Joys of Historical Research: The Battle of Hayes Pond

Hi writer friends,

I am beginning to write a novel about North Carolina.  Incidents that I half remember from when I lived there keep coming up in the back of my mind.  Then I have to see what the public record shows about these half-memories.  This week, I recalled that while I was in high school, the Indians of the coastal region of NC surrounded a Ku Klux Klan rally and won the fight with them hands down.

I remember that the Klan was unpopular, even though there was a lot of racism in my whites-only high school, and that people passed around gossip about the Klan's defeat with great glee, even people I knew had racist attitudes towards black people.  The fact that the Klan behaved like terrorists, hitting at night, keeping their identities secret, and trying to win by intimidation, probably accounts for why my fellow students rejoiced in their loss of the battle.  I hoped to find out more about this event, and turned to the internet to find some sources I could order.  Most sources seemed to be newspaper and magazine articles, at least as cited in the Wikipedia article.  Now I'm really tempted to use this incident in my novel!

Have you ever included real historical incidents in your fiction?  How do people react to that?

Six Twitter Surprises

What's Twitter, I asked?  A Social Media site.  You must be active on Twitter to sell your book, I heard in reply.  I posted here a while back about finding out how to forget trying to read the whole stream of Twitter and get in.  Go ahead and follow me/follow you in excess.  The stream of Twitter is a lot like a real water stream.  It is constant, it has molecules of every dead king and live star, it is always moving and never the same, and there is no way you can experience it all.  That was my first surprise.  The second one was hearing things before they officially happened.  In the Arab spring we all know this now.  Tweet before news even after repression.  But that's a surprise we all got at about the same time.  Here's something else I, who thought of Twitter as an outgoing publicity machine, never expected: moments of transcendent beauty.  Instant poems that transfix me as the stream rushes by.  Referrals to lightning storms set to gorgeous music.  Images of volcanos erupting.  Moons covered with frost flowers from a winter window.  And moments of connection with people I really don't know were another surprise.  A young woman whose cat died.  A man whose father never hugged him even once.  Simple, direct appeals to the open universe for support by these tweets.  And fifth is the #ww and #ff system.  These symbols are for lists of people (tweeps) you recommend for others to follow.  If they like you, they might like them too.  And it's a good way to reward people who follow you and put you on their #ww and #ff lists.  Last, but by no means least, there are hashtags.  Want to find authors?  Go to #writers or #authors.  Want to work with working writers?  Go to #amwriting.  There you can even go to the associated web site and post a bio.  Want to read writing tips?  Go to #writingtips.  Writing memoir?  Go to #memoir.  You can even make up your own hashtag and start including that in your tweets.  If you're irresistible, others will follow and you can manage the hashtag list.  There is a heck of a lot more to Twitter than I thought!  Enjoy.

The mystery of voice

For one of my classes last semester, a class in British Literature (modernism), the professor let me do a creative writing paper rather than a research paper.  After he read my draft, he said, "Wow.  The first three pages are very poetic.  You really got into the landscape of the area where you grew up.  But then, it's like you feel off a cliff.  It's not in the same voice at all."  I knew exactly what he meant.  I almost never have "flow" when I'm writing, but those three pages jumped from my brain to the page almost effortlessly, with joy and purpose, with writerly thoughts, with a sense I knew what I was doing.  But then, I didn't know how to go on.  I had a setting and a main character, but although I wrote about 27 more pages around the setting and character to turn in for my professor, working on and off for a period of weeks, I never found that voice again.  I hope very much that I can, in some quiet moments in natural settings this summer, reread the three pages, meditate, and reconnect that cord to the source of the voice.  I don't know if it will be possible, but with every fiber of my being, I want to make it work.  I only hope wanting it that much won't get it the way.

Braiding Storylines

I don't know if you can discover braiding storylines without writing something long, like a novel or a novella, and then rewriting.  I had no idea about how exciting this method could be until I began to rewrite my novel, The Bad Project.  I had a straight-through story, involving what happened to two women during their first semester in college, more or less chronologically.  The strands I braided into it came from the question, "What else did they do?  Just go to class?"  Of course not.  The roommates began to meet with a writing outreach group for high school girls, and that helped Marianne call her resistance to Chinese culture into question.  Marianne took on a co-editorship for the college literary magazine with a gay black man, helping her to mine the prejudices of Mandy, the student representative on the panel judging Crystal's application for the Forscher premed scholarship for "students of good character." Also, Marianne had to put her writing out there to be judged by older students, some of whom were none too gentle with her.  These strands of extra-curricular activities seemed to be side issues, but when I began adding them, they made strong connections and big contributions to the main themes of the book.  Crystal sang in the Gospel Choir, and her concert broke open some of her inhibitions about relationships with men and also allowed Marianne to relax from excessive studying.  So, the fact of writing a longer story gave me the room and the freedom to develop some related activities for the two women, thinking they might prove to be distractions, only to find that they often led me right to the heart of the story.  That is why I thought of it as braiding; in braiding you take an outward path, but then it curves back to the center and connects.  I found this process highly enjoyable and surprising, and when I reread the novel now, I cannot imagine the story without these braided elements.

7 Important Reasons to Write a Memoir

Why write a memoir?  1. You can't help it. You feel a strong compulsion to do it.  2. You have learned something from your life that you want to share with others either so they can avoid repeating your mistakes or because you've proved something works.  3. The rhythms and flavors of your life are unique experiences that you'd like to explain to others.  4. You want to move from writing into speaking about parts of your life that were important to you.  5. You want to get out and compete with others to sell a lot of books.  6. You want to become a celebrity and make a name for yourself.  7. You are a celebrity and know that others want to read about your life and how you succeeded.

I wrote my memoir for reasons 1-3.  I am not a celebrity so reason 7 is for the Oprah Winfreys, Ellen DeGenereses and Maria Shrivers of the world, not for me.  What about reasons 4, 5, 6?  Those are the things that reclusive, shy writers don't consider, don't want, but may have to accept.  Being a professor, I'm more comfortable with speaking than some writers I know.  I don't much like 5, the competition.  And I have a love/hate relationship with 6.  I think I might like being a household word, but I might hate the loss of privacy.  Once you've written and published a memoir, at least part of your privacy curtain is gone anyway, so perhaps it's just as well to imagine it all gone.  But I'd like to have my cake and eat it too: I'd love to sell a lot of books but not be recognized by the woman in the street.  Probably, I'll get at least half my wish!

On Writing What You Know, or Not

One of those powerful dicta that newbie writers receive many times is, "Write what you know."  It certainly worked for Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Hardy to sink body and soul into the places that ran in their bone marrow, to use the accents and verbiage of their homebodies, to ignore the rest of the universe.  Each of them sought the commonality of humanity in the specifics of their own villages and towns, farms and roads, libraries, ramshackle cars or carriages, and tired feet.  But is that the only way you can write anything worthwhile?  What about Blind?  Who has experienced what it would be like for everyone to become blind at a stroke?  Yet it's a profound novel, well worth reading, with great insights into human behavior and emotions.  I've thought a lot about this advice, and I think it can inhibit creativity. Its virtue is that you are likely to know the important details of places you've lived and loved.  But it can prevent you from applying those details to new places and ideas.  And here's the real rub.  You can tell yourself you know a place and its people, but the insides of their heads could be much different than you imagine.  So unless you talk about the world according to your own thoughts, there is no real way to write only what you know.  And if you talk with any philosophers, even your own thoughts will have fading reality.  So, I'd say this.  Keep in mind rooting what you write in the physicality of the universe you're describing.  But let your imagination go free in placing your writing in Stonehenge, on Mars, or in a time and place of your richest desires.  And enjoy yourself in that world.

One special detail is all you need

Something I have become more and more aware of is the way authors I enjoy use the special detail that conveys the whole picture.  Someone from my MFA program, for example, described an old Irishman as having eyebrows like hamsters.  Picture that!  You don't need any more details, do you?  I certainly didn't.  And this master detail that conveys it all shows in full bloom in stories by Chekhov.

Francine Prose, in Reading Like a Writer, decribed how Chekhov broke all the rules for short story writing but said she can't put his short stories down.  I started reading these stories, and I completely agree.  And I think that his use of the one detail is part of the reason the stories work so well.  Of course, Chekhov had other methods as well, including providing a slice of life instead of a nice neat ending.  But the telling detail is so well chosen in Chekhov stories that I often just stop and marvel about how much you can read out of a single detail.  If you haven't tried to describe things with ultimate economy like this, it takes a lot of thought.  You can't just remove all the details but one and have it convey it all.  That special detail has to bring the whole scene into focus, has to be the detail that implies the rest.  You may have to think about what it could be for a few days before you find it.  But it is very worthwhile.  People may read your story and say things like " Such economy of description!"  The underlying secret is not just economy, but worth per word!