Making a Literary Life Friday: Slap Dash Dishing

Allison Winn Scotch sold the movie rights to her yet-to-be released novel, Time of My Life. Jennifer McMahon's novel, Island of Lost Girls is a New York Times bestseller. Tish Cohen sold television rights to her middle grade novel The Invisible Rules of the Zoe Lama. Brava to all!

Okay, okay, so we all don't have that kind of news to share -- yet -- but something good must have happened in our literary lives this week. Maybe we wrote a magnificent sentence or our protagonist's most important relationship became crystalline or we can feel the mojo when we sit down to write, you know, that elusive flow. Whatever your good news is, we want to celebrate with you.

Lisa Marnell
My WIP finally makes sense. Odd revelation, perhaps, but there you have it. I'm thrilled!

Amy MacKinnon
I deleted two chapters from my WIP that completely stalled the flow and now I know where I'm going. What an enormous relief. Also, TETHERED is at BEA this weekend (in the light box? which I hear is a good thing) and now I'm waiting for feedback. If anyone reading this is there in LA and is kind enough to snap a picture of the Crown table with my book there, I would be eternally grateful.

Hannah Roveto
The end is in sight, is all I can say. I know the Group will have comments, but the ticket to agent city is dropping from the air like a feather over my head, wafting this way and that, most important, ever-downward. I can see it, just about reach up and grab it. Time to both polish my writing and to review that Dream Agent List I made months ago. (Wasn't there a useful post this week on that very subject?!)

Lynne Griffin
I finished a first draft of my second novel, and then, knowing the story in its entirety, I reworked the first chapter. Now the work of revising and rewriting begins. I love this part of the process. More on a great model for revision in next week's post.

As for LIFE WITHOUT SUMMER, I got to see the proposed interior design this week. What a rush it is to see my words formatted in book layout. It starts to make the whole thing real.

Write In Tune

by Hannah

I read and reread the Essay in the New York Times Book Review this Sunday, in which Haruki Murakami talks about becoming a writer and the influence of jazz.

"Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have a good, natural, steady rhythm... Next comes melody -- which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of words to match the thythm." He says his style is as deeply influenced by Charlie Parker as F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Miles Davis, by Thelonious Monk.

When I write, I prefer silence, or indeed, jazz. I can listen to U2, of all bands, as long as I don't pay attention to the lyrics, letting sound flow in the background. (My daughter, peeking over my shoulder, asked why I don't mention The Who, her favorite band. There, I did, but I can't write to them.) I like complicated music when I write, if I listen at all, but it needs to be on low and it needs to be such that I can choose not to pay attention to its complexity, instead allowing the whole to wash over me.

When I am not writing, I still love jazz and blues and rock. And folk. And classical. I like music played by the person who wrote it. Take the rock genre alone. I love James Taylor and Bonnie Raitt. I love John Mayer and Aerosmith, The Who, KT Tunstall, Miles Davis, Dixie Chicks, Tom Petty, David Bowie, The Beatles, Brian Wilson, Annie Lennox, Bob Dylan, the Fray, Dave Matthews, Stevie Nicks and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I love musicians who string together more than notes, adding in the poetry of lyrics.

I once thought that if you wanted to teach children who "hate to write" to write, you would sit them down and ask what is on their iPods. What are the songs? What do they say? Write them out on a chalkboard or SmartBoard or a roll of poster paper. Wrap the room in words they love. Then you could throw in a poem, not letting them know it didn't come with a melody. Then slide in a short story. Use music to show them their world is filled with writers and words, tell them anyone can put them together, one by one. Ask them to write a line, to arrange words to match the rhythm of their lives, then to keep that rhythm steady, to keep it going. Just keep going.

Slow Down

Posted by Lynne

All my life I've been called fast. Oh no, not in that way. I mean finishing work in record time. Rushing to get here, there and everywhere. I'm afraid I've never been referred to as easy-going. Perhaps it's a cosmic lesson in patience that I should enter the world of writing and publishing. Here, everyone is required to slow down.

Prior to spending every stolen moment writing, I read. I devoured three or four books a week; books in almost all genres. Since I started writing non-fiction parenting books, a novel, blog posts and now freelance magazine pieces, I've spent less time reading. The reality, that there aren't enough hours in the day, is a sad one.

Recently, friend of our blog, Therese Fowler published a list of must reads on her blog. Though I could proudly say I'd read more than fifty percent of her suggestions, I couldn't say the same for Jane Smiley's list. In Smiley's, Thirteen Ways to Look at a Novel, she includes her one hundred and one suggested must-reads. Here I came in at a shabby fifteen percent. I admit I felt like a bit of a fraud as a writer. I haven't yet made time to read Toni Morrison's Beloved or Nabokov's Lolita.

I've been a tad overwhelmed of late with all the wonderful books I want to read, but struggle to find the time to read. And then I picked up a copy of a book Amy recommended last week. Francine Prose, author of Reading Like A Writer, gave me hope.

While Prose also includes a list of Books to be Read Immediately, she gives writers permission to perform what she calls a *close read*.

With so much reading ahead of you the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it's essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious, but oddly under appreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint... we lose sight of the fact that words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

I'm certain I will always be a person for whom there are so many books, so little time. My I-haven't-read-it-yet shelf will always be burgeoning. Still it's nice to know that dipping into a classic to study the way a writer chose to handle a certain type of conflict is recommended. Or that reading a beloved book aloud is time well-spent. It's freeing. Permission to slow down has been granted. In fact, it's encouraged.

I love reading like a writer. Like at a banquet of desserts, I don't need to eat every cake. I simply need to savor each delicious bite I take.

Sing

By Amy

Many of you know I read the fiction slush pile for Post Road. It’s a wonderful literary journal that’s published some memorable short stories, my favorite among them being those of Tom Perrotta, Paul Yoon, and H. H. LeCraw, especially August by H. H. LeCraw. I promise that in years to come you’ll find yourself stilled in unguarded moments, wondering about the old man holding the baby fast to his chest as they nap.

The editor sends the submissions in bunches and, for the most part, I read them in their entirety. A very few are written for simple shock value and don’t warrant more than a single page of a reader’s attention. Most are fine. Just fine. And then there are those that sing with the first line, where the writing has been given a voice, infused with a particular tone, a rhythm that cradles and lulls the reader.

Voice is what gives life to your writing. It’s a tone that’s struck from page one and the good writers are capable of maintaining it through to the end. In Jon Clinch’s Finn, his first line is all you need to understand his voice: "Under a low sun, pursued by fish and mounted by crows and veiled in a loud languid swarm of bluebottle flies, the body comes down the river like deadfall stripped clean." His voice is languid, melodic, ever so slightly menacing, thunder on the horizon on a sweltering summer’s day.

Voice calls to life your writing. If structure and plot are the bones of the story, characters the flesh, then voice is the soul a writer breathes into it all to make it come alive.

How does one find one’s voice? I don’t know how others do, for me it was through essays. I wrote of the most personal experiences of my life, stories about miscarriage and war, postpartum depression and hope. My first attempt at writing a book, I admit to copying other voices, an amalgam of successful authors. It was fine, just fine, but it wasn’t my voice. It failed, but I kept trying.

I started a second book and sent off a very rough first chapter to a friend, an avid reader, but not someone familiar with writing or any of its terms. After she read it, she replied with a one line email, one I’ve saved to this day, “You’ve found your voice!” She had no idea that voice is a craft designation, she knew only that I was writing in a manner that was wholly my own.

I suppose a writer’s voice is what springs from our cores, if only we would listen, the one that speaks from that thoughtful place within each of us. The next time you find yourself stilled in one of those unguarded moments, after your thoughts turn over the old man and his grandson, take a moment and listen, really listen to that voice inside of you. Can you hear it murmur? It’s whispering now. Listen. There. Do you recognize that tone? Let it go, allow it to lull you. Feel it envelope the words, cradling them as the rhythm carries you away. Deep breath now. Ready? It’s time to sing.

The Music of Words

Posted by Lisa

Parts of New York City are similar to Montreal. Last weekend, the area near my hotel (the Hilton on 53rd Street) reminded me so much of the city where I grew up. Nothing in New York is the same as Montreal’s Old Port or the McGill Student Ghetto with their signature walk-up apartments with balconies. But some busy streets remind me of Crescent Street or Ste. Catherines. The chi-chi shops, the cave-like restaurant hideaways. And the idea, indeed much of the plot to some future novel came to me. With it came memories: the smell of a Montreal metro – not unpleasant, but distinct, the icy blue of the Montreal sky in winter.

One of my characters in this imagined novel lives in rural Quebec. Having spent my teen years growing up in such a place, I know there’s a ‘feel’ to it, and French Canadian Folk Music brings it all back to me. I HATE to try to describe its sound as I won’t do it justice. It is fiddles and foot stomping and joie de vivre. It is midnight feasts on Christmas Eve. Spring parties with sap running and maple syrup bubbling and burning. It has the quickest beat.

In Sherry Ellis’s book, Now Write, novelist and Grub Street Creative Director, Christopher Castellani, describes an approach to writing wherein he listens to the music of the era: “It’s a quick and powerful path to the empathy you are always striving for as a writer. You imagine yourself as a character responding to the lyrics or the emotion of the music.”

Hear the music in Christopher’s prose (from A Kiss from Maddelena):

“Vito scanned the crowd: the girls in their sundresses rubbing their arms, the men counting and pooling their bills, Maddelena in a pack with Carolina and Ada and Fiorella. Her hair, unpinned and freed from the hat, lifted and fell onto her bare shoulders as she talked.”

As I work on my contemporary novel, set in New Hampshire, you can imagine the radio stations Rose, my protagonist, must endure as a passenger in her dad’s car. (Poor thing, she can’t afford an IPod). It’s unreal, to me, the power of music when I write. It takes me there, where I need to be.