Marly on hiatus

In the way of an apology: I am drowning and not waving, having come back from NYC ("Beastly Bride" reading, visits with writers and editors, lovely mini-Yaddo reunion with Maggie Paley and Stacey Engels) and then leaped in the busy-ness of prom weekend. Graduation is coming closer with great swiftness, and much must be done between now and weekend after next: college paperwork and so on (yes, thank you, financial donations are always appreciated by the mother with multiple children in college); various events; some work on my four upcoming books (madness); talks to polish for my stay at Hollins as writer-in-residence and for my stint at "Shared Worlds"; 16 manuscripts to comment on for Hollins; need to finish and show my current manuscript (a NYC promise--rash, rash!) and more.

So no, I am not writing you or you, not here and not anywhere else. Not for a while. If you're in Roanoke or Chapel Hill or Cullowhee or Spartanburg or Cooperstown, I might just see you...

Booklife / Shared Worlds

Little mini-essays written for "Shared Worlds" are starting to pop up on the Booklifenow site. I pass something in, and Jeremy Jones writes a nifty little introduction and slaps a title on it. Other writers respond to the questions, producing varied results. New topics include questions on good and bad advice and writing about the Other.

And Jeremy has also done an interesting interview with Michael Curtis, longtime editor of The Atlantic. Here's a sample question and answer:

What has been your greatest editing challenge?

Curtis: My greatest editing challenge. I can think of three:
A) Shortening stories far too long for The Atlantic format but so distinctive and artful that we hated to give them up. One early example was a story by Joyce Carol Oates, at the time a little known but already prolific writer of short fiction. Trimmed to half its original length, and retitled, the story appeared in The Atlantic in 1964 and was then chosen for inclusion in the O. Henry Prize Stories for that year and was awarded First Prize as the best of the stories in that collection. A more recent example: two stories by a writer whose first collection won a Flannery O Connor Award in the 1990s. We published two of his stories at roughly half their original length without, I believe, leaving out essential detail or nuance.

B) A second challenge: working with writers (often poets who have turned to fiction) whose ideas about language have less to do with literal meaning than with the sound of the words, in isolation or in sequence. This kind of writer often resists the objection that he/she hasn’t said what is plainly intended, and that other words would do a better job. “But I like that word,” he/she will say, “and why can’t I use a noun as a verb, or vice versa?” Problems like this get solved, eventually, but not always in the editor’s favor.

C) A third challenge lies in the use of language too frank or sulfurous for general audiences. When such language is fundamental to a story, can’t be changed without damage to the intent or affect of the story, we usually just return it. In many cases, however, alternates are available and are often just as effective. Such revisions, however, require negotiation and patience. In recent years, frankly, The Atlantic has allowed language it would not have published in the 1960s, offending a handful of readers but probably going unnoticed by the vast majority, and certainly by those familiar with, and comfortable with, the loosening of artistic boundaries in all the arts.

Today's assignment has to do with inventing creatures to be illustrated as part of the Shared Worlds writing camp. Should be hairy and scaly and interesting...

Illustration: The logo above is by John Coulthart, a book designer who is amply suppied with both coult and hart. The image is drawn from Jeff Vandermeer's Booklife jacket. More of John Coulthart's designs and concerns can be found at Atelier Coulthart.

Running with goats, etc.

Here's another question and answer from the Shared Worlds people that will eventually go into the writers' pot at the Booklife site. I'll let it sit a few days and then tweak the answer and send it over to Jeremy Jones at Wofford.

It'll be clear that I have evaded answering the first half of the question. As it happens, I didn't feel like it and have exerted my right to be whimsical and difficult. Feel free to pelt what is there with rotten fruit. Or even to make sensible (or silly--I have a liking for silly) suggestions.

The question is from writer Nisi Shawl: ROAARS is an acronym used in Writing the Other [written with Cynthia Ward] as a shorthand designation for a set of differences dubbed "important" by the dominant culture: Race, (sexual) Orientation, Age, Ability, Religion, Sex. 1.) What is your best experience writing a character of another ROAARS? 2.) What about your worst experience writing a character of another ROAARS?

As a woman, I am in some danger when writing about a man who could be described as sensitive or reflective. I was raised in an era that tried to declare that men and women were the same, but it's not at all so, "equal" being so very different from "same." I've had to tweak several male characters in revision to make sure they weren't women in disguise, and that happened even when the character in question was waging war or exerting himself in feats of redwood-climbing.

I'd say that the clearest I've ever been on writing about the opposite sex was in the book I'm polishing now. I've written a fantasy for each of my children, and the current one was for made for a sports-mad boy of 12 who came late to liking books and school (still hates homework) and who is extremely social. He is blessedly normal in all his boy-ways, and all I had to do was meditate on his likes and dislikes to have an imaginary boy rise up around me along with a pack of young associates who didn't always want to follow his lead, a fair degree of silliness and nonsense, twists and puzzles, feelings conveyed through action and reaction, a bit of revelatory violence, a fairly quick pace, and a general male refusal on the part of the primary character to ponder about anything except what must be done next, now. And football. We had to have football. If I could have worked in track and wrestling, I would have done so.

I have long advocated tossing little boys out the door to run with goats and goatherds until they are ten or eleven years old--until they are ready to sit still in a classroom and crack open a book--although nobody ever pays attention to this modest proposal of mine. So what I have aimed to write for my son and any other young readers is a book that might serve as one of the first adventures a boy hears after coming in from the fields and joining what is called civilization--a story full of juice and sun and life. And a dash of football.

* * *
I have been rather over-involved in facebook--all those funny people! all those writers!--and am now making a resolution to do better in tending to the blog. Oh, and if you want to know about my upcoming books (I'm up to four now), please slip down to the next post.

Writing advice

Illustration: Shared Worlds showcase booklet from last summer, the work of that interesting designer, John Coulthart.

Jeremy Jones, the director of Shared Worlds, has sent me a couple of questions to answer by Tuesday . . . Evidently they will be linked up both to Jeff Vandermeer’s Booklife site and to the Shared World online resources—something like that. (I'll be visiting Wofford for Shared Worlds in July.) So I’m going to fool around with answers here and let them age a day and redo them before I send them off. Unfortunately, I have a terrible memory for just this sort of topic. Perhaps that’s fine; only the big things will stick.

Feel free to criticize!

What is the worst piece of writing advice you've ever received? And how'd you figure out it was bad advice?
I’m not very fond of the advice “write about what you know” because I think it’s too bald and not nuanced enough. Aren’t we always writing about what we know, whether we are writing about another universe or an Anglo-Saxon mead hall? We can’t get away from what we know, no matter how we try.

But I would rather talk about the worst advice that turned out best. One day when I was teaching—I quit teaching as soon as I got tenure and promotion, being of a contrary turn of mind—one of my colleagues said to me, “What does the world need with another poem?” He had no idea of such a question meaning anything to me at all. It was a joke, and I knew it was a joke. But you see, I was a poet until he said those words to me. Then, abruptly, I could not write a poem. It stopped me up completely! So it seemed, indeed, “bad advice.”

Because I could not see how people live without making things, I had to do something else. On the weekends I began writing stories. A year later I was writing a short novel. I was no longer a poet but a writer of fictions. One day I committed a poem—I was a poet again. But something marvelous had happened during the time when I could write no poems. Writing fiction had changed me a great deal. It seemed to me that all my prior poetry was simply too small. I wanted the new poems to be bigger. Sometimes I wanted them to tell stories or to be dramatic. At the same time, I wanted the poems to be as different from fiction as possible, and I picked up all the old tools that I had been advised not to use—the things that we were too advanced to use anymore—like meter and rhyme and delightful, puzzling forms.

Now I move back and forth from poetry to fiction and back again. Each changes the other. Each brings something to the other. The world is always in need of another story or poem—a living story or poem—even though the world does not know it, for the most part. And that is fine with me.

What is the best piece of general writing advice you've ever received? And how did you put it to good use?

The advice I frequently give is to finish what you begin because you learn a great deal by forcing yourself to finish a thing, no matter how ill it looks to you! Solving problems by doing is the only way to move forward as a young writer. “Finish” is advice I dole out often to my daughter, who is a teenage writer and artist and much more.

But what is the best piece of advice that I’ve ever received?

I was a maniacal reader as a child, so it certainly wasn’t advice to read. That is good advice if you’re not much of a reader, but how could you desire to become a writer if you had not been a reader? Every writer has been mad to read at some point.

Writing every day is excellent advice, but I don’t do it. I doubt any mother with three children does.

Probably the best piece of advice I missed entirely was when poet Michael Harper told me with an air of surprise that I was quite good with form. I had tossed off three or four formal poems for an exercise, and everybody else in our group refused to write any at all. If I had taken Michael Harper's remarks seriously, I might have discovered something about myself and what I loved that took me years to find out on my own because I was under the thumb of what the world said was the thing to do.

But you ask about the best piece of advice that I took and used.

“There are no rules that can’t be broken.” I’m sure somebody said something like that to me early on, and it is true. Rules have a kind of fascination for us. We welcome most the ones that seem like something we already believe or do. We enjoy the silly or odd ones. We ignore the rest. But there is almost no important rule that cannot be overturned. (Some of the seemingly minor ones like not overusing adverbs or using complicated dialogue tags like “he gargled through a mouthful of hot soup” are impossible to overturn except in the case of comedy and satire.) I wonder what the biggest rule that I have broken might be. I tend to be violently allergic to doing the same thing twice, and that is precisely what many publishers want us to do: the same thing twice. Or thrice. Etc. Perhaps that is my broken rule.

Or perhaps I have just broken the rule that says that one must answer questions in a straightforward and sensible manner. Yes, no doubt I have just broken that good rule.