Of Workshopping and Editing and Reviewing

At the Indiana Writers Center, I've led a workshop group for the last ten years and we occasionally have a great discussion on the different approaches to "workshopping."

This particular workshop was founded ten years ago as an outreach for the IWC and is, first and foremost, open to anyone who is or becomes a member of the IWC. Thus, in a sense, we're a very open group as opposed to most ongoing groups that can be selective in who they allow at the table. At any rate, the IWC workshop operates on a single guiding principal: each of the writers participates with the goal of doing their very best to help the other writers make their work the best it can be, based on where that writer is in the process and what they've chosen to write. In return for those efforts, we receive from the others around the table their own best efforts to help improve our writing based on our specific goals and motivations and vision--not theirs.

Of course, this approach isn't the only way--nor maybe even the best in other circumstances--to operate a workshop. Keep in mind there are three (at least) approaches one might employ in commenting on another's writing: straight critiquing (our approach), editing, and reviewing, and each has a place and value. Just as with the three modes of prose writing--narrative summary, scene, and description--and the importance of the writer's awareness and control of which mode they're using--and when and how to mix them--it's crucial that members of any group remember those workshopping principals and understand where they might be stepping over the line into another mode. 

A Title by Any Other Title

What's in a title? Wouldn't a title by any other title still smell as sweet? A title is a title is a title, right?

With apologies to both Willie and Gertrude, I find myself thinking about titles and their importance not only for that potential buyer out there once we finish our masterpiece, but even--and maybe especially--as guideposts and north stars for us as we work through our drafting and fine tuning. We recently published a marvelous short story in Flying Island by a talented young writer who mentioned that they really struggled with titles and sometimes didn't even have a working title for a project. We chatted about titles and their importance and how they indeed can sometimes evolve as we progress, but my point was that having at least a working title can and should inspire and guide us as we work.

Speaking of evolving titles, the original title of my civil war manuscript (see these posts, Knit One, Purl Two and Unravelling the Yarn) had been Come Retribution, which had apparently been one of only four code phrases used by the Confederates during the war. While still finishing up the first draft, I had a chance to pitch a New York agent at a week-long workshop and, having never done it before, I launched into my ramble and forgot to even mention the title. When I told her the protagonist finally realized her goal had to be "to strike a single hour" from the war, her face lit up and she stopped me to ask "Is that the title?" Of course, being reasonably bright, it only took me a few seconds to catch my breath and nod "Yes, do you like it?" She loved the title and asked me to send her the full manuscript whenever I was ready. She ended up considering the novel for seven months and testing the concept with a couple editors before finally deciding to pass on it, but the name stuck.

Random Acts of Editing

George and Michael and I finalized our search for an editor for our first Random Acts Books publication and are moving forward with revisions to our stories. The first book to come out will be Illusions, an Ekphrastic Trio, with a target publication date next spring. In the earlier post, And Then There Were Three, I noted we were in the process of finding that editor but didn't get into much detail. The process was fascinating and enlightening to say the least.

We started by selecting seven likely editors from several sources, mostly those recommended by Joanna Penn at her great website The Creative Penn. I emailed all seven, telling them about ourselves and our concept for our company and our projects--and including samples of our writing where requested--and we got responses from five of them. Not bad. Two of the five said they were extremely busy and probably couldn't work with us for months. Of those two, one said she loved my writing sample and we engaged in a lively email discussion of the arts and have actually reached a handshake to work together on my story collection, A Quiet Polyphony, once I've completed it. Very exciting and inspiring.

Progress and Poetry

Our Random Acts Books project continues to make progress, and we hope to finalize an arrangement with an editor by the end of the month.  We've had more skype sessions and have enjoyed getting to know a few editors as they've read the stories for our first collection, An Ekphrastic Trio.  We all agree we want to add a more engaging title for each of our miniologies, but we still like the Trio theme as a subtitle.  More on the final selection process once we've reached an agreement with our editor!

In the meantime, I read a marvelous piece on the editorial page of the New York Times this morning, titled "Poetry: Who Needs it?" by William Logan.  Wow, the LEAD editorial--well, in the digital edition, anyway--the one with the engraved illustration!  For poetry!  Is there hope for the world, after all?

And Then There Were Three

In Sci Fi Agonistes III, I chatted about starting on the path toward Indie Publishing for my science fiction novelette, And on the Eighth Day.  As I continued to surf and read more about the process, I found a number of websites and books that have been extremely helpful, and I've mentioned them all in that earlier post.  I'll just say there are many, many, wonderful folks out there blogging and posting and linking great tips and guidelines, and you can really learn from them...so be sure to thank them as well.

So, here I am, exploring and making notes and nodding, "ah ha, didn't realize that," and wondering where to begin--not to mention how I'd be able to accomplish all that new work and still be able to do any writing, oh, and yeah, that other something called a job--when a good friend and fellow member of our fiction workshop, Michael Bloom, says over coffee one day, "How about we team up on doing the Indie thing and start our own boutique publishing company?"  Eureka!  "And let's see if George Evans wants to join us."  Double Bingo!

One by One

Last night, my wife and I were overwhelmed by a performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem at the Palladium.  Britten, a pacifist, combined in telling fashion the latin mass for the dead with poems by Wilfred Owen, the poet best known for "Dulce et Decorum est."  Neither of us had heard the complete piece before, but we were excited since one of our daughters sings in the Symphonic Choir, a neighbor is principal flute in the Indianapolis Symphony, and my wife had trained many of the singers in the Indianapolis Children's Choir.  The work, for orchestra, chamber orchestra, chorus of over a hundred with three soloists, plus a children's choir, is a powerful and moving piece with its juxtaposition of the requiem mass and Owen's pacifist poems, and the audience sat in total silence for nearly a minute after the final "amen" died away.

This morning, those lingering motifs and words haunt me as I continue revising my manuscript, To Strike a Single Hour, a civil war novel intended to find a potential truth amid the puffery of P. T. Barnum's "Spy of the Cumberland," Pauline Cushman.  I've draped my narrative over a bare skeleton of the little known "facts" about the brave and steadfast heroine, a woman who, unlike "...the milk-and-water women of the day, whose only thought is of dress and amusement, but one of the women of old, whose soul was in their country's good..." threw herself, according to Barnum's commissioned vanity biography of her by F. L Sarmiento, into the breach with nary a hesitation.

A Guest Post on the Indiana Author Awards Blog

I was honored today to contribute a guest post on the Indiana Author Awards blog at

http://www.indianaauthorsaward.org/the-blog/

Take a look and explore the other guest posts by many Indiana writers, including JL Kato, Poetry Editor for Flying Island, and Ben Winters, recent winner of the Philip K Dick Award for his novel Countdown City.

Keep your eye peeled for the 2014 Indiana Author Awards coming this October.

In His Own Words, GGM

The passing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez last week has been widely noted and his pathbreaking work in creating the spell of Magic Realism justly praised around the world.  Let his words speak:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."  One Hundred Years of Solitude

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

“She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: You are either born knowing how, or you never know.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”  One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

"My heart has more rooms in it than a whorehouse."  Love in the Time of Cholera

“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

"I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him."  Love in the Time of Cholera

“He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

“But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

“Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.”  Love in the Time of Cholera

"He recognised her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: 'Only God knows how much I loved you.'"  Love in the Time of Cholera

Sci Fi Agonistes III

So, once more into the breach...literally.  As noted a while back, the fledgling Sci Fi publisher and I parted ways earlier this year, so I've been focusing on becoming an "authorpreneur" and going the route of indie publishing for the novelette they had solicited, And on the Eighth Day.  I've shared a lot of info with Keith Krulik about this approach and you can check out his recent post about indie publishing at the Fiction Forge Indy blog here.

As I dug into the topic myself, I was struck initially by the difference between the new "indie" approach and the older, often predatory, self-publishing or vanity press approach.  Yes, the vanity press has its place: for those who want to publish something they simply wish to share with family members or a small group, and who have no interest in reaching a broader audience or ever publishing anything else.  A vanity press is perfect for them and, without it, their dream would never be shared.  Bottom line, the key is that the vanity publisher's customers are not the readers of books but, rather, the writers of them.  Their revenues come mainly from the provision of services to writers, not the sale of books.

Turning Pro: A Long and Winding Road in the War of Art

Wonder of wonders:  at a recent business conference, a young fellow spoke about entrepreneurship and the importance of what he called "turning pro" being "greater than being an amateur."  In a few of our early posts last year, we debated the meaning and relevance of taking a professional approach to our writing, but we didn't dig too deeply into exactly what made one a pro instead of an amateur.  (BTW, I like the word "amateur" as opposed to beginner or neophyte or dilettante ...or worse.)

At any rate, the bright young speaker made several links between being an entrepreneur and the arts, and he recommended a number of books, including one that really caught my attention, Turning Pro, by Steven Pressfield, who also wrote The War of Art.  Pressfield tells the story of his journey to become a published author--a long and winding road in his case--and he recognizes a point at which he moved from being an amateur to approaching his writing as a pro.  He lists his discoveries along the way, and comes up with twenty traits of being a pro, among them:

The pro comes to work every day.  Ideally, that means setting and respecting a time and place for writing each day, but even if we can't always do that, at least the pro is thinking about her work, planning, considering, repeating dialogues or running scenes in her head.  Nothing is more important to becoming a pro than making that level of commitment.  

Photos and Words: The New Ekphrasis

Thank the goddess for Zite, my news aggregator of choice these days.  (Although it does piss me off a touch that we think it's cool to misspell even German words these days.)  Just yesterday, over the last of my morning coffee, scrolling through my aggregated pieces on classical music and bicycling and chess and photography and, primarily, books and writing, I tapped to read "A Thousand Words:  Writing from Photographs," a blog entry by Casey N. Cep in The New Yorker.  

In a fascinating turn toward the digital age, Casey tells us she "...gave up writing hurried descriptions of people on the subway...and scribbling down bits of phrases overheard at restaurants and cafes."  She actually stopped even carrying her notebook.

So, what is she doing now to supply her writing habit?  Easy, her phone/camera, taking shots of everything from urban scenes to unique stones to odd characters to books or paintings she likes or wants to explore further.  "Photography" she says "has changed not only the way that I make notes but also the way that I write.  Like an endless series of prompts, the photographs are a record of half-formed ideas to which I hope to return."

Wow!

Leverage and Magic

How would you like to have a system for your writing that freed you to concentrate on your brilliant ideas and render them consistently in that magnificent prose you hear in your dreams and in the shower?

How would you like to have a system for your writing where you could easily and consistently and instantly make reference to any and all of your research, including videos and pdf’s and website url’s, and hang any of them, so to speak, right by your manuscript as you work, inspiring you and keeping you on track effortlessly?  (Okay, nothing is really effortless, but hang in there!)

How would you like a system where you could integrate as detailed a planning outline or index card view right into your manuscript and yet see it only when needed?

How would you like a system where you could easily break your manuscript into as many, or as few, pieces as you like—major parts, chapters, or even scenes within chapters—and where you could easily and instantly shift the order of those chapters or scenes, along with their place in your outline, to see how that progression might strengthen your masterpiece?

Unravelling the Yarn

So my stale manuscript (see Knit One, Purl Two…Rip it Apart) has been out of the drawer and warming in the light of day for several weeks now, and I’ve found myself with more energy and enthusiasm for a project than I’ve felt for a good while.  There’s some pretty good writing in this thing, woohoo!  Okay, and I’ve also found a few more darlings and dispatched them heartlessly.

My first real steps in the process were to read the old synopsis and the chapter outline of the novel, making a few notes on areas that seemed to be more sideways motion than forward action.  I then dug into my “manifesto,” a somewhat random compilation of notes and ideas and sketches one of my former grad program mentors, Melissa Pritchard, had encouraged me to write to serve as a holding area of thoughts and debates on the project.  That was well before the days of Scrivener, of course, but that's another post or two.  Over the years, I’ve added to my manifesto by entering new elements, bullet point fashion, at the top of the first page rather than at the end, so my latest ideas and critiques and notes are the first thing I see. 

My goal with the reading of the synopsis and outline was to see how the project fit, structurally, within the guidelines of Larry Brooks’s excellent book Story Engineering, since the majority of the feedback on why the novel didn’t work had to do with a lack of consistent forward direction and increasing overall tension.  It turned out that, in an overall sense, I had my plot points and pinch points in about the right spots, so it seemed I needed to dig deeper to see why the novel still wasn't working.  And, after a few productive sessions of staring off into space and simply trying to BE in the story, I discovered some new, tighter, more dramatic plot elements and characterization that still maintained much of the existing action.  Perfect!

Tilt.

The Significantly Insignificant

A few posts back, I mentioned my reentry into Marcel Proust's Swann's Way, the opening volume of his modernist milestone, In Search of Lost Time.  It had been probably been six or seven years since my last read.  At any rate, I had suggested that, as soon as I finished reading it "in a few weeks," I'd write about setting and description--one of Proust's strengths--and how his writing is a superb example of how great detail can bring fiction to life.  The bad news is that I've not come close to finishing Swann's Way yet.  The good news is also that I've not finished Swann's Way yet, so I'm still savoring Proust's incredible subtlety and penetration in revealing to us not only the details of our surroundings in a way that makes us feel and smell and hear with a freshness that's new, yet comforting in its familiarity, but also in how he peels back the frailest of layers of the depths of what makes us human.  His writing brings the same deep warmth as the tiniest sip, rolled on the tongue, of a wonderful single malt, or a fresh cigar smoked in perfect surroundings, or--name your own sensual delight.

So, as I smile and close the book (figuratively, since it's on the Kindle app on my iPad) and lean back and dream and envy the way Proust has opened the world of ourselves to us, I recall another book I've been savoring these days, James Wood's How Fiction Works.  Wood makes his delightful and enlightening way through the craft elements of fiction and plumbs them with a subtlety and insight beyond most such books I've read.  Starting with POV and his rendering of "free indirect" style, through character, which he boldly notes as the single most difficult task in the craft of fiction, to setting and description (and much more.)  He pegs the deeper use of setting and description--what he terms a "commitment to noticing" or "thisness"--to Flaubert, as most do, and he then goes on to quote the sublime (Chekov and Mann and Bellow) and the flabby (sorry, John Updike in one of his later works!)  And, full circle, back to Proust, Wood says that "Literature makes of us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life."

Painting and Planning and Pantsing and Pacing, Oh My!

I'm not a painter, although I almost played one on stage when I sang an opera role where I was in a few scenes with Cavaradossi working at his easel, the painter who turned revolutionary and was in love with the beautiful Tosca in Puccini's extravagant opera.  That's probably the closest I've come to the execution of the visual arts other than fiddling with some watercolors and creating the dingiest shade of brown ever seen.

So, when I just finished reading Sena Jeter Naslund's latest novel, Fountain of St. James Court; or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman, Mike's latest post about pacing in fiction came to mind as I thought about Sena's novel and what I'd taken from it.  The novel is a delightful quodlibet with the "Fountain" portion following the contemporary writer, a woman--a precisely detailed clone of Sena herself, right down to the details of her neighborhood and even her house--who has just finished a solid first draft of her latest novel about another woman, a well known painter who lived through the French Revolution.  And yes, they're both old and looking back on their lives, so the "Old Woman" segments are the actual draft of the novel about the painter.  Interesting conceit reflecting the interrelatedness of all the arts, another of Sena's favorites.  Of course, Sena extends the intertextuality theme and riffs off the Joyce homage and frequently improvs off one of her favorites, Virginia Woolf, with the opening line giving notice by immediately bowing to Mrs. Dalloway.

At any rate, Sena has done her research and a major theme of the work is the way artists--in the broad sense of that word--see the world and practice their art and craft.  A fascinating juxtaposition of the visual and the verbal, and their similarities of approach, even when we use different techniques and unique words to describe the concepts.

Knit One, Purl Two

Okay, so there's this manuscript lying in the drawer, after several years maturing or moldering in the darkness, waiting, just waiting for the tug on the handle that exposes it once more to the harsh light of day.  A manuscript that found its way into hibernation after a few major agents said it came oh, so close; a boutique literary publishing house had four folks give it a read before passing; and a well-known figure in the editing world read the entire piece (as a favor, not for a fee) and called the novel "bold and accomplished, absolutely publishable." Readers enjoyed the retelling of a little known Civil War character's experiences, found the settings and the territory in the heartland of Kentucky and Tennessee evocative, the voice and message powerful, and they loved to hate the antagonists.  

So what had gone wrong?

Flying Island's First Publication!

Today marks the first publication in our reborn online journal with a group of poems by Tracy Mishkin!  Check it out at the link on the left, and sharpen your pens and submit!