Tag Archives: writing

Setting the pins

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Bowling PinsWhen I was a kid I had a job as pin boy, which was in the basement of a local church. A pin boy, for those younger than I, was the kid who set up the bowling pins in a bowling alley. (This was long before the job was handed over to robots.) It was tricky and sometime dangerous work, because pins could and did fly in wild directions.  

One my tasks was to make sure the pins were spotted exactly right. If not, the bowler, looking down the alley, would shout, “Hey pin boy. Pin six. Get it right!” If I didn’t get it right, the bowler would have a harder time knocking down all the pins and thereby achieving a “strike!”

I thought about that today as I worked on my new book. Sometimes when I write, I have the plot more or less all worked out in my head. It’s never that simple of course but sometimes I know, sort of, where I am going. Other times, such as at this moment, I’m not at all sure. As I result I go back and forth, this way and that. Here I am, one hundred and fifty pages in, and I write a new chapter one. And then some. 

What I am doing, if you will, is setting up the plot pins. If I don’t get the plot right, line it up, space it just correctly, the reader won’t be able to knock them down. Dangerous work, setting down plots.

The Pause Key

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Pause ButtonOne of the questions I am most often asked when visiting a school is, “Have you ever had writer’s block?”

How young people even know the term “writer’s block “ is a mystery to me. Over the years, however, I think I’ve come to understand what they are really asking. 

First, however, writer’s block is, as I understand it, a serious form of depression. And depression is the occupational disease of writers. But this is something more specific.   From what I understand, writer’s block is a fear of writing, a psychological state in which the writer becomes fearful of revealing—going public, if you will—of something (consciously or unconsciously) that is embedded in his or her writing. As a result they stop writing. I am hardly an expert on this, and in any case, I have never really been subject to such a condition.

What I’ve learned, however, is that what young people actually mean by the question “have you ever had writer’s block?”  is, “Have you ever been stuck, unable to think out the next word, sentence, paragraph, etc.?“ The answer is, of course! All the time! One hundred times a day! Writing requires a huge amount of thinking, planning, deciding, and so forth.  Pausing. No one writes in one long endless flow. No one. This is important, because when young people get stuck—which always happens to all writers—when they don’t know how to proceed, they think it means they can’t write. But writing takes time. Pausing. Sometimes for a long time. Any teaching of writing that does not allow time for thought gives a very wrong message to the young writer. Being stuck is very much part of the process, as is thinking out how not to be stuck. 

What you leave out

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Letter CA writer friend recently sent me an e-mail. “What are you doing?”

I said, “Pushing the alphabet keys. You?”

She replied, “Working the delete key!”

I suspect that the most important aspect of writing is what’s not on the page. The white space. What you take out. Leave out. Cut. An editor once told me it’s much better to over- write, than under-write. Better to cut than to add, so you have only what is necessary. I once heard a lecture by Donald Hall, poet, picture book writer, a former US poet-laureate.  If I remember his words correctly, he said, “The good writer tries to create the perfect O.  But he leaves a gap, so that it’s like the letter C. If that gap is too large, your reader cannot fill it. If it’s too small, there is no reason for the reader to fill it. But if it is just right, your reader fills it with his/her own experience and the circle is complete.”

Want to study writing? Take three courses.

1. A journalism course will teach you what to put in. 

2. A poetry course will teach you what to take out.

3. A voice class will teach you to hear if your words sing.

How many pages each day?

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BookPeter from Portland, Oregon, wrote to ask me, “How many pages do you write a day?”

Most (not all) writers I know write every day. My own personal goal is five pages a day. Sometimes I do more. Sometimes less. I have written a book (S.O.R Losers) in one twenty-four hour period. The longest time it took me to write a book (Bright Shadow), start to finish, was fourteen years. Needless to say I didn’t work on that one every day. The shortest time elapsing between the time I started to write to when the published book was in my hand was eleven months (Encounter at Easton)

The other day I read an interview with a British author who said she tried to write a thousand words a day. A writer friend told me he gets up at four o clock  each morning and stays at his desk till he gets ten pages done. Someone once told me that Stephen King used to write a hundred pages a day. Anthony Trollop, an important British Victorian writer wrote, “I have allotted myself so many pages a week. The average number has been about 40. It has been placed as low as 20, and has risen to 112. And … my page has been made to contain 250 words… I have had every word counted.” 

But—as I like to remind would–be writers—if you wrote just one page a day, at the end of the year you’d have 365 pages—a pretty big book!

Can writing change the world?

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Dayanara, of Quincy, Illinois, wrote:  “. . . my dream is to become an author someday. My dad would never approve of it though. He wants me to become someone who can change the world, but he doesn’t understand writing can change the world.”

Go Dayanara!

Sophia's WarBut . . . can writing change the world? Having just been emerged in the world of the American Revolution so as to write Sophia’s War, the evidence is clear that such writing as Tom Paine’s Common Sense, and “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . “  changed the world. But since Dayanara wrote to me, perhaps, it’s fair to ask if fiction can change the world? More specifically, can writing for young people change the world?

I am struck by how many adults vividly recall books they read as young people and with an enthusiastic memory for detail that is striking considering the years which have passed. I’ve noticed, too, how many people recall, in particular, a teacher who read a lot to a class. I’ve often been told by older women that, when younger, they read The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle many times. Only rarely however, did they tell me what they did because of that reading. 

And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry StreetSpeaking for myself, I do believe And To Think that I saw it on Mulberry Street, opened my imagination. The Wind in the Willows gave me a new awareness of the natural world.  Treasure Island, informed me what a boy (Jim Hawkins) could do.  

Beyond all else, however, I believe reading taught me how to think. And what I read was, of course, writing.

Finishing a book

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lawnmowerHow does it feel to finish a book after working on it for months, if not years, every day, and for most working hours? As the writer Harry Eyres has suggested, it is a “triumphant moment of loss.” Famously, Virginia Woolf suffered acute depressions when she finished her novels. Not so uncommon among writers. It’s not that bad for me, I’m glad to say. But—as a writer—your life has been structured on your daily involvement with plot, characters, etc., etc.,—and then it all goes. Those people, and their dilemmas, that you have invented were  your daily companions. You’ worried and fretted about them.  Wondered what they were doing. Saying. Then—they go away. They become your readers’ friend. (In fact your readers tell you things about your characters that you never knew!) Melancholy moment, indeed. Nothing else to do but—start something new. Or mow the lawn.