where I wake up wondering if I’m trying to cram too much into a five-hour workshop, or not allowing enough time for students’ sharing their work aloud, or if I’ll have to face 12 faces staring at me blankly.  Where I’m excited, too, hoping for the magic that can happen in the classroom.  I’ve had some bad teaching days, but many more good ones, and as I pull my notes together this Friday morning, I’ve reminded of the joyful surprise I found in my first-ever class, all those years ago at UC Davis:  I love teaching!

A short list of “steals”:

Blue Beard—”The Bloody Chamber” (Angela Carter)
Red Riding Hood — “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (Joyce Carol Oates) & “Company of Wolves” (Angela Carter)
“The Overcoat” (Gogol) — “The Overcoat II” (T.C. Boyle)
“Hills Like White Elephants” (Hemingway) — “Good People” (David Foster Wallace)
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (Raymond Carver) — “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” (Nathan Englander)
“Parker’s Back” & “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (Flannery O’Connor) — “Idols” (Tim Gautreaux)
“Lady with a Pet Dog” (Chekhov) — “Lady with a Lap Dog” (Joyce Carol Oates)

And, of course, novel versions such as Wide Sargasso Sea, Ulysses, Grendel, East of Eden that make use of literary forerunners.

Please:  Add to the list!

 

 

 

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How Revision Brings Us Closer

Posted on July 5, 2013 by Lindsey Crittenden

This first Friday in July, I’m thrilled to offer a guest post by my friend and colleague Monica Wesolowska. Her memoir, Holding Silvan, will blow you away.  And she’s got some nifty insights here, too. 

Thank you, Monica!
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At a recent reading from my memoir Holding Silvan, a friendly young man in the audience asked how I’d managed not to be angry or bitter in the book about the people who’d failed me while Silvan was alive. I had to laugh. I could have said the memoir just came out like that because I’m naturally a lovely person, but catching my eye from the second row was Lindsey Crittenden. Lindsey’s in my writing group.  She read my rough draft.  She and I both know it wasn’t that easy.

Holding Silvan is a love story, one that I couldn’t write for years. Silvan was my son. He was a beautiful baby—physically perfect with his olive skin, long lashes—but he was severely brain-damaged during birth. My husband and I chose to remove him from life support and let him live his brief life in our arms. It was an agonizing loss, but a beautiful death. That is the raw material, the true story, upon which my memoir is based.

For years, Silvan’s story remained just that: a private memory. Sure, I talked about Silvan to the people in my life. And I had the diary I kept while he was alive. But those versions seemed too raw, too sad, too angry for strangers. When the story did come popping out, a terrible silence usually followed as if I’d given, as they say, too much information. And that only made me sadder and more angry.

So what compelled me to make the leap from personal to public story, to reveal all to strangers? As a writer and a mother I suppose I felt that Silvan’s story belonged in the world. We never could have made the choice we did alone. And I wanted to test it again, to ask ourselves these questions: Did we really love Silvan well? Was his death a “good death” for him as well as us? And would revealing the hidden story of choosing to let our son die really benefit the living?

One day I was ready. Eight years had passed when the rough draft rushed out. With the strength of distance from my story, I sat tight as Lindsey and my writing group went through that first draft line by line. They teased me for writing about Silvan as though he were the most beautiful baby ever. They chastised me for writing as though I’d behaved better in crisis than anyone on the planet ever had. They questioned me as a narrator, someone who’d been changed enough by my own story that I had the wisdom to come back and tell it. They did all this by crossing out a word here, a word there, asking me to be more and more specific.

OK, so maybe they weren’t really teasing or chastising, but it felt that way.  At first.

Writing is a solitary act, but language itself puts us into communion with others. The more closely I worked with my own language, the wider my world became. And that, I told the young man in my audience, is one of the gifts of writing. I wrote myself right into compassion. I saw how closed we all can be. And I realized the power in my story was less my grief and rage and more my love. Here, my book says, is Silvan. You can hold him. Come on. Don’t hesitate. Now’s your chance. Hold him the way we’d all like to be held in the end.

—Monica Wesolowska

 

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Formula One?

Posted on June 21, 2013 by Lindsey Crittenden

Before beginning the post itself, I’m happy to report that my piece on agreeing to disagree on matters of faith is in the July/August issue of Spirituality & Health, hot off the presses!  As I write this, the piece isn’t yet online, but I hope it shows up there soon.  Otherwise, you can look for it the old-fashioned print way.

Here’s the post:

Saved cats.
Two pillars.
Four themes.
Three juggling balls.
Eight points.
A snowflake.

No, it’s not a found poem, though it could be.  What these six items have in common?

They’re all formulas for story structure.  I put out a call yesterday at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, where I have an office, for advice on what to do.  I’m stuck.  Stuck.  Stuck.  Stuck.

Plot-structure-wise.

I’ve revised my novel (not for the first time) and have about 75 pages go to.  I’ve written those pages already, but I know they’re not working.  I need to think outside what’s already written.  I need to try big changes.  I need a formula.  As wary as I am of reductive  formulas, I’ve decided one or two might help.

I’ve tried outlines and timelines and index cards and flowcharts.  Now I envision scattering them in the air, like playing cards in a game of 52-Pickup or Smoke, Smoke, Fire.  Seeing where things land, seeing if new connections form.  Does the queen have to follow the jack?  What does she look like next to the 2?

I’m holding my deck, ready to fire. My Grotto colleagues have come forth with quite a few good recommendations—the Plot Whisperer, Robert McKee’s book on screenwriting, Blake Snyder’s book on screenwriting, and others.

I’m not starting from scratch. I’ve got my story, my conflict, my characters, my anguished question (what all successful fiction starts with, Wallace Stegner reportedly said).  What I don’t have—yet—is a clear, compelling climax and resolution. I’ve got several ideas for one, and it’s hard to see past them to something new and clarifying.

Part of the problem is that I’ve got more than one protagonist.  I’ve got four characters with “death stakes,” four characters with their own discoveries to make.  Yes, they’re interrelated, but still.  Every see a ball of tangled yarn?

But here’s the thing:  I’m convinced that the solution lies in that tangled yarn.  That the cat’s cradle of Eileen & Jeremy & Chris & Naomi will, once I find the pattern, knit together the right ending.  So I’m looking at pattern books.

I’d love to hear what’s worked—or not—for you.

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Coming Out of Traction

Posted on June 7, 2013 by Lindsey Crittenden

First, a few announcements this first Friday in June:

Summer writing classes at the Grotto are now open for enrollment.  I’m excited about teaching a weekend workshop in August, on using existing models to craft short fiction.  Check out all upcoming classes here.

I’ve started planning on another new class, Developing the Memoir, at  UC Berkeley Extension this fall.  Watch for details.

We’ve extended the deadline for the Summer Fiction Intensive at UC Berkeley Extension!  Get that writing sample out this weekend to make the 6/10 cut-off! (Yes, the online catalog says 6/3, but it’s really 6/10 .)

What a treat it is to fall in love with a writer.  Just discovered Elena Ferrante, whose novels now feel imperative.  Finished My Brilliant Friend. The Lost Daughter coming up next.

And now, onto Traction:

The challenge of keeping a blog is, of course, keeping a blog.  That is, posting regularly on topics we hope resonate with readers.  Some weeks, the topic introduces itself—based on an event, an overheard conversation, a particular problem of the recent past.  And other times, I think I’ll never again find anything remotely new to say.

So it’s with a wee bit of hesitation that I offer up a post once again drawing on … yoga.  I can’t help it.  Last night’s Upper Back and Shoulder Care workshop left me not only with happier traps but another nifty parallel to the writing life.  So here goes:

We had lined up our mats, tied our belts to the wall ropes and cinched them to a 30-degree angle (which looked more than 45 degrees to me), lain down, and put our heads in the loop of the belt so that the taut  belt “caught” on our occiput, which our teacher (Yoga Loft senior Iyengar instructor Anne Saliou) pronounced with a wonderfully French accepted final syllable.  We then scooched our bodies slightly away from the wall, until the base of the skull pulled gently away from our necks.  (Medical liability disclaimer goes here.)

It felt divine.  Especially afterward, when we lifted our heads out of the belt (using our hands, not our just-relaxed neck muscles) and placed them on the folded blanket.  And even more, when we sat up and registered a delicious, floating sensation.  Not like being stoned; no, there was nothing “altered” about this state.  Instead, it felt like a return to the alignment and lightness that we’re meant to feel when we’re not hunched over a keyboard or steering wheel all day.

But here’s the key.  We didn’t sit up right away.  Delicious sensation of lightness, yes, but not immediately.  Transitions matter, Anne reminded us.  Don’t jerk your body into movement right away.  It is too harsh on the nervous system.

The transition she directed us through was intentional—and I could feel myself resist it.  I knew that if I’d been at home, practicing head traction in my living room (with the belt attached to the doorknob), I’d have removed the belt, rolled properly to my side, and sat right up.  I’d have enjoyed the sensation of the traction, but when the pose was over, I’d have moved right on.  Time to start fixing dinner.  Time for a load of laundry.  Time for…whatever.

Transitions are the toughest part of writing.  Not just transitions on the page—how we get from scene to scene, sentence to sentence, chapter to chapter—but transitions in the act of writing itself.  I’m in one now.  I just handed in 29 pages to my writers’ group, which means that when we meet next Tuesday, I’ll have feedback from them.  Wednesday morning, I’ll have plenty to do as I go through their notes, make decisions, begin revising those 29 pages.  But today?  I’ve finished those 29 pages, so now what?  I have a piece of journalism to start researching, I remind myself; I’ll spend the day on that, once I get this blog up.

The longer I’m away from the desk, the tougher the transition.  Monday mornings, I struggle to get back into the groove of the week before, even I followed Hemingway’s supposed trick of ending a writing day with an unfinished sentence so you know where to begin the next morning.

And two-week vacations?  It takes me days to find my way back.  So it’s a little unrealistic to expect me to finish my most recent 29 pages of the novel on Thursday and immediately start working on a piece of journalism on Friday. Yes, I have an outline due in two weeks.  Can I go from fiction to nonfiction just like that?  Or should I let my head rest a bit on the folded blanket before I sit up?

My head feels lighter already.

How do you tackle transitions?

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