The Upside of Down Time by Dawn Shamp

Dawn Shamp (left) and her class at Table Rock Writers Workshop in 2010

Maybe you’ve seen that greeting card of a befuddled-looking mastiff with his head quirked between his owner’s bowed legs? The one with the Ashleigh Brilliant quote, “My life has a superb cast, but I can’t figure out the plot.”

Well, he’s not the only one. Besides writing this summer, much of what I’ve created has taken place in my head. Which, I suppose, is another way of saying I’ve taken to loafing. Reading good fiction (long and short), dawdling around the house, and the occasional sitting in a stupor. I’ve become highly disciplined in all of it. The reason I bring it up is this. I’m working on a new novel, set on the cusp of WWII and told from multiple points of view. But my story reached a point recently that got the better of me (hence, the loafing).

This writing slump, or dry spell, whatever you would like to call it, usually happens when we start having doubts or second-guess what we’ve written. Does what I’ve devised, so far, make sense? Have I delved enough into my characters’ minds? Does each character’s actions serve a purpose and move the story forward? Are the words precise? Or (insert foul invective here) am I trying to chase a butterfly up a mountain? After a while you start to think that the writing won’t ever come back. But it does—it did! Loafing, as it turns out, provides a greater deal of stimulus than we might think. We need to put the … um … “smart” phone away. We need down time to be creative. Yes, even dawdling. Learn to appreciate crushing boredom.

Waiting for something to shake loose, I revisited a book on craft and gave myself a writing assignment. That refresher happened to be therapy. One simple exercise, and now all of my characters are fighting to get on with it. Oh, there are pages of action still to write—detailed events and conflicts—but I’m thinking now I might just have this “dry” thing licked. Like a mastiff’s chops, it’s all about flapping the tongue, assessing the surroundings, and getting on with the possibilities of search and rescue … or reading the messages of the day.

Dawn Shamp is teaching this fall at the Table Rock Writers Workshop, September 19-23.  Join us by visiting the website.

The Goal of Enchantment by Ed Southern

I’ve been thinking about ‘Making Up the Past’ since the fourth grade.  That year we studied North Carolina history, and my best friend Sam and I wrote a play about the Lost Colony.  We didn’t worry too much with the details of writing in the past; we would have had no idea what ‘anachronistic’ meant, if a critic had lobbed that charge.

Later that year, though, I wrote a story of my own about World War II fighter pilots.  As I was writing what was supposed to be the climax, an odd and unexpected thought crept into my head.  Without warning, the notion occurred to me that young men in the 1940s probably didn’t talk to each other the same way fourth-grade boys talked to each other on the playground.

Of course, having become and then been a young man, I now know that most young men in any era or circumstance talk to each other almost exactly as they talked to each other on the fourth-grade playground.  The vocabulary changes (not for the better, all in all), but the conversational essence stays about the same: “Watch this!”  “That’s nothing, watch this!”  “You suck.”  “No, you suck.”

Still, little fourth-grade Ed was onto something.  I was writing characters who spoke the same slang words my friends and I used, and somehow the writer in me knew that while some words are made to last, these words were transient, unstable, and would not have been used forty years before.

Many years later, I remember that early effort every time I write something set in the past.  Now I know about things like the Oxford English Dictionary, and how to find and study contemporary accounts of times and places.  I know how language can change, how the looping, discursive narratives of the early colonial era become the more rational, less artful descriptions of the Revolutionary era.

I’ve learned how just one or two ill-advised, inauthentic word choices can break the spell of a book.  One author, writing about NASCAR, described Dale Earnhardt as the governing body’s bête noir, and the crowds in the Darlington infield as hoi polloi.  Earnhardt may well have been NASCAR’s dark beast, but he sure was nobody’s bête noir; infield crowds usually are common people, but they are never hoi polloi.  That book lost more than a bit of its enchantment, and I lost a little respect for its author.

Keeping the reader enchanted is the goal of any story, whatever time or place it’s set in, and that has less to do with strict historical accuracy than with an unbroken sense of authenticity (only a miserable pedant would fault Shakespeare’s references to striking clocks in Julius Caesar) and good old-fashioned storytelling.  How do you achieve the two?  I can’t wait for the third week in September, when we’ll try to answer that question.

Ed Southern will be teaching “Making Up the Past (And Getting It Published)” at the Table Rock Writers Workshop, September 19-23, 2011.  For details, see http://tablerockwriters.com/instructors/instructors-southern.html

The Miraculous Gift of a Writing Community by Abigail DeWitt

The first time I wrote something I liked I was in college. I had a story due for a class and no story ideas. Normally, I had lots of ideas, a vivid fantasy of myself as a Great Solitary Writer, and endless energy to devote to the fine-tuning of my sentences. I was always disappointed with the results, but I refused to give up. This time, my mind was blank. I went to the library to keep from procrastinating and, with people all around me writing research papers and solving problem sets, I tried to come up with a story. Nothing.  I had no creative juices, just a deadline.

That’s all I remember until much later in the evening. Somehow—and this is the key thing: I had no idea how—I had written a story and I liked it. Thirty years later, I still like it. I can vaguely remember sitting at a desk, finishing it, but how I started, where the idea came from, is still a blank.

The next time I wrote something  I liked, I was in graduate school. Once again, the good writing came when I was frustrated and had nothing to say.  Two stories hardly make a pattern, but I was convinced: I could only write when I was so sick of the whole business that I was ready to give up. When my approach to the blank page was, “what the hell.”

Months later, a fellow student whose writing I loved told me she had finally figured out how to write a story. I had the feeling that she’d figured out a formula—not something that would result in formulaic stories, but some steps or rules to follow that would lead to truly good fiction every time. What’s odd is that I didn’t ask her what those steps were. I can hardly believe it—there I was, in striking distance (I thought) of the answer I’d been looking for for so long and all I said was, “Wow. That’s great.”

I understand now what was really going on when I thought, “What the hell.”  I know how to re-create those conditions whenever I want. In other words, I’ve learned how to write fiction. I can even teach it to other people.

But here’s another key thing: I know how to write in general, but I don’t know how to write my next novel. Every book has to be written in its own particular way, and the techniques I mastered when I was writing Lili were little help to me when I was writing Dogs. The only way to learn to write a novel is to write it, and then what you’ll know is how to write that novel. Which sounds exhausting and daunting—and would be, were it not for the great, miraculous gift of a writing community.

When I was in graduate school and I didn’t ask that woman what she’d learned, I still believed writing was a solitary art. Now I know that trusted readers are a writer’s greatest treasure. Judy Goldman and I regularly exchange manuscripts—she knows what my intention is with any given piece and she can tell me when I’m on the wrong track and when I’ve struck gold without realizing it.

What I finally learned about those “what the hell” moments was how to get out of my own way and write from the unconscious. What I’ve learned from having trusted readers is another kind of ego-dismissal. There are no Great Solitary Artists—we all write together, learning from the writers who went before us, from our friends, from our students.

Spring tonic: writing with accountability

We had a fabulous gathering of dedicated writers this September at the Table Rock Writers Workshop. I have heard from so many Table Rockers that the week was life shifting, changing, transforming. Pick your present participle. Everyone contributed to the community and the experience.

Now it’s November, one of those milky, damp days brightened only by the lemon-colored leaves that are left on the trees here in the Piedmont. Our fall workshop seems far away. I have been traveling around the state, promoting the second volume in the Literary Trails Guidebook series, Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont. Every time I pick up a copy, I am struck by how heavy the book is–all 455 pages.

Now, facing the task of finishing the third book in the series, this time on eastern North Carolina, I can’t quite imagine how I wrote either the first or the second volume of Literary Trails.  That’s how it is with writing. You are always starting over. Square one. The blank page.  The long hours. If it seems to be getting easier, then you’re probably repeating yourself, or at least that’s my fear.

Writing is hard work. Period.

So what’s the tonic?  How about a Spring Studio for writers?  What’s a spring studio, you may ask.

Here’s the idea: We’re going to gather on the campus of an art school on the Blue Ridge Parkway in a village  called Glendale Springs, almost at the Virginia line.  It’s a pristine location where many painters have found their Muse, including the world renowned fresco painter Ben Long, who once thought he might become a writer when he came under the influence of Duke’s Reynolds Price.  But Long instead took up an ancient form of painting and became an apprentice in Italy, learning the art and craft of fresco painting. One of his first works in North Carolina, painted in 1980, is in the Holy Trinity chapel in Glendale Springs. The work initially caused  a stir, because Long invited the folks who lived near the church to serve as his models for the disciples in The Last Supper.  Then, when the local rector forbade Long’s dog from being with his master in the chapel during the long weeks of painting, Ben simply painted his dog below the supper table so that he would be in that church for eternity.  I love that story.

But I digress.  We are going to the mountains this May to write every morning with religious fervor.  Then we’ll have some lunch and each person can continue writing into the afternoon or opt to take a little guided excursion in the mountains for inspiration.  Then we’ll reconvene for THE HOUR OF REVISION, in which folks can look over their morning’s work with a fresh eye.

After supper, we’ll gather to discuss the craft of writing, the discipline, tricks to keep you writing, and how revision is an entirely different practice from drafting. Among those who will be speaking to us will be Darnell Arnoult, Joseph Bathanti, and Jim Minick.  Our  closing speaker is Lee Smith.

This schedule is not like our fall workshop when you give most of your day to classwork.  This event is about quiet writing time.  A chance to practice the practice, so to speak, in the company of others who are doing the same.

I once got a writing fellowship and took off alone  for six weeks to New Mexico to write. I felt such pressure to perform in those six weeks–spending the precious fellowship dollars, taking the time away from my job, all in solitude–that I choked.  I didn’t get anything of consequence written.  What I did instead was begin a lifelong love affair with New Mexico. That’s why I think this retreat idea in the company of other writers is a much better idea than the solo escape. We offer accountability to each other.  We’ll have our meals made for us. We’ll have a space to write and we’ll know when to quit and do something else. We’ll have veteran writers to talk about getting in the groove and staying in it. We’ll have inspiration and that glorious golden green of spring to watch as it climbs the hills around us.

Doesn’t this sound good? May 16-20, 2011. See http://tablerockwriters.com/studio/index.html Please consider joining us!

Poetry as Seduction by Darnell Arnoult

Darnell Arnoult (right) and daughter Beth Stone

As a poet and fiction writer, I am compelled to play with language as much as use it. And because I’m a poet as well as a prose writer, I’m conscious of the language I use serving the purpose of my meaning and pulling in my audience.

So many folks think they don’t like poetry because of what they were made to read in school, because they were made to decipher a poem’s  meaning by figuring out what the poet meant and in what meter and measure he related that meaning. Some people think to write poetry is to rhyme–to rhyme in some doggerel fashion.  That is, in fact, out of fashion except in the card section of Wal-Mart and Hallmark.

The workshop I’m teaching this September at Table Rock Writers Workshop is for both poets and fiction writers. It is about enriching language without coloring it purple. It is about finding ways to give your characters, settings, and sentences the attention they deserve. It is about how to use language to seduce your reader through sound and sight and those other three senses, employing strong syntax, and using just the words you need, in just the shape you need them.

When I think of my favorite poets, I think of how they tell a story in so few words.  Each word matters, as in Frank X. Walker’s poems from his collection Black Box. In “My Poems Been Running They Mouths Again,” Walker writes about family and facing family after you’ve written about them, after your poems have told things your mama wouldn’t want told. (61)

you gotta be careful

what you say around children

‘cause they are guaranteed to repeat it

when company comes

my poems are like that

speak ya mind

pour outcha heart

on a page

within earshot of black alphabet words

and they will run and tell somebody

Or his poem “Curiosity” about the narrator’s first sexual experience with a generous and compassionate prostitute. (29) In the latter poem, because every word is perfect, in fifty-five words counting the title, the poet renders a whole night, two characters, several rites of passage, two kinds of climax, and the change necessary for this few lines to render the classic points of a story’s arc: trigger, quest, complication and surprise, climax, reversal, and new status quo.

In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros creates a novel out of what are, at first appearance, vignettes, but are actually a series of narratives that work like prose poems, which link together to tell a story, like so many brush strokes in an impressionist’s painting. Here in this excerpt from the chapter entitled “Hips,” Cisneros renders a scene among young girls with the language, rhythm, and attention to metaphor and layered meaning of a poet.

I like coffee, I like tea.

I like the boys, and the boys like me.

Yes, no, maybe so. Yes, no, maybe so…

One day you wake up and they are there. Ready and waiting like a new Buick with the keys in the ignition.  Ready to take you where?

They’re good for holding a baby when you’re cooking, Rachel says, turning the jump rope a little quicker.  She has no imagination.

You need them to dance,  says Lucy.

If you don’t get them you may turn into a man.  Nenny says this and she believes it.  She is this way because of her age.

That’s right I add before Lucy or Rachel can make fun of her.  She is stupid alright, but she is my sister.

But most important, hips are scientific,  I say repeating what Alicia already told me.  It’s the bones that let you know which skeleton was a man’s when it was a man and which a woman’s.

They bloom like roses,  I continue because it’s obvious I’m the only one who can speak with any authority:  I have science on my side.  The bones just one day open. Just like that.  One day you might decide to have kids,  and then where are you going to put them?  Got to have room.  Bones got to give. (49-50)

In his novel Mystic River,  Dennis Lehane opens with sentences that drip with lyric specificity,  defining not only the neighborhood and childhood of his characters,  but defining his rich style as well.  This opening paragraph could easily be broken into lines and stanzas and be made into a poem.

When Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus were kids, their fathers worked together at the Coleman Candy plant and carried the stench of warm chocolate back home with them. It became a permanent character of their clothes, the beds they slept in, the vinyl backs of their car seats. Sean’s kitchen smelled like a Fudgsicle, his bathroom like a Coleman Chew-Chew bar. By the time they were eleven, Sean and Jimmy had developed a hatred of sweets so total that  they took their coffee black for the rest of their lives and never ate dessert. (3)

These are just a few examples I can pull from my shelf of books written by my favorite authors. It is my fascination with the power of language and image and metaphor that has led me to teach a workshop on this subject at Table Rock in September. In my class called “Poetry as Seduction,” I’ll be working with poets and prose writers as we concentrate on sentence or line to discover the potential for vivid and lyrical narrative, to find the most engaging way to tell their best stories, to examine the common ground of poetry and prose, and to demonstrate why each writer should cross genres as a practice, if only to enrich their chosen path. I hope to see some of you there around that table.

Why write?

Let’s call her Edith.  She arrived at the first session of my novel workshop clearly agitated.  I asked each participant to go around the table and tell us why he or she wanted to write fiction.  Edith began to shake.  Her neck got blotchy.

“Revenge!” Edith hissed, when it came her turn. “I want to write a novel for revenge.”

Edith, it turned out, had bought a horse from a neighbor who was apparently a pretty shady character.  The more she learned about this horse trader from other equestrians in her community, the more Edith realized the dramatic potential of writing about this woman whom she so detested. Perhaps it would be a way to expose her thievery while also making back the money she’d lost on her horse. Edith was obsessed. Somebody had finally grown weary of her diatribe and suggested that Edith go ahead and  sign up for a writing class and get busy on the novel she kept talking about. Edith could tell a story.  She was also something of a natural at dialogue.

Characterization, however, was another issue.

Week after week Edith came to our group with pages that drew her main character as evil incarnate.  Her subject was so one dimensional that Edith’s classmates finally told her that she probably needed to find something lovable about her main character, to identify some aspect of this horse trader that made her not so dark, so evil.  Maybe even write from the horse trader’s point of view. First person.  At first Edith resisted.  She could see nothing redeemable about this woman she thought she knew.  We reminded her that this was a FICTION class.

Somehow that idea landed.

Soon Edith was bringing in pages that she could read to us without getting red in the face and short of breath. She was creating a character that held parts of her own self, her own voice.  It was a character we could finally believe.  Edith was proud of herself.  She was also finding compassion–for her neighbor and herself.

Though she worked hard for several more years, I heard from another student that Edith passed away, her novel unfinished.  But we all learned so much from her in that class.  I will never forget Edith.  Several of her classmates took their own advice and also began working harder at creating multi-dimensional characters that held the seeds of their own truths.  Some got published.

My lesson was, don’t put off the stories you want to write. You never know how much time you have.

Okay, well, maybe I’m still working on that lesson.  But just this week an e-mail came into the Table Rock box that reminded me of Edith.  We heard from a representative of the Candy Maier Fund–an organization that offers scholarship support to women writers from Western North Carolina who want to attend writing workshops such as ours.

Why does the Fund do this? As their website explains: After Candy Maier’s unexpected death in November of 2005, writing friends established a fund in her honor to offer other women an opportunity to participate in the kind of shared writing experiences that she found fun and meaningful.  These experiences brought out and fostered Candy’s writing talent, but she died before many of her poignant, funny, true-to-life pieces could be published.

I hope if you are on the fence about taking the plunge with a writing workshop, you’ll go for it.  Who knows whether you will publish or not.  Publication is not the only reason to write.  Candy Maier made some special friends through her writing.  Edith found her way to forgiveness.  I found my way to keep on writing and teaching, because the rewards are mountainous.

To find out more about the Candy Maier Fund, click on the logo above. To find out more about what and why you might want to write, come to Table Rock.
–Georgann Eubanks

ONE CLASS FULL: Another Added

One of the advantages of this digital era is that we can turn on a dime, or more correctly, a pixel.  Because Abigail DeWitt’s class at the September Table Rock Writers Workshop is already full, Dawn Shamp has stepped up to accommodate more beginning writers with a different course. It’s called DIVING IN: FINDING YOUR NICHE IN FICTION. She found hers, of course, in her amazing first novel, On Account of Conspicuous Women, published by Thomas Dunne.

Here’s the course description:

We all have to start somewhere. So we’re going to start where YOU are. You love to write. You want to write. But maybe you can’t quite wrap that short story or novel. The “haints” keep taunting: “I’m not worthy.” “I’m not able.”

Let’s take it from the edge. Bring your ideas to the mountain. Let nurture take its course.

Let’s play with possibilities, from defining success to divining your best as a writer. Novels are one thing. Short stories and even flash fiction are others (Hemingway is credited with these six haunting words: “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”)

Whatever the genre or conclusion, fiction opens doors. Let’s dig in, share some writing, play with the basics — characterization, point of view, description, dialogue, dramatic scene. The building blocks.

We’ll look for places to tighten, perhaps expand. Places to strengthen both narrative and dialogue.

I strongly recommend that you read or re-read (and own) a copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.

I will provide handouts of works from published authors to propel discussion of craft. In-class exercises will help us identify language that weakens prose or gives it more authority.

Please send me up to 10 double-spaced pages of your work (flat, not folded, please) in time for me to have it by August 21 for my critique. I will return your work, along with line edits and comments, on the first day of the workshop.

Dawn Shamp is a fine human being, an accomplished writer, fine storyteller, and a humble teacher.  Go for it, ya’ll! Please visit our website to register: http://tablerockwriters.com.

–Georgann Eubanks

The secret benefit of the workshop by Georgann Eubanks

Okay, so you have 175 pages of a novel and you are looking at this Table Rock Writers Workshop.  No way in a class of six or ten people are you going to get feedback on all those pages, you tell yourself.  No way are you going to reveal yourself on the page to so many  total strangers.

Still, you crave a reader.  Someone to tell you that you are on the right path. But you’ve already been in a writing group where everybody shared pages with each other and suddenly you realized you are reading these dozens and dozens of pages and marking on them, and your mates are giving you a half dozen versions of your pages back with marks all over them.  And the opinions vary widely. They contradict.  Cancel each other out.  Some are potshots.  Some are unkind. You have been burned already, thank you very much.

You are confused and overwhelmed.  You think about building a fire with all those pages.  Even in this heat.

This is where the Table Rock philosophy comes to your aid.  That is, if you are willing.  You will come to the mountain for a few days. You will have a sympathetic and serious teacher who has managed to finish and publish a book.  She eats with a fork just like you do and spills her grits on her blouse one morning. She seems human, approachable.

You have a half dozen folks in your workshop of varying degrees of finished, unfinished, hopeful and discouraged. You are drawn to some and put off by others.

Each of them has something to teach you.

So here’s the secret:  the workshop format we provide at Table Rock is about learning to get outside yourself and help others. You follow your instructor’s lead.  You listen fiercely to another person’s work and offer your honest reactions. You learn to lean into the material, observing what worked and what didn’t.

It is much easier to comment on another’s work.  Well, duh.  To be helpful is a skill you will practice every day at Table Rock. You don’t tell someone how to fix it.  Instead you try to ask open and honest questions about what the author’s intention is for that scene or story and make room for the author to think about it–to come to his own solutions.  Yes, it’s a bit like therapy.  You are there to help your colleague find his or her own answers in this journey called a story or novel or poem.

And once you learn to be genuinely helpful to another writer, the closer you can come to objectivity about your own work. Suddenly you begin to see your patterns.  Because surely the verbal tics and patterns that are screaming at you  in another person’s work are probably your own worst habits.   Murder your darlings, as Faulkner said.

So why come to the mountain?  Because it is more blessed to give than to receive.  For real.

And when you go home, you will slowly unpack the riches you carried down the mountain among your notes and papers.  And  in the solitude of your workplace you will begin to move forward with a new awareness and confidence. And those of us who were with you will still be there, right behind your chair, rooting for you and your book-to-be.

Of Chocolates and Word Choices from Dawn Shamp, Instructor

I love learning new words. But what writer doesn’t? Playing around with them, creating phrases that zip and zing, and then finding for them that oh-so-special place within my stories.

When my 1920s-era novel On Account of Conspicuous Women was barely an idea, I reveled in filling it with as many period words and regional phrases as possible. What I didn’t consider (well, until later on) was that not everyone shared my enthusiasm. Especially my editor.

I thought books like Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and The Chicago Manual of Style were only for people who wrote papers with footnotes.

But a decade of wear and tear as a wordsmith has taught me that paying attention to grammar and use of language is about being a more thoughtful reader—and a more disciplined writer.

It’s taking time to check for spelling errors, redundant words, clichés, overwritten language, or anything that chokes clarity for a reader — what James Kilpatrick calls “ridding our prose gardens of chickweed banality.”

As a fun chickweed experiment, do a “find” search through your manuscript for the word “like.” Then consider the possible impact of deleting some of them. Can the story carry more subtlety or power by eliminating some of those “likes?”

I do believe Forrest Gump is better off with the quote, “My momma always said, ‘Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.’” That momma thing, to me, conveyed far more than if he’d simply said, “Life is a box of chocolates.”  But sometimes it’s worth asking yourself if you should write, “She was just like her mother” or “She was her mother.”

These are not absolutes, but they’re exercises worth exploring for trimming, tightening, focus in line editing.

No Trembling–from Judy Goldman, instructor

I could look up the date.  But trust me, it was a long time ago.  I was a trembling student, with eleven other trembling students, in Sir Stephen Spender’s poetry workshop at the Duke Writers’ Conference.

Every morning we’d gather around a long table in a sweltering classroom on Duke University’s West Campus and wait for our instructor to arrive.  He would lumber in, out of breath and perspiring, wearing a black suit and black wide-brimmed hat, papers falling from his arms.  Each day he would critique two students’ poetry.  Each day two students would be devastated.  One left for home before he could even get to her work.

Even though he was rough on us, impatient, demanding, implacable, I felt as though I was getting a glimpse of what poetry was all about.  Every night I went back to my hot little room and wrote poem after poem on my Olivetti manual.  I made myself stop – sometimes, as light was rising in the window — so that I could sleep enough to be able to wake in the morning and find my way to the workshop.  And that workshop was – surprisingly – an important turning point for me.  I was buoyant, I was churning toward the next step in my writing, I felt I could see everywhere!

Now I’m teaching at Table Rock Writers Workshop, an offshoot of the Duke Writers’ Workshop.  The tone of this workshop is quite different from the one I just described.  No one trembles here.  No one leaves in a huff mid-week.  In fact, we leave at the end of our time together wishing for just one more day.  Our aim is this:  We want to meet you where you are, gently tug you along in achieving the writing goals you’ve set for yourself.  We want to convince you that yes, you can do it.  We’ll share what we know.  We’ll teach craft.  We’ll do everything we can to move you from where you were at the beginning of the workshop to where we believe you can be.

Please come!  We’ll care deeply about your writing.  We’ll be available to you during class, mealtimes, walking about, at happy hour each evening.  We’ll help you find the same magic I found years ago in my cramped little dorm room.  We believe you’ll find your magic here, bending over your laptop in your comfy room, Table Rock Mountain out your open window, the promise of a cool breeze.