Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Entry # 177 - "Looking Back & Writing Forward"

Honolulu - Photo Credit - Jim Wilson - Sept. 24, 2013
In our Tuesday Journal & Memoir Writing Class this week, we talked about possible sources that help us shore up partial memories and get at events that have had an impact upon us as writers and as people. And this we decided: if you wish to move forward to develop a piece of writing, you need to spend some time looking back over the past at incidents and people.  Whether your writing efforts are focused on creative nonfiction or fiction, exploring the power of the past is essential. But what sources are essential and readily available for research?


Ideas for journal & memoir writings can come from both personal and public sources that will enrich and provide additional depth. And although we do have more access to information than previous generations, here is a reminder of some sources worth exploring.
Hawaii - Photo Credit - Alex Dunn - Sept. 24, 2013
Personal Sources
Talk with people who have a perspective to share. 
1. Memory – yours & others who shared events with you. Listen & take notes.
2. Family Possessions, Furniture and items passed down. Find the story behind these.
3. Journals – diaries & family writings, photographs, deeds, land records.
4. Family Bibles – hold birth & death notes and handwriting records from the past.
5. Baby Books & Photo Albums -- boxes of old photographs, movies, videos.
6. Boxes of old Letters and Papers – Estate Items - from your family or others.
7. Report Cards, Yearbooks, Magazines and Newspaper clippings.

Public Sources 
Examine public information specific to a particular time or event.
Information is easily obtained from numerous public documents, Internet searches, libraries.

1.  Documents -- deeds, land records, marriage records, birth & death certificates,
     diplomas, dated items of any kind, such as: bills of sale – for cars or other items.
2.  Newspapers and Magazines of a particular time and place.
3.  Old Movie clips and radio show recordings
4.  Libraries (Talk with experienced librarians. They know amazing things!)
5.  Interview family, old friends, neighbors, baby-sitters, and even enemies and the gossips.
Honolulu - Photo Credit - Jim Wilson - Sept. 24, 2013
As you focus upon a particular time and place for the creative writing efforts, gather suitable source materials.  If you gather too much at first that’s okay.  As your vision for your writing project sharpens, you will find sources that will help your work resonate the literal and spiritual truth at its core.  As you write, rewrite and shape your material, you will decide at some point what to keep and what is excess to be jettisoned or used in another writing.        - REMEMBER -
"History is nothing more than a thin slice of what is remembered, stretched out over an ocean of what has been forgotten."  
 ----Milan Kundera
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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

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Entry # 176 - "Be Brave"

My Fall 2013 Journal Writing Class began September 10, 2013.  We have 15 dedicated writers for this session, ten from previous classes and five new writers. For the next eight Tuesdays we'll be working on journal writing exercises during two hour sessions to tap into memories that they can explore and develop into longer (mostly) nonfiction work. In the first session I give each new student a journal that they use for their beginning exercises, since our initial journal entries are handwritten. 
One of the interesting things I've noticed is how difficult some writers find it to write those first imperfect, free-wheeling entries into their journal.  Maybe it has to do with opening a fresh new notebook, with clean lined pages and bright ink entries in a process that taps into the early childhood experiences. Remember when we tried to gain perfection with every first word and sentence? Writers who begin this journal writing process express relief when I reassure them that their journal is a place to grow seeds that will become new ideas. I urge them to write freely, with passion as they try to capture something elusive that floats softly at the edge of their memory. One of the most useful bits of writing advice I've ever experienced for myself, and that I share with my students, comes from Natalie Goldberg's wonderful book, Writing Down the Bones. 

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Natalie Goldberg lived in Brooklyn until she was six, when her family moved out to Farmingdale, Long Island, where her father owned the bar the Aero Tavern. From a young age, Goldberg was mad for books and reading, and especially loved Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, which she read in ninth grade. She thinks that single book led her eventually to put pen to paper when she was twenty-four years old. She received a BA in English literature from George Washington University and an MA in humanities from St. John's University. Goldberg has painted for as long as she has written, and her paintings can be seen in Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World and Top of My Lungs: Poems and Paintings. They can also be viewed at the Ernesto Mayans Gallery on Canyon Road in Sante Fe.  A dedicated teacher, Goldberg has taught writing and literature for the last thirty-five years. She also… Read more     on Amazon - ========================

Her New Book - 2013

I have modified, condensed and shared what has become (for me) six really useful "Rules for Happy Journal Writing Practice" that owe their initial formula to Goldberg's original text. Someday I would like to tell Natalie Goldberg just how much she's helped me and countless writers get started in ways that overcome some of the fear and baggage we carry from our early writing experiences.  I tell writers some version of Natalie's advice modified into the following:
 
"Rules for “Happy” Journal Writing Practice"


1.  KEEP YOUR HAND & PEN MOVING. 
Keep your pen on the page and write whatever you can during the allotted writing time. If you’re stuck- just keep writing –say- “I don’t remember” or “what I do remember” until you find your writing moving on – going deeper into your writing prompt.  Don’t pause to reread lines you’ve just written. That is your inner editor & critic stalling and trying to get control of what you’re saying. This is a first cut to see what lies deeper in your memory. 
2.  DON'T CROSS OUT. 
Don’t edit as you write.  Even if you write something you didn’t mean to write.  Just leave it and keep going. Don’t worry about it. Editing at this point tends to strangle your creative efforts.  No one sees this material except you.  It’s too raw to share yet – so don’t stress over it. 
3.  DON'T WORRY ABOUT SPELLING, GRAMMAR OR PUNCTUATION.  NOT YET. 
Again – you can deal with this later. But - not now.  Later. 
4.  LOSE CONTROL. 
First thoughts have tremendous energy. The internal censor usually squelches them. Your aim here is to burn through to the first thoughts, to the place where energy and "white-hot memory" (as Robert Olen Butler calls it) are unobstructed by social politeness or your internal censors. You’re writing to the place where your mind actually sees and feels, not to what it thinks it should see or feel
5.  DON'T THINK TOO MUCH. 
DON'T GET LOGICAL YET.   Not yet. Do that later. 
Initially you don’t need to analyze or be critical.  Just let your writing go into the subconscious storehouse of your knowledge and experiences.  That’s where the good stuff stays until you lay it on the journal page. 
6.  BE BRAVE. 
Go Deep. Be fearless. If something comes up in your journal writing that is scary – dive         
right into it. It’s the good stuff. It probably has lots of energy.   
  

 ---from – Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones

    (modified by Jan Bowman - September 2013)

"Every time I start a new class I appreciate - yet again - how useful Goldberg's advice has been for me and others."   
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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

 Email:    janbowmanwriter@gmail.com 

Friday, September 13, 2013

Entry # 175 - "Does It Look Like Fiction?"

So - What Does Fiction Look Like?
Atlantic Crossing 1 - Fall 2012 - Jan Bowman

A writer friend told me that Gordon Lish was "an evil man" who got 15, 000 manuscripts to read every year and his initial reaction was to hold the manuscript at arms length to see if it "looked like fiction" and then he'd look at the white space to see if it really "looked like fiction" - and then - he would read the first sentence.  If any part of this process annoyed him in any way, he tossed it in the trash.
Atlantic Crossing 2 - Fall 2012 - Jan Bowman

Okay. That's cold, but it's a reality.  So if you're a writer revising your manuscript for one last time before sending it out next week, what can you do - without even reading it - to make sure it "looks like fiction?" 

Renni Browne & Dave King's craft book, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to edit yourself into Print, has a useful section in Chapter 9 - "Breaking Up Is Easy To Do" that addresses the importance of  'white space page impressions' when readers pick up a book and decide whether or not to read it.    And they describe an opening section in Alice in Wonderland, when "Alice glances at a book her sister is reading, notices it has no illustrations or dialogue, and thinks, 'And what is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?'  [And] ... If you've ever leafed through a book in a bookstore and noticed page after page of long dense paragraphs, you probably know how Alice felt."

Long, unbroken chunks of text tend to turn off fiction readers. Browne & King provide a checklist. They suggest that writers hoping to improve the white space ratio in their manuscript, flip through it and evaluate the 'eye effect' upon readers.

So what should writers do when they see too little white space and long dense paragraphs?  Revise with an eye toward showing and scene building, as well as creating relevant dialogue exchanges that build connections and create tensions.  If paragraphs run for a half page or a page or more, then perhaps too much telling and explaining is occurring, or maybe one character is talking excessively.

If scenes drag on too long, try paragraphing a little more often. Cut or compress to extract the essential action.   Try to avoid characters 'making little speeches' to each other. 

And what if you find many short scenes that have no long paragraphs and consist of a lot of clipped back-and-forth dialogue? Ask yourself,  how is that working for you in the text? Too much back-and-forth in short dialogue set into scenes can be equally boring or confusing, especially if you're telling and showing readers information they already know. 

Remember you're after a balance on the page and in the scenes, dialogue, and actions that occur.  How the page looks is important.
Atlantic Crossing 3 - Fall 2012 - Jan Bowman


What does fiction look like? Perhaps no one can really provide a specific generic response for this question.
But this I know...it requires a lot of revision.  
"I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you hit it right the first time, but more often, you don't."     ----John Dos Passos
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Montevideo, Uruguay - Fall 2012 - Jim Wilson

About Jan Bowman                   (JANET)

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

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Entry # 174 - "Review of David Mercier's book: A Beautiful Medicine by Laura Mueller -

Thanks to:   Laura A. Mueller, M.Ac., L.Ac.
www.lauramueller.com
Acupuncture & Zero Balancing©

Feel free to comment on the blog site or contact Laura, if you'd like to write to her about this review.

David G Mercier

Image of David G Mercier
Thumbnail image of David G Mercier Thumbnail image of David G Mercier
David Mercier is a seminar leader, speaker, life coach, and acupuncturist. In the 1970s he went to Sri Lanka where he practiced mindfulness meditation as a Buddhist monk for two years. But instead of finding peace of mind, he became ill and depressed. After returning to the U.S., he sought healing from acupuncture and other forms of integrative medicine, also known as holistic or complementary and alternative medicine. Since then, David has had extensive experience in management and in integrative medicine as a clinician. His passion is helping people lead a life of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment.
With master's degrees in organization development and acupuncture, David has established and led a hospital-based integrative medicine center, and has held consulting and leadership roles in healthcare organizations. Combining science and spirituality, he writes of the humanistic and…more.
A Beautiful Medicine: A Radical Look at the Essence of Health and Healing,

by David Mercier, Still Pond Press, P.O. Box 2766, Easton, MD, 21601. Copyright 2012.




A BEAUTIFUL MEDICINE 
David Mercier 
Still Pond Press
The tone of this award-winning book evokes the timeless silence that contains both the warm, wavering light from a crackling hearth-fire and the safe, cold ground over which stars emerge from the dark depths of space. By holding present antipodal experiences, the writing opens in us new insights, possibilities, and transformation—for our long-term health as well as for our lives here and now. “A Beautiful Medicine is the integration of all that we know of love, healing and health in a blended singularity.” (p. 272)



David Mercier is a leader, healer, coach and Transformer, not only inter-personally in treatment rooms and board rooms, but inclusively through Culture honoring the Cosmos, “the fabric of the Whole.” (p. 148) He opens a whole-hearted expansiveness by distilling his own transformational, healing experiences into inspiring stories, effective methods, and beneficial treatment approaches, which he distinguishes in three types: controlling methods, substitutive, methods, and catalytic methods, all of which have their place in a beautiful and integrative medicine. They are Heart-Essence in action in the world, balanced by deep roots in the Ground-of-Being which is “not neutral but loving,” (p. 150) and where, as spiritual teacher and author Andrew Cohen puts it, "Nothing is wrong, and nothing ever happened."



Illuminated by his own and his patients’ healing journeys, David Mercier reclaims from the screen and stage onto these pages the “the primacy of our Heart” with the “texture, scent, and flavor of our humanness.” (p. xxvi) He proclaims the thrill of clear-seeing into Nature’s deep patterns. He recalls to us the gratification of feeling—from inside our bones—the currents of wind and trees, water and earth, moon and sun. He validates why the soul of our human narrative belongs in every visit with any doctor or health care professional. Then he shows us how to keep it there.



What feels most enlivening is his evidence and acknowledgment of our inexhaustible yearning—our longing for belonging—as the deep message from which our symptoms emerge and toward which they redirect our attention. As we grow and evolve, symptoms point us back to our Heart’s path: to our Core, the Mystery, the “aesthetic feeling experience of the Authentic Self,” (p. 259), the Evolutionary Impulse, “the creative principle of life itself.” (p. 49) He reminds us of this “already-connectedness” as “The drive toward wholeness is the task of a conscious, intelligent universe,” (p. 150) He reminds us of Brian Swimme’s “allurement” and of Martin Buber’s insight: “the task of the world, the task of creating unity, a task that’s in the design of the cosmos.” (p. 151)



I’m so grateful for how well this book contributes to our patients, while providing to us practitioners a clear, tranquil, and well-lit pool where we can deeply reflect on our work. A Beautiful Medicine consolidates the fragments we speak during many treatments into a warm, personable reflection that opens the world of “Integrative Medicine” and ignites in both patients and practitioners our collective aspirations to achieve its highest purposes. After first reading about James and Kendra—two of David’s patients whose years-long health issues disappeared within a week of their first treatments (pp. 61-62); my husband went “gluten-free” and noticed within four days his energy expand, abdomen lighten, digestion improve. His warm color, bright eyes, and lasting attention invigorate me, too!  



“Health is as much about the condition of our souls as it is about our physiology.” (p. xxvi) When we have unknowingly abandoned ourselves into “a life skewered by disaffection,” our symptoms arise as messengers calling us to “recollect” ourselves—to return to what has always been Essential, True, and Authentic. In our anamnesis—our remembrance through our symptoms—no one else can recall for us our unique relationship with our Essence or Authentic Self. No matter how intimate they have been with us, we cannot delegate our healing to anyone but ourselves: not to our parents or children, friends or lovers, teachers or colleagues, country or culture. Not to our practitioners, nor to the health care system itself.



When we discern that a particular knee pain is just that—a knee in pain, we can get help from our practitioners to relieve the intensity. To further reduce its duration and frequency, we can avoid recurrent twists or misuse, strengthen muscles and tendons, rest deeply, nourish appropriately, breath fully, or perhaps change an outgrown relationship or job. In this way we establish health, wholeness, wholesomeness—fully empowered, hale and hearty, and as David encourages us, “a little more peaceful and a little less troubled.”



Our privilege is to hold a space of listening—in ourselves, with each other, and with our patients—where we perceive a symptom as a lens in focus, sending its timely message from the Authentic Self to guide transitions in our life here and now. “If we can fully know ourselves for the first time, then the bursting of the seams of the self happens in a crescendo, at the omega point of splendor, meaning, and the heart’s full satiety.” (p. 272)



~ Laura Mueller
Laura A. Mueller, M.Ac., L.Ac.
410-707-1394
www.lauramueller.com
Acupuncture & Zero Balancing©
Feel free to comment on the blog site or contact Laura, if you'd like to write to her about this review.
2013 NAUTILUS AWARD
GRAND AND GOLD WINNERS

 


GRAND & GOLD WINNER


promoting spiritual growth, conscious living and positive social change – offering life-affirming options with imagination and possibility to a world that longs for a new story. 
Nautilus Awards are given to print books of exceptional merit that make a literary and heartfelt contribution to spiritual growth, conscious living, high-level wellness, green values, responsible leadership and positive social change, as well as to the worlds of art, creativity and inspiration.



=======================

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
Contact - janbowmanwriter@gmail.com  
if you'd like to write a Book Review-

Saturday, September 7, 2013

Entry # 173 - "Cut Yourself A Break"

A Perfect Sailing Day - Jan Bowman - Sept. 6,  2013
Whether you believe George Eliot's quote: "I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offense," or not, writers set ambitious writing goals and objectives for themselves and can find themselves getting into a 'kind of funk' when they fail their own expectations. I fall into that habit of mind myself sometimes.  I am reminded that goals are larger and long-term, such as 'to write more or to write daily or to finish a first draft, or  to revise an existing body of work,' while objectives set specific numerical amounts of work by which one can measure progress, such as: 'to produce a set number of pages, words or write an identified number of hours each week or month.' Which is to say, that if your writing objectives align with your goal to finish your novel by the end of the year, then most likely, your goal will be met.

Bay Bridge in Distance - Jan Bowman - Sept. 6, 2013
Anthony Trollope said that "Three hours a day will produce as much as a man (or woman) ought to write..."(at one sitting). Whatever your personal writing goals and objectives - whether you chart your progress by the hours, the words, or the pages - most of the time such objectives are needed if you hope to get work done.  

But I also want to make a case here for writers to find a moment to gain a bit of perspective and to 'cut yourself a break' - which is to say, sometimes writers are much too hard on themselves. One writer friend I know gets so mad at herself when she doesn't meet her writing objectives that she won't allow herself to participate in anything else - in a sort of punitive response for her failure to complete her self-assigned writing tasks. I've told her that she's kinder to her children and friends than to herself.  And I do believe that if writers treat writing as a task that requires punishment for failure, maybe it's time for a reality check on why you're writing in the first place.  Writers get their lumps from others so often in the form of rejection letters and criticism, most don't need to self-hate.  My friend says, "I can't do anything until I get my essays finished and yet, I find I am hating writing."

I urged her to take a break. Cut herself some down time. Go to a movie or a play or a concert. Do anything other than write, and see if new ideas, a better perspective presents itself during down time.

And yes, for me, as well - writing is hard work too, and some days my work doesn't go as well as I'd hoped, but even on a bad day, there is a great deal of joy, of pleasure, of satisfaction in the process of getting words on the page.  And sometimes - it is important to remember that we live in an amazing world. 

Some days - like yesterday here in Maryland - was another one of those 'perfect days to go sailing' and so I set aside my writing objectives (one of which was to write an additional scene in a new story while the other was to post a blog entry) and played. And here is the blog entry, posted today and a different one from the one I'd intended, but one that insisted upon shouldering its way onto my blog. 

And, last night I dreamed two scenes for a new story I'm working on - so - a break gives the mind space to play and reconsider possibilities. 
John Steinbeck said, "We work in our own darkness a great deal with little real knowledge of what we are doing."    So - Cut Yourself A Break.  
A Distant Freighter on the Bay - Jan Bowman - Sept. 6, 2013

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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


Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Entry # 172 - "Building A House?"


A Story & A House & A Cat - Photo: Jan Bowman
So How Is A House Like A Story?    In Alice Munro’s Introduction to her Selected Stories, she says, “a story is not like a road to follow; it’s more like a house.”  She says “you go inside stories and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like, discovering how the rooms, windows, and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows.”  She says that readers and writers can return to the house or story and always find more than they saw last time. In fact, she says that she doesn’t necessary start writing or reading a story from beginning to end. She often starts anywhere and might read or write a story either backward or forward to see the full experience from different angles.

And while this might sound odd to some readers and writers, I understand this search for perspective.  I had an “Aha” moment when I first read this. I don’t usually start a story and work chronologically, whether I’m reading or writing one. And I often reread a story. A good story gets better - like an interesting house - every time you visit it. I firmly believe a story deserves, even requires, multiple reading to obtain its richness.  I am interested, not only in what happened, but also how it happened.
Photo - Jan Bowman - 2013 - "Summer Garden"


Munro says a house (like a story) has a “sturdy sense of itself, of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you. To deliver a story like that, one that is durable and freestanding, is what I’m always hoping for.”    


That seems to me to be a worthy goal whether you are a reader or writer or one who must of necessity do both in order to live well.
Cat Cluttered Office 2013 - Jan Bowman
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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


Sunday, September 1, 2013

Entry # 171 - "Pardon My Prologue"

Annapolis, MD - Photo Credit - Jan Bowman - 2013
Recently I wrote a story and I did something I'd vowed I'd never do. After I'd let that story sit for a while, I went back and added a prologue, a brief quote from a Dickens novel. No need to say which one - except that I thought at the time that  it seemed to help make a deeper human character connection. At least it seemed so a couple of weeks ago, but now I am having second and third thoughts about it.

So after a brief Q&A session between my reader-self and my writer-self, I realize I need to come up with some kind of justification for having a prologue, because I believe that unless you're writing the kind of soaring novel, that must give opening background so a reader has a place to stand, or unless you're writing an oddly formatted play that requires one so the audience can get aboard from the start, or unless you're Shakespeare or his sister, a prologue does more harm than good.
Annapolis, MD - Photo Credit - Jan Bowman
What does a prologue do in a short story? Well, I've been in workshops where writers insist on including one and I've found that prologues often pull readers away from making emotional contact with characters and their troubles. A short story is by design a tight fit for focused human emotions. Writers have an advantage in the short form because they get in, connect, leaving a trace that resonates, and then they get out, having left readers looking at something ordinary in an extraordinary way. For me, a prologue serves to distract and distance, rather than draw me into the story. 

Sometimes a prologue serves as a hook to draw readers into the story. Most prologues provide backstory, some of which is not necessary, useful or effective. Excess is distracting. In fact, I suspect that giving readers prologue information before they've met the characters and conflict, flies right past most readers who have not yet gathered enough of the story threads to make use of the information. In general, I think a prologue is not useful because the purpose is to offer information that could be better woven throughout a story. 

So now I'm left with deciding what to do about my little story that has a prologue, sprouting like unsightly facial hair from its chin and I need to decide whether to (a) get rid of it and tweak the opening paragraphs of my story more carefully, (b) condense the existing prologue to one 'threadbare sentence' - a challenging task when dealing with a sentence from Charles Dickens, (c) rethink it, get rid of it, and forget I ever considered it, (d) disconnect it from all things Dickens, and/or revise it so that it is really short, has a hook and 'only' connects.

Photo Credit - Jan Bowman - Bay View - August 2013
Readers are bright people. Most don't require a prologue. Few care. And some are distracted and pulled out of story if one is included, so while I still haven't decided what I'll do with this particular story, it has caused me to spend some useful time considering why writers might feel the need to add a prologue to a work of short fiction?
===============================

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