826 Valencia: Where Aspiring Pirates Can Write

What kid doesn't love pirates, space travel, robots, Big Foot, and superheroes? When you walk into one of the storefronts for the "826" writing centers in SF, NYC, LA, Chicago, Boston, Ann Arbor or Seattle, you can size up for a pirate's peg leg or a superhero cape. Then peek behind the supply stores where children gather to write.

Founded in 2002 by Dave Eggers, the original 826 Valencia offers innovative community outreach for neighborhood school kids to benefit from on-site tutoring, student publishing, field trips, in-school volunteers, workshops and scholarships. Watch this video about the Young Author's Book Project to see how 826 can help young people "explore their love of writing... and better express their ideas through the written word."

Revision

A teacher I once had compared writing to building or working with clay: you can only begin assembling when you have all the pieces. You can’t sculpt until all your material is on the table. “First drafts are for learning what your story or novel is about,” writes Stephen Koch in his book The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop. “Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge or enhance an idea, to re-form it.” 

So how exactly does one revise? Koch suggests taking some time off from the first draft. Then, he says, do the following:

Inhabiting Your Characters

Last month I attended a workshop by B. Lynn Goodwin, who helped us to inhabit a character by putting ourselves in his/her shoes - literally. "Stand up and walk from your character," she instructed. "Notice how your character moves differently from you. Does s/he lead form the chin or the stomach or toes? How does s/he feel as s/he walks?"

Journaling about your character is another way to access who s/he is. After a free write we were instructed to ask questions of our character, or allow the character to ask questions of us, the writers. Then pick one question to expand upon.

Here's what I began with, followed by my questions and more free writing:

 My name is Azalea. Sometimes my grandma calls me Azel-ya, making it sound sloppy, and my mom gets mad. Then Mama says each syllable, crisp as a cracker without the peanut butter on top. I live with them on the second floor flat. Grandma picks me up from school and we take two buses across town, then walk the last few blocks home.

• How old is the girl?
• What happens to her (plot)?
• Who are the other characters?
• What does my world look like, inside and out?

Sometimes I skip. Past the corner store where Mr. Guthrie sweeps the front stoop in his white apron. Past the library lit up like a dollhouse at night, through windows cozy and warm. On lucky, days, Junior and Giana are playing hopscotch on the sidewalk, or picking up jacks with a bouncy ball. Then I race down the hall, zigzagging  with the crazy eight shapes on the old carpet, and burst into the room I share with Mama to grab the marbles I keep in the velvet drawstring bag beneath my bed. And its back outside before Mama calls out the window for suppertime.

 Dear Reader:
What characters are you rendering on the page? How do you make them come alive?

The First Draft

"Hard writing makes for good reading," said instructor Kirsten Valdez Quade in our final summer MFA lecture on the topic of revision. Valdez Quade referred to the myth of the inspired writer who churns out abundant pages in fits of fervor. “Be suspicious of writing easily,” she warned. “Approach writing, and especially revision (the bulk of it), as work.”

While writing a first draft requires getting the ideas down in some semblance of order, “what may resemble a story is often just the skeleton,” Valdez Quade said. She defined a first draft as an initial, but complete, piece -- from its beginning to its end -- whether a short story or a chapter from a book. 

Some people (and I envy them) can accomplish this task in one sitting, which requires quieting the critical mind and allowing the words to get down on the paper, messy as they may be. My style is to edit as I go, making it meticulously slow. What appears to be a first draft is actually the product of multiple mini-drafts. (In the old days these would be the balled up sheets of paper on the floor; now the process is guised by the delete function.)

Though both approaches serve a similar goal, one downside of my writing process is it tends to get bogged down in the details. Writing at the microscopic level may result in some finely shaped sentences or a series of vignettes, but it’s more challenging to see the story’s structure and allow it to unfold. That's where revision comes in... (See next week's post.)

Dear Reader:

How do you approach the first draft?

First Friday Author Feature: William Maxwell

William Maxwell, born in 1908, was fiction editor at the New Yorker for forty years. (He shaped the work of writers such as John Updike, who wrote about Maxwell for the magazine here.) He was also the author of six novels, as well short stories, a memoir and literary criticism. In 2008, the Library of America published a centennial two-volume collection of his work, eight years after he died.

Maxwell often wrote about small town America from the turn of the century, when the "unhurried" life of  horse and buggy left "time for brooding and thought... and time for telling stories." He claimed 75% of his subject matter came from his childhood memories.


In the following 1995 NPR interview with Terry Gross, Maxwell discusses the interior lives of characters -- what Gross refers to as "the territory of writers"). He distinguishes the inner life (a repetitious mirror) from the external one (involvement and activity) and speaks about writing, memory and old age. "Everything that's happened to me is there," he says. "It's a matter of unhooking it and bringing it out to the light."

Writing Contests

In this month's issue of WEND magazine, one of the contributor bios mentions being a SOLAS category award winner for 'Best Travel Writing.' It took me a moment to realize, "Hey, I've had one of those too!"

Winning contests can add to your authorial resume. Even better, they can get your work published in high profile places and pay big bucks (mine didn't) at the same time. The down side: Most contests require fees, though nominal.

A word of warning: If your winning piece is posted online, as mine was, it might be considered published when you submit it elsewhere. And then it's stuck in no-woman's-land.

Bonni Goldberg: Percolation, Revision & Going Public

Years ago I took an afternoon writing workshop with Bonni Goldberg, author of Beyond the Words and Room to Write. Goldberg listed three things that nourish and move writing forward: Percolation, Revision and Going Public. She said our creative flow is disrupted when obstacles arise in any of these three areas. Certainly every creative person has confronted 'writer's' block: the fears of failure (and sometimes success) that stop us in our tracks. Goldberg claimed that shifting perspective and examining our attitudes towards our writing can help restore alignment with our work.

She defined these characteristics and offered some suggestions for breaking through --

Writing Feedback

Three years ago, when I began a yearlong sabbatical from the 8-4 life of teaching to focus more intensively on writing, I hadn't anticipated the isolating task of self-disciplined study. 

Writing is primarily a solo endeavor. The words are our own. But most often our work thrives from the reflection of others during the painstaking process.

Learning to Write

I wrote the following passage sixteen years ago. I read it again this morning as I embark on my first writing assignment for the MFA. Somehow, remembering we all had to learn to read and write helps me step forward to cross another threshold.

"The little girl stands hesitantly at the threshold to the classroom. Peering in, she sees desks in rows. No more playing in the pretend house with the sink and stove and the plastic fruits. No more sitting in a circle on the carpet, wedged between her best friends while the teacher reads a story.

The girl knows that desks mean schoolwork, real work. Not like playing office, scribbling pages of important make-believe documents. In these desks there are real notebooks. She will have to learn to read and write real words and the pretending time is over.

But first they sculpt animals from papier-mache and print their hands in clay. When she learns to read it isn't all at once but slowly sounding words on the page, and the pretty books still have pictures. She likes using the big brown pencil, the way her fingers curl around it to form the letters in her name, to write her first short story about the bird with the broken wing that she cares for and sets free."

Gifted

The other day I brought an audio book by Anne Lamott to my day job for a colleague to listen to. Remarking on the author's accessibility through a mix of self-deprecating humor and just saying it like it is, I wondered aloud if Lamott mulls over every turn of phrase or if sometimes the words just come. 
 

 
"Oh, writers like her have a gift," my colleague responded. 

The implication was that by virtue of being bestowed with brilliance, authors and poets simply channel their passion to the page. No real striving required. Lamott, herself, disagrees. In her how-to-get-off-your-tuchas-and-write classic, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, she says:

First Friday Author Feature: Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott was a daydreamer in school. "It's how novels get started: You wonder," she said during a reading at my local independent bookstore last month. On tour to promote her eighth novel, Imperfect Birds, the third in a trilogy including Rosie and Crooked Little Heart, Lamott spoke to a packed room about "how we come through our survivable losses" -- substance abuse, perfectionism, adolescence -- and how these themes infuse her stories.

Writing Fiction from Life

In an SSU extended education class by Daniel Coshnear called Fiction From Life, a primary question was: Why write fiction?

Coshnear illuminated the distinguishing characteristics of fiction as follows:

1. Fictional stories create distance from the personal that nonfiction stories can't.
2. Though "untrue", fiction can reflect a broader truth.
3. Fiction frees the writer from telling what 'really' happened, and protects the innocence of others (including oneself). 
4. Fiction offers more creative license. You can embellish a story where memory fails. You can create your fantasy dialogue or change endings you wish existed.
5. You have access to fictional characters & the imagination that you often can't get with real people or places.

Sustaining a Life as an Artist

"You need to figure out what kind of life you need in order to sustain your art," said fiction writer Thaisa Frank last Saturday at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

The college offers an MFA in Writing and Consciousness - one of three graduate programs I was recently accepted into. Frank spoke on a panel of four local writers and artists to a room full of eager students, many of them from the adjoining Creative Inquiry/Interdisciplinary Arts program. My good friend -- taiko performer, visual artist and blogger Yurika Chiba (art here) -- also attended the event, called 'Sustaining a Life as an Artist'.

Inner Critic

Last night, while still tinkering with the grad school statements, I couldn't get far without my inner critic interrupting. Peering over my shoulder, she whispered insidiously -- almost convincing me that the effort was futile: "I don't know what I'm doing. This piece is no good. No school will accept me."

When I stated this aloud in the midst of a wee tantrum, my partner simply replied, "You're just trying to convince yourself that you're not ready for the rigors of graduate study. But you are. Now get back to work." But I couldn't type one word in without that nasty critic beating me down.

I keep this humorous card from a former forth grade student on my desk. Maybe every reward comes with a mutated flower.

Mucking Around

Annie Dillard writes, in her essay To Fashion a Text, "It's a privilege to muck around in sentences all morning." Each morning before (paid) work, I open the laptop for 2 hours to wade through the muck. Sometimes the words flow and constructing sentences is a pleasure. 

It can be difficult to click 'shut down' and prepare for the 15-minute drive down the backcountry road, past the sheep fields and old farms, to the school where toddlers hold up their arms to be held. Most days I have to remind myself that it is, indeed, a privilege to write. But that knowledge doesn't make the task any easier.

Writing Materials

"If I waited for perfection I would never write a word." --Margaret Atwood

In high school I'd fall asleep to the thundering of my mother's hands as I listened to her type her master's English thesis late into the night in the room above mine. Gone are the days of crinkled onionskin, which I pulled with a satisfying tug from the old typewriters we practiced on during 5th grade recess.

Today I played paper-pencil-pen in an effort to promote last week's new year goals. I bought a dry-erase calendar, an ascending file sorter, a few notebooks, highlighter pens, an array of colorful large paperclips. And more printer paper.

When I return from my birthday weekend on the coast I'll enjoy organizing my new desk supplies. Then formulating -- and sticking to -- the short-term goals (weekly, daily, hourly).

Still waiting for perfection...