Category Archives: Content

I write about love because I tell stories; and it is impossible, I believe, to tell any kind of powerful or valuable or meaningful story without writing about love.  And, too, I have found that it is impossible to write a story without love.  The writer must love her characters, must open her heart to them, give the whole of herself to them, in order for those characters to give themselves back to her.                                             –Kate Dicamillo, “Characters who Love Again” Today I’m pondering love’s role in the making of literature.  Love is a basic ingredient, like water in a soup.  Without water, you have no soup. Before there’s any hope of writing well or of an audience appreciating your work, you must love writing itself.  You must love…

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(This blog post is reprinted after appearing in The Loft’s “Writer’s Block.”) “I’m not interested in spiritual stuff.  I just want to write stories.” A friend—a thoughtful, church-going friend—said this to me in passing the other day.  Since she couldn’t hear my internal temper-tantrum, I’ll give it here:  What in tarnation is more spiritual than stories?!  Every story, from a child’s imaginative play to an adult’s crafted composition to an elder’s reminiscing, contains both the muddy mundane and the spark of mystery.  When we humans want to understand our world, we make stories.  It’s how we compose and are composed by meaning—Sharon Daloz Parks’ definition of faith.  Dabble in stories, friends, and you work with the most intimate orientation of your heart. All writing’s spiritual. My point exactly.  So what are you going to do about it? Sunday morning golfers like to joke that they pray on the putting green. …

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The real subject of autobiography is not one’s experience but one’s consciousness.  Memoirists use the self as a tool.            –Patricia Hampl Perhaps because I’m entering my twenty-third year of teaching writing, I’m getting curmudgeonly about memoir.  I still revere fine examples in the genre, but the vast majority of memoir seems myopic and disengaged.  Published works irritate me the most; I read a memoir like Sheryl Strayed’s Wild and run screaming back to the classics to recover.  Memoirs-in-process at least contain the possibility of improving. The amateur writers I work with fear that memoir is selfish, but this isn’t my gripe.  “You may keep the self-centered material—that’s all we writers have to work with!” writes Carol Bly.  The self is a wonderfully worthy subject.  Perhaps what grates on me is a distinctly American understanding of the self, obsessed with personal pain and disturbingly isolated.  I am interested in the self…

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Recently, while reading yet another volume of Philip Zaleski’s Best Spiritual Writing, I grew increasingly annoyed at essay after essay of heady language about grandiose meditations and abstract ethical conundrums.  My spiritual life, lived out as I potty-train my daughter, lift canned tomatoes from a boiling bath, struggle to remain a loving member of my bickering church community—in other words, lived out in details and increments—was absent from this collection.  I thought of the hundreds of times I’ve folded my daughter’s trainer undies, printed with delicate pink roses; I hold their warm cotton to my cheek, imagine them snug on her sweet behind, and my knees go weak with adoration for this life.  Underwear can be holy, too! I wanted to shout at Zaleski. Fortunately I’d also recently read the 2011 VIDA count (http://www.vidaweb.org/the-2011-count).  VIDA, an online organization serving women in the literary arts, takes an annual survey of how…

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When I teach, I often ask the question, “What’s at stake for you in this story?”  I’m not alone; it’s a common question in the world of writing.  Students are puzzled by it, however, and usually ask me to explain. Really I’m looking for the intersection between the writer’s heart and the words on the page.  How does this subject terrify you, compel you, wrap its sweaty hands around your longing and jerk you into unexplored territory?  When a story nags, it always shares some fundamental passion with the writer.  It always taunts the writer with the promise of discoveries that cannot be made in any other way.  How does this project set you on edge?  What’s the rabbit hole you’ve been skirting?  Your writing will take you down. For people who keep journals and new writers, writing is a natural extension of the self.  We don’t recognize any separation…

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Perhaps the most important question for every creative writer to ask—and definitely the hardest question to answer—is “What’s at stake for me?”  For writing to work well, the writer must care deeply. On the surface this question seems simplistic; our care is instinctive, compelling, and unspoken.  In practice, the journey through revision is an excavation of the author’s stake, digging below external reasons (“I want to help others; I want to be published”), below the outer story (“I want to explore this memory, character, or idea”), to some subconscious, undercurrent of longing.  Our stake is always found in our emotional relationship to the subject matter.  Without some connection to our content, we might convey the content to a reader but we’ve no reason to explore it.  And passionate exploration is what makes writing great. What’s in question?  What are you risking?  What of your heart have you invested?  A writer’s…

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A critical but usually unspoken component to writing well is the quality of the human being who writes.  Is he or she smart?  Thoughtful?  Curious?  Provocative?  Original?  Has he or she done emotional research to undergird the story?  “Living a conscious and reflective life is a prerequisite for writing a memoir of substance,” writes Judith Barrington.   Likewise with poetry and fiction.  The written word may be wiser than the human who wrote it, but never by much. Writing classes don’t address these questions, for good reason; little can be done in a school setting to address a student’s basic nature.  Perhaps when writing teachers despair of ever being effective, this is why.  Unfortunately, many writing teachers shy away from teaching revision as a result.  Creating writing prompts is easier than helping writers to jettison egos, generate new narrative structures, and discover the emotional undercurrents that will become unifying themes. But…

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I’m a tender-hearted gardener.  When last year’s cherry tomatoes reseed themselves, I don’t have the heart to pull them out.  And so I end up with an abundance of late-ripening cherry tomatoes.  What to do?  Make tomato sauce.  But cherry tomatoes are a hassle to peal, even after blanching, so I choose the lazy route, slice them with skins on and throw them in the pot.  The resulting tomato sauce is tasty, but a bit watery and swimming with skins. The process by which we create something helps shape the final product.  Our exuberance, laziness, playfulness, discipline, patience, bull-headedness, kindness, skill, and all the other qualities we bring to the writing process play a part in the text we finally create.  Just as my choice to give the cherry tomatoes room in the garden rather than planting good saucing Romas contributes to the quality of my spaghetti sauce, each choice…

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In Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, she writes: The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in the void.  The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom—or rather the movement toward it—that counts. The world—the context within which the author’s life plays out—must show up in our story as well, and this inclusion requires memoirists to “move toward wisdom”, or, as I would put it, draw connections between one’s private life and the human experience.  The connections are both inherent in the lived experience as well as created in the writing experience.  Gornick goes on to say: A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will…

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If we show up in our stories as a character, our memoirs are stronger.  Why?  A reader entering a story needs shoes to walk around in and a pair of lenses to see through.  We are embodied creatures.  Even in the two-dimensional world of language, we need bodies or, at the very least, personality.  Every reader of creative nonfiction is aware of the author lurking behind the story and brings to reading the expectation that the author will appear, either as character or narrator.  Graham Swift wrote this about his fiction:  “I favor the first person.  One reason I do so is that I do not want simply to tell, out of the blue, a story.  I want to show the pressure and need for its telling—I am as interested in the narrator as in the narrative.  I want to explore the urgency of the relation between the two.” Swift’s…

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