Journal Notes from the Summer of '93

In early 1993, I pitched a book idea to Thomas Nelson Publishing and a movie concept to a producer on the set of Iron Will, and within a month both offered me opportunities to move forward.

While working full-time, I created a tight eight-month plan with two critical deadlines: August 1 for the book and October 1 the screenplay. But then my wife Susie threw me a curveball. She'd had enough of living in town and wanted us to go house-hunting so we could move to the country that year. To do all three felt like more than I could handle. I countered with this: she could go house hunting with a friend and after August 1 I would go see what they found. 

Sure enough, she brought me to look at a house on August 2, and by the end of the week we were owners of 8+ acres, a house and two garages--his and hers. By October we moved in and the screenplay was completed as well. 

Here are a few select entries from my journal that summer.

Seeds / Journal Notes

Proverbs 17:3

The crucible is for silver,

the furnace for gold.

The Lord tries hearts.

 

D.H. writes of our tendency as grapes to complain about the instruments God chooses when crushing us to produce holy wine.

June 23, 1993

 

Monday Ralph had a dream that I brought him two Bibles. Afterwards he said, “Who gave me this dream?”  I suggested that when he reads the Bibles, he’ll find out.

June 30, 1993

 

We remember our dreams to our own peril.    
June 30, 1993

 

At root I am depressed by the thought that I am not going to “make it” as a writer. That is, that I do not have the drive, the “neurotic passion” that is sufficient to make it.  That is, I allow other things to distract me, diffuse my energy, divert me from my course. I am not writing every day, every night.  And even though I am far more productive than my peers, it seems that I create illusions that give the impression that I am much more than I am. Do I have what it takes? Or am I just a small peeper making big noises that carry with the wind?

July 2, 1993

 

Our lives are written in time like words upon a scroll, with none of it to be erased.

July 3, 1993

 

I have labored these many years to produce a body of work. Today it seems so small… with so many stories yet to tell.  
July 5, 1993

  

There were four of us, brothers… till the four winds scattered us ‘cross the wild unwatered plains while the seeds of future dreams are nourished by private wells.

July 17, 1997

Harry Gold, Revisited

SHORT STORY MONDAY
The following is a piece of flash fiction written in a rather unconventional manner. All of the sentences from this story have been borrowed from other works of fiction created by other authors. It was sort of a word game. For continuity sake I did add a few sentence fragments and used the name Harry Gold in all the places where needed. I think it interesting how a sentence, placed in a new context connotes new meanings through the unexpected juxtapositions. See if you can tell where the original ends and the newly created addendum begins.

Harry Gold

"The rule of 'nothing unessential' is the first condition of great art."
--Andre Gide

After dinner Harry Gold reads us the last two chapters of his La Nuit. The next to last especially seems excellent to us, and Gold reads it very well. Being rich is an occupation in itself, particularly for people who arrive at it via parachute in middle life.

We go out for a walk -- William Williams, Gold and myself. Never has it seemed such a long way to the top of this hill. The road with its tossing broken stones stretches on forever into the distance like a life of agony. It is hot as a furnace on the street and we sweat profusely.

I bring up the question of ownership. "Who owns language? Can a man own words? Sentences? The turn of a phrase?"

Gold's face becomes agitated, defiant. "It's mine now. No matter what they say, it's mine."

It occurs to me that Williams doesn't like this reply, but there are no others to turn to and we are forced to accept it. Gold feels guilty because his work is heavy with borrowing. Ideas, phrases, sentences, even whole paragraphs have been shamelessly appropriated, pilfered without attribution, plagiarized.

Harry adds, in a low voice, "The will of man is unconquerable. Even God cannot conquer it."

I can not bear to see him like this. To myself I think, Why do you do these things? In human affairs every solution only serves to sharpen the problem, to show us more clearly what we are up against. I consider how sages of the future will describe this historic day.

For a while we walk without speaking, the heat pressing down on us like a heavy hand. The hill seems steeper than before, as if it has grown suspicious of our intentions. Williams kicks at a loose stone and sends it rattling down the slope. The sound echoes faintly, like a small confession that no one intends to pursue.

Gold wipes his forehead with a handkerchief that was once white but now bears the stains of long arguments and careless pockets. He walks with a strange determination, as if pursued by invisible editors demanding an explanation.

At last he stops and looks out over the valley. The town lies below us, quiet and indifferent, its roofs glowing in the late afternoon sun.

“You speak of ownership,” he says, almost gently now. “But language is a river. We drink from it, we carry it away in cups, and still it flows.”

Williams nods slowly, though whether in agreement or exhaustion I cannot say.

I begin to suspect that Gold’s crime, if crime it is, lies less in the borrowing than in the boldness of admitting it. Most men prefer their thefts to remain hidden beneath respectable silence.

The wind picks up briefly, stirring the dust along the road. For a moment the heat lifts and we breathe more easily.

Gold laughs then—a short, unexpected laugh.

“Perhaps originality,” he says, “is merely the art of remembering badly.”

We continue our climb.

Somewhere beyond the crest of the hill a dog barks, and the sound travels toward us as though the evening itself were calling us onward.

# # # #

Illustration: ChatGPT

Throwback Thursday: A Nod to Somerset Maugham

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JUNE 2010

I am currently reading The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham, one of the great writers of the last century. My first awareness of Maugham was in 1964 when our family moved to Bridgewater, New Jersey, in Somerset County. One day while I was in the car with my mom in Somerville, we drove very slowly down a street with a row of old houses with porches. She slowed to a near stop in front of one, and said, "Somerset Maugham used to sit on that porch." She said it in that tone of which even though I was but eleven I knew meant something significant.

Maugham was 91 when he passed away the following year at his home in France.

There's no question that Maugham was a gifted writer. Reading The Painted Veil, one becomes intensely aware of his ability to describe in microscopic detail the inner workings of the human heart. I also think he is gifted at putting into words many of the thoughts and feelings we often conceal because we're too considerate. The seamless manner in which inner workings of the heart intersect with plot in this story is impressive.

Maugham was one of the highest paid -- if not the highest paid -- writers of the 1930's. In that pre-television era he was able to connect with readers who agonized while waiting for the next segment in his serialized novels and short stories.

His father and grandfather were lawyers, and as an uncertain youth he spent some time studying for a medical career. This Wikipedia note helps one to not only understand Maugham's ability to portray the cholera epidemic in The Painted Veil, but perhaps gives insight into why the Anton Chekov, himself a doctor, was such a master story teller:

Some critics have assumed that the years Maugham spent studying medicine were a creative dead end, but Maugham himself felt quite the contrary. He was able to live in the lively city of London, to meet people of a "low" sort that he would never have met in one of the other professions, and to see them in a time of heightened anxiety and meaning in their lives. In maturity, he recalled the literary value of what he saw as a medical student: "I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief ..."

Maugham carried the burden of being a homosexual at a time when it was less acceptable, a factor that complicated his life. He was not known to be a cheerful man. On one occasion while among the literati in Mexico City he departed for some other destination with his young partner. D.H. Lawrence famously remarked, "He wasn't happy here and he won't be happy there."

My two favorite Maugham short stories are The Verger and Mr. Know-All. Each has a payoff worth pursuing. The latter can be found in Volume I of The Complete Short Stories of Somerset Maugham. The Verger will be discovered in Volume IV.

Kent Peterson Shares Two Books That Made an Impact on Him Long Ago

As much as people love the music and the events at Duluth Dylan Fest each year, there's another dimension that is equally rewarding. Getting to know the people who gather here for this weeklong celebration of Duluth's native son. It seems like every year there are new faces and a surprising number are writers.

I met Kent Peterson and his wife Christine at the Trivia Contest about two weeks ago. Kent is a writer who produces one page of typewritten copy each day. There's a whole community of these one-pager writers who share their work in cyberspace at a site called One Typed Page. (https://onetypedpage.com/)

I immediately shared with him how I used to do what I called Limbo Exercises each day, filling a blank page with typing... ideas, observations, poetic expressions, subconscious mining. The objective (for me) was to learn how to write on command, as opposed to sitting around waiting for the Muse to arrive.

Kent has since been sharing some of his pages with me. If you were to be a regular reader, you'll notice that he does not always use the same typewriter. I'm curious how many manual typewriters he has. I know that I loved my first Smith-Corona, and also the very slim Olivetti I took to Mexico in late 1980. 

Kent's one-pagers are thoughtful, well-crafted and always have a takeaway. I asked permission to publish this one on my blog today. 

Sunday, February 20th 2022 --- 1956 Smith-Corona Skyriter

There are a couple of books that I read years ago but that I still think about now and then and recommend often. While both of these books are just plain old good stories, they are also books that I wish were read by more folks because they contain valuable insights into how narratives can take on lives of their own, with far reaching, often disastrous consequences.

The first of these books is Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. First published in Italian in 1988, I read the English translation in 1989 and it immediately claimed the "best book I read in the 80s" spot on my mental list. It tells the story of some bored folks at a publishing house who get tired of reading all the "true" crackpot conspiracy theory manuscripts that keep getting submitted, so they merge every crazy notion they've ever read, heard about, or just plain invented into one huge mega-conspiracy. And then the killings start...

I recall several things as being great about the book. First off, you can tell that Eco has to be one of the most well-read guys on the planet. He knows classical stuff and pop culture stuff and history and languages and science and psychology and obscure trivia and by golly you wouldn't want to be up against him in a game of Jeopardy! Second, damn near every scenario he lays out has at least two fairly plausible solutions. You never quite know where things are going. Finally, and it's been decades since I read the book, I kind of recall that it seems like it's wrapping up out there is still like 100 pages to go (it's a huge book) and those last 100 pages turn it from being a great book to being a GREAT and important book. If more folks read Eco then maybe a shitty book like Dan Brown's DaVinci Code wouldn't have been a best-seller and maybe we wouldn't have to be dealing with all this Q-Anon bullshit.

The other antidote-to-madness book that has stuck in my head is Todd Gitlin's 1992 novel The Murder of Albert Einstein. Gitlin was, among other things, a professor of Media Studies and the novel tells the story of a telegenic but aging TV reporter working for a national TV newsmagazine who gets a lead on "the story of a lifetime". If you are my age you might picture the reporter as someone like Jessica Savitch and the show as being something like "60 Minutes". What made the book fascinating to me was that the importance of a "scoop" precisely timed to meet the broadcast schedule and the ratings were more important and often in conflict with fact-checking the story. Like Pendulum, this is a thriller that makes you think about what you know and who tells you what you know.

Kent Peterson, Superior WI USA

* * * 

EdNote: Kent's "typed page" was converted to text using Google Lens, another trick Kent taught me.

Tribute to John Prin: Author, Mentor and Friend

Selfie taken during our annual meet in Hinckley, 2020.

We lost another good one. 

In 1982 I met John Prin at a Twin Cities Christian Writers group. An author of national stature came to speak at one of those early meetings we attended and after the meeting we sought each other out because of the questions we each had asked in the Q&A session.

 

John had been a full-time writer at Control Data, a major corporation during the early days of the digital age. I was a "failed missionary" who was now painting apartments and trying to figure out how I would spend the rest of my life. I felt inwardly drawn to the idea of being a writer and ultimately came to believe it was a calling. To this end John became my mentor. He not only helped me improve my skills as a writer, he taught me how the publishing business worked for freelancers. 

The following summer we attended the weeklong Decision School of Writing and from that time on I began publishing continuously. From the end of 1982 til 1986 I painted apartments by day and devoted myself to developing my writing skills and getting assignments by night. 

In 1986 Susie and I inherited her grandmother's house in Duluth. It was my hope to get a full-time writing job and put painting apartments behind us. To showcase my work while job hunting, John instructed me to buy a $25 binder instead of a three or five dollar binder. The tactic worked. It created a professional impression that led to several freelance assignments before landing a position as a writer the first week of July. This "break" evolved into a successful career in advertising, marketing and PR. 

1988. Top row: John and I. Front row:
John's Susie, my Susie and their Emily.

Over the years John and I continued to meet annually, to share our life adventures and writing successes. I was impressed with his successes as an author, an addictions counsellor and involvement in helping the needy, not only here but also in war torn Kosovo.*

In 2007 I began blogging daily and three years ago added Medium, another blogging platform. John followed my online activities keenly and last year sought my help getting started on Medium himself. He was excited about Koinonia, a publication for Christian writers, as a platform. He was attracted to its capacity for helping others beyond his physical sphere of influence.

Because he was older and had not been involved in social media before, it took a lot of hand holding, and I did all I could to help him with blogging the way he guided my early efforts to become a publishing writer.  

A week ago Friday he called me, seeking help on another article for Koinonia. We agreed to set up a time to work through the issue on Saturday, but when he called Saturday to follow up he was unable to talk. John has been battling pulmonary fibrosis for the past few years, a disease that took his daughter Emily 5 years ago this month, and which his twin brother Dave is also struggling with now. 

The next day he went to the hospital and passed away by mid-week, diagnosed with pneumonia and Covid on top of his primary issue.  

* * *

I wrote this a couple days ago not knowing how to finish. Perhaps it's a way of saying thanks to someone who made a difference in my life. 

If you're a young person reading this with something on your heart you wish to pursue, find a mentor whose values you share and who has travelled the path ahead of you enough to help show you the way.  

*John and his wife Susie made 13 humanitarian trips to Kosovo and twice to Macedonia. Susie also made trips to Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia with other groups.  

Related Links

John's website: www.TrueYouRecovery.com

John's books on Amazon

Roadmap to Lifelong Recovery: Interview with John Prin

Stories by John published on Koinonia

Chopin: Desire for Love and Thoughts from the Keen Mind of George Sand

George Sand was a woman who could not  and would not live within the confining boundaries society placed on women of her day. To be published as a novelist, she therefore wrote under a pseudonym. Her real name was Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, baronne Dudevant. 

This week I was watching a movie about Frederic Chopin and his relationship to George Sand titled Chopin: Desire for Love. It brought to mind the 1991 film Impromptu with Hugh Grant and Judy Davis in which Davis (as G. Sand) states that the beauty of Chopin's music is "proof that there is a God." It was a great line, and a statement that is hard to argue with. His piano compositions were exquisite.

Chopin: Desire for Love is a more recent production (2002) and less enjoyable. Like Impromptu it centers on the relationship between Chopin and Aurore Dupin, but in this latter version their conflicts become the story. His self-centeredness becomes painful to watch, no matter how much his compositions inspire or convey of the turbulence at the center of their passions. 

Dupin has two children who still need a mother. Chopin, who has never married or had children, sees her children as an impediment to the inspiration her love provides him. It's a form of machisimo that is common in certain parts of the world. When we worked at an orphanage in Mexico, some of the children there were kicked out of their homes by a second husband who would have nothing to do with the offspring of the first. 

Director Jerzy Antczak was nominated for an Academy Award for this 2002 production, which he filmed in Polish, then dubbed in English. The score is fabulous, simply because there is so much of Chopin there. Yo-Yo Ma is even one of the players in the soundtrack. 

The effect that Antczak attempted to achieve was to illuminate the conditions that created these sometimes emotionally charged pieces, much like that which was more successfully accomplished in Immortal Beloved about the music of Beethoven. Beethoven's stormy temperament is fairly well-known, so that film worked for me. This film diverged significantly from the image I have of a fragile, perfectionist composer who struggled with sickness and depression. 

One imdb.com reviewer stated that both Chopin films strayed far from the actual story of Chopin's career and affair with Aurore Dupin so that both were unacceptable. Of the two I preferred the former, even though I become impressed with the skill with which modern film makers are able to re-create the sets in these period pieces.

The actors were good and well cast for their roles--Piotr Adamczak as Chopin and Damuta Stenka as George Sand. Several of the reviewers gave the film high marks, so it may be something to consider, even if it does have a soap opera aspect. I will give it 5 stars out of 10, only because there is so much wonderful Chopin music in there. 

* * * 

George Sand by Auguste Carpentier

George Sand as a writer did not get as developed in this film. According to some, she was even more popular than Balzac and Victor Hugo in her day, and highly influential politically. I thought it would be worthwhile to share some quotes from this rule-breaking woman who had to make a go of it in a very restrictive time for women. She believed it was OK for a woman to wear pants (they were more comfortable than frilly dresses) and write novels. What I seem to recall was that she lived much of her life on less sleep because she did all her writing at night. Making sacrifices is what writers must do if they are to succeed. 

I'm always impressed by how much writers of that era accomplished without typewriters and word processors, or photocopy machines. George Sand lived in 1830, the typewriter was invented in 1872.

What follows are several quotes from her letters and writings.

* * * 

"I have an object, a task, let me say the word, a passion. The profession of writing is a violent and almost indestructible one."

* * * 
"Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life."

* * * 

"Life is a long ache which rarely sleeps and can never be cured."

* * * 
"Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth."

* * * 
"Masterpieces are only lucky attempts."

* * * 

About Chopin

"His creation was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without searching for it, without foreseeing it. It came to his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he would hasten to hear it again by, tossing it off on his instrument. But then would begin the most heartbreaking labor I have ever witnessed." 

* * * 

How Effective Is A Personal Website for Short Stories?

What follows is my answer to a question I was asked on Quora, the international crowdsourcing Q&A website. In 2018 I got the nod as a top writer on Quora, a website I enjoyed because I could help people by answering their questions, from silly to curious, earnest and serious, and everything in between. In 2019 I dropped off from being so active on Quora because I'd amped my participation on Medium, a platform that pays its writers whose work is being read and appreciated.

Q: How effective is a personal website for short stories?

Effective in what way?

When the internet was first emerging I created a website and shared poetry, art, journalism and short stories…. among other things. There were not a lot of websites in 1995–96 and I even got a badge from the St Paul Pioneer Press as a Top 5 Minnesota Websites of the Week.

One day I got contacted by a poetry website in Croatia. They asked permission to translate my story Duel of the Poets into Croatian as a centerpiece. (The story now appears in my book Unremembered Histories.)  A few months later a Russian website contacted me to translate another one of my stories into Russian.

Later, a French grad student was given the assignment to translate a story by an American writer into French and he selected my story Terrorists Preying. This was especially interesting because the word Preying is a Homonym for Praying and he had trouble trying to convey that in his translation.

Still later, I was contacted by a pair of young filmmakers for permission to make my story Episode on South Street into a short movie. I said I was honored and within the year it was on Vimeo.

I never made a penny, but felt honored and gratified that my work was appealing to readers. So I go back to the question “How effective in what way?” Keep in mind that the whole world is uploading content at dizzying speeds and your little batch of stories may never be seen at all if you don’t also find ways to let people know they are there. According to this website “There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day at our current pace, but that pace is only accelerating.”

In early 2011 I received some encouragement from someone I respected that my stories were worth sharing more widely and by the end of the year I published Unremembered Histories and two volumes for Kindle which, if I could do over again I would have done differently.

I think a website is useful for having all your work in one place. The downside is that most publications consider your work “published” if you do this, and you will have trouble selling it later.

I did it in order to share my work with readers. I disliked the whole game of sending things to publishers and waiting for rejection slips. But if you do decide to put your stories online, you can also repurpose them and share them on. Medium, which is a community fo writers.

As a  final aside I'll mention here that also used the website to share a few stories my children wrote. We were homeschooling for a while and in 2000 or 2001 I shared a long cowboy story my son had written and two of my daughter's stories. As it turns out, one of my daughter's stories was published in a California periodical and another in a New Zealand publication. No money in either, but it did make me a proud papa.

I hope this has been helpful.

Jack London Bio Offers New Insights While Raising Old Questions

At one time Jack London was the highest paid writer in America. There were two things that gave his writing such force. First, the stories he told were drawn from experiences he’d lived, adventures that transcended the norm. Second, and equally important, was his skill at storytelling.

His fame, however, came as the result of two other qualities. He was extremely persistent and incredibly prolific. Once he’d determined to be a serious writer he purportedly produced a minimum of 1000 words a day, every day, till the day he died.

The title of the biography I read this week is Jack London: An American Life by Earle Labor. Although this is the first biography of London that I’ve read, I’ve been quite familiar with much of his life story because two of his novels — Martin Eden and John Barleycorn — are autobiographical.

For the record, Earle Labor is the acknowledged major authority on the novelist Jack London, serving as the curator of the Jack London Museum and Research Center in Shreveport. What makes Labor’s labors so authoritative is that he’s read every piece of correspondence that exists, to or from London, as well the diaries of the women London’s life story.

* * * 

Like many schoolchildren I’d read “To Build a Fire” and “Call of the Wild” during my youth. My intro to Martin Eden came years later at the first writers’ conference I’d attended. One of the instructors, who by his early 30’s had published over 3000 articles, stated that young writers would glean much of value from reading that book, and indeed I did.

Earle Labor begins the story of Jack London’s life by noting his accomplishments: fifty books and international fame by the time he died at age forty. The first half of those forty years included delivering newspapers starting at 3:00 a.m. before going to school at age eight; dropping out of school at age thirteen to to work twelve to eighteen hours a day as a child laborer; becoming an oyster pirate at age fifteen, working as a sailor on a seal hunting schooner, riding the rails as a hobo, serving time in prison for something he didn’t do, searching for gold in the Klondike and more.

In some ways London’s adventures reminded me of Hemingway. Both were the kind of “man’s man” that seemed drawn to violence. (London wrote many stories about pugilists, Hemingway wrote about bullfighting.) Both seem to have had short fuses and personalities that would put them out of favor in our contemporary world.

London's ship, The Snark. He loved the open sea.

London’s first successful story was something he wrote for a contest, in part because he needed the money. Despite being a school dropout, he won the $25 prize against competition that included Stanford journalism students and the like. Getting from first base to fame took a little more time, but he was determined. To expand his vocabulary he learned a new word every day, writing it on a piece of paper, placing it in his pocket and using it in conversations until it was totally embedded.

That’s exactly the kind of thing I look for in young writers today, not just making an effort to expand one’s vocabulary but deliberately and consciously striving to improve the various aspects of their craft.

* * * 

There are aspects of Jack London’s life that are less than flattering. To his credit, Labor did not attempt to sugarcoat London’s story. I was appalled by some of the letters he wrote to his daughter. They were cruel and unwarranted., which raises the age old question as regards the relationship between an artist and his or her art. Should we think less of the art when we discover that the artist was a jerk or was a fiend?

* * * 

Three decades ago, I had a writer friend who was a big Jack London fan. I must have been discussing Martin Eden with him which opened the door to another fact of London’s life, London the Socialist. His experiences in sweat shops and other early life indignities obliged him to speak out for the underdog.

In the latter part of his life he acquired land and planned to build his dream home on a thousand acre spread in Sonoma, California. Two weeks before he and his second wife were to move into the home London called Wolf House, it was destroyed by fire. Was it arson? Had he made too many enemies advocating for socialism? My friend believed so.

Earle Labor makes a case for an alternate explanation. In 1995 some forensic scientists visited the ruins of Wolf House. The fire occurred on a day when the interior of the structure had been rubbed down with linseed oil. It was an extremely hot day and combustible fumes were in the air as the oil dried. They believe the rags ignited due to spontaneous combustion and the disastrous fire was the result.

“A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem.”

London made his mark because he learned early the kinds of stories that would sell. Here’s some advice for writers that was published in The Editor in 1903. It is an excerpt from an article titled “Getting Into Print.”

Fiction pays best of all, and when it is of a fair quality is more easily sold. A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration. Avoid the unhappy ending, the harsh, the brutal, the tragic, the horrible — if you care to see in print things you write. (In this connection don’t do as I do, but do as I say.) Humor is the hardest to write, easiest to sell, and best rewarded… Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.

Reading Labor’s London biography has prompted me to follow up with a return to reading some of the author’s other books and stories. How about you?

Related Links
My review of London's short story A Piece of Steak
Jack London: An American Life

John Gardner On Writing Fiction: Nine Quotes for Writers

John Gardner. (Public domain)

In my first writer's conference in 1983 I took both the fiction and non-fiction (article writing) tracks, in part because I wanted to be a publishing freelancer and I also wanted to learn the craft of fiction. It was a life changing week for me and I have been a publishing writer ever since.

In the advanced article writing class, the instructor recommended reading Jack London's Martin Eden, advice which I dutifully followed up on. Years later I read it again, and though now a century old it still offers rewards for wannabe writers.

John Gardner was another author whose books were also recommended. The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist are considered classics. After finding one of these in our local library I purchased both for my personal library. I'd pretty much suggest that if you are a beginning writer, you do the same. That is, read all the books you can find in the library about the writing craft, then purchase the best ones for your own ongoing usage. (This formula works for advertising, marketing, entrepreneurialism and other pursuits.)

John Gardner was both a writer and a teacher. He wrote more than a dozen books, both fiction and non-fiction including Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf tale from the point of view of the monster.

Gardner died in a motorcycle accident in September 1982, not yet 50. Like too many other artists, he died too young. Here are several quotes from the two books cited above. If you are serious about writing fiction, I commend both of these to you.

The Art of Fiction

"Though the literary dabbler may write a fine story now and then, the true writer is one for whom technique has become, as for the pianist, second nature."
J. Gardner


"... whatever the genre may be, fiction does its work by creating a dream in the reader's mind."
J. Gardner


"Thus the value of great fiction, we begin to suspect, is not just that it entertains us or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations."
J. Gardner


"What the young writer needs to develop, to achieve his goal of becoming a great artist, is not a set of aesthetic laws, but artistic mastery."
J. Gardner  

"At least in conventional fiction, the moment we stop caring where the story will go next... the writer has failed, and we stop reading.
J. Gardner  

"When the amateur writer lets a bad sentence stand in his final draft, though he knows its bad, the sin is frigidity: he has not yet learned the importance of his art..."
J. Gardner 


On Becoming a Novelist

"It may feel more classy to imitate James Joyce... than All In the Family; but every literary imitation lacks something we expect of good writing: the writer seeing with his own eyes."
J. Gardner


"Detail is the lifeblood of fiction."
J. Gardner


"The study of writing, like the study of classical piano, is not practical but aristocratic. If one is born rich, one can easily afford to be an artist; if not, one has to afford one's art by sacrifice."
J. Gardner  

* * * 

* Philip Yancey was keynote speaker at the banquet. I had the good fortune of having a meal with him that evening.

Ten Minutes with Carol Dunbar, A Ghostwriter Who Lives in the Woods

There's a difference between writers who dabble and those who purposefully practice a disciplined writing life. Hemingway's goal was 500 good words each day. Jack London produced a thousand. You will be impressed with Carol Jean Butler's output, as well as her personal history. I believe you'll learn much from her insights based on her decades of experience.

EN: Share how you came to be a professional writer. What was your path from childhood scribbles to a serious career decision?

Carol Dunbar: My path was not a traditional one. My first book titled The Dog Who Got Eaten was about a dog with a hole in the middle of its body who got mistaken by his owner for a donut. So, right away I struggled with plot. But I wrote many books until third grade when I decided to get serious. I labored over my masterpiece, the sequel to Peter Rabbit. I don’t know why I was obsessed with that rabbit, but it was an assignment for school, and I over-achieved, writing pages and pages—I wanted it to be really great. These were newsprint pages with those thin red and blue lines, and I erased so many times the pages became transparent and difficult to read. My teacher gave me a C. It was the only C I ever got and the hardest I’d worked on anything up to that point in my life. Then in fourth grade, I saw Man of La Mancha and fell in love with a more physical form of storytelling. I got my BFA in theatre, wrote in secret, and worked professionally as an actor for 10 years until I moved off the grid to finally focus on writing.

EN: You were born in Guam and have lived in several places such as Georgia, Rhode Island, Hawaii, and Texas. Now you live off the grid, in the woods here in Northwest Wisconsin. How have all these places and experiences informed your writing?

CD: I feel incredibly lucky to have this wealth of place to draw from, but it took me a while to tap into that. I used to think that because I was from nowhere, I couldn’t write with authority about anywhere. I used to bemoan the fact that I’d never write a cozy small-town story about growing up in one place where everybody knows everybody. I admire what Elizabeth Strout did with Olive, Again and how she brought all these characters from her previous novels back together into one fictional place. I might do that someday now that I’ve lived in Wisconsin for 18 years. But right now, I’m working on a novel-in-stories about people who can’t settle down. I’ve always wanted to read a book about people who move.

EN: You write both fiction and non-fiction. I myself feel my non-fiction has been enriched by poetry and fiction writing. How does your fiction inform your non-fiction writing?

Carol Dunbar

CD: This is an interesting question because my fiction informs my non-fiction from two different directions, both personally and professionally. And let me just say I think it’s wonderful you let poetry enrich your fiction. I admire poets and their precision.

From my fiction writing I learn how to tell the truth. A friend and writing colleague once shared with me that when she writes her characters in first person, they lie. That absolutely is true for me when I write nonfiction, and it’s why I prefer the third-person narrative. I have to work really hard to tell the truth when I’m writing personal nonfiction. It feels more vulnerable, and I only do it if I have something important to say that can’t be shared any other way. From a professional standpoint with the nonfiction articles and books I ghostwrite, my fiction skills help improve the writing because I know how to thread a narrative, how to draw out a story. Because of my theatre training I have a penchant for high drama, and I exploit that shamelessly to make my financial planning books more palatable.

EN: For authors seeking to publish books, especially fiction, finding a good literary agent is challenging. How did you get matched with yours?

CD: Serendipity. I met my agent at a writing conference and I pitched her. But making the decision to seek representation felt a lot like trying to decide when to go to the hospital during my first pregnancy. After so many years laboring over a book, I didn’t want to query too soon and be sent home.

I read this book called Your First Novel: An Author Agent Team Share the Keys to Achieving Your Dream by Ann Rittenberg and Laura Whitcomb, with a kickass foreword by Dennis Lehane. Wonderful book. And I didn’t query an agent until I’d done all 10 things on this list included in that book, a list that basically said, “Don’t even think about querying until you’ve done X, Y, Z.” The list included impossible things like giving a public reading to a group of strangers, and my heart sank because, as a mom to little kids, I knew it would take me years to do all the stuff on the list. But the process was rewarding in of itself, and my novel got better with each item I check off. Through Lake Superior Writers, I was given an opportunity to give a reading at Grand Central Plaza. I was so nervous presenting my book to this group of seniors, but they were just marvelous. They listened attentively when I read the first three chapters, they asked questions and we talked. Then to my utter delight they wanted to know what happened next, so I read to them some more.

It was having this engagement with readers that clued me in on what was interesting and important about my book. It helped me both from a character development standpoint and from a marketing standpoint when writing my pitch. By the time I set out to query, I felt on solid ground because I knew how to talk intelligently about what I’d written. When I set out to find an agent, I received two requests for full reads after only five queries—and that’s going from the first 10 pages, to a request for 50 pages, to a request for the full manuscript. I share this not to brag, but to make the point that in my experience, if you really do all the things that the professionals advise you to do when setting about this process, the work pays off.

EN: You mention that you don’t send something out till you have read it out loud. This is great advice for beginning writers. What are some other tips you might suggest?

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CD: I can share two tips brought to you by my theatre background. First, learn how to read your drafts like an actor. An actor treats the written text like a holy thing where every word matters and is there for a reason. First drafts obviously have a lot of problems and are full of crap, but they can also offer unexpected gifts from the subconscious. If you can learn to identify these gems and trust yourself, they can reveal hidden motives and help show you the way.

Second, listen to yourself. Even if you’re not someone who typically engages with the written word aurally, even if you hate the sound of your own voice, even if you don’t have time, read it out loud, record it, and then listen to your story like a reader would listen to an audiobook. This process helps me edit in three different ways. First, as you said, when I read the work out loud, I suddenly see and hear big problems that I didn’t see when looking at the page. Second, reading and listening both help you to feel your way through the climax of a chapter, a story, or a scene. It helps you to recognize when you’re peaking too early, when you’re losing tension, when you’re doing too much or not enough or when you’re repeating yourself. And third, when you go for a walk or a drive and listen to your story again, you trick your brain into thinking you didn’t write this, and you become the person who just wants to be told a good story. And if the piece isn’t doing that, then you can identify why, and roll up your sleeves. Because the cool thing is that now, you won’t be just poking around, you’ll have a real intention to your editing because you will have identified what’s not working and why, so you will be able to fix it. This might sound tedious, but when you finally have a draft that’s a pleasure to listen to, there is no greater reward.

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EN: You’ve had real success ghostwriting for a variety of clients. What do you like most and least about ghostwriting?

CD: What I like most is getting to interview people across the globe. It’s a little doorway into lives different from my own. I love hearing how they talk, hearing the background noises, and most especially I enjoy the conversations that are off topic. I once wrote an entire short story based on the sound of a young man’s voice who interrupted our interview with the word, “Grandpa?” So, my professional work energizes my creative work, which I’m grateful for, because you’d think it would be the opposite. I typically write 2,000 to 4,000 words a day for my paid work, and that’s in addition to logging in a 1,000-word minimum for my creative work. (I like to think that my writing muscles are buff.)

The physical fatigue is the hardest part. While the long form suits me, I’m banging away on a keyboard for hours at a time. I have an ergonomic everything plus a standing desk and a chiropractor.

EN: What are you working on now that has you jazzed?

CD: Great question. I’m working on a novel in stories that celebrates restaurant culture and the lives behind the hands that serve. These are what I call my waitress stories, and I wrote them between drafts of my novel. But the problem I’ve always had with short story collections is there’s no driving pull to get the reader to the end. So, with this collection, I’m working to thread a narrative that follows a group of individuals who all work together at a restaurant that has decided to close. So, the reader will follow them across the country to other places where they pursue other dreams and succeed or fail at building new lives.

As a writer I’m very interested in how people move through transitions. One of my favorite books is Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, and one of the most interesting parts to me was when Santiago worked at The Crystal Shop. He was very good at his job at The Crystal Shop and it was lucrative for him to stay there, but he was on a quest and so always felt this underlying dissatisfaction and a pull. I love this metaphor because I think we also get stuck in our lives working at our own equivalent of a Crystal Shop, and it can be very difficult to move on from that and answer what’s calling. Of course, in The Alchemist, the journey called him back home. And this is also interesting because in real life, it isn’t always that we have big ambitions; sometimes the greatest lessons come from learning how to stay.

EN: Thank you for your time and the rewarding read.

Related Links
www.caroljeanbutler.com
www.caroldunbar.com