by Rachel Unkefer

From time to time, writers need to protect their characters against knowledge or technology that could wreak havoc in their fictional worlds. For example, in a suspense story when your protagonist is in jeopardy, how do you keep her from pulling out her cell phone and calling the police? Is your plot is built around searching for a person from the past? Your book will only be long enough for your main character to search on Google or Facebook.

This seems to be an increasingly common issue for the fiction writer. Sometimes we need our characters to be more innocent than our readers, and often the solution to the problem is to set the story in the past. This is not always motivated by the desire to portray a certain moment in history, but sometimes to avoid the complications of current events.

I’ve found myself doing this on several occasions. Recently, I wrote a story set in France that tangentially deals with a priest abusing a child. I didn’t want the issue to be front and center in the story, the way it would be if my main character had been exposed to years of news reports, although I knew readers would likely put the pieces together. My solution was to set the story in 1996. This gave me the side benefit of bringing in the beginning of globalization and the economic effects of the formation of the EU on ordinary people in France, without having to acknowledge the recent economic collapses.

I’ve read a number of novels that end just before September 11, 2001, which has become a dividing line in our recent history (The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud comes to mind.) There was the world, culture, worldview and lifestyle before that date, and then after. Many novels tiptoe up to that Tuesday and then stop, almost as if to say to the reader, “we all know what comes next, so no need to keep going.” Others end with the historical events and a bit of aftermath (The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman.) Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Bleeding Edge, due in September 2013, takes place in “2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th…”

There is a double benefit for the author in these situations. The problematic knowledge or technology can be avoided, and at the same time, the reader knows something about the character’s future world that the character is not privy to. Readers like this feeling of omniscience, of foreknowledge, of being smarter than everybody else. The same way we have the urge to scream, “Don’t open that door!” in a horror movie, when a character in a book tells his friend about his trip from Boston to Los Angeles the next day, and it’s September 10, 2001, we want to yell, “Don’t get on that plane!”

Have you ever set a story in the past in order to avoid a historical event, a technological development, or some other problematic fact in the “real world?”

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 Joan Mazza

Since December 2011, I’ve been writing a poem every day. To help me stay on task, I send my poems to friends who have agreed to receive them by email. No obligation to read, no need to respond unless moved to do so. Knowing I’ve made this commitment and that people actually expect and want to read what I write, I am more likely to deliver. A little structure and accountability helps. Occasionally, these friends will jump on and write too. Or they’ll make suggestions for improving the poem, elevating it from its mundane start.

After a while, every writer discovers what rituals, disciplines, routines work best for the creative process. What I’ve discovered is that my process isn’t always the same. For each book I’ve written, my planning and writing schedules were different. Although I write mostly in the morning when I’m most alert, I now know I can write any time of day or night. If I wake up and have something in my head that might be worth getting on paper, I grab a notebook or turn on the computer. Regardless of the hour.

Some people need a lot of time to let the phrases, images, and ideas buzz around in their heads before they sit down to write. I prefer to write something, however poor, and then work on revisions. Producing a lot of work guarantees that some of what I write will be good, even if most is junk. And I have the delight of occasionally writing something I think is quite good for a first draft. The more I write, the more frequently I produce quality work. Like practicing scales on the piano, my skills improve.

My theory is that pledging to write a poem every day keeps me in my “poetry brain.” By that I mean an attentiveness to detail, observing what moves me, listening to people’s voices, tone, and words, and catching phrases that carry a charge. If I’m inclined to say, WOW, then I know there’s a poem ready to pop. I jot something down in the notebook I always carry. My goal is to write something that’s relatively complete in one sitting. Your mileage may vary. Maybe it’s a good start toward something longer. The poet Stephen Perry says, “You can’t revise a vacuum.”

Some days, I spend twenty minutes or less. Other days, hours. Longer, if you count the mental meanderings. I’ve learned that more time doesn’t necessarily mean better writing. I’m amused by my friends who write back, “That’s a winner. Send it out!” I know I just dashed that one off because I was running out of time.

Every day, I begin anew. I might read the news and see if something catches me, or just ponder what is in my mental foreground at that moment and hope to land on a metaphor. More often I stay with the personal— my old obsessions and recurrent concerns. Still, the poems surprise me. I protest, I didn’t mean to write that!

Writing in this way, I’m frequently appalled by what I reveal and hesitate to share the poems. I feel naked and vulnerable, mortified by my petty mind, neurotic fixations, and anger.

Surprise! Those are usually the poems my readers like best, the ones that get published and praised as being strong and powerful. Others recognize their petty impulses, resentments, and weirdness, and they thank me.

The more I read and write poetry, I develop my craft. Paying attention to sound, diction, image, metaphor, emotional tone in the work of favorite writers pays off when I’m writing my own work. I improve just by writing steadily and being willing to revise. But for first drafts, the pressure is completely removed. You can’t expect or demand a good poem in thirty minutes. So just write. Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird tells us to “write shitty first drafts.” The task is to get something down, no matter how mediocre.

I don’t know the form when I start out. I’m most likely to write free verse, but I have bursts of writing in traditional forms: sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, even sonnet crowns. Not in thirty minutes, for sure, but certain subjects seem to call for form. Sometimes, I write a few lines and I say, “Oh, I’m writing in rhymed couplets. I’ll stay with that.”

As I said, by writing or making other art, we discover what works best to keep us creating and improving. For now, writing a poem every day works for me. For months, I wrote imitations of poems I liked and that worked too. You can try it for a week or try it for a year and note its benefits. By doing this or changing it, you might figure out a method to keep yourself writing instead of waiting for inspiration to strike from outside. That might be too long to wait.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, writing coach and seminar leader. Author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), her work has appeared in many magazines, including Potomac Review, Rattle, Kestrel, American Journal of Nursing, The MacGuffin, and Writer’s Digest. She now writes poetry and does fabric and paper art in rural central Virginia. www.JoanMazza.com

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.

by Alexis Schaitkin

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.