Seeing from another's eyes

by Joan

Over the years the six of us have critiqued each other’s work in any number of combinations, depending on time commitments and type of critique sought, among other things. We’ve learned each other’s styles and strengths. As Kim said in an earlier post on our critique styles, “We are six very different people brought together by a mutual love of writing.” 

Over the past few months, Elizabeth and I have provided detailed feedback on our respective manuscripts. One night after a lengthy back and forth she emailed me this:

“I have to tell you, the irony of you telling me XXX needs fixed, and meanwhile I'm telling you XXX needs fixed is striking. Because we are saying the same thing pretty much about the other's MS--but in yours, it makes perfect sense to you, and in mine, it makes perfect sense to me. Had you noticed this too? :)”

Well, no, I hadn’t, until then. After drafts and revisions and rewrites and more revisions, it’s nearly impossible to be objective about your own work. Paragraphs flow in your head as if they were lyrics to a song and you hum and smile as you re-read for the sixtieth (at least) time, convinced no one could possibly find a clunky sentence. (Trust me, they will). It never occurred to me that my manuscript included the very things that trip me up in another’s work.

Along this same vein, we noticed how we differ in our reactions to plot points. I was completely convinced my character was in the wrong about a particular situation and wrote a scene with her apologizing profusely and trying to fix it, while Elizabeth couldn’t see anything wrong with my character's behavior and found the call for atonement odd. At the same time, I disagreed with one of her character’s actions while it seemed completely logical to her.

I perceive the world, and therefore fiction, from my own spyglass. My experiences, good and bad, have tinted the lens. Yours have done the same. Your view might not be the same as mine, but that doesn’t make it wrong. As a critique partner, I have a responsibility to recognize that my opinion is only that, my judgmental observation. That I need to widen that spyglass range to allow that other people don’t see the world or their lives as I do. 

Or, as the eloquent Elizabeth Berg wrote in The Pull of The Moon:

“I have wanted you to see out of my eyes so many times.” 

Poetry-minded

By Pamela

Tucked away in my dresser, behind a tangle of tights and scarves, is a book of poems I contributed to in high school. Some bear my byline; others I wrote for a boy in my class who was too stoned to write his own--my first foray into ghost-writing, I suppose. In college I took an advanced English class and wrote more poems, long since discarded as binding them into a book required more forethought than our professor possessed and, by that age, parents were hardly clamoring to discover what we were writing in class.

Old Barn by Mike on Flickr

Since then poetry has been that distant cousin--someone I seldom see but enjoy immensely when I do. And then Friday night, during Ron Rash's talk at the DMA, something clicked. After sharing his writing process and listing his published endeavors--novels, short story collections and books of poetry--he began to read from his book of short stories Nothing Gold Can Stay. "Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out" features two men in a barn, birthing a calf. Hardly the stuff of poets, but poetry it was:

The men sat on the barn floor, weary arms crossed on raised knees as they waited for the calf to gain its legs. Carson leaned his head on his forearms and closed his eyes. He listened as the calf's hooves scattered straw, the body lifting and falling back until it figured out the physics. Once it did, Carson raised his head and watched the calf's knees wobble but hold. The cow was soon up too. The calf nuzzled and found a teat, began to suckle. 

The cadence in his phrasing--made even more lyrical with Rash's southern lilt--brings a poetic quality to the story that might seem rote in someone else's less-capable hands. Later he read a scene from another story that followed a young girl as she got caught up in the rapids and drowned. While both captivating and heartbreaking, Rash later said he rewrote the scene, which sounded effortless, about 25 times.

One of my favorite authors is Elizabeth Berg, not because her stories are particularly spellbinding, in fact, I sometimes confuse one story for another, but because her gift of language in describing an ordinary scene (particularly those with dialog) is poetic. Case in point, here's one of her recent posts on Facebook:

It is my habit, most mornings, to come into the living room with my first cup of coffee, to sit on the sofa and read a poem and then hold still, waiting for gratitude. It always comes, when I make space in the day for it. And I am reminded then of the beauty we enjoy despite the despair we endure. So as the sky lightens and a new day offers itself for consideration, I sip coffee and notice small things: a bird on a wire. A sky the color of weak tea, if tea were blue. The space beneath a table. The trumpetish formation of the petals on a miniature daffodil plant.
This accumulation of small, gentle things acts as counterpoint to the insults of yesterday: an account in the paper of child abuse, the worsening effects of climate change, Putin’s bullying; the invention of a watch/computer to serve as “companion” to your smart phone, first incarnation already obsolete. I sit in the quiet living room and watch the birds and the day breaking and rid myself of those other things as though they were burrs at my hem. I leave them lying there. I can’t destroy them, but I can leave them lying there while I go into the kitchen for cinnamon toast, the slices as thick as a small town phone book. And then, body and spirit buoyed up, I can come back and stand before them, hands on my hips, and consider what to do.

Her comment about starting most days with reading poetry wasn't lost on me. Surely her work is influenced by the reading of poetry just as Rash's work is buoyed by the fact that he is a poet who also writes novels and short stories. And so my goal is now to immerse myself in poetry. To lend my ear to the rhythm of the words and phrasing. Susan recommended I start with:

• Mary Oliver
• Good Poems, an anthology edited by Garrison Keillor
• "Aimless Love" by Billy Collins, a poet laureate
• Natasha Trethewey
• Frank X Walker, poet and editor of Pluck!, the journal of Affrilachian arts and culture 
• Maurice Manning, Kentucky poet and educator
• Sylvia Plath

Serendipitously, April is NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), and so we have less than a week to organize our thoughts and jump in with this to stretch our imaginations and see if we can write a poem a day. If that feels too ambitious, at least READ a poem each day, perhaps commit a favorite one to memory. I know I'm on board. Care to join me?

Escaping into the familiar

By Julie

Photo credit: CaptPiper's Flickr photo stream by Creative Commons License

Last night, I disregarded the half-finished library book waiting on my nightstand. (Peace Like a River by Leif Enger.)

I disregarded the other books teetering beneath that one in my to-be-read pile. Ones I eagerly purchased and really can’t wait to read—but not today. (No One is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel, for instance.)

I ignored Catching Fire, the second book in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, which has been queued up on my Nook for a few weeks now. (Series books make me nervous.)

I even turned away from several unread novels written by close friends—ones I know I’ll enjoy immensely not only because I know the authors, but because I know they’ll be good; I’ve read the reviews!

Instead, I scanned my local library’s holdings of available e-books in search of something. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was I searched for, but when I saw this story waiting, I thought, “Yes. That’s the one.”

And today, as I turned to the familiar comfort of this newest Elizabeth Berg novel—Once Upon a Time, There Was You—and I touched my phone screen to flip through page after page after page while I did my daily walk (yes, I am that talented), I nodded and thought again, “Yes.”

Occasionally I read to discover what made a book so revered it won coveted prizes and drew the attention of Oprah Winfrey.

Sometimes I read to learn about yet another instance where humans were capable of incomprehensible horror and humans were capable of unbelievable hope.

Very often, these days, I read to learn what’s on the publishing horizon or what’s trending or what’s grabbing the attention of social media mavens.

Even more often, I buy books and read them in support of authors I’ve come to know online nearly as well as many friends I know in person.

And these are all fine reasons, and inevitably, I enjoy the majority of these books and am grateful for the experience. I’m more knowledgeable, more compassionate, more aware.

But sometimes, I simply need to revel in the familiar. I need to read a book by one of my favorite authors for all time, someone like Elizabeth Berg. Someone who seems to be able to take the contents of my mind and channel them directly onto the page. I read and I nod and I think, “How did she know that?” and “Exactly!”

The last week or so (well, much longer than that if you want to get technical) has been especially sad and depressing from a media standpoint. I’m not going into details there. You know. And I am that person who spends hours and hours poring over news articles and opinion pieces, truly attempting to see issues from all sides, trying to develop an educated perspective as opposed to whatever perspective the media is feeding me. This can be a little exhausting, and I do get to the point where, in my exhaustion, I simply have to withdraw for a time. Withdrawal, for me, often means seeking reading material that not only replaces what I’m avoiding, but re-centers me.

And I thank authors like Elizabeth Berg for writing stories like this one, for recording the thoughts she somehow clairvoyantly withdraws from my mind. The things she says for me. The reminders that we are all human, in spite of our seemingly impossible-to-overcome differences of opinion. We all age. We all have insecurities. We all mess up. We all love desperately. We all love foolishly. We all cry. We all laugh. We all get scared. We all are what we are.

Once Upon a Time, There Was You drew me humbly back to a love for humanity.

That’s why I needed to read today.

Deliver

by Joan

Recently Pamela blogged about beginnings. Also recently I was talking with Susan about endings. I’ve been critiquing her manuscript, The Angels’ Share, and she made a comment about not being entirely certain how the story was going to end, even though she was very close to being finished. It got me thinking about the promises writers make to readers, and how we’ve all read books that started out beautifully and didn’t end up where we thought they would or, rather, where we thought they should. Just as every book doesn’t grab every reader, it’s hard to please all readers once you’ve nabbed them at the beginning!

I told Susan I’d changed the conclusion to The Bodley Girl at least four times and, even though The Architect at Highgate is 99 percent finished, I’m still tweaking the last scene. I advised her to play around with a few possible endings, by writing down several alternatives to see if one spoke to her more than the others.


I recently finished Elizabeth Berg’s Dream When You’re Feeling Blue. I enjoyed the book, a WWII-era story featuring three very different sisters, who embark on letter-writing campaigns to soldiers, including two of their recently-deployed fiancés. Berg weaves the tight narrative with touching emotion and believable wartime observation. It was a fast read and when I breezed toward the end, I did a double take at the twist. The story forwarded about thirty years, which was a little unexpected in itself. But I hadn't anticipated the outcome, filled with sacrifice and love. There were subtle hints along the way that I later recognized as key. Not liking my endings pink and neatly-tied, the more I thought about it, the more I liked the conclusion. There might have been other ways to end the book, maybe Berg wrote a list of her own possibilities, but this one felt perfect.

At the conclusion of the 944-page Crimson Petal and the White, Michel Faber’s bawdy Victorian tale of love, lust, greed, and sorrow, I actually thought the dance stopped too abruptly and wondered why he’d jilted free the reader. There again, after some contemplation, I wondered how I would have ended it differently? Here I am, years later, pondering the story. And I haven't even mentioned Sarah Waters’ Little Stranger and Poppy Adams’ Sister! I’m still reeling from those endings!

Just as beginnings must entice the reader into a long and winding dance, endings must release the reader, satiated and somewhat spinning. As writers, we need to deliver what we’ve promised, whether it be a ballet, hip-hop, salsa or, yes, the twist.

A perfectly crafted last line can sear a book into our memory. Here’s a list, originally from the American Book Review.

And from the lovely novel, The Distant Hours, by Kate Morton (who will in two weeks stop by WWW!):

“The door closes behind her, leaving the ghostly lovers alone once more in the quiet and the warm.”

If you have a favorite ending or last line, tell us about it.