What did I learn about writing this week?

The authors of “Under Construction: How Narrative Elements Shape Qualitative Research” seem to argue that framing a story via narratological devices ( e.g., plot, character,  authorial distance, and point of view) is just as important when sharing research data as it is when plotting a novel.

While I admit that I enjoy reading/writing pieces that are conversational and enriched by anecdotes, metaphor, and voice, I do wonder who can afford to take the author’s advice without fear of repercussions.

Some of the examples the authors offer are books and book chapters, places where writers tend to have some latitude. They might be encouraged to tell a good story and told they can stick the theoretical framework, methodology, and other sections of research papers traditionalists will be looking for in the appendix. I admit there have been times when I’ve left it out all together because it seems obligatory and uninteresting. I know this is wrong and I have been trying to break this bad habit. My only excuse is that I like papers that are well-written, not rote.

 

If it bores the crap out of me, I stop reading it. I have too many other texts to get to.

Want to read it?

Karri Holley & Julia Colyar. 2012. Under Construction: How Narrative Elements Shape Qualitative Research. Theory Into Practice, 51:114–121.  

Fear Creeps In

Sometimes when writing or thinking about writing, fear creeps in.

Fear of

• criticism;
• divulging personal thoughts and feelings;
• rejection;
• the blank page/screen; and/or
• success.

Yes, some of us even fear success.

How do we work through these fears so we can put our butts in the chair and write the way Anne Lamott advised?

Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm by Thich Nhat Hanh tells us there are strategies we can use:

• mindfulness, being fully present in the moment
• deep belly breathing
• practice peacefulness
• respond with compassion to others and to ourselves
• remember that things and people are impermenent
• talk to the fear, tell it we can defend/take care of ourselves

 

What is new adult literature?

Everyone seems to be talking about new adult literature.

I feel left behind.

Writer's Digest simply labels it literature written for ages 18 to 29-- right after declaring young adult (YA) literature stops at 17.

Oh?

I dig a little deeper and  learn that this genre is now "in vogue" according to new adult author Gensese Davis. Davis says she fought for the new adult label (as opposed to a YA marketing plan) for The Holder's Dominion and won.

I think back to a YA class I took a few summers ago and realize that my class project would probably be labeled new adult because it's set at a historically black college. My protagonist is dealing with adjusting to college life and becoming an adult. Will having a label for it encourage me to dig that project out of my junk (read draft) drawer and revive it?



If only writing could be so simple.



Sources:
Chuck Sambuchino, "Meet 28 agents looking for new writers," Writer's Digest October 2013, p. 29
Gensese Davis, "Overcoming the YA obsession," Publishers Weekly, January 21 2013, p. 72

A Dream about Writing

“Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe and enthusiastically act upon must inevitably come to pass.”

 

~~Paul J. Meyer quoted by Kevin Harrington in Success magazine (Jan. 2011, p. 27)

 

Balancing my time

I was whining to my son this week that I have to work.

He said, “Mom, you always say you’re never going to finish it all anyway.”

That’s right! I do say that, don’t I?

It finally donned on me that I should work like this handyman I used to know.

Whenever I asked him to come to my house to do something, he’d come, work on whatever it was for a little bit, and then say, “Kaa, I’m not going to finish this today. I need another this or that. What else do you want me to do for you?”

He’d work on something else for an hour or so, and then he’d say, “Kaa, I’ve done all I can with this. I’m going over to so and so now. See you tomorrow.”

What’s my point? The job couldn’t be completed in one day. He knew it and I knew it. So he’d devote some time to it and then move on to other projects at my house or my friend’s house down the street.

He wasn’t putting out fires. He was working at a steady clip.

I decided to do that. I devoted chunks of time to projects. Stopping whenever I had to.

Did I finish anything? Not really. But I felt good knowing that I devoted some time to as many things as I could. And I made some progress.  

I wrote a piece

It took me a while, but I finished a piece.

I don’t want to describe it because I haven’t found a home for it, and at the risk of sounding superstitious, I don’t want to jinx things.

Really, I just have to document that I actually did it.

You might look at the work I’ve done and say what is she talking about. She’s been productive enough.

What I’m talking about is moving into the type of writing I think I could be really decent at.

The type of writing I’ve been too chicken, too busy, too much of a novice to pursue.

My problem is usually that I can’t think of an idea to save my life.

I did that this time.  An idea came to me.

I am so happy!

Even though this post might sound like gibberish, I made a personal breakthrough when I finished this piece.

I proved something to myself that I’d been doubting, even hampering, for some time.

Tell a Story

One piece of writing advice that has always helped me came from a colleague at Michigan State.

I was trying to learn (I still am) how to write pieces, and how to share my work with audiences.

Her advice was seemingly simple, but important because you can lose sight of it, especially when you’re writing nonfiction.

She said, “Just tell a story.”

When writing gets hard, no matter what I’m working on (e.g., an article, a book review, a presentation), I fall back on this advice.  

It helps me find my way.

I hope this advice helps you.

Write Fresh

There was another thing Burke said in the interview I blogged about yesterday that made me take pause.

He talked about how hard it is to write before and after work. 

He’s right. I write best first thing in the morning when I have an hour or two to concentrate on it.

During Christmas break, I was in heaven.

I could wake up at 6 or 7 and write until my brain was numb. 

Pure bliss!

Did you write during the break? It's hard if you couldn't find time to be alone. 

Take a look at the interview in Writer's Digest, Nov./Dec., 2011 

There's Only One Way to Be a Writer

“If you don’t actually write, you don’t get anything written."
~~ Stephen Pyne, Voice and Vision



Let's get something on the computer screen (or good old fashion wide rule paper).

Publishing Resources (All Ages)

As I read the books in the widget on my home page, I will list the resources I find about publishing here.

Publishing

Guideposts (Christian pieces)

The Scriptorium

Skipping Stones (multicultural)

Business of Writing
How to Get Published

Youth Publishing

As I read the books in the widget on my home page, I will list the resources I find about publishing here.

Cricket  (multiple publishers & genres)

The Concord Review (history papers)

Highlights (teen writers )

Kidscribe (bilingual authors)

Online Magazine-Girly Thing (articles)

Merlyn's Pen  (multiple genres)

New Moon (female writers only)

Speak Up (literary, multiple genres)

Stone Soup

Student Bylines

TeenLit (multiple genres)

TeenInk  (multiple genres)

Young People's Press  (multiple publishers & genres)

Writing Frustrations

The exercises help, but as I look at what I’ve written so far, I have a long way to go.

Here are a few of my questions:

What could happen to Kia?

What’s next?

Where should she go?

What exchange could she have with her roommate?

What’s the conflict?

Arg! The words will not come…

This Exercise Might Help You

As you know, I’ve been trying to jumpstart a piece I began in the summer. I found this exercise and it actually helped.

It might work for you, too.

It only takes about ten minutes, but you can adjust the time, up or down.

“Keeping Time” is the name of the exercise. All you have to do is look at the clock and write down the time. Next, you start a dialog using the time you wrote down.

Here’s how I started: It’s 7:00am, T, why is your alarm on?

Before I knew it, Kia (my main character) had made a discovery about her roommate (T) that I wasn’t even aware of.

I was so happy with the results, I tried it again.

This time I created a brief scene (Kia goes to her friend’s dorm room) and put the time dialog in her friend’s mouth.

As I wrote, I learned Kia was being stood up.

Who knows what, if anything, I’ll do with the scenes I wrote.

The good thing is that this exercise relieved me from being stuck.

Yay! I got something on paper.

The exercise described above can be found in
Please let me know if it works for you. If you improve on the idea, please let me know that, too.

Writing Persuasively

Background: OK, so I’m Trying to Learn How to Write Nonfiction for Youth based on encouragement I received from a teacher friend.

More Background: I want to write something that will help youth/teens who want to learn more about writing persuasively. I guess this could be an article someday. Who knows?

Note: One of my friends has already called me brave for writing this blog.  I’m sharing because writing takes practice and it hurts when the writing stinks, but you have to keep trying if you want to get better.

What Your Teacher Wants You to Know (I changed the title to Getting the Power of Persuasion)



Photographer from wikicommons.



When you’re watching TV and the announcer on a commercial says, “The stuffed crust pizza only from Pizza Hut. A piping hot layer of mouthwatering cheese baked right into its soft golden crust. The stuffed crust $9.99 deal. Any way you slice it, it’s terrific!,” and you find yourself texting your mom to ask if you can order a pizza.

What happened?

Photographer from wikicommons.

Or you’re skimming the MSN Foxsports page to see if it’s really true that twenty-seven-year-old Brandon Roy is retiring, but before you can get to the second sentence of the story, you notice a royal blue Shelby GT500 off to the right. Underneath it is a button that says, “Expand to customize.”  You haven’t found out everything you wanted to know about Roy yet, but you can’t help yourself; you click the button and spend the next fifteen minutes examining the car, selecting different colors and styles. The next thing you know, it’s time to go to practice and you still don’t know Roy‘s story.

You’ve been captured by the power of persuasion.  We all have.

Ads make writing persuasively seem as easy as nodding off while read Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, but we both know it isn’t as easy as it seems. Sometimes it takes a little more than images and alluring phrases to persuade your audience, especially your English teachers. So, I recently asked several teachers I know: What activities would you recommend to students who want to write persuasively?

Photographer from wikicommons.

Getting started with any writing task can be challenging. There is so much to discover, including what you already know and believe about your topic. One teacher I spoke with recommends that before you begin to write persuasively, you need to make sure you know the difference between fact and opinion.

“Start with someone else’s writing, an editorial maybe, and highlight the statements you believe are facts with one color and the ones you believe are opinions with another.” This will help you begin to distinguish between the two so that when you write persuasively, you support your opinions with facts, not additional opinions.

Arguing is another way to get started. Talking is an important part of the writing process. A middle school teacher said, “A friendly debate will help students write persuasively. They would have to use literature to support their point of view. To make it tougher, they should take the opposing point of view.”

Playing devil’s advocate with your friends would make this suggestion easy. Even if you agree with your friend’s opinion, make statements and ask questions as if you believe differently. Watch how your friend responds. Don’t forget to do this in a light-mannered tone and admit to your friend that you actually agree with him or her, but also wondered about the opposing side.

Just like with sports, practice is essential to becoming a better writer. One teacher suggested, “Look for ways to practice writing persuasively.” Take a look at your school, your hobbies, your neighborhood. There might be opportunities to practice writing persuasively for a real audience.

Photographer from wikicommons.

What if your principal decides he wants you and your classmates to not only wear uniforms, but to get the school logo engraved on them as well. You think this is ridiculous because you often wear your polo shirts to Sunday school and functions that require you to dress up, but having a logo on them would make you think twice about doing so.

You decide to write the principal an e-mail explaining why he should reconsider making logos on school uniforms mandatory. This will give you practice writing persuasively and it will also give you an opportunity to express your views about a topic you care about.

The heart of writing persuasively is being able to express yourself in a convincing manner. This skill will prove useful to you whether you’re communicating verbally or in writing.

Books for youth that give information about writing persuasively:

OK, how’d I do? What parts bored you? Wait, don’t answer thatJ

Revision: Conversation at Lunch by Cynthia Miller Coffel

Today I'm  sharing a guest blog by Cynthia Miller Coffel. Enjoy!

Revision: Conversation at Lunch 

by Cynthia Miller Coffel

At lunch yesterday a colleague, Alice, told me that she had decided to rewrite her dissertation.  Alice is one of the few scholars in the field of Victorian studies who has written about dance, and she has a publisher interested in her work. But since she’d written her dissertation, she had graduated from her program, left academia, married, had a child, and begun an office job that kept her busy.  Over salad in the company cafeteria, though, she told our group that she had recently watched the way that, through the program NaNoWriMo, a friend had written an entire novel in the month of November.

            “The thing is to just get it done, get a draft out there,” Alice said.  “And my friend did it!  It’s a crappy novel, I suppose, but she’s got the first draft—now all she has to do is rewrite it. And I thought, if she could do that, why can’t I?  I’ve got the draft, I’ve got the proposal written, I have the university press interested, I figure from here on out it’s all about revision. I’m giving myself a year to get it done.  And I’m telling you about it to solidify my commitment.”

            I think Alice is correct that the first step to writing a book is just to get the damn draft done. Remember the story of how Joyce Maynard wrote a draft of her first novel, Baby Love, in three weeks?  She put her daughter in daycare, told her husband she didn’t plan to cook or clean much for a month, and wrote it all out, day after day, on a typewriter at the kitchen table. 

Revising Thinking Themselves Free

When I started revising my book, Thinking Themselves Free: Research on the Literacy of Teen Mothers, I had my academic draft done.  I had been granted the PhD, and my advisors told me they thought my dissertation could become a book.  They told me—and I’ve since learned that this is gospel for dissertators who want to publish their revised work—that I needed to focus on three things:

1)      Which audience I was writing for

2)      Which voice or tone I would revise in

3)      Which models I would use

I wasn’t sure what kind of audience I should imagine reading my work when I changed my dissertation into a book.  I knew that, since Thinking Themselves Free is about education, struggling readers, and the experiences of poor girls in school, some of its main audience would be teachers and teacher educators.  I knew that since the book is about teenage mothers trying to finish high school, many women who are feminists like me, and who are concerned about the schooling lives of girls, would be interested in it. And I knew that since it contains many critiques of the education system, progressive educators in particular might like it.

            But I wanted the women who were my friends at work to find it interesting as well.  These are women who are smart and thoughtful readers, curious about the lives of other women, savvy about policy arguments in education. They read imaginative literature more often than they read educational research, however: they are not academics.  I wanted to entice them to read my book, too.

Audience & Voice
 

After I had thought through who I expected my main audience would be, I thought about the voice of the book. My dissertation had begun as a series of papers which I had written in each class I took in graduate school. When the papers were all put together in chapters, the tone of each chapter was very different from the last. One chapter was written in a very reserved, formal, scholarly voice; another in a more chatty tone, describing my personal reactions to the teenage mothers I worked with; another chapter was written in a reportorial way. I knew I needed to smooth the voice out, make the scholarly chapters less so, and make the personal chapters a bit more scholarly.

Finding a Model

I solved the problem of audience and the problem of voice by taking the third bit of advice my advisors had given me: finding a model.  I read and reread Caroline E. Heller’s book Until We are Strong Together: Women Writers in the Tenderloin.  Heller began her book personally, comparing herself—a wealthy graduate student in her thirties—to the homeless old women she was working with, so I began my book in a personal way, too, and compared myself to the teen mothers I was working with.  Caroline Heller used italicized interludes, which were character sketches of the women she worked with, in between each of her chapters. I wrote interludes myself, each small section being a memory of my experiences as a young teacher in an alternative school for married, pregnant, and mothering teens in the 1980s.  I placed these interludes next to chapters that were about my more recent experiences discussing similar topics with teenage mothers. I placed an interlude about writing with the married, pregnant, and mothering teens I worked with as a young teacher next to the chapter on conducting writing research with the teen moms I got to know recently; I placed an interlude focused on daycare in the school for married, pregnant, and mothering teens next to a chapter that discusses the benefits of housing daycare centers in schools. Using these interludes helped me keep the personal voice in the book—a voice I thought my non-academic friends might like—and it helped me express the feeling of time repeating itself that I had experienced when I worked, now as a middle-aged women, with teen mothers again. It also provided a shape to the book, as, in these interludes, I described the progression of a young teacher—my young self—through the school year.

     I also read and quoted from and used as a model Lisa Dodson’s beautiful piece of research Don’t Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Story of Women and Girls in Poor America.  From reading Lisa Dodson’s work closely I learned about ways of organizing my research chapters, about avoiding educational jargon in research, so that the voice and purpose of the work is clear.  I also learned from Dodson that pieces of research don’t need to be written in a stuffy way: You can write your research book, as Dodson did, with passion, with a full heart.  

Revision as Weaving

Revising Thinking Themselves Free felt to me the way I imagine weaving feels—I throw the shuttle, hold the warp yarn in place, throw the shuttle again, pull the weft yarn across to make the weave; I keep some of what was there in the beginning and rip out some of my favorite strands of yarn; I create a whole out of what once were separate pieces. 

I didn’t tell Alice about my experience of making my dissertation into a book, there as we talked in the company cafeteria about her plan to revise, but I did remember the joy I had working those materials. I hoped that her revision experience—as she thought about her audience, about the voice of her book, and about who her writing models would be—brought her as much deep joy as my revision experience had brought me.  I told her, woman writer to woman writer, to let me know if she needed any help.  I told her I’d be happy to sit alongside her—metaphorically, at least—as she revised.

                                                                        -Cynthia Miller Coffel

Advice to Novice Writers from Nancy Holder

I needed this advice from Nancy Holder.

I started a fiction piece a few months back in a writing class. I don’t know where the piece is going or even what it is. All I know is I started it to satisfy a young adult literature writing class requirement. I am extremely frustrated because I can’t seem to figure out where I want the main character, Kia Parker, to go, what I want her to be. 

I’m coddling her too much, as if she were me, or someone else I love, instead of pushing her out into the world where she will surely be hurt, disappointed, infuriated. 

What Holder’s advice says to me, is that I have to see it through, even if it doesn’t end up being a novel, even if it has no chance of ever being published. I must do it so I can get on with my life. Right now it’s like an itch, way down underneath a sweaty, thick cast on my leg. Somehow I’m going to have to find some way to get to it. 

The interviewer asks, “What about the novice writer is there anything to offer there? How about heading into the recently exploding self-publishing arena if one has a hard time getting a mainstream publishing contract?”

Holder replies, "To the novice writer: read, write, network. There's no other way to do it than to do it. Writers write every day. Write it, finish it, and move on to the next one. It's very important to finish things even if you think they're terrible. You need to read everything and you need to make contacts and get the skinny. Social media makes it happen even for the shy. Some self-published writers have gone on to great success. I'm thinking of Coleen Houck, who self-published her first one or two books in a trilogy, got an agent who asked her not to self-publish the next one, and is a New York Times bestselling author now."

 

 

I don’t want to self-publish fiction, even though I’ve read about success stories.

What do you think about self-publishing?What does Holder's advice say to you?

Nancy Holder, qtd. in “Dark Deals: The 'Wicked' Options of Nancy Holder” by Del Howison

Learning to Write with Beneath a Meth Moon by Jacqueline Woodson

I got a chance to hear Jacqueline Woodson talk to her editor about the writing process of Beneath a Meth Moon during the ALAN Workshop last month. Woodson said some things that might help us thinking about our writing processes.

At one point, Woodson talked about Moses, a character in Beneath a Meth Moon who befriends the main character, Laurel, when she is at her lowest point.

Woodson said early on Moses was not fully developed, but her editor kept asking questions about him.   

As a result, she realized that she did not know what was not on the page yet.

The story was in her head, and she believed she was conveying it, even in the early drafts, but the editor helped her see that the “story hadn’t gotten from [her] head to the page” yet. 

She said the questions the editor posed helped her ask, Who is Moses?, Why is he in the story?, and How is his story going to impact Laurel?  

Woodson later said that the finished draft that she sends to the editor is actually like a skeletal outline; she fills in the story in response to the editor’s questions. 

What can writers learn from this?

Take a look at this blogger’s thoughts about Beneath a Meth Moon.

Rejection's Good

I know this might sound crazy to you, but rejection can be good.

Here's 3 reasons why:

1. It means you are writing!

2. It means you are not afraid to let others see your work. Do you know how many closet writers there are who are too afraid to show anyone, including their own family members, their work?

3. You're closer to getting published. My motto is if I keep asking people something, sooner or later I'm going to get the answer I want. It can work this way with writing, too. A good book says, "You have not because you ask not." 

Let's keep "asking" by revising our work and putting it in front of as many readers/editors/publishers as we can.

We can do this!