Sucker Punch

I thought March would be a month of writerly delights. No less than three weekends were planned, all centering on what I enjoy best. The first of these was the much anticipated Tucson Festival of Books, a weekend long writer’s conference/book fair I’d been looking forward to ever since attending it the year prior and having such a grand time. Getting there was to be a fun road trip with friends Char, Diana, and LaDonna, all serious writers, and interesting people.

For a lover of books the TFB is a kind of high desert Nirvana. This year’s schedule included the likes of Alice Hoffman, Elmore Leonard and Jenna Blum. My friends in the ANWW and I planned to have dinner together Saturday evening, and a few of us would probably spend Sunday morning sipping lattes in some campus coffee shop or another, before a second delicious day of everything bookish. I would also finally get to meet fellow Arizonian Twitter writers, Melissa Crytzer Fry and Jessica McCann in the ‘real world’.

The following weekend in March was the Saturday meeting of the ANWW…always a weekend I look forward to with anticipation and joy.

The third Saturday would be spent in the Phoenix living room of my dear friend Trish, an awesome writer who organizes and hosts a Pulitzer book study group that is attended by writers. Again, the conversation here would center around everything I love best to discuss: novels and writing.

Those are the events that were supposed to happen. Here’s what actually did.

In February March shimmered on the horizon of my life like a literary oasis. I dragged my small overnight suitcase out from storage and made reservations for a room to share in Tucson with Diana. I worked diligently to wrap up outstanding business, bought batteries for my camera and notebooks small enough to fit in my purse. Last year we starved during the day at the festival—the cafeteria was jam-packed and the workshops are scheduled so close together there’s no time to wait in food lines if you don’t want to miss anything—so this year I bought beef jerky, nuts and dried fruit to share with whoever was with me. I had it all planned. It would be great fun, and I wouldn’t allow anything to spoil even a moment of it.

The week before the festival I developed what I first took to be allergies. By Thursday I realized it wasn’t allergies, but either a sinus infection or the flu. Thursday night I was so miserable I didn’t sleep at all, and as the sun rose on Friday I realized I would not be going to the festival. I called my friends and let them know. I looked up the confirmation number for the hotel reservations and emailed Diana. I also cried for a few minutes. But stuff happens, and I’m a big girl, so I got over the disappointment and set my sights on getting well.

And I did get better. By the time Sunday rolled around the worst of the snotty, sneezing, aching misery had passed and I knew I’d be completely well in a day or two.

But now I had a small pain in my lower back, just to the right of my tail bone. Had I perhaps sneezed too hard and pulled something? The pain wasn’t bad. I took some of the Motrin and flexural my rheumatologist prescribes for MCTD, and figured it would pass. My sinus infection got better but the pain in my back did not. I met with clients on Wednesday and one of them pointed out I was limping.

By Friday I knew something was seriously wrong. The small pain was not so small anymore, and it had spread like flaming napalm to my hip and down my right thigh. By 7pm Friday night I could find no position that didn’t hurt, and my right leg could not be bent without causing me excruciating pain. I could barely walk by this time, and I couldn’t sit, because that required bending my leg at the hip and knee, so it was a tense ride to the nearby urgent care clinic. We got there right before their 8 pm closing time. I stood leaning against a wall in the waiting room as the attending doctor saw to the last people who had been there before me. I was fighting back tears, and trembling with pain, but more importantly, I was beginning to feel frightened.

I am not a sissy when it comes to pain. I’ve given birth to two children, both of them large babies, and the first without benefit of pain meds. But this pain I was experiencing was so widespread, severe and inexplicable it actually frightened me. The doctor saw me. He suspected bursitis of the hip and gave me a scrip for pain meds, which my husband went and got filled, after taking me home and icing my hip and thigh as the doctor had recommended. I took the vicodin and waited for the pain to abate. But it never did.

By 5:30 am Saturday morning I was officially out of my mind. I was experiencing back-arching, claw-handed agony that nearly made speech impossible, and the pain meds the urgent care doctor had prescribed, even doubled, weren’t touching it. The large muscle in my right thigh jerked and jumped like it was electrically charged. My husband half carried me out to our truck and attempted to get me up into the passenger side. I was sobbing and frightened and in the most complete misery I have even experienced, outside childbirth. On a scale of 1 – 10 this pain was a 10, and I was completely freaked out by it.

Jim took me to the nearest emergency room, which happens to be located in a nearby retirement community. At the emergency room entrance I fell into the proffered  wheelchair. But since my hip and knee wouldn’t bend without exponentially increasing the pain all I could do was perch on the edge of the seat with my back arched and my head resting on the top of the seatback so I was staring straight up. I could not lift my right leg onto the foot rest, so whoever was pulling the chair wheeled me into the hospital backwards, with my right foot dragging, as my husband went to park our truck.

The wait in the emergency waiting room would have been humiliating…if I had cared what anyone thought of me. I was sweating profusely and my teeth chattered uncontrollably. My waist-length hair was wrapped everywhere around me and under me. I sat arched back in the chair, gripping the armrests with white knuckled intensity, hissing and sobbing with pain. I wore an old pair of black yoga pants and an old tee-shirt and flip-flops. I’m sure, in retrospect, I looked perfectly demented.

You would think a person in this condition would be brought right into the treatment area of an emergency room and cared for, but such is not the case. I was deposited in a public waiting room full of the disembodied voices of curious strangers while my husband had to fill out and sign a lot of papers. I don’t know how long I sat in that waiting room. It may have been an hour, it may have only been ten minutes, but every second ticked by like an hour. I recall hearing a woman nearby say, “Oh, my, that poor girl. She can go in front of me.” Next I heard the deeper rumble of an indignant man: “No. You’ve been waiting. When it’s your turn you go.”

“But I’m not that bad off,” said the female voice.

My husband returned and hovered over me, trying to comfort me. “Hang in there, babe. Just a little longer.” I heard him return to the admittance nurse’s window numerous times to ask how much longer I’d have to wait, and asking if they could at least get me out of the chair and onto a table, because sitting was not really possible and the position I was in was making the pain worse.

Eventually they called my name and someone grabbed the handles of the wheelchair and attempted to push it. The metal footrest jammed into the soft ligament at the back of my right ankle. “Mame, pick up your foot and put it on the footrest.” The demand penetrated the red haze surrounding me and I tried to respond. My leg wouldn’t move on its own and I couldn’t relax my grip on the arms of the chair or lean forward, both actions that would result in my hip bending. “Can you hear me?” Louder now. “I said pick up your foot.” The chair jerked impatiently. I think I said something like: “Uhhgrr.” I heard the low murmur of my husband’s voice. Then I felt hands lift my leg and place my foot on the footrest. The institutional acoustic tile ceiling above me whirled dizzily and I was wheeled off to the station where temps and blood pressure are checked.

I was so out of it that I remember very little of the next fifteen minutes or so. I was cuffed and questioned, and did my best to answer coherently. But I’m not sure I made much sense. I have no recollection of what anyone who spoke to me looked like, or what they asked me. I was wheeled into the treatment area of the emergency room and parked beside a bed, which my husband helped me up on to, all the while gently encouraging me. More questions were asked, and a short, middle aged Hispanic woman got an IV in my left arm.

“Where’s that noise coming from?” a male voice asked on the other side of a white canvas curtain. “It’s this one, in here,” another male voice replied. “I just ordered up morphine for her.”

My husband stood beside the bed I lay on, alternately stroking my hair back from my forehead and rubbing my spasming right thigh, while I worked on breaking the world record for saying ‘oh’.

The morphine took a long time to get to the emergency room. It seemed it needed to be brought in by camel, then unpacked and accounted for, before I could have it. Hard as it is to believe, morphine is apparently not kept in the very place where it is most needed.

The relief, when it finally arrived, hit my blood stream like mother’s love. The pain, which had grown to colossal size, shrank to a smoky throb in my lower back, hip and down my leg. My madly twitching thigh muscle slowed and my teeth ceased chattering. I felt my senses begin to return. It occurred to me I might be in some serious trouble. I could even be dying.

Over the course of that long Saturday I was again given morphine, and a little later something called dilaudid, when it became obvious the morphine wasn’t ‘holding’. The person assigned to me, a P.A. named Grace, ordered up tests and asked more questions.

Somewhere near the middle of the day I realized it was the Saturday of my writers workshop, and I was missing the second pleasure I had been looking forward to in March. My children came to see me, faces worried as they bent above me. My daughter brought me a birthday card, and I remembered it was St. Patrick’s Day…my birthday.

It was nearly 7pm by the time Grace had ruled out all the dire things she thought might be causing the problem. It wasn’t appendicitis, and it wasn’t anything to do with any of the other organs in my abdomen. Should I be admitted? Or should I go home? My only fear, at that point, was going home and having the pain return. The dilaudid was beginning to wear off and the pain was bearing its teeth at me in a wolfish grin, so Grace ordered up percoset to see if it would be sufficient to see me through until I could get to my GP on Monday.

Jim and I arrived home near sunset: me pale, hobbled and shaken; both of us ravenous after a long day without anything to eat other than some crackers the nurse had provided when she brought the Percocet. He brought me into the house and got me settled. There was a card on the front door from Diana, who had been worried and come looking for me when I hadn’t showed up at the workshop, which really touched me.

Jim went out front to retrieve my purse from the truck, and returned with his arms full of Tupperware. Our next door neighbor, Laura, had given him a corned beef supper, the traditional meal of St Patrick’s Day, complete with homemade Irish bread. This unexpected act of kindness completely shattered me. If I could have moved, I would have run next door and hugged her. It’s funny who the angels turn out to be, when something like this happens.

To be continued…

Drafting vs. Outlining

The debate can get quite heated on this topic. We’ve all read the various posts, articles and books touting one method above the other.  Some folks say they must have everything down on cards or a ‘beat sheet’ before starting their novels. Others just seem to write their first draft without doing any of that.

I recently got to thinking about these two, seemingly opposing views, because a writer in my workshop was having trouble with her first novel. This woman is a talented writer, and a quick study. So I wondered what was going on when she missed a few meetings. An email exchange revealed the problem:

A “writing teacher” had told her she couldn’t write anything further until she had a complete outline to work from. That she had to have her plot twists and characters—all figured out ahead of time. And she shouldn’t write another word forward until then.

This proclamation had gotten the writer all jammed up and critical of herself—because she couldn’t ‘think’ of an outline, and had therefore deemed herself a failure. She despaired she could ever write anything to completion, and was now experiencing a mental block to her own creativity.

I have to say here…my first reaction, once my hair laid back down on my scalp, was extreme annoyance with said “writing teacher”. I had an almost irresistible urge to paddle the teacher and send her down to the principle. So the first thing I did was wait for that to pass. (Nothing good ever comes from violence!)

Then I wrote to the writer, and this is what I told her:

What some people call outlines are what other people call first drafts.

It’s as simple as that. You can write your first draft on cards, or in notebooks, or on your computer in files labeled as chapters. Whatever you choose to label it, if it’s words, written in a sequence, using the letters of the alphabet, naming characters and what they are doing, it’s a first draft. And you can’t get to it without sitting down and filling white space with words.

What we choose to call it is just semantics.

The method we choose is just preference.

It really all boils down to how different people create, well…differently. Some are sprawling, like me. I write big, loose, wild first drafts without any outline. I have some scenes, some of the characters, and I kinda know what the story is about—a premise. The entire first draft is where I find out exactly what the novel or short story is about, who all the characters are, what they sound like, and what parts they will all play. I cannot create any other way. I sit and write. Wildly. Fast. 1500 or more words in two or three hours, every morning. During the rest of the day, when I am doing my day job, or washing my hair, or the dishes, or reading…that’s when I am thinking about what I wrote that morning, and what it means, and what I might write next. (I keep notebooks handy and jot down ideas and cryptic words, sentences and images to help guide me the next day.)

A more ‘traditional’ outline simply doesn’t work for me. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this and I think I know why. It’s because writing that type of outline requires the use of my left brain. And all the really good stuff, the creative stuff, comes from my right brain. That’s where my muse lives, and she doesn’t come out to play when I am being too analytical.

The rational side of me likes the idea of file cards and beat sheets. It seems so deliciously orderly. It’s like folding laundry or plotting the fastest route for a road trip. So very organized and rational. Unfortunately it’s also completely stifling, creatively…for me. Everything I’ve ever written from this kind of left brain activity was utterly boring. If I resisted the urge to deviate from the outline as I wrote, (to pop out of my left brain and into my right) what I ended up with had none of the power, inventiveness or surprise of the work written ‘by the seat of my pants’.

Do you remember ever doing a paint by number painting when you were little? They’re fun. You get to fill in numbered spaces with numbered colors, until gradually a picture emerges. Unfortunately it’s not a picture you want to look at for very long. You definitely don’t want to frame it and hang it on your wall. They usually end up in the trash…which is where they belong. That’s what ‘writing from an outline’ does for me. I end up with a finished story, that I don’t want to read.

If you listen to folks who study the brain and how it works, you quickly pick up that all the most creative stuff we do: inventions and works of art—even Einstein’s flights of mathematical insight—comes from the right brain. So it stands to reason that however we choose to create anything must be the way which stimulates this side of the brain for the individual. If postlets or file cards do it for you, so be it. Call yourself an outliner and go for it, my friend.

But please don’t insist this is the only legitimate way to do it. That it is superior in any way (it’s not). This is just one way. It’s the thing that stimulates you creatively. And we are all wired different.

An outline is a first draft is an outline.

 Oh, and the writer from the workshop? She’s back to doing some writing. She’s still dealing with her inner critic…which grew bloated and strong on what she’d been ‘taught’. She is working on getting over the idea that the published novels she reads were somehow shat out by people, complete and polished. But knowing she doesn’t have to show her work to anybody else has helped, and I know if she sticks with it…if she just fills white space with uncensored thought, she will get there.

“It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.   

E.L. Doctorow

 “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor. Perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force.”  

 Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird

Patricia Highsmith is one of my favorite authors. She wrote her tightly plotted suspense novels using notebooks and a typewriter, and writing many drafts. I suspect she fell somewhere between a plotter and an organic writer.

Writers, how do you create best? Are you an ‘organic’ type of writer? Or are you a ‘plotter’? Do you fall somewhere in between?

Mr. Bacon’s Visit

This past week was such a busy time for my household. We were in a frenzy of cleaning and preparations: dusting and vacuuming, readying the guest chamber. You see, we were expecting the arrival of one of the most renowned and erudite celebrities of the blogosphere…yes, you guessed correctly. None other than Mr. Bacon!!

I knew this visit would be a whirlwind of activity…Mr. Bacon’s ‘handlers’ keep his schedule fast-paced and there is always much pressure to fit in all his scheduled engagements…and yet I hoped to still have some time to get to know ‘the man himself’, away from all the hoopla of his more public persona.

Alas…the beginning of our visit did not get off to the best of starts.

RUN Mr. Bacon!

Mr. Bacon’s legs are, regretfully, rather short.

Oh my! <muffled shrieks of HELP!>

 As you can see, things got a little dicey for Mr. Bacon. Zeus got a whiff of his bacony mojo—and deemed him irresistible.

<louder shrieks><muffled giggles>

<arg!>

 

<oof!>

Things happened rather fast. But at last order was restored.

The whole episode took a little shine off our guest. A bath was  ordered for Mr. Bacon…or HG (His Greasiness), as we now call him here. Followed by a time out in the birdbath spa, to regain some lost composure.

Mr. Bacon relaxes after 'his ordeal'.

After some R&R HG was “fit as a fiddle” and ready for his much awaited visit to the Arizona Novel Writers Workshop.

Mr. Bacon treats the ANWW to a reading of his dissertation

There he deigned not to hear any of our “country scribblings”, but offered instead to read us his 400 page dissertation on, The Benefits Obtained by Living a Kosher Lifestyle, or (subtitle) Failing That, At Least Be a Vegetarian For Pete’s Sake.

This was a surprise (and, I must say, a little bit of a disappointment) to those attending, since we had presumed HG would be giving us advice on OUR writing. But HG brushed aside our misgivings, and, after dealing with my ‘silly question’ as to who this Pete was, for who’s sake we should become vegetarian, launched into the opening pages.

The suggestion was made that perhaps the title should be shortened, (and indeed, the entire thing) to perhaps say: The Benefits of Being Vegetarian. This made HG scoff. You see, (he informed us, chest puffed and head high) his host with whom he resides is obtaining his MFA, and he therefore knows that lengthy titles are de rigueur for dissertations. In fact, it can hardly be considered a dissertation without a lengthy title. To which I responded, stutteringly, (he’s very intimidating) that I knew that. I have, after all, “been to Berkeley”. I could see this disclosure had the desired effect, and I was greatly raised in HG’s esteem. (He needn’t know it was for a Joan Baez concert back in the 70’s.)

Dissertation read, I awoke the other members of the ANWW, and we commenced to party. And I must say, HG is a man, err, bacon strip, who can hold his own.

Bacon with wine

 

Hurry back, Mr. Bacon!!

HG exerts his charisma and tames the beast

 

 

 

For more bacon bits check out my friend Julia’s blog. And if you’re still craving more, try Melissa’s blog. To reach Mr. Bacon at home go to Patrick’s blog.

 

 

The Cult of the Short Sentence

Over the course of having my work critiqued in local writers groups I have gotten back this remark numerous times: This sentence is too long. It takes up two and a half lines, and should be made into two or more sentences.

Where does this belief that all sentences should be short stem from? Is it the result of the shrinking American attention span? Of over-exposure to ‘sound bites’ and commercials and texting and tweeting? Is it instilled by the pallid preaching’s of exhausted high school English teachers, struggling to cram some semblance of education into the hormonally preoccupied, marginally literate minds of teens hopped up on Red Bull and Monster?

I have listened while writers tell other writers that their flawlessly crafted sentence should be chopped into shorter lengths – “because it is too long, you see.” (And these were not sentences dealing with action…just to clarify.)

At a recent writers’ group meeting a lovely young woman who might someday – if she diligently studies craft and reads a lot – become a writer, told the group, with unblinking sincerity and conviction (for her JC English teacher had said so), that any sentence over 10 or 12 words was suspect of being a ‘run-on’ sentence. After a stunned pause while those around the table absorbed this proclamation a discussion followed, with some writers claiming that most readers don’t have the patience or intelligence to read a novel containing long sentences.

With the exception of age appropriate genres like children’s and YA, (and perhaps pulp fiction and detective novels), I disagree.

And so today, my darlings, to both rebuke and refute this erroneous thinking, I am going to regal you with very long, very beautiful sentences—written by literary masters.

If you belong to the Cult of Short Sentences, gird yourself:

The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.

And another:

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them as silently as eyes.

From The Road, by Pulitzer prize winning author, Cormac McCarthy.

It looked like those farmhouses you ride by in the country in the middle of the afternoon, with the chickens under the trees and the dog asleep, and you know the only person in the house is the woman who has just finished washing up the dishes and has swept the kitchen and has gone upstairs to lie down for half an hour and has pulled off her dress and kicked off her shoes and is lying there on her back on the bed in the shadowy room with her eyes closed and a strand of her hair still matted down on her forehead with the perspiration.

And another:

I ate roast duck stuffed with oysters and yams and that wonderful curry they make in Savannah, which tastes good even to a man like me who loathes food, and drank rye whisky, and walked down those beautiful streets General Oglethorpe laid out, and stared at the beautiful houses, which were more severe than ever now, for the last leaves were off the arching trees of the streets and it was the season when the wind blows great chunks of gray sky in off the Atlantic which come dragging so low their bellies brush the masts and chimney pots, like gravid sows crossing a stubble field.

From All the King’s Men, by Pulitzer winning poet/author, Robert Penn Warren

“The Emperor Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad, king of kings, known since his childhood as Akbar, meaning ‘the Great,’ and latterly, in spite of the tautology of it, as Akbar the Great, the great great one, great in his greatness, doubly great, so great that the repetition in his title was not only appropriate, but necessary in order to express the gloriousness of his glory—The Grand Mughal, the dusty, battle-weary, victorious, pensive, incipiently overweight, disenchanted, mustachioed, poetic, oversexed, and absolute emperor, who seemed altogether too magnificent, too world-encompassing, and, in sum, too much to be a single human personage—this all-engulfing flood of a ruler, this swallower of worlds, this many-headed monster who referred to himself in the first person plural—had begun to meditate, during his long tedious journey home, on which he was accompanied by the heads of his defeated enemies bobbing in their sealed earthen pickle-jars, about the disturbing possibilities of the first person singular—the ‘I.’”

From The Enchantress of Florence  by Salman Rushdie  (contributed by writer, David Waid). In 2008, The Times ranked Rushdie thirteenth on their list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945″

It was a city in which the very old and the very new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names – Crouch End, Chalk Farms, Earl’s Court, Marble Arch – and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or more recently, motorized, and the needs of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every manner and color and kind.

From Neverwhere by award winning author Neil Gaiman

“That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student’s exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; all this well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing—the stream.”

From The Green Hills of Africa by Pulitzer prize winning author, Ernest Hemingway  (Yes, this is all one sentence…all 424 words of it.)

Do you have a favorite long sentence? Do you know someone who fears them—for whom we might perform an intervention?

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Bad

The truth about writers’ groups.

I’ve belonged to many writers groups over the years, in several different areas of the United States. So I feel I am in a unique position to understand what makes up a good one.

A good writers group offers camaraderie and an understanding ear (something our non-writing friends cannot) as well as free editing, mentoring, growth and advice.

Questions to ask yourself to determine if a group you are considering is the right one for you:

Are the other writers your target audience? Do the others in the group read your genre?

If they don’t, you are likely to get many critiques asking what words mean, and correcting terms, word count and phrases that are common in the genre of your novel, but unfamiliar to those in the group. Not only is this time consuming and generally unhelpful in any practical sense, but it can actually damage your novel. Yes, I did say damage. If you are unsure of your skills you may concede to this pressure and end up leaching all the color and vitality out of your manuscript.

If you choose to participate in a group that reads mainly vampire novels and sci-fi, for instance, you are likely to run into problems with comprehension if you write say, romance, or literary.

Another question to ask yourself is:

Are the folks in your group writing at the same level as yourself?

If they are writing at a level much above yours and they are kind and mentoring folks, good for you! You’ve found a good group! Stay and glean all you can from these kind and giving people.

If, however, they are much more skillful than yourself (or even just think they are), but unkind and egotistical, then you are in for a hellish experience. One of the very first groups I belonged to as a young writer in Virginia was this sort. I always left feeling, not inspired, but depressed and anxious, and as if I would never attain the level of the other writers.

At the very least you will come away from a meeting like this with a feeling that your writing is worthless. Again, this can actually do damage, not only to your manuscript, but to your nascent view of yourself as a writer.

A final question you might ask is: are the others in the group serious writers?

By this I mean: do they write every day, or do they just doodle a bit when the feeling comes over them; when they feel inspired. There’s nothing wrong with this, by the way, but if you are serious about taking your writing all the way to a career, these hobbyists won’t be of any help to you.

Okay, that’s the Bad.

Now for the Ugly…yes, it can be even worse!

Ahhh…the uglies. If you’ve been in many writers’ groups you have undoubtedly encountered them. They come in many guises. But let me tell you about two of the most toxic I have encountered.

First there’s the Monolog-ist. This guy loves to hear himself talk. And talk. And TALK. He will monopolize the meeting (the meeting you’ve been looking forward to for days) to the point where folks begin looking at each other around the table to see if it’s only them, or if this guy really has been talking for 10 solid minutes. About his wife, or his job, or his political leanings, or his car, his house, his sex life, his dog, his shoelaces. Until you want to scream, “Dude, SHUT UP!”

But that wouldn’t be nice.

So, you sit patiently and wait for him to wind down. You examine your fingernails, plan your grocery shopping list…waste your precious Saturday afternoon.

Another ugly that haunts some meetings is The Expert. The Expert knows more about your topic than you do. He will cite pseudo facts and give Wiki-links to back them up. If you dispute them he will challenge you to email him with your links after the meeting. The others around the table will listen and assume The Expert knows what he’s talking about…he certainly seems to. The Expert has a little of the Monolog-ist in him—because he will dispute your facts at length. For the first few meetings you may not mind this too much. After all, this guy really seems to want to help. But after going home to redo your research each time this occurs you soon discover The Expert is not really as knowledgeable as he pretends to be. Your research is solid, your facts irrefutable.

The Ugly

So, you rise to his challenge at the next meeting and politely suggest he stop checking your facts. The meeting degenerates into a brawl. No solid critiquing of your work or anybody else’s gets done. The Expert is quiet for a meeting or two, presumably chastened. But then one evening it’s His turn to give His opinion…and you see that maniacal gleam in his eye.

Even if you like the other writers in these groups, STOP GOING! If the group’s leader or the other writers do not rise up and control a tyrant, the group will just be a drain on your time, toxic to your life, and your work. Stop attending and look for another group. You’ll be so happy you did.

And now, at last, the Good  (always nice to leave on a positive note).

Good writers groups are out there. A good writers group has a leader(s) that directs the meetings and keeps them on track if they begin to stray. In a good group writers check their egos at the door on the way in. They are well-read, well-mannered and come from a wide range of life experiences. If they have something to say that might be hard to hear, they say it kindly. A good group is one where the writers respect each other.

Sound too good to be true? Well, it’s not. I have belonged to several. I belong to one now.

If you know what you’re looking for you’ll be able to find it. And if you can’t? Well then, Creative One, why not create your own group? Cruise the established groups in your area and find some good writers. Get to know them. The internet provides any number of venues to advertise and attract the sort of people you want to your group. One such venue is Meetup.com. Think about what you want the atmosphere of your group to be. What is the ideal you have in mind? Then set about making it happen.

The Good

Happy writing!

What are some of your writers group experiences? What advice would you give to a writer looking for a group?

Book Fest, Back by Popular Request

In response to requests for a little more about the Tucson Festival of Books I got out my notebook and will give you a few of the tidbits I gleaned.

Literary agents Amy Rennert and Claire Gerus had many suggestions for new writers. Both thought following Publishers Marketplace and Publishers Lunch were good sources to keep in the loop about what is being published.

A social media marketing workshop proved to be interesting. Although I don’t subscribe to the idea of automating tweets, as the workshop leader suggested we do. (Personally I am not interested in reading automated tweeps, so why should I send them out to others?) I use Twitter to build relationships with folks. I want to actually know about those I interact with on Twitter. I’ve found support there, and opportunity to give my support to others.  If you haven’t tried it, perhaps you should?

During a workshop for sagging middles – don’t look down at your waist, we’re still talking writing here – I learned that getting through a tough middle on a novel can simply be a matter of asking, “What is the next indicated thing a character would do? Then possibly asking, “ What is the last thing she would do?” Also, “What would make my character suffer the most?” (Always my favorite, brwhahaha.)

I attended the festival with workshop writer friends: Char Bishop, Diana Douglas, LaDonna (yes…just LaDonna, you know, like Cher, or Prince) Janice Russell, Patricia Cox, David Waid and John Blohm. All fantastic writers, and wonderfully supportive of each other. (Members of the ANWW.)

Writers of the ANWW and friends

Trish arranged for us to get together with some other writer friends Saturday evening at The Blue Willow. We ate outside on the patio. It was the perfect way to cap off the first day of the festival. The ladies later retired to one of our rooms at the Marriot, where we drank wine and talked about the high points of our day.

(It would take not one, but two, strong lattes at the funky hookah bar near campus to get me going the next morning.)

I’m marking my calendar for next March and definitely plan on attending. And if you plan on being anywhere near Arizona next year in March, you should too!

The Tucson Festival of Books – highly recommended.