It's 9 pm. Do you know where your subjects and verbs are?

I've spent the last several days preparing a 2-day workshop for software salespeople on writing better emails and other business documents. Two days isn't a lot of time to teach writing improvement, and I always make sure the supervisors who hire me understand that I can present a lot of information and suggestions but that each employee must practice what he or she doesn't know in order to get better. I can guarantee them an entertaining and informative two days, but I can't guarantee better writing. You can lead a horse to the comma....

One of the biggest stumbling blocks in teaching writing improvement is that few people under 40 have any knowledge of grammar or parts of speech. Or rather they have only an internal grammar and not an external one. The internal grammar is the collection of rules and usage that we each develop as infants and children. We're born with this capacity and it gets filled up with our first language,the one we learn from our parents or other caregivers. It's our automatic language and we use it without thinking about it, a lot like we drive a car without thinking about it.

Having an external grammar as well, explicit knowledge of the rules and terminology of the language, is helpful  for repairs and stylistics (just like knowing the names of car parts and how the engine works may come in handy if you want to repair your car yourself). If you're a writer by profession or craft, you will want to learn these rules and terminology. (A good guide is a handy book/workbook called The Least You Should Know about English. It's recently been rereleased in a hideously expensive version but old copies are just as good and cheap on amazon.) It's really a must. But other people use writing all the time and don't have a lot of interest in those technicalities.

My challenge tomorrow will be teaching some basics to people who are not writers by trade or inclination but  who must improve their writing skills as part of their job. They may not come to the class with much enthusiasm or inclination so I'll have to pull out all my tricks to help them learn where their subjects and verbs are.

The joy of sharing what I know

This past week I've been in Naples, Florida. Monday and Tuesday, I co-presented at a writing workshop with my friend Karen Casey. Karen and I have complementary styles and that worked out great. She knew just what to say to bring out the content of the stories we were asking the 30 women to write and I knew most of what to say to bring out their confidence that they could write them and write them well.

I love teaching what I know about writing: zero drafting, staying out of editing mind when you're drafting, being willing to write crap so you can practice and get to the good stuff. Writing specifics, including dialog and description; taking things deeper.

We spent two days in a church rec hall, eating ham sandwiches and cookies and trying to keep the room cold enough for those of us who were too warm and warm enough for those of us who were too cold. And we spent two days writing and reading to each other. We started off with the writers reading their drafts in groups of three although we made it very clear that anyone could choose to not read. I was delighted to see that only one woman passed that first day. At the end of the day, we asked anyone who wanted to come up to the microphone and read. Six volunteered and read wonderful drafts.

Yesterday, day 2, we had much more reading to the whole group and the stories were moving and inspiring and we laughed and cried with each other. By the end of the day, only one person hadn't read at the microphone, preferring to read to just one other person.

I'm so glad I'd agreed to come, that I agreed to be part of this experience. I learned a lot from Karen about content and evoking deeper feelings, and I got to share my beliefs about the importance of writing our stories and encourage 30 women to do just that. I'm so lucky!

Missing my daily writing

I'm in Florida this week. I'm doing two workshops (three days) and a speech (one evening). I'm staying with my co-presenter and her husband and they're lovely people. And my schedule is not my own.

Yesterday I got up at 3:30 am and left for the airport at 4:45. I just couldn't find the energy to sit down to the novel. I planned to get up early this morning but with jet lag I slept until 8 and the day was starting. Tomorrow, we head out early for the first workshop.

So I'm feeling pulled by the social aspects of the trip, by the work I'm here to do, by the editing work I brought with me, and by Frankie and her story.

And I'm just trying to be okay with getting done what I can.

Long-range thinking about the writing life

In the course I just finished with Eric Maisel, he closed the last session with a discussion of the long haul of the creative life. Most of us get stuck, often quite pleasantly, in the current project. That becomes our focus. How do we complete this book? this series of paintings? this album of songs? We're concentrating on this tree in the forest of our creative lives.

Maisel encourages us to frequently and regularly step back and look at that forest. What is our body of work? And what do we want it to be? These questions concern both quantity and quality. Here are some things to consider:

1. Do you keep a notebook or other file for new ideas? Subjects, themes, ideas, characters? Do you visit that file frequently?
2.Do you pencil in time to just sit with your imagination and doodle?
3.Do you know what your next project will be, even if you have just started this one?
4. Do you need additional skills? Are you on the lookout for ways to get them?
5. Do you read widely in your field and in other fields (or visit galleries or listen to music)?
6. Do you have a plan (evolving, flexible) for your body of work?
7. Do you regularly think about what success might mean for you?
8. Do you keep up with what's going on in your marketplace and how those changes might affect you in the long run?

For these are conversations about the long run, about living fully into your life as a creative. Just something to consider.

Working with back story

In the last two manuscripts I've edited (one a very good novel, the other an interesting memoir), both writers have struggled to work well with back story. As you probably know, back story is the story or pivotal events of the characters (usually the main ones) before the novel begins or the specific event in the memoir took place.

There are some good rules for back story that I use in my own fiction writing and encourage my clients to use, although my encouragement is not always successful as some people are married to a particular memory in a particular place. But here are some problems and some suggestions.

Tip #1: Use back story sparingly and at just the right moment. 
In the novel I was editing, there were some important pieces of information in the growing up of one of the major characters that needed to be inserted somewhere along the narrative. The author chose to do these as memories sparked in the mind of the narrator. Unfortunately, there was no pattern to these memories and they were not linked to external events, just a kind of loose "that made me think of Patty when..." As the reader, I found myself unable to figure out how old the girl was in each memory and how the memories fit together to help me understand her. I suggested the author go back and put the memories in chronological order and do at least some of them as flashbacks, rather than just the narrator telling us about them.

In the memoir I was editing, events that had been timely in earlier chapters showed up in later chapters as back story. Now, it's fine to allude to earlier information. Authors do that all the time. But information can't be presented as new information in several places. That tells the reader that the author has no control over his information. This is a self-editing task.

Tip#2 Don't insert a flashback or back story into an action scene. 
Good writers don't have characters stop and remember something in the middle of an argument. An exception is something that passes quickly through the mind of the character. "When he shouted at me, I heard my dad's voice yelling at my mother." That much we'll buy. But a whole scene from childhood will throw the reader back in time and diminish the drama of the scene at hand.

Trusting your writer self

I have a couple of shelves on books on writing. Some are well-worn, others untouched although they looked interesting when I was in the bookstore or they were recommended by another writer. This morning while I was journaling, I noticed the spine of Courage to Trust on my shelf, a self-help book a friend had mentioned recently and one that I've skimmed. Then I saw John Lee's Writing from the Body, one of the untouched books, and opened it to a section called "Afraid to Trust." Okay, too many coincidences, so I read the section.

It starts with this quote from Wendell Berry: "One puts down the first line...in trust that life and language are abundant enough to complete it."

I've been struggling with the early-morning novel writing the last few days, eking out 100-150 words in my allotted hour instead of the 300-400 I'd been averaging. That in itself is okay. I don't have a quota to fill each day. But I feel deeply unsure all of a sudden about where the story is going. I'm not unsure about all that I've already written. It's a solid idea, and some good writing, but I'm stuck with where to go next and I've grown suddenly timid. I'm not afraid of wasting time. Any writing experience is a good one and part of the lifelong apprenticeship I've committed to. And I don't think I'm afraid of making a mistake--that's easy enough to correct.

I think rather that I've lost trust in my relationship with Frankie, my character, and in my relationship with my muse, whoever and however that shows up. That all the communication we had built up over the writing retreat has dissipated in the face of just a few minutes to write each day and then onto paid work and commitments and my other life. And there's no help for that now, not for the next month or so anyway.

So I'm committed to taking a deep breath and recognizing that I'm overcommitted and relaxing around that and solving it as a very solvable problem. And I can shift into trusting my writer self to wait and be there when the time opens up.

Shifting gears from the retreat

For 8 full days, I was on a writing retreat. Other than some kitchen chores and occasionally checking emails, I had all my time free to write and be with my characters. I wrote each morning first thing for a good hour in my room, watching the light come up through the alders in the marsh. Then I moved to the kitchen and did my morning pages journaling for another hour over tea and breakfast.

Most days I went back and reread what I had written in the early hour and then planned to do something else for a while but the story and the characters kept talking to me and so I'd write a good while longer. Then I'd check email in the other building but while I was doing that, I was really thinking about what to write next. The same thing happened when I took my 2-mile walk down the road in the late morning. I'd be letting my mind wander but it always came back to Frankie and Lola and what was going to happen to them next and I'd come back and write some more and the day would drift away like that.

I wrote a lot, 10,000 words, and now I'm back full tilt into my other life of paid work and the gym on a schedule and fixing all my own meals and running my own errands and fielding client questions and talking on the phone to family and friends and loving on my cats. It's a wonderful life I have, but not so conducive to hanging out all day with my characters.

So I've been feeling a bit frustrated since I came back. I'm getting up each morning and writing for the early hour but it's a shift from the retreat, knowing I can't just drop in when I feel like it. I may have to sort out something in addition.