I have WriterHouse to thank for my writing group, BACCA Literary: Bethany, Anne, Carolyn, Claire – aspiring authors, already-writers. After meeting in David Ronka’s Evening Fiction class and responding to Bethany’s emailed invitation, we’ve spent the past two years honing our skills in monthly critique sessions. We’re honored that our writing group will be the first (as far as we know) Virginia Festival of the Book session by writers-in-progress, for writers-in-progress. We present at 10am on Saturday, March 23, at an event called “Creating a Great Writing Group.” We’re excited – maybe even a little nervous – and want things to go well. To prepare for the session, we decided to spend a late-winter weekend at a nearby retreat.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

Like walking into a new class for the first time or sharing your work with strangers, spending an entire weekend writing with people you normally see once per month is an “uncertainty situation.” It’s hard to know what to expect. The pay-off could be huge – or not. Before I headed out of town, I wondered, “Will this be more like a vacation, or more like work?”

We chose a beautiful place to retreat, with one space for meeting and another for resting, dining, and socializing. Internet was limited. By chance, we were the only group on the grounds. Though the air was chill and the skies cloudy, the land cradled us in rich earth tones of straw and bark, red clay, and spring-green grass in spots. Just beyond were the Rapidan River and the Blue Ridge Mountains, timeless reminders to relax and let our creative energies flow.

We began the weekend with a writing prompt, plucked from a paper bag at 5pm. The instructions were simple, based on our composer Anne’s experience with a music retreat: choose one prompt, then take 24 hours to write a short piece. The next day, read your work to the group.The others seemed game, but I was initially skeptical. Our writing group routine is to share, one week before meeting, material that we’ve polished for months. What could we possibly produce in 24 hours? Especially without knowing the topic in advance?

The prompts were:

• Write about an object you love dearly – something besides photo albums – that you’d save in a house fire.
• You’re convinced that your best friend’s son plans to bring a gun to school.
• You’re sorting through your childhood things and a stuffed animal suddenly begins talking to you.
• You have a near-death experience. When you awaken, the only person you remember seeing is Adolf Hitler.

After choosing our prompts, we rested or brainstormed in solitude. Then we made dinner and chatted. Carolyn brought a “Moon Signs” book and we playfully psychoanalyzed ourselves before bed. It started to feel like a bona fide slumber party. That night I slept on a loft with a window to the sky. I awoke once to the moon at its peak, a shining light I could have read by.

The next morning, we prepared for our VA Book session. Then we wrote. The 5pm prompt deadline approached. At 4:50pm, I was 99% done. I needed an ending though – the piece hadn’t gelled. Then, an insight, and a hasty final sentence, which ended up the same as the first. Funny how things come full circle. But was it any good? I didn’t have time to edit.

At 5:01, I walked into the kitchen. The three others sat around the table already. Everyone looked as hesitant as I felt. Someone said, “Y’all realize this is a rough draft, right?”

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

If you want to know what we wrote, you’ll have to wait until we publish our pieces. But suffice it to say that after we finished sharing, we agreed that each piece was submission-worthy, with a little tweaking. We agreed that the prompt activity had far surpassed our expectations, and that two years before, there was no way we each could have written something coherent in 24 hours.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

So was it the beautiful place, the energy of an all-but-unplugged retreat? Was it the change in scenery or the moonlight? Or was it two years of monthly meetings and regular feedback? Whatever it was, here we are. Four women, four writers, four friends. After working together, we’re presenting at one of the country’s best book festivals – Bethany’s preparing to teach her E-publishing WriterHouse class – Anne’s consulting with other writers in her small business – Carolyn won second place in The Hook’s 2013 short story contest – and I just completed my first book.

“Uncertainty situations” are designed to stretch us, sometimes in uncomfortable directions. But perhaps that’s the point of writing, writing classes, and writing groups. To stretch, learn, and grow. Especially in the company of friends.

BACCA Literary is:

• Claire Cameron:  - non-fiction, stories of personal transformation
• A M Carley: – creative nonfiction and fiction about contemporary life in the U.S.
• Bethany Joy Carlson:  - fables and young adult adventure stories
• Carolyn O’Neal:  - fiction and environmental sci-fi

Key West Literary Seminar 2013 Stage

This article is reposted from Christy Strick’s blog The Wandering Writer by permission of Christy Strick and Sharon Harrigan.

If the view out your window is anything like mine right now—snow on slippery sidewalks—let me offer you this mid-winter writer’s daydream: Flip flops and floppy hats on beach cruiser bikes to stir up inspiration. The sun so bright on the ocean you can swim in it every day of the year, like Tennessee Williams did. The descendants of Hemingway’s cats lounging at his house under flowering shrubs, just the sight of their softness somehow making your prose more muscular. Cafe con leche and guava pastries before writing workshop with Hilma Wolitzer at Judy Blume’s house. Panels and presentations by literary superstars like Colm Toibin, Brad Gooch, and Billy Collins, followed by dinners with the speakers and your fellow workshop writers at the lighthouse, near the southernmost tip of North America. Finally, after a corkscrew climb down the winding steps, a pink taxi or pedi-cab waits to deposit you in the jacuzzi at your bed and breakfast (aptly called, of course, Authors’ House).

It’s not a day dream. It’s called the Key West Literary Seminar. I was able to attend for the first time, last month, and the experience still helps me write more brightly, whatever gray days may arrive, outside my window or in my head.

The seminar takes place every January, and there are three ways you can attend—as a winner of one of the three prizes, as a scholarship participant, and as a general attendee. I was lucky enough to be the Joyce Horton Johnson Award recipient this year. For more information, see the seminar’s web site: http://www.kwls.org/

Spread the word about KWLS. I wouldn’t have known about it at all if it weren’t for my fellow WriterHouse members who won the award in previous years (hooray for Kristen-Paige Madonia, George Kamide, and CHRISTY STRICK!).  It must be something WriterHouse puts in the water, or maybe good things just happen when you’re part of a fabulously smart and encouraging literary community. Thank you, Christy, for all your tips on Key West and everything else.

Sharon Harrigan has published over three dozen short stories, essays, and reviews in such journals as Narrative, The Rumpus, and The Nervous Breakdown.

by Jay Varner

Writers need to only do two things: write and read.

Francine Prose’s very helpful book Reading Like a Writer begins with a chapter on close reading. This doesn’t mean holding the book up to your nose. It means, as Prose says, going word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. Every word and comma is there for a good reason—at least, it better be there for a good reason. Why should you do this? Forcing yourself to focus on the seemingly small details in the context of the larger story is close reading.

A young Harry Crews dissected a Graham Greene novel by doing this: taking apart the chapters, weighing how much time each chapter covered, examining how Greene handled pacing and point of view. When I first started to get serious about writing personal essays, I set “Under the Influence” by Scott Russell Sanders as my model. The first time I read that essay, the need to know what happened next pulled me from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, as any good story should. Then I printed out the essay, sat down on the floor with a pair of scissors and tape, and cut up the sections. I taped pages together then laid them side-by-side on the floor. Some sections were 2-3 pages, some under a page. Why? Why did he go long rather than short? I had to find out.

I grabbed some note cards and scribbled out 4-5 words that summed up each section. When I stood back, I began to see the flow. Sanders started tight. Think of a movie that opens with a close-up on a character’s face—in this case, a drunk father—and then slowly pulls back until we see the world around him. The next section goes big, real big. He moves away from his father and he talks about society’s perceptions and portrayals of alcoholism. When I talk about going wide, that’s what I mean. Again, think of a movie: this is the overhead view of a countryside or city. Big. But standing above my papers littering the floor, I also had a wide view. I considered why Sanders structured the essay the way that he had. We don’t read the back-story about how his mother fell in love with this drunk until three-fourths of the way into the essay. It’s not chronological. But then I considered that the story doesn’t start there—at least not for Sanders, our narrator.

I went back to that first section, to the first sentence: “My father drank.” Boom. No pretense there. That’s the story of the piece. The narrator’s father drank. And the next several pages explore that with the micro and the macro. We get to know his father as only a drunk. But then Sanders changes it up—he gives us the back-story about a man just home from World War II. We see him before alcohol took hold. It plays with our expectations here—how many movies or television shows have we seen where we witnessed the decline of a character into alcoholism or vice-versa? Sanders gives us the alcoholic from the first sentence, then complicates and layers him for several pages. By the time we see the man sober, we know how the story will end, but that doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking. I’d cracked the code—or so I thought. While I could see how the sections worked against each other, how did an individual section work?

We often talk about the arc in a story; each section has an arc as well. Macro and micro. To find out, I needed to dissect. So I went back to that first section, to the first sentence: “My father drank.” Again, right from the start, a reader knows what this thing is about. But his father didn’t just drink. “He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food—compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling.” That’s specific. That’s voice. He didn’t drink a lot or drink until he passed out. He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath.

I moved on to the remaining sentences in the paragraph: “I use the past tense not because he ever quit drinking but because he quit living. That is how the story ends for my father, age sixty-four, heart bursting, body cooling, slumped and forsaken on the linoleum of my brother’s trailer. The story continues for my brother, my sister, my mother, and me, and will continue as long as memory holds.” Wait, wait, wait! He just gave away the ending, right? I mean, if I know his father dies, where’s the tension? Again, Sanders is going against the expectations we’ve gleaned from easy television shows and movies. The tension here is not that his father dies. The tension lies in that final sentence of the paragraph: “the story continues.” Why? What’s that mean?

It harkens back to that old example of a story: the king died and then the queen died. Not much happening here: two royals are dead. Aside from morbidity, I doubt you even care how they died. It’s an anecdote, not a story. But what about this: the king died and then the queen died of grief. Now we’re getting somewhere. Suddenly, I do wonder how the king died—was that what caused this seemingly fatal case of grief for his wife? And what’s her deal? Sanders, ever a master of storytelling, plays that well.

So there you go. Once I systematically took apart the entire essay for the better part of a week, I felt ready to tackle my own stories. Know what I did next? Completely ripped off Scott Russell Sanders. I mean shamelessly lifted the structure down to the rhythm of sentences. When I finished, I stood from my desk and high-fived myself. Nailed. It. Except I didn’t. What I had done was write a Scott Russell Sanders essay. Yes, I was making my story work, but I was doing it in the confines of what Sanders had done. It took weeks for me to realize that while all of this worked for Sanders, it didn’t work for my story. But it was a necessary part of the process.

Picking out an example like I did and writing it is a great thing. Try it. Find something you like, something that speaks to you—I chose Sanders because he explored trauma and masculinity, two things I was interested in writing about. Yes, maybe what I wrote was a rip-off and maybe even some kind of plagiarism. I had no desire—not yet—to publish anything. I just wanted to learn how to tell a story.

When you read, get out the pen. Engage. Get close. You’re not just reading for pleasure—at least not at first. Read it through the first time to see what happens. Makes notes of what works or what doesn’t. Use different colored ink each time you read. Remind yourself of what you felt when. I promise that you will see something different the second time around. That second read is not for pleasure—it’s your attempt to figure out what works and what doesn’t, what you can lift from that essay for your own stories. Hey, maybe you’ll even write a total Scott Russell Sanders knock-off like I did. That’s fine. I needed to do that—all writers do. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have discovered my own voice and style.

Oh, you want to know a secret? I still do this during the infancy of a piece. And so does every writer I know.

Jay Varner teaches creative nonfiction classes at WriterHouse. He is the author of the memoir, Nothing Left to Burn, (Algonquin Books, 2010). He earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from UNC-Wilmington, where he was nonfiction and managing editor of Ecotone: Reimagining Place. His essays have appeared in Oxford American Magazine and elsewhere. (Image courtesy of nuchylee / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

by Stephanie Morris

Back in October of 2008, several days before National Novel Writing Month began, I created a list of writerly tips to motivate my muse through the long weeks of November. Four years later, I still follow it.

This is a rare enough occurrence; self-doubt has a habit of poking holes into whatever advice I give myself until I cease to follow it. However, this list still resonates with me. Perhaps this is because I stuck to the basics, wrote it as a letter, and took my own habits into consideration. Whenever I sit down to begin a project – whether it is a short story, a novel chapter, or an essay for school – I refer to my list of writerly tips. And now I wish to share it with you. Perhaps you’ll find something on it to inspire you on your own journey.

Dear Self,

• Write every morning. You focus best before the sun has risen, while the house is still quiet.

• Pretend your muse is that cork board that you keep above your writing desk. Actively seek out advice to write down and pin to it. Don’t remember any advice simply because it seems “good” or “useful” – save it only if it resonates with you. Only then will it truly be useful. Only then will it truly stick.

• Keep your writing desk clean and organized. Keep necessities within reach, but don’t allow them to clutter the area. Upon the same note, keep your laptop’s desktop clean and organized, free of distraction.

• Highlight those passages it hurt you to write, for later editing. (Or edit them immediately if that is what will motivate you to continue writing.)

• Seek out other writers – in person and online – for help and friendship. Celebrate your triumphs as well as theirs; indulge in a bit of lighthearted complaint; share secrets. Writing may be an activity best accomplished in solitude, but it does not have to be a lonely chore.

• Know your beginning. Your end. The basics of getting there.

• When you stop writing, stop in the middle of a sentence, so that starting again the next day will be easier. Write everything. Go for broke. Don’t stop writing until your mind is empty. Don’t fret over finding the right word unless it motivates you to keep going.

• Get some sleep so you can wake up early!

• Engage with your story as much as you can. Dream about it. Find solutions and stepping stones while you sleep or shower or take notes in class. Interact with your characters, even outside the story. Dream about them. Write them letters. Roleplay them when no one is looking (or even when someone is). Get to know them. Encourage them to whisper you their stories, then dictate.

• You’re telling a story. Tell it.

• Keep it simple. Keep it honest. This story is yours to love and enjoy, first and foremost – no one else’s. Keep it fun.

Love,

Self

Stephanie Morris is a WriterHouse intern, a college sophomore who majors in something new every week, an aspiring writer of Gothic horror and speculative fiction, and a voice actor. (Image courtesy of nattavut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

by Jay Varner

I’m a big fan of documentary films—and it seems documentaries are more alive than ever before. I recently saw a trailer for Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder. As you can guess, it’s about Ferlinghetti and his contributions to the poetry world. On one level, anytime poetry and literature is exposed to a mass audience, that’s a win for writers. However, this documentary is yet another in the ever-growing “bio-mentary” field. Essentially, these are no more than extended magazine profiles of celebrity subjects. In the past year alone we’ve seen documentaries on former NYC mayor Ed Koch, pop star Katy Perry, reggae singer Bob Marley, artist Wayne White, 60’s era rock star Ginger Baker, skateboarder Danny Way, comedian Eddie Pepitone, and lyricist Paul Williams.

I usually find these to be documentaries in only the barest sense of the word—pointing a camera toward a subject and shooting. There’s little artifice beyond a simple cut-and-paste mentality that most college students learn in their first semester. I would guess that these films make it to the screen simply because focusing on a famous subject automatically guarantees a larger audience. But the idolatry of celebrity—even celebrities I might admire—lacks something for me. I’m not denying that there might be something compelling about watching and learning about someone’s creative process or even acknowledging someone’s impact on their field. However, these films do little in terms of challenging the viewer or wrestling with ideas—not to mention, many of them come off as a slanted love letter to their subjects. Documentaries are one of our most palpable forms of this genre. Filmmakers and audiences owe it to each other to demand films like Gibney’s latest effort. When we consume these “bio-mentaries” we simple encourage all of our nonfiction forms to continue toward a People magazine level of engagement with the subjects.

All of this is meant to serve as pretext for one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in recent years, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God. There’s no way to avoid the uncomfortable and disturbing subject at the heart of the film: clerical sex abuse in the Catholic Church. Alex Gibney, the man behind Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side, directed the film which is currently airing on HBO. This topic is undeniably a lightening rod for viewers based simply on subject matter. This is a film that provokes, unsettles, and elicits true emotion for people who are too often overlooked—victims. However, what I found most amazing was the techniques Gibney and his team used to tell this story. Like the best trial lawyers, they systematically present their case with evidence and characters.

This is a vast, international story—on the surface, it seems all but unapproachable to tell as a story. But Gibney is assured and confident. He begins the film by tightly focusing on the story of a Wisconsin all-deaf boys school plagued by abuse in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The first twenty minutes of the film tell the story of the students—we see them sign on screen and actors like Chris Cooper and Ethan Hawke translate for us. Through this horrific story, the film then goes wider. It looks first at the archdiocese in Wisconsin, then the church at the national level, and finally within the Vatican. Piece by piece, Gibney exposes his lens and we see more examples. Yet the thread of the narrative is always rooted in that Wisconsin school for the deaf. I watched the film in awe—not simply for the story, but in the masterful execution of structure and storytelling techniques. Gibney no doubt debated the very same questions that all creative nonfiction writers confront: focus, structure, characters, and ideas. It’s an immense subject, one that must be tackled correctly. Quite simply, Mea Maxima Culpa is creative nonfiction at its very best.

Jay Varner is the author of the memoir, Nothing Left to Burn, (Algonquin Books, 2010). He earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from UNC-Wilmington, where he was nonfiction and managing editor of Ecotone: Reimagining Place. His essays have appeared in Oxford American Magazine and elsewhere.

I had been working on my first novel for a year when I sat down with a good writer friend to discuss my brand-new version of my brand-new first chapter. In the preceding months, I had completely revamped the novel’s plot, transforming it (or so I thought) from amorphous and slow to dynamic and suspenseful. So my friend and I sat down at a café and he told me how beautiful the sentences in the chapter were, and how clearly the characters came across. And then he said the words that just about broke my heart: “I still don’t know what I’m reading to find out. What’s going to happen?”

I couldn’t think of a reply. Oh, I had the novel’s climax in my head—the big reveal in the final fifty pages. But what was going to happen in the three hundred pages before that? I had dozens of ideas swirling in my head, but the truth was that after twelve months of working on this project and getting to know my characters, I still had no fixed sense of the novel’s events.

Later that night, I realized that my problem was even bigger: Although I had been reading novels almost my entire life, I still had basically no idea how these things were put together. What is the architecture of a novel? How many big events and how many small events are needed to sustain one? How many past events and how many present events? And how thematically cohesive ought all these events be? I had assumed that I must by now have developed an intuitive sense of these things simply by reading. But I hadn’t. And I would wager that very few people are able to figure out how to shape and structure a novel just by reading the way we typically do—for pleasure.

And so I gave myself an assignment. For the next two weeks, instead of writing, I would diagram novels. I picked books with similar timeframes, conflicts, and numbers of characters to my own. I skimmed each chapter, taking notes on the things that happened. With this done, I created a summary for myself of each novel’s major conflicts/events, the novel’s smaller plotlines, and which of these were located in the past, present, and (in a few cases) future.

My goal was not to chart a structure that I could mimic, but rather to answer for myself the important question: How much stuff, and what kind of stuff, makes a novel? At the end of my two weeks of diagraming, two main things had become very apparent to me. First, I realized how fast and loose most novels play with time—flashing back, zooming forward, doubling back to revisit scenes that have already been explored from one perspective. More than this, most novels gained their expansive feel through an almost meandering structure, with side stories about minor characters’ childhoods, or the history of a town’s river, or pages-long explorations of memory. There was, I realized, a looseness and freeness to most novels that I’d never really considered.

The second thing I realized was that, besides one major plotline and a few smaller stories, there was often not all that much going on in a novel, in terms of events. A novel’s expansive feel—the feeling that this is a complete, rich world—comes not from lots of stuff happening, but, in most cases, from a single central arc with lots and lots of tributaries leading to and from it.

None of these revelations are rocket science. Yet I had been unable to absorb them simply by reading lots of novels. I learned more about how novels work during my two-week project than in years of passionate pleasure reading. And I learned something about process, too: We writers are all our own teachers, too; and sometimes when you reach an impasse with a project, it helps to give yourself an assignment.

Alexis Schaitkin’s writing has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, The New York Times, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, and other journals. Her essays have been listed as notable in The Best American Essays 2011 and 2012. She is an instructor at WriterHouse.

by Deborah M. Prum

One of my sons attended pre-school with a child named Adam. Each day Adam would find a new way to stir up a bit of excitement for his teachers and other students. This happened years ago, so I don’t exactly remember how. I have vague memories of him pouring sand on a little girl’s head, of him using an abacus as a deadly weapon—you get the idea. At four, Adam was already infamous.

In fact, Adam’s “badness” became the standard by which my son judged his own behavior. Some days he’d describe himself as bad as Adam, and other days, not so bad as Adam.

You might be expecting that I will now attempt to draw some grand parallel between infamous pre-school Adam and the first Adam of original sin fame. However, making that argument in a persuasive and articulate way would require lots of deep thinking. When I think too hard, I fall asleep. So I’ll make one simple point rather than many weighty, sophisticated points.

My son tended to think in terms of black and white when he considered Adam. Adam was bad. And to be fair, Adam energetically did his part to contribute to that view. However, as we all know, no person is entirely good or entirely bad. We are complex creatures. While it may have been difficult to see the good in Adam, it was there, nuanced perhaps, but there nonetheless.

All right.  I can hear you thinking out there, so what is her point, the simple point that she said she was about to make? Here it is: as writers we need to make sure that the characters we depict are complex, not all bad, not all good.

Why should we do this? Characters should seem real. You want to write truth. The truth is that no one is perfect and no one is perfectly bad.

We also want to create interesting characters. Very good characters and very bad characters are dull and predictable. Why bother reading on? You know who they are and what they are going to do.

You want to create characters for which your readers feel empathy. Honest readers will admit that they have admirable traits and also ones they will avoid listing on a resume.  Those folks will be able to identify with and be more invested in complex characters.

When you create a character with strengths and weaknesses, you give yourself a lot more to work with. You can show how a flaw ultimately brings down your mostly good character. You can show how the glimmer of a good trait can lead your mostly bad character to do a good deed.

When you portray a complex character, one who has the potential to behave honorably as well as to sin, you’ve given yourself an opportunity to talk about grace and redemption.  What do I mean by that? You can show good coming out of bad. You gently can point your reader in the direction of hope.

So, go ahead and make your good characters a little bit bad and your bad characters a little bit good.  Why not?  You are reflecting reality; you’re adding interest to your story, and you’re allowing us readers to identify with the characters you create.

So, whatever happened to Bad Adam? I’ve heard that he is an honor student and plays in the high school band. Go figure.

Deborah M. Prum’s award-winning fiction has been in The Virginia Quarterly Review and other journals. Her essays air on NPR-member stations and appear in newspapers and magazines. She’s written a book on the Renaissance called Rats, Bulls and Flying Machines.

by Stephanie Morris

I recently sorted my bookmarks folder, in an attempt to reduce my 1000+ collection to a more manageable number. It was not a profitable exercise. By the time I exited my browser, I had bookmarked at least two new pages for every one that I deleted. Way to go, self.

However, I discovered one interesting fact during the course of my labors: an overwhelming number of my bookmarks were book blogs.

It makes sense. Books, for me, are a second pair of lungs—absolutely necessary to my survival. Book blogs provide the oxygen: they alert me to new books and offer insights into ones that I have already read. The number of book blogs out there is fantastic. Each time I discover one blog that captivates my interest, I receive yet another opportunity to discover ten more potentially intriguing ones via the blogroll. The sheer number of places to visit and follow delights the Eternal Reader in me.

However, there are a few that I find myself returning to again and again—blogs with friendly atmospheres, blogs that are intellectually engaging. So, without further ado, allow me to present three book blogs that have captivated me:

The Broke and the Bookish…
… is the official blog of the Goodreads group, College Students, a lovely group I followed when I first discovered Goodreads. I love the diversity of the book selections (George R. R. Martin! Harry Potter! The spectrum of literature, all in one place!), the Top Ten Tuesday meme, and how the blog was my introduction to the bookish branch of the blog world.

The Reading Ape…
… is, unfortunately, no longer being updated—but the archived posts are wonderful to read through (and the author is still reading, writing, and reviewing on other sites). I love that “The Reading Ape” was not focused solely on book reviews, but on the broader concept of literature and the reading public. I particularly enjoyed The Ape’s posts on blogging and gender (here is a link to his Redux post). His writing is elegance itself, and there’s a nice post on having a favorite author (and how it is oftentimes impossible to choose with any certainty). I can certainly relate.

Last, but not least, Dead White Guys: An Irreverent Guide to Classic Literature…
… balances humor with the gravity of the classics—and sends solemnity flying right out of the window. Jane Doe’s writing is wonderfully engaging. My favourite post, so far, is the Top Ten meme from The Broke and the Bookish: it’s made me look at books that I’ve read and not enjoyed—such as Anna Karenina—in new ways, from different perspectives, and encourages me to try them again.

Do you have any favorite blogs—whether book- or writing- related—that you follow? Share them in the comments!

Stephanie Morris is a WriterHouse intern, a college sophomore who majors in something new every week, an aspiring writer of Gothic horror and speculative fiction, and a voice actor. This post originally appeared on audiblecandy.blogspot.com. (Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

I recently finished listening to the audio recording of Room by Emma Donoghue. The novel is set in the United States, by an Irish-born author who now lives in Canada. A few years ago I listened to On Beauty by British author Zadie Smith, set in Massachusetts. While both of these novels have much to recommend them, both set off my pet peeve meter every few minutes.

It’s a small thing (“pet peeve” could also be a shortened form of “petty peeve”) but I find it aggravating every time I encounter it: the difference in usage of the word “meant” between British and American English. In British English, in place of should, one says “meant to” when in American English we say “supposed to.” As in, “You are supposed to be home at noon,” which comes out as, “You are meant to be home at noon.” Most of us can internally translate this, and when I’m reading or listening to a book set in Britain, I have no problem; when a British author puts those words in the mouth of a supposedly American character, though, it just doesn’t sound right.

The narrator of Room is a five-year-old boy who has spent his entire life locked up in a room with his mother. There is next to zero chance that he has ever heard someone say, “You’re meant to be asleep while he’s here,” and yet that is exactly how he reports what his mother says to him. According to Amazon’s “search inside this book,” there are twenty additional instances of this usage. Zadie Smith’s book, set in Massachusetts, does the same thing nearly forty times. While I can forgive an omniscient narrator slipping in a “meant to” here or there, in dialogue it thuds and clanks. An African-American kid from a rough neighborhood in Boston is not going to talk that way, unless he’s in the habit of watching Masterpiece Theatre and affecting the diction he hears there.

Why, oh why, does an editor not correct this? It’s such a simple thing. Of course, it’s not the only “Britishism” in these books. It’s just the one that irritates me most. If your characters are American, please make an effort to have them sound like Americans. Likewise, if you’re an American author writing about people who were born in London and currently living in London, please make them sound English. Is this so difficult?

Here’s a hint: have a copyeditor or a friend or someone who is native to the place where your novel is set read it through to fix the clunkers. In fact, I volunteer my services. Any British (or other non-American) author who wants someone to make a pass through his or her novel to fix these niggling things, get in touch with me. I will be glad to help.

I wonder if this happens in other languages. Do South Americans bristle when a Spanish author puts continental colloquialisms in the mouths of Peruvians? Do Moroccan readers shiver when French authors make their African Francophone characters sound like Parisians?

Yes, it’s a small thing. But the sound of prose is just as important as the sound of poetry, especially when it is experienced as an audiobook. If the characters don’t sound genuine, the listener is yanked out of the sustained dream that a novel is supposed to be, or meant to be, whichever.

Rachel Unkefer is a founding member and current president of WriterHouse. Her fiction has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Prime Number Magazine, and elsewhere. Her own blog languishes at rachelunkefer.com while she writes this guest post.

by Roselyn Elliott

A loud cacophony from Canadian geese low over my house draws me out onto the deck. The flock’s sound and shape, their colors, their legs held almost horizontally near their bodies, distinctive webbed feet pointed in flight once again stir my fascination. The geese pass, and down the hill beside my driveway, the mailman puts something in the box. Among the catalogs and flyers is a letter addressed to me in my handwriting. A rejection from a publisher, one whom I really wanted my poems to persuade, this time, to include at least one of the five darlings in his upcoming issue.

Both experiences move me to write—the startling seduction of another species honking and talking so close to my living space will stay with me for days, repeating itself in my senses until some rudimentary splotches of language begin to congeal on a page in my journal. And the rejection?  I refuse to leave those poems and essays I worked so hard to craft into something resembling literature yellowing in the desk drawer. Some will get more work, one or two may stimulate a new poem or a short piece of nonfiction. That thin three by five inch slip of paper in my long legal envelope will move me in a pragmatic sense to create something new or polish the not-quite-ready efforts toward wholeness.

Now I can hear some of my students saying, “What do you mean, exactly, by ‘moves us,’ and if I’m lucky another student will answer the question before I attempt it. Webster’s has five meanings for the word, and nearly all of them could be applied to writing, especially “the arousal of emotion” one and “to take action.”  Allowing oneself to feel the emotion in the present time can change the day quite remarkably. To then take action: to think, to feel further, to move the arms and fingers and eyes in the act of writing, or to draw, to paint, to sculpt, to sing, to play at whatever our interest and aptitude allows—that’s where we want to be.

What moves you? What stirs or offends your aesthetic ( your idea of beauty and good taste)? What have you been feeling and thinking about so long that it just has to come out in some form?

What place and/or experience deep in your past begs to be talked about? William Carlos Williams argued that anything in the world can be a subject for art. Before him, Walt Whitman had proclaimed that. The idea is to be genuinely moved, and not just pretend to ourselves and an audience that we are stirred by a flock of geese, or stunned by a pink and purple sunset or outraged by atrocities. The world is full of grief and joy, fear and happiness. The trick is to feel it, to let its power take over for a while, let the story happen and unfold. Now that we have received permission from the masters, what else do we need in order to act on what moves us? Only one thing, it seems: imagination.

Recently a friend wrote in my Facebook page, “How is your Muse, Rose?” and I realized that I hadn’t thought about my muse in many months, at least not as a separate functioning entity, and in a way I’d been prioritizing all sorts of “necessary” tasks and relationships ahead of that one part of me that needs to be nurtured in order to avoid the sullen withholding behavior which is sure to occur if it is ignored. The truth was that over the holidays I had not been moved to write or even to imagine very much and my muse was probably hanging out at a rest stop somewhere along Route 81 since this last trip north to visit my family.

Time to reenter the present—the inner moment—the visceral feeling of allowing oneself to be moved. I’ve heard it referred to by another writer-friend as “stepping off the world for a while.”

“How?!” I asked at the time and she replied that the habit has to be cultivated. And that’s a topic for another installment and a commitment for a new year.

Roselyn Elliott is the author of three poetry chapbooks: The Separation of Kin ( Blueline-SUNY Potsdam 2006 ), At the Center (Finishing Line Press 2008), a nominee for the Library of Virginia poetry award, and Animals Usher Us to Grace (Finishing Line Press 2011).  Her poems and essays have appeared in ABRAXAS, diode poetry journal, The Florida Review, New Letters, and other publications.  Previously, Rose has taught writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, Piedmont Virginia Community College, and the Visual Art Center of Richmond.  She lives in Charlottesville, where she does private tutoring and has been teaching poetry and creative nonfiction at WriterHouse.