Entry # 164 - "Picture This"

Butterflies - July 26, 2013 - Jan Bowman

I have been reading Susan Sontag’s Essays: On Photography.  Here is a thought-provoking passage from her essay, “The Image-World” that seems timely and relevant whether you agree or disagree with her philosophical positions on the power of cultural images. I’m imagining the ways a novel might explore this idea. Fiction has the space to expand this idea and explore it in depth. This collection of essays is worth the time you might dedicate to reading it.

“The Image-World”

Here’s an extended passage from it…page 178…

“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them.” 

“Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers).”

“The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.”

Jan Bowman - 6 Bees & 2 Butterflies - 7/26/13

Well. Okay. Sontag had much more to say on the subject of photographs and images. And as I think of our growing “connections” via Facebook and its assorted Internet cousins, I see the vast potential for positive and negative effects on the overall culture. 

But for now, here are two images of butterflies and some bees in my front yard garden. I’m not sure that they offer up a political statement – unless you happen to remember that massive spraying of pesticides has resulted in fewer of them.  The political and economic impact of that fact has grave possibilities for us all. Perhaps that is one of the many reasons I cultivate and tend my little garden. I can’t change the world. I can just tend my rose and remember Antoine de Saint Exupery’s statement that I have paraphrased here. “It is the time I’ve wasted on my rose makes it important – to me.”     And I hope no one minds that I’ve quoted this passage from Sontag’s essay – but it is a useful essay to read in its entirety.

About Jan Bowman

Jan Bowman’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications including, Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes and others. Glimmer Train named a recent story as Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short Story Awards for New Writers. Winner of the 2011 Roanoke Review Fiction Award, her stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best American Short Stories, a Pen/O’Henry award and a recent story was a finalist in the 2013 Phoebe Fiction Contest; another was a 2012 finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two collections of short stories while shopping for a publisher for a completed story collection. She has nonfiction publications in 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 www.janbowmanwriter.com or

visit blog:  http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com

Entry # 163 - "Who Will Read Your Work?"

Front Garden - Butterfly - Jan Bowman - 7/23/13

Tillie Olsen said, “Not to have an audience is a kind of death.” 

Francois Mauriac wrote that “Each of us is like a desert, and a literary work is like a cry from that desert…The point is: to be heard ---even if by one single person.”  That is why writers write.  But who will read your work? Even the most favored and famous of writers have a limited audience who love their work; for every fan, there are those who dislike a particular writer’s work, as well as those who do not know that it exists in spite of large scale publicity projects for a select few. And yet writers press on producing words on a page. So who do writers envision as they write?  Don Delillo said, “I don’t have a sense of a so-called ideal reader and certainly not of a readership, that terrific entity. I write for the page.”

Butterfly on Flower - Jan Bowman - July 23, 2013

We can hope what we write is valued by someone in the world. We do not write for everyone. If we do try to write for everyone, we end up writing for no one. First and foremost we write for ourselves. We write to say the truest, most powerful things we know and to put thoughts and feelings about life on the page. We write to help ourselves and others deal with the injustices of the world. We write to create order out of chaos, ever fearful that without order, the chaos might -  indeed - be meaningless. We write to calm our fears and to explore that which terrifies us. We write to understand and to be understood. I’m reminded that  Marianne Moore said, “Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”

Anne Sexton wrote, “I write very personal poems but I hope that they will become the central theme to someone else’s private life.”

“And we can not ask for recognition…it’s not the artist’s place. All we can do is work with all our hearts. What happens is not our responsibility.”

--- Sophy Burnham from her book, For Writers Only.

More Butterflies - Jan Bowman - July 23, 2013

About Jan Bowman

Jan Bowman’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications including, Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes and others. Glimmer Train named a recent story as Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short Story Awards for New Writers. Winner of the 2011 Roanoke Review Fiction Award, her stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best American Short Stories, a Pen/O’Henry award and a recent story was a finalist in the 2013 Phoebe Fiction Contest; another was a 2012 finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two collections of short stories while shopping for a publisher for a completed story collection. She has nonfiction publications in 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 www.janbowmanwriter.com or

visit blog:  http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com

Entry # 162 - "What Do You Want to Grow In Your Journal?"

Photo - Jan Bowman - July 2013

Book List for Journal Keeping and Creative Nonfiction

List Compiled by Jan Bowman – July 2013 –

Your Life as Story: Discovering the “New Autobiography” and Writing Memoir as Literature  - by Tristine Rainer.

Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir – by Lisa Dale Norton.

Bang the Keys: Four Steps to a Lifelong Writing Practice – by Jill Dearman.

In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction - edited by Lee Gutkind.  

The Best Creative Nonfiction – (vol. 1-3) – edited by Lee Gutkind.

The Story Within: New Insights and Inspiration for Writers – by Laura Oliver

In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction – edited by Judith Kitchen & Mary Paumier Jones. 

Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction – edited by Judith Kitchen.

Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from the Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs – edited by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard.

In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal – edited by Judith Kitchen & Mary Paumier Jones.

Photo "Butterfly on Bush" - by Jan Bowman - July2013

Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction – by Brenda Miller & Suzanne Paola.

Inventing the Truth: The Art & Craft of Memoir – edited by William Zinsser.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing & Life – by Anne Lamott.

Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past – by William Zinsser.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft – by Stephen King.

Writing Down the Bones – by Natalie Goldberg.

Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life - by Natalie Goldberg.

Portrait of My Body – by Phillip Lopate.  - (read “Confessions of a Shusher”  and “The Story of My Father”)

Photo - Jan Bowman - July 2013

The Writing Life - National Book Award Authors: Essays & Interviews (read Ron Chernow’s “Stubborn Facts & Fickle Realities: Research for Nonfiction).

AND Any Year of the Best American Essays – published yearly -- with changing editors.

 =================

About Jan Bowman

Jan Bowman’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications including, Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes and others. Glimmer Train named a recent story as Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short Story Awards for New Writers. Winner of the 2011 Roanoke Review Fiction Award, her stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best American Short Stories, a Pen/O’Henry award and a recent story was a finalist in the 2013 Phoebe Fiction Contest; another was a 2012 finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two collections of short stories while shopping for a publisher for a completed story collection. She has nonfiction publications in 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 www.janbowmanwriter.com or

visit blog:  http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com

Entry # 161 – "Telling Secrets: Silas House's Essay”

I read a thoughtful essay in The New York Times on Sunday, July 14, 2013.

The essay, Tell Their Secrets by Silas House, is now online at nytimes.com/opinionator and it is an interesting essay for readers and writers. House says…

 

“We have to think about all the things that make people endlessly fascinating. Their quirks, their body language, their histories, their beliefs. Then we articulate all of that on the page, giving the most important parts when we first meet them, going on to weave even more fascinating facets throughout the rest of the text."

“Above all, give us characters we will carry with us after meeting them. Give us people we will remember as if they were real. The books that have meant so much to us are the ones populated by characters like that, characters who resonate because they epitomize our own hopes and struggles and stories.”

---

Silas House, the author of five novels, a work of nonfiction and three plays, teaches at Berea College and Spalding University’s M.F.A. program in creative writing.

House's newest novel slated for release August 11th, is Same Sun Here and I plan to read it.

House writes – “Show us how a character pines - to reveal how he ticks. …Writers ‘shape’…characters by revealing their deepest secrets.”

Yes. I liked this essay, Jan says.

About Jan Bowman

Jan Bowman’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications including, Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes and others. Glimmer Train named a recent story as Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short Story Awards for New Writers. Winner of the 2011 Roanoke Review Fiction Award, her stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best American Short Stories, a Pen/O’Henry award and a recent story was a finalist in the 2013 Phoebe Fiction Contest; another was a 2012 finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two collections of short stories while shopping for a publisher for a completed story collection. She has nonfiction publications in 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 www.janbowmanwriter.com or

visit blog:  http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com

Entry # 160 – “Turning Up The Heat On Revisions”

Photo by Jan Bowman - Hawaii - April 2013

How many revisions are necessary to finish a story? Someone asked me this. And I said, “It depends on so many factors that I can’t say anything definitive.” In fact, most stories can continue to be improved even after first publication and they often are revised extensively before being republished again in collections. But I am reminded that in response to this same question, S. J. Perelman was reported to have said, “Thirty-seven. I once tried doing thirty-three, but something was lacking.” Now clearly that was intended to be humorous and it did make me laugh the first time I read this in David Madden’s useful book, Revising Fiction. Writers spend many more hours revising than they ever spend on writing the first draft. That reality surprises most people.

So. How long do you bake a cake? And the answer depends on the kind of cake, the experience of the baker, the recipe, stove, and the intended results. But if it’s not baked long enough, it will be half-baked. It seems particularly useful to notice though, that the experience of the writer (or baker) does play an important role in the process.

Madden describes the process studied by Wallace Hildick in his book, Word for Word in which Hildick examined D. H. Lawrence’s body of work and described the four revision stages writers go through in their development.

[The writer]

1.  makes a mistake, but fails to see it.

2.  makes a mistake, sees it, but doesn’t know how to fix it.

3.  makes a mistake, sees it, has learned techniques of fiction,

              but he/she just can’t quite fix it.

4.  makes a mistake, sees it, has learned that solving technical

    problems in the creative process is just as exciting as writing the first

    draft.

Of course - Madden dryly says, “Then book reviewers come along and tell him he only thinks he fixed the problems.”

Like baking a cake, the revision process takes knowledge of techniques, but unlike the baking of a cake, revision involves a long, difficult process, that can be as exhilarating as exhausting. It helps me to remember this when I am grinding along hour-after-hour revising work.

Photo: Jan Bowman - Hawaii - April 2013

I read somewhere that Raymond Carver said that if his first draft was around forty pages, it would be half that by the time he was finished cutting, adding, and editing, while he was “loving the process of putting words in and taking words out.”  

About Jan Bowman 

Jan Bowman’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications including, Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes and others. Glimmer Train named a recent story as Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short Story Awards for New Writers. Winner of the 2011 Roanoke Review Fiction Award, her stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best American Short Stories, a Pen/O’Henry award and a recent story was a finalist in the 2013 Phoebe Fiction Contest; another was a 2012 finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two collections of short stories while shopping for a publisher for a completed story collection. She has nonfiction publications in 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 www.janbowmanwriter.com or

visit blog:  http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com

Entry # 159 “Whisper To Me"

Photo Credit - Jan Bowman - Spring 2013

Eudora Welty is reported to have said, “I’m terrible about titles. I don’t really know how to come up with them.”  Writers often struggle finding the best title for their work. So how do we name our stories? What shall we ‘name’ a story or novel, if we are to suggest, intrigue, and connect with readers so that they say the title in their mind? And if we truly find the perfect one, we can imagine our readers saying it aloud or whispering it softly to themselves as they wander among the stacks in a library or bookstore. Readers saying a title, bring it to life with their breath.

Music and metaphor live within great titles, especially when a title confronts the ear and the mind with the richness of promised pleasures. Great titles leave readers with a desire to explore, to discover and savor what else lies within the pages of the story.

Looking in my bookcase I see titles that truly intrigue me now as much as when I read the books quite some time ago. For example:  Grace Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man, or Ann Patchett’s The Patron Saint of Liars or Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow or John Dufresne’s Deep in the Shade of Paradise or Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures or Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog. These are just a few examples of titles that were perfect for what I discovered upon reading these books.

In some ways finding the title within the book is a bit like naming children. Both involve a difficult process requiring thought and patience, if we hope to find both the truth and promise within.

David Madden's writers’ handbook, Revising Fiction, says, “Titles have a runic, iconic, talismanic, touchstone, charged-image effect.”

About Jan Bowman

Jan Bowman’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications including, Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes and others. Glimmer Train named a recent story as Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short Story Awards for New Writers. Winner of the 2011 Roanoke Review Fiction Award, her stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best American Short Stories, a Pen/O’Henry award and a recent story was a finalist in the 2013 Phoebe Fiction Contest; another was a 2012 finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two collections of short stories while shopping for a publisher for a completed story collection. She has nonfiction publications in 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 www.janbowmanwriter.com or

visit blog:  http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com

Entry # 158 - "Toads as Characters?"

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"Ted's toad eyes"

How Does A Character Look? 

Fiction writers face difficult decisions in deciding how much to describe their characters. Once upon a time it was quite common to read novels that languished in tedious descriptions of characters’ physiques, personalities, and background information that David Madden, in his guide, Revising Fiction, describes as a “stultifying practice” that bores readers and is unnecessary for most readers.

In fact writers are tasked with finding, what I call the ‘particular and peculiar’ telling details of the physical body or life that help the reader read deeper into subtext of character to finish an image.  Madden cites examples like a character with ‘bee-stung lips’ or ‘aquiline nose’ or ‘voluptuous legs’ that suggest so much more. And a little description serves most readers with enough to build the characters.   

Madden says that writers who write long physical descriptions of height, weight, hair and eye color or other useless information, do it because they are inexperienced or think their readers require it.  These kinds of descriptions read like police blotter descriptions of crime perpetrators. If something about a character’s red nose or sunburned arms is meant to have relevance to the reader’s understanding of the story and the character, then it should be there, but if it’s just filler, cut it during revision.

I read this somewhere and wrote it in my journal.  "A frog ought to be a good frog and a thief a good thief; beauty consists of exactness."

About Jan Bowman

Jan Bowman’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications including, Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes and others. Glimmer Train named a recent story as Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short Story Awards for New Writers. Winner of the 2011 Roanoke Review Fiction Award, her stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best American Short Stories, a Pen/O’Henry award and a recent story was a finalist in the 2013 Phoebe Fiction Contest; another was a 2012 finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two collections of short stories while shopping for a publisher for a completed story collection. She has nonfiction publications in 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 www.janbowmanwriter.com or

visit blog:  http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com