Twice again Writers Digest has published entertaining and useful books. Their 2007, A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words: image driven prompts and exercises for writers by Phillis Sexton – photos by Tricia Bateman and Bonnie Trenga’s 2006 The Curious Case of Misplaced Modifiers: How to Solve the Mysteries of Weak Writing.

Sexton structured A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words by which section of the story he designed the prompts to aid: beginnings, description, character, dialogue, emotions, ending, and story starters. Each chapter begins with an explanation as does each prompt. It will work even better to explode blockages and help with existing projects than as an idea mine. You’ll find tips on how to get the most out of each exercise in the introduction and later in the book. These are not ten minute prompts to begin a circle. The recommendation is to set a minimum length of 1000 words for each exercise (about two pages.)

According to the back cover of The Curious Case of Misplaced Modifiers, “Most people think that good grammar leads to good writing. But the truth is that while good writing may be technically correct, it’s also strong, concise, and specific.” Trenga identifies the seven writing weaknesses that editors [and today’s plethora of inept professional proofreaders] face the most. It’s written in a humorous mock police procedural style. Like Lynn Truss’ Eats Shoots and Leaves it’s a lively written adventure suitable for the grammar police as well as those of us who plague them.

I hoped for a recommendation.  Instead I got sent back to my word processor.  After my initial despair, I feel lucky that this happened now, and not after I queried an agent.  Read more about my experience–and maybe you have a similar experience?– on getting a first book published.

The other day, I drove through B. K. Lounge (aka Burger King.) The route through the congested parking lot took me past double parked vehicles and through a short wooded path before viewing the needed window. As I pulled away from the cars, a strange sensation swaddled me. Though the path was clearly a paved driveway with small, square curbs, the trees rising up on both sides had transported me back more than four decades. “Riverview” flashed through my brain.

Riverview was the premier amusement park in Chicago when I was a kid. Which ride? I couldn’t say – either Shoot the Chutes or the Tunnel of Love. Yes, preteens did ride the Tunnel of Love with their fathers in those days. It was a respite from the heat and the noise. Both water rides, though the latter were less revving, cooled the riders off even before they reached the main function. (Okay, argue with me. Most people rode the Tunnel of Love to get revved.) The long (or short ) benched boats floated with equal purpose and leisure through winding canals before plunging you into darkness. Then, the Chutes sent you rollicking down a waterlogged roller coaster while the Tunnel . . . Well, you get the picture.

Needless to say, the burger and fries were an anticlimax.

That momentary time-travel was a gift. How easy it is to forget the importance of sensory memory. Recently, I’ve tended to get bogged down in the story’s present. Sensory writing realized the transient ether: the loud party sounds emanating from the next hotel room at 2am, the smell of frying chicken, the taste of gasoline in the air. The air’s touch of autumn humidity accompanied by the aroma of the first day of school had long been hibernating. The perspective of why the sight sound, taste or smell had meaning was lost in the stresses and frustrations of life and revision. Character was a function of twitches and slung-snot rather than the result of a lived life.

Take it from me, that’s a particularly dangerous place for a writer to be stuck.

From the visionary poet and literary organizer Marilyn Nelson came this note across our Facebook transom, answering some friends who had inquired about her latest book. Posted here with her permission.

(Status Line): Marilyn Nelson received emailed sketches today by the San (“Bushman”) artists in Botswana who are illustrating one of her forthcoming books!

Story is this: Abba Jacob and I went to Botswana about 5 years ago to try to figure out how, in some small way, we could help the San. Encountered an NGO that’s working with them by, among other things, encouraging them to paint (the picture on my profile is some of their work, seen on our second trip to their world). I came home and wrote a little picture-book text to be the vehicle for some of their art. Made arrangements with publisher that all proceeds — advance and royalties — will go to the NGO and the San artists. It’s taken a looooooooong time to communicate everything across the distance, make contracts, etc., but finally! The book is called “Ostrich and Lark.” Looks like it may be out in 2010. Looks like it will be spectacular!

Triolets for Triolet, which Curbstone Press put together for me, all proceeds going to a Creole village in Mauritius which had been torched in racist violence. (though Triolets — the text is reprinted in my book, The Cachoeira Tales — didn’t make a lot of $$, of course. But Ostrich and Lark is a picture-book for children, and I’ve achieved some success in that market, so it will earn more. Writing poetry books to make $$ for other people is as much a fool’s game as writing poetry books to make $$ for oneself! )

Note from Glenda: It would be impossible for me to say how much I admire her. That she is an acclaimed poet, yet still focuses on what needs doing for others, burnishes everything she touches. Among her many other gifts to us, Marilyn supports and heads Soul Mountain Retreat for writers.

Find out about it here:
http://www.soulmountainretreat.org/
Learm more about Marilyn here:
http://www.soulmountainretreat.org/marilyn_nelson.html

What is an endorsement? Who do you ask for one?  How do you meet these people to ask them for an endorsement?  How do you ask them for an endorsement?  What was asking a really important person for an endorsement like?  Do I really have to ask people for endorsements myself?

The short answer to the last question is Yes–or you can ask a mutual friend to ask them for you.   I blog about the answers to the other questions on my continuing blog, “Getting a First Book Published.”

As a reader of  “See Jane Write,” you might be interested in experiencing (or re-experiencing) the lessons and effort required to get a   a first book published.  I am in the middle of trying to get my memoir published–Groundbreaker:  Coming of Age in the First Class of Women at the United States Air Force Academy. I blog about everything I do and learn along the way at my own wordpress account.

My latest blog discusses The Book Proposal–and how it is as time consuming as writing the sample chapters.  Please check it out at “The Official Blog of — Anne Martin Fletcher.” Then let me know what you think.  Do you agree with me or was your experience different?  Are you new to writing and have a question about book  proposals?  Please sign into wordpress and let me know.  Happy Writing!

Anne Martin Fletcher

Karen Salyer McElmurray

The Motel of the Stars

“Memoir,” as writer Patrica Hampl says, “seeks a permanent home for feeling and image, a habitation where they can live together.”  I wrote a memoir, one about finding my son, surrendered to adoption over thirty years ago, and I without a doubt sought feeling, sought expression via imagery of a loss I had not yet explored.  Writing that memoir took me to a center in myself and thus, I believe, to a crossroads with what I want from writing itseslf.  When I turned again to fiction writing in the form of a new novel, I’ve discovered truer characters, places, scenes.  Fiction and nonfiction, for me, must both drink from the Twin Rivers of joy and of sorrow, and that is truth I must keep discovering.  What I’m interested in more and more is a kind writing that reaches beyond the strict definitions of genre–novel, short story, poem, memoir.  As Hampl says, I want habitation–a place where the center and its translation, regardless of form–is the thing that counts.”

Karen Salyer McElmurray, Assistant Professor of English at Georgia College and State University, teaches Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Prose Form & Theory, and other creative writing courses. She advises The Peacock’s Feet, the student undergraduate magazine, and is Creative Nonfiction Editor for Arts and Letters.  Her newest novel, The Motel of the Stars, is a tour de force of imagination, moving her characters  from the mountains of Nepal to the Sedona desert, to the sacred space of Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina, without a whiff of vertigo, but with a great deal of thoughtful exploration about what happens when we let loss determine our path. Her work is brave and divinatory. Order it, or ask your local library to buy a copy.

Judy raises the issue of health problems and how they affect our writing.

I have fibromyalgia, too, and a host of other  problems from two back-to-back auto accidents, involving damaged nerve  roots in my spine and crushed discs. I have such severe food allergies  that I am frequently in trouble in various grisly gastrointestinal  ways. Including right now. I spent all day Friday in the emergency  room doing things I don’t want to mention, and have a week full of
doctors to come. So I’m not producing much right now but editing.

Do I always feel like writing? Heck, no! Sometimes I don’t write for
several weeks, and sometimes I don’t produce much for months. I might
post something on my blog or jot notes, but can’t seem to really get
disciplined. Usually that’s when I travel–get out and experience
something new, do some research, just follow my nose. If nothing is
calling to me from my desk, I just go see what might call me from out
there. Sometimes that’’s reading journals or online publications to
see what interests me in topics or tones or ideas. Or, I get really
pissed off about something and want to take the root cause apart and
see what’s there. In the winter, I do not write much because I have a
harder time, healthwise.

The urge to really dig in and move words around on paper alway comes
back to me, eventually, though. Usually, I get intrigued about trying
something new, a new form, or a new sensibility. Or it occurs to me
that something I’ve been rolling around in my head for a while is
actually a story, a poem, an essay, or a novel idea–something I know
how to handle.

It has been very interesting having a two-year novel seminar and
deadlines, deadlines, deadlines, imposed by someone else. It has
forced me to write through my laziness and pain and my reluctance to
tackle certain material.

I think writing groups help you keep your motivation up; at least, it
does for me, and I have noted it works that way for some others. The Jane Writing Circles are powerful motivators!  (If you haven’t joined one yet, email me at janesstories@mac.com and we’ll set you up.)

As a  teacher, I have observed that sometimes when we have writing blocks
it’s because there’s some tough material that’s too close to home that
we are reluctant to air, even to ourselves.

It nearly killed me to kill off a favorite character and to delve into
the effect on her family; I had to force myself to sit in the chair
for hours doing nothing unless I put some words down. It brought out
feelings of grief for my mother, for a dear friend, and also for
another friend who was dying of cancer even as I was writing the death
scene. He died while I was in Louisville working on my novel, and that
was a tough night.

One of the things I do is write dialogues with my favorite writers to
see what I have to add to a conversation they started. That usually
gets me moving into a story. Haven’t done it with poets, though
sometimes I will read everything I can find by a favorite poet until
the ideas start bubbling up.

I am not writing too much these days and I have a boxful of excuses for why this is not happening.  Though, I am doing something really necessary to improve myself as a writer.  I am reading some old classics suggested by my sister who is a published writer and journalist. ( See, here’s another excuse for not writing these days. She writes so well, so why should I even bother?) I finished reading Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe and Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. I will post something on them later but I would like to focus on George Eliot’s  Middlemarch to comment on a 19th century women writer.

I was interested to learn why the author changed her name to be more like a man’s . I have read several commentaries on that. Mary Ann Evans Cross was born almost two hundred years ago in England.  She started out as a devout religious woman and later broke from the church. At the age of sixteen she started to expand her knowledge and embarked on a program of intellectual growth.   Imagine that! Tongues must have wagged about this uppity woman in Victorian England. When she started writing in earnest, she changed her name to George Eliot so she could be published more easily, knowing full well that women writers were not given much value and their writings were not considered important enough to publish.

Middlemarch was her eighth novel and is considered to be one of her best novels. I have not read her other works apart from condensed versions as a child, but I have to say that I loved this book. Do you know the wonderful feeling that lingers when you finish a good book? You don’t want it to end and you start imagining what would happen to the characters after the writer finishes with them! You start re-reading passages that were beautiful and ageless. You do your chores in a daze and drive your family crazy talking about the book.

Victorian society is so well-laid out for all of us who only know about it through books and movies.  Her character portrayals are superb.  But I enjoyed how she describes and fleshes out her women characters.  The blonde, beautiful,wealthy Rosamond is poised , polished and well behaved , but right in the beginning you see character flaws. Mary, who is plain, of modest means and hard working shows great strength of character and intelligence.  Beauty does not have to go with brains and women like that are admired and appreciated.   Woe to those women like Mary who have a brain! A smart woman in those times required a lot of prudence, wit and careful planning. I thought  of  Elizabeth the first who had to rule England and be respected and obeyed as a ruler. Did she become a Virgin Queen and look’ manly’ to be taken seriously? What about the young servant girl in the fictionalized version of the great Dutch artist Vermeer’s life and times  in The girl with the pearl earring? If you have not read it, find out how a poor,good looking, intelligent woman  manages to protect herself to remain ‘respectable’.

I still think we have a long way to go as women and as  writers. Women are still objectified and are trivialized.  We hope organizations like Janesstories Press will encourage women to write and express themselves openly. And I  feel women in books and writers like George Eliot have paved the way for us to be creative and plod on fearlessly. Which means that I better stop my reading for awhile and get back to some writing.

Jane’s Stories Press Foundation is co-sponsoring the Other Words Writing Conference with the Florida Literary Arts Council (FLAC). The conference will be held in Paradise–er–I mean St Augustine, FL, from Friday, 6 November until noon on Sunday, 8 November.

Jane’s Stories will staff a table at the associated bookfair all day Saturday. We will also be presenting two of the Saturday seminars and one workshop on Sunday.

In addition to the events above, we will be hosting a Jane’s Writing Adventure on Friday afternoon, before the official conference registration. Our adventure will combine tourism and writing in historic St. Augustine.

Please stay tuned for more information. In the meantime, mark your calendars and make travel plans!

Anne