Entry # 97 - "What Helps Writers Grow?"

Photo Credit - Jim Wilson - August 2012

So what helps writers grow? What helps expedite the revision process? In Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, she describes relying on the help of competent readers, those people who have the skills to read thoughtfully and respond honestly.  Writers grow when they have selected careful readers who provide feedback that responds not only to the strengths, those things that worked within a given text,  but more importantly, text based things that did not work for the reader.  

Burroway describes the process of having a trusted reader "lay a finger on the trouble spot" in the text. Those places where the reader began to feel - "I didn't understand this" or "Why did she do that?" or "I didn't believe this" and while this sort of feedback makes most of us cringe, the truth is this type of text based criticism is important to hear, absorb, and accept if we are committed to improving our writing work. Burroway says, "This kind of laying-the-finger-on-the-trouble-spot produces an inward groan, but it's also satisfying; you know just where to go to work." 

While some approach the revision process with fear and loathing, most writers are invested in making a piece of writing as good as it can be. Getting the first draft done is only the beginning. Burroway says, "Making it right will involve a second commitment, to seeing the story fresh and creating it again with the advantage of this [process of] re-vision."

Marianne Moore said, "The thing is to see the vision and not deny it; to care and admit that we do."  It helps me to remember that almost anything I write can be improved. But that doesn't mean it's not good or even worthy of publication. Writing is revision. Revision is writing. It's a process. It is a growth process. It is an ongoing process.

Photo Credit - Jim Wilson - August 2012

"The creative process is not all inventive; it is partly corrective, critical, nutritive, and fostering --a matter of getting this creature to be the best that it can be. William C. Knott, in The Craft of Fiction, cogently observes that 'anyone can write --and almost everyone you meet these days is writing. However, only writers know [or learn] how to rewrite. It is this ability alone that turns the amateur into a pro.'"   ----Janet Burroway - Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft.

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Jan Bowman’s work has appeared in Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, Broadkill Review, Trajectory, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes, and others. She won the 2012 Roanoke Review Prize for Fiction. Her stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories and a story was a finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two collections of short stories and currently shopping for a publisher for a completed story collection. She has nonfiction work pending publication in Spring 2013 Issues of Trajectory and Pen-in-Hand. She writes a weekly blog of “Reflections” on the writing life and posts regular interviews with writers and publishers.   Learn more at:

Website – www.janbowmanwriter.com

Blogsite – http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com

Entry # 96 - WRITERS TALK - Paul Hanstedt - Part 2 - Author of Hong Konged and General Education Essentials

Background Notes:

Paul Hanstedt is a Professor of English at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, a father of three, a writer, an educator, and a traveler. Besides his text book, GENERAL EDUCATION ESSENTIALS, his academic work has been published in MLA's The Profession, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Liberal Education. He regularly travels throughout the country and around the globe working with faculty and administrators on general education/liberal education reform, curricular design and development, course design and development, and assignment and assessment design.

Part Two of our Interview with Paul Hanstedt

Jan:        Let's begin this part of interview by talking about our mutual fear of flying. I must confess I laughed, but I really did connect to your blog essay, “Confessions of a White-Knuckle Flier.”  Roanoke has an 'interesting' airport nestled in between those hills. So you too hate to fly, and yet you love to travel.  Can you talk about this paradox? How do you manage this contradiction?

Paul:        I can’t stand flying.  Can’t stand it.  Takeoffs and landings are the worst:  the arms of my seat will be soaked in sweat.  My hands will be clammy.  I’ll be able to hear my own breathing.  I’ll feel every bump.  It doesn’t matter if I’m sitting next to an engineer who can explain about how much stress wings can take or a pilot who can tell me about how technology can defeat wind sheer before it even starts:  All of those things are meaningless compared to the image of myself plummeting thirty thousand feet straight down. 

But then the flight ends.  And I’m somewhere really cool.  The food is different, the drink is different.  I’m surrounded by a language I can barely understand.  The quality of light is different.  I’ve got a whole new place to explore.  I love that feeling, and it’s a big enough feeling, one that lasts for a long time, that it will drown out the immediate and finite fear of flying. 

Or it will, at least, until that one final fatal flight where my plane is ripped in half and I plummet, along with 300 other people, to the rocky ground below.  : )

Jan:        Recently you returned from a conference in Korea and you’ve written about the challenges of traveling when you don’t speak the language.  So how 'do' you manage when language barriers exist?

Paul:        It depends:  if I’m alone, I just muddle through it.  I’m clumsy, I’m awkward, I’m a buffoon, I talk too loud or not loud enough, I make weird gestures, I exaggerate my expressions—I do all of these things until I’m used to the place and things become a little easier, until I know enough phrases or enough about the culture that I can get by okay.

When I’m with my wife, her energy sort of pulls me forward.  She’s a very open person and very good with languages, and people respond to her well, so I’m able to ride on her coattails some. 

And when we’re with our kids, none of the rest of it matters:  people will approach us, they’ll talk to the kids, they’ll look at us and smile, they’ll shake our hands, they’ll give us food.  Waitresses will cluster around my sons and waiters will nod seriously at my daughter.  And somehow they’ll be more patient with us.  It’s like the kids are a universal language, a sign that everything’s okay, that it’s okay to talk to these people, to help them out.  I’d like to think that it’s the same way here in the US when others come to visit, but I don’t know for sure.  A few years back, though, we had some friends from France visit right around Halloween, and when we went to shop for pumpkins, the guy running the stand—a big farmer with calloused hands and a few teeth missing—was about as gracious to those kids as I remember seeing anywhere. 

Jan:        You’re author of a well-received text book, General Education Essentials and many people know you more for that and your essay readings on Virginia Public Radio, but as you know I’m a fiction person, so I’d like to know more about the other creative work that you’ve published in Beloit Fiction Journal, Puerto Del Sol, and Confrontation. Which of your recent short creative works is more in tune with your larger writing aspirations?

Paul:        I’d say the last story I wrote, called “Lists” and published in the Beloit Fiction Journal maybe six years ago.  It’s a story told completely through a series of—surprise!—lists, and I liked it for a couple of reasons:  first, it let me have a huge cast of characters for a fifteen page story.  It just moved so quickly and I was able to revisit characters so often that it felt like the cast of a Dickens novel to me. (I got my PhD in Victorian literature, and love that stuff).  Second, it allowed me to have a “messy” ending, one that didn’t really tie up very neatly.  I can be a bit anal at times, a bit too organized, and my fiction often felt too symmetrical, too predictable to me.  This one felt less so. 

All of that said, there’s a reason why I haven’t written a story in six years:  creative nonfiction, by its very nature, gives me the unpredictability that I crave.  I can’t control where a story goes, I’m stuck with what’s there.  I like that.  I feel like the power has been taken away from me, and that allows me to do some things that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.  Like, for instance, speak directly to the reader, saying, “What I want to give you here is X.  X would feel good, and we both know it.  But what actually happened is Y.”  And I like the aesthetics of that, the way it can surprise the reader. 

Jan:        Is there a must read book on writing that you would recommend to any aspiring writer?

Paul:        E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel.  It’s short, clean, and almost every sentence in it is a keeper.   

Jan:        What are you reading now?  What are the top four books on your ‘to read’ stack?

Paul:        I’m not fudging on this, I’m telling the absolute truth:

1)    Rory Nugent’s The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck.  It’s such an event-filled journey through India that I sometimes wonder if it’s all true.  But it’s funny and beautiful and powerfully written.  He’s got one passage where he talks about the power of the Brahmaputra River, and how it’s so strong that you can actually hear the river changing the shape of the islands as you drift by.  Great stuff.

2)    Chris Gavaler’s School For Tricksters, about the Carlisle School for Indians, and a pair of students, Ivy Miller and Sylvester Long, who pretended to be native Americans in order to get an education there.  It’s set during the time of Jim Thorpe, “Pop” Warner, and Marianne Moore, who taught typing there.  It’s just so well imagined, so authoritative, so well researched, so powerfully written on the sentence level—just so accomplished.  It makes me feel like I should be handing out milk and cookies with my book. 

3)    Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari.  Theroux is obviously one of the best travel writers alive today.  I’m not sure I’d like to hang out with him—and I’m positive he wouldn’t want to hang out with me—but he does a great job of bringing hidden corners to the page.  It’s slow going sometimes, so I pick this book up and set it down again, but I always come back to it happily.

4)    M.C. Beaton’s Death of a Maid.  Pure cotton candy, but damn I do love her Hamish Macbeth series.  Just quirky, funny, lightly told but compelling.  You can see the world she’s describing, you get her characters, but you never get bogged down.  I have a 50-mile commute to and from work every day, so I usually listen to her books in the car. 

Jan:    Wow. That's a great list. I think I will add a couple of these to my reading list. What’s the best writing advice you have ever been given?

Paul:  The best advice I ever got was from Christopher Tilghman who is (or was) the chair of the creative writing program at the University of Virginia.  I’ve never met him, and he doesn’t know he gave it to me, but nonetheless.  It happened a few years ago when I was stuck in an administrative job that was pulling me away from my writing time.  A friend of mine who studied under Tilghman told me how Tilghman was once asked if he didn’t resent his administrative responsibilities, if he wouldn’t rather be writing instead.  According to this friend of mine, Tilghman’s reply was, “All writing is writing.  It doesn’t matter if I’m writing a memo or a personnel evaluation, it’s all writing.  It’s all good, it’s all practice.” 

That helped me, I think. I was writing a lot of curricular models, a lot of powerpoints, a lot of rationales.  This made me think about how I wrote those things, allowed me to have more pleasure in writing them, in making the language work the same way I would if I were writing a story. 

Jan:         And what advice did you decide to ignore?

Bad advice?  I’m sure I’ve received some . . . but honestly, I don’t remember any of it.  I suppose that says something, right? 

Jan:     Finally, I wanted to ask this one question for a while.  If you could be a literary super hero, what would your super power be?

Paul:  Making people laugh out loud with one sentence, then cry with the next.  And taking them to a place that they’ve never been before so thoroughly that it almost feels familiar to them.  Or is that three powers?  I always want too much.  

In addition to HONG KONGED, his nonfiction memoir about a year in Asia with three kids under the age of ten, Paul Hanstedt has published creative works in the Beloit Fiction Journal, Puerto Del Sol, and Confrontation, among other journals. He is a regular essayist and can be heard on Virginia Public Radio.

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Jan:        Thank you, Paul, for your wonderful interview.  Readers can order your books online or request them from a local or university book store.  Happy Travels!  
   

Jan Bowman’s work has appeared in Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, Broadkill Review, Trajectory, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes, and others. She won the 2012 Roanoke Review Prize for Fiction. Her stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories and a story was a finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two collections of short stories and currently shopping for a publisher for a completed story collection. She has nonfiction work pending publication in Spring 2013 Issues of Trajectory and Pen-in-Hand. She writes a weekly blog of “Reflections” on the writing life and posts regular interviews with writers and publishers.   Learn more at:

Website – www.janbowmanwriter.com

Blogsite – http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com

Entry # 95 - "Reflections on the Inner Critic"

Photo Credit - Alex Dunn - September 2012 - Florida Sky

We talked about self criticism in my writing class this past week. It seems that often we are  harder on ourselves and our writing efforts because somewhere back in our memory, we carry the scars of a voice that told us our work wasn’t any good, or perhaps the voice said we weren’t good enough at writing to justify our desire to write.  I’m often aware of the power of the negative to shape our perceptions of who we are and what we can accomplish. 

Writers readily acknowledge that almost anything you do in writing can be improved, and most agree revision is writing and writing is revision, but the reality is that no critic can cause you so much doubt about your ability as your inner critic. And that inner critic comes from your experiences with others who judged too soon and too harshly. 

Sometimes these negative inner voices might say, "You're not a Real Writer because you: can't spell well, have poor handwriting, have not been published, don't have an MFA, don't write every day, are too old, or too young to have any thing important to say." These are some of the kinds of negative messages that float in the background for people who have aspired to write.  If you want to write, you'll learn to ignore this back ground chatter.

Often these voices came from our childhood and continue to shape our attitudes as adults, perhaps leaving the adult - as one person in a writing class I was in over the summer, described it - "feeling so incompetent and self critical it's hard to write anything more complex than a grocery list."  So this kind of thing shapes the inner critic and prevents the full growth of a mature writer, if that negative inner voice is not ignored.

Photo Credit - Jan Bowman - May 2012

Now let's be clear. I'm not suggesting that all self criticism of writing is a bad thing.  What I am suggesting is that if we would write - we need to be able to sort through those voices from the past whose criticism is based on attacking the confidence of our inner writer and ignores the truth that all writers will write better with practice, patience and persistent attempts to learn how to write. Learning how to write is an ongoing process. Writers should be open to growth and new insights and the amazing possibilities available to them every time they put words on a page.

"If you have a motto as a writer, it might be, 'In my heart I trust.'" ---Richard Goodman, The Soul of Creative Writing.  He also observed, "No critic who ever lived will cause you as much doubt or anguish about your writing as yourself."

Jan Bowman’s work has appeared in Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, Broadkill Review, Trajectory, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes, and others. She won the 2012 Roanoke Review Prize for Fiction. Her stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories and a story was a finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two collections of short stories and currently shopping for a publisher for a completed story collection. She has nonfiction work pending publication in Spring 2013 Issues of Trajectory and Pen-in-Hand. She writes a weekly blog of “Reflections” on the writing life and posts regular interviews with writers and publishers.   Learn more at:

Website – www.janbowmanwriter.com

Blogsite – http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com

Entry # 94 - WRITERS TALK - Paul Hanstedt - Part 1 Author of a new nonfiction memoir, Hong Konged

Background Notes:

Paul Hanstedt is a Professor of English at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, a father of three, a writer, an educator, and a traveler. Besides his text book, GENERAL EDUCATION ESSENTIALS, his academic work has been published in MLA's The Profession, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Liberal Education. He regularly travels throughout the country and around the globe working with faculty and administrators on general education/liberal education reform, curricular design and development, course design and development, and assignment and assessment design.

In addition to HONG KONGED, his nonfiction memoir about a year in Asia with three kids under the age of ten, Paul Hanstedt has published creative works in the Beloit Fiction Journal, Puerto Del Sol, and Confrontation, among other journals. He is a regular essayist and can be heard on Virginia Public Radio.

Jan:        Thanks for agreeing to an interview, Paul.  You have a wonderful new nonfiction memoir, HONG KONGED, about living in Asia for a year with your family.  With three kids under ten, what were the greatest challenges and greatest joys of your family’s ‘most excellent’ adventure?

Paul:        Simply keeping perspective.  You’re in a foreign country, you’re already generally exhausted from trying to figure out where you are, where you’re going, who’s who, the language, the food, the map—it’s all exhausting.  And then you’re on the train heading down to Central Hong Kong, surrounded by quiet, well-behaved Hong Kongers and their quiet, well-behaved children, and your kid decides to do a Demi Moore imitation, swing round and round on the support pole in the middle of the train.  At home this would be bad enough, but at least you’d know how to respond and you’d know that your response is a legitimate one.  Overseas, your sense of scale is thrown off and it’s pretty easy to overreact.  Not that I ever did, of course.  I’m a calm, well-mannered, very quiet, very rationale human being.  Really.  Seriously. 

In terms of “joys” it’s hard to pick:  the food was amazing, just exploring a new place was amazing, lion dances, Shang Hai opera—it was all crazy and overwhelming and wonderful.  But the best thing was watching our family just sort of adjust to where we were and what we were capable of.  For example:  it’s late May and we’re planning on going to one of the outlying islands for a bun festival celebrating Buddha’s birthday (I’m not making this up).  I have a meeting in the morning that I think will last 30 minutes that actually goes four hours.  At two I drag myself into the apartment and tell the kids, “In fifteen minutes, we’re leaving.  Do what you need to do.”  And fifteen minutes later we all troop out the door, shoes on, backpacks on, down to the bus, down to the train, down to the ferry.  We just go.  No one asks any questions.  This is just what we do:  we go places, we see things.  How cool is that? 

Jan:        So what do you, and your family, miss most from your year of living abroad?

Paul:        The reality that every time—every time—you went out the door you would see or taste or hear or do something that you’d never seen or tasted or heard or did before.  I know that word “literally” is overused these days, but I mean this very literally:  every time we walked out of the apartment, something surprised us—a kind of candy we’d never had before, a dignified old lady at the bus stop stroking my daughter’s hair, goose feet for dinner, pink dolphins off the stern of the ferry . . . it never ended. 

Jan:     What was the biggest cultural jolt upon your return to Roanoke, VA?

Paul:        Besides the predictability?  The size, I think.  We flew into Chicago and drove up to my parents’ home in Wisconsin.  The sky seemed so big.  The land seemed so broad and flat.  The streets are so wide, the lawns so wide, the parking lots absolutely huge.  And somehow all of that seemed very empty.  I’m not sure what this means—if it was just our boredom with returning to what we knew, or if we were sensing some sort of American angst, a desperation to create space and big things as a means of establishing ourselves as relevant and important -and ultimately failing in that effort.  This feeling didn’t disappear when we returned to Virginia.  Even here, where the mountains close you in a bit more, there’s a sense of size.  I mean, have you ever seen the parking lot of your CVS absolutely full?  Why, then, do they make the things so damn big?

Jan:        How do objects, and in particular 'found objects,' ground you as a writer?  What do you need in order to write while you’re traveling?

Paul:        “Stuff” matters:  the material world, the concrete details we describe in our stories, that’s what makes the world understandable for the reader.  When I mentioned goose feet a few questions ago, I’m guessing that was a moment that was both startling for the reader—woah!  Really?—and familiar:  they could see the feet, could see the webbing, could sense the peculiar (and unsavory, I might add) rubbery quality of it. 

One of the few things I’ve actually figured out in my life is that writing isn’t just about putting words on a page, but about living differently:  I think writers pay attention more, remember things that other people don’t, the spines on a leaf, the stiff crust of a corner brownie, the way the young mother at the pool walks with her hips forward, her arms swinging gracefully as though she’s in the evening gown portion of a beauty contest.  And I think that writers need to pay attention and need to remember more.  It’s essential for good writing.  Writing, then, is a way of life, a way of living.  

All of that said?  I take a lot of pictures and use my wife’s pictures as well.  If there’s someplace in a piece where I keep getting stuck, I find it’s useful to go to her Picassa site [website for photo sharing] and browse the photos from that part of the trip.  Inevitably I’ll find some small detail that gets me going again.  

Stay Tuned for Part Two of Paul Hanstedt's Interview - Next Tuesday - September 25, 2012 - After 4:30 p.m.   We'll begin by talking about the paradox of our mutual fear of flying and love of travel. 

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Jan Bowman’s work has appeared in Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, Broadkill Review, Trajectory, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes, and others. She won the 2012 Roanoke Review Prize for Fiction. Her stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories and a story was a finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two collections of short stories and currently shopping for a publisher for a completed story collection. She has nonfiction work pending publication in Spring 2013 Issues of Trajectory and Pen-in-Hand. She writes a weekly blog of “Reflections” on the writing life and posts regular interviews with writers and publishers.   Learn more at:

Website – www.janbowmanwriter.com

Blogsite – http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com

Entry # 93 - "On Landscape in Fiction"

Photo Credit - Alex Ketley - Aug. 2012

So - how important is landscape?   By that, I mean the physical environment of a setting in fiction? That’s something I’ve been thinking about over the summer. Writers must make decisions about the physical setting and those decisions are important to other decisions that help in the ‘building’ of an organic story.

Photo Credit - Alex Dunn - Aug. 2012

Is the story set in an urban center, like Paris or LA, or is it more like NYC; these places are very different, even if they are urban areas. Maybe the setting for a story is suburban, like outside Chicago or Atlanta or DC or Baltimore. 

But clearly these areas are different not only in culture and community, but also in the ‘built environment’ – by that I mean – housing,  streets, traffic – as well as weather conditions, climate, flora and fauna.

Maybe the landscape is in a rural setting, like the hills of Virginia, mountains of Maryland or in the wilds of a national park? How does the landscape of a fictional place look? Well, if readers are to believe in the magic of the story, the physical environment needs to be a believable place that they can imagine or connect to in some way in their own real world experiences.    

Even if the setting is rural West Virginia or a place carried in the memory of a past inhabitant of  “Zog-19” [a nod to Pinckney Benedict’s story in Miracle Boy and other stories] – it needs to have landscape of some sort.

Photo Credit - Alex Dunn - Florida 2012

What impact does the terrain, climate, plants and animals have on the formation of a work of fiction? Writers must give this some thought.What kinds of animals and plants are common to the landscape? Is water plentiful or scarce? Or is the availability of water not an issue? Are lakes, oceans, rivers a part of the place? Is it out in the natural beauty of a national park or is the setting uninviting and hostile to visitors?

Photo Credit - Alex Ketley - 2012

I was struck by some of the newest Mars photographs and the newer digitally enhanced Moon photographs and how much they both look like parts of California, Arizona, or the American Southwest areas in Texas or Utah. 

This Photo by Alex Ketley - While hiking in California - August  2012

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Jan Bowman’s work has appeared in Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, Broadkill Review, Trajectory, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes, and others. She won the 2012 Roanoke Review Prize for Fiction. Her stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories and a story was a finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two collections of short stories and currently shopping for a publisher for a completed story collection. She has nonfiction work pending publication in Spring 2013 Issues of Trajectory and Pen-in-Hand. She writes a weekly blog of “Reflections” on the writing life and posts regular interviews with writers and publishers.   Learn more at:

Website – www.janbowmanwriter.com

Blogsite – http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com