A Writer's Mandate

Kate Carmack, born Shaww Tlaa

With the exception of a few work-for-hire projects, most everything I've written has been because I've wanted to, not because I had to. It's a curse and a joy, this freedom. Writers get to indulge in pretty much anything, limited only by language and imagination. They also get to take a lot of wrong turns. Most have files bulging projects gone wrong.

Then there are those stories that have to be told, stories that for one reason or another can't be relegated to the never-mind folder. Wealth Woman: Kate Carmack and the Last Great Race for Gold is one of those. Once deemed the richest Indian woman in America, Kate claimed to have made the discovery of a lifetime. Though cheated out of her fortune, she stood her ground between cultures. Hers will the first book-length, mass-market gold rush history to be told from the point of view of the ones who were there first, the Indians.

From the beginning, I knew this was a story that had to be told, and that I was the one to tell it. How I reached that conclusion, and how I'm handling dozens and dozens (hundreds and hundreds?) of decisions and dilemmas connected with getting Kate's story into print will inform my 2013 teaching series. How to know this is a story that must be told? How to evaluate the merits of a project? How to know you're the right person to write it? How to organize research material? How to outline the narrative? How to refine the narrative style? Which title? How to put together a proposal? How to attract the interest of an agent and editor? How to deal with conflicting primary source material? What constitutes truth in history? In narrative? What place is there for invention in nonfiction? How to balance summary and scene? How to write scenes grounded in historical fact? How to cite sources? How to know when to stop researching and start writing? How to handle revision? How to handle culturally sensitive material? How to keep your momentum? How to pace the narrative? How decide on your form? 

These questions (and more) will be among those I address here. Whether you have an interest in writing, the Klondike, American Indian history, mining, the West, or gold, consider this your invitation to tag along as I see through to completion a project that's called to me from the start: the story of Kate Carmack and the Last Great Race for Gold.

Time, Risk, and Writing

The stately clock has been with us for years. When we moved, we transported it as carefully as we had when we first brought it home, even though it had never once while in our possession ticked off a single second. At the new house, we found a stashed key and finally delivered it to the local clock shop for repair.

Today we started it up precisely at 11:49, the moment at which it had long ago ceased tracking time. The pendulum now ticks and tocks, beating a rhythm all but forgotten in our digital age, a reminder of time passing, passing, passing.

Time is a tough foe. We race with it, beat ourselves up over it, lose ourselves in it. In the end, time always prevails. Writing, an inefficient pursuit at best, is especially at odds with time. As a New Year looms, full of promise, we can’t resist looking back at all we failed to accomplish – the unfinished manuscript, the imperfect poem, the unanswered queries.

But writing, as Doctorow points out, is no mere way of passing the time. It is an endeavor that entails large risks, risks that call your very sense of self into question.

“It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader,” said Paul Gallico back in 1946. “If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.”

Real writing, the hazardous, vein-opening kind, is at odds with our schedule-happy, competitive, productivity-obsessed modern age. Revision is especially so. In her essay “Waiting and Silence,” Susan Snively notes that Franz Kafka kept a sign above his desk that said simply “Wait.” A writer’s completion of a first draft, Snively says, is “the most exhilarating, and therefore treacherous, moment,” because we are all too eager to show our unpolished work to the world.

The ticking of my clock is a gift, a reminder that as a writer, I’m privileged to step beyond time. In my stories, I can mold it as I choose. I can take immeasurable risks without leaving my chair. I can stop time, waiting until a piece rights itself, following the example of poet Elizabeth Bishop, who would leave gaps in her drafts where she lacked the right words, waiting patiently for them to reveal themselves. “Her refusal to hurry a poem was, among other things,” Snively says, “a way to say that the poem’s special life had to be honored above her own need for closure or publication.”

The swinging pendulum of our newly-refurbished clock says this: the passion for truth trumps the march of minutes and hours every time. As writers, may we be fierce with determination, unflinching with risks, and generous with ourselves.  

Catharsis

“In your writing, remember that the purpose of everything you’re doing is to bring about some kind of emotional reaction in your reader.” Christopher Vogler

What draws us to literature? What makes writing worthwhile? The holiday season has answers.

Yes, that holiday season, the one we love to hate. Whether you celebrate Channukah or Christmas or Kwaanzaa or St. Nicholas Day or St. Lucia’s Day, or whether you plug your ears and cover your eyes and roar humbug at it all, you need only a little fortitude and persistence to dig beyond the advertising inserts and glitter and cheesy carols to discover truths for your writing.

A recent caller to Rick Steve’s travel show described his favorite holiday ever: nestled with his family under a blanket on a balcony in a Swiss village that bans motor vehicles, listening to the clatter of horses drawing sleighs through the streets, enjoying a snowy scene happily lacking in bustle. As Christopher Vogler points out in The Writer’s Journey, that sort of simple, reflective interlude was the original point of the solstice holidays, presenting a sacred opportunity, a turning point in which we collectively removed ourselves from the rhythms of daily life.

But in the modern age, we’ve subverted the ritual cycle which birthed literature, and we’ve lost touch with genuine rest. As a byproduct, we’ve also lost touch with catharsis, the sudden release of emotions evoked by story, which is why much modern writing, including our own work, can leave us largely unsatisfied.

A few years ago, I had my first cave experience, thanks to the kind owners of Alaska’s Boardwalk Lodge on Prince of Wales Island. (I also nearly blinded their fly-fishing guide, but that’s a story for another day). We hiked up the side of a mountain to El Capitan, the largest known cave in Alaska and home to the deepest limestone pit in the country. After belly-crawling deep into the caverns, we extinguished the lights. The total darkness we shared is what Vogler calls “the perfect stage to initiate young people into the mysteries of the tribe, its deepest beliefs, the essence of its compact with nature.”

Originating in festivals that ritualized the cave experience in a cycle of mythological death and rebirth that includes mortification, purgation, invigoration, and jubilation, story plunges us into a place of darkness from which we emerge transformed “The absence of things that were normally taken for granted created a renewed appreciation for them,” says Vogler of ancient rituals born from the disorienting effect of the dark. “It also focused the minds of the people and reminded them of the possibility of death that was always near.”

These days, mortification and purgation are out of vogue. Heaven forbid we deprive ourselves, which ritually speaking explains why the jubilation we’re supposed to experience at this time of year feels so feeble.

In Aristotle’s era, catharsis was a medical term for the elimination of poisons.  In story, the hero stands in for the sacrificial god-king (or queen). As her fate unfolds, we feel sorry for her, and we fear her fate. We are purged. The poisons are gone. We leave the story relieved that though we, like the hero, are flawed, we haven’t had to endure what she has.

That’s classic tragedy. We associate it with the Greeks, but the concept is universal. Consider what Mark John says about story-songs in Yupitt Yuraryarait (Yup’ik Ways of Dancing): “Even a song, our ancestors sang it to take out bad feelings inside, and they considered such songs powerful. And though one feels tired before the dance, when one goes home, it seems like one’s being has been expanded.”

Comedy, too, is cathartic. The jolly old elf of our current season is no accident. Neither are the celebrations of light, joy at emerging from the cave.

In your holiday greetings to writers, you need but one word: catharsis. It’s a reminder of purpose.  As Vogler says, “You are always raising and lowering the tension, pumping energy into your story and characters until some kind of emotional release is inevitable, in the form of laughter, tears, shudders, or a warm glow of understanding.”

Try This:  In a favorite piece of poetry or prose, identify the cathartic effect. Then do the same for your own work in progress.

Check This Out: The back matter describes Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey as “one of the most influential writing books in the world.” Though they must resist the urge to find formula in Vogler’s analysis of mythic structure, writers will benefit from understanding the primal function of myth in story.

Butting Heads, and Other Pursuits of a Writer

The youngest writers have no problem with conflict. Ask six-year-old Billy to tell you a story, and he’ll dizzy you with an unflappable hero who prevails against bad guys at every turn. But then Billy’s idea of conflict resolution is to whack Bobby over the head with the Tonka truck he wants. Grown-ups will spend lots of time and energy training Billy out of this impulse. For the sake of the greater good, he’ll eventually do a full 180 and spend a good part of his adult energy avoiding conflict. If he’s not careful, the characters in his stories will do the same.

To make sure your stories have enough conflict, you don’t have to re-inhabit your six-year-old self (though let’s face it – you know a person or two on whom you’d like to execute that Tonka truck maneuver). But you do need to acknowledge the importance of conflict and understand how to unleash it in your prose.

Conflict matters in story precisely because of how we train Billy and all of our children. To play well together as grown-ups, conflicts are channeled and rerouted and boxed in to sanctioned activities. They acquire protocol. The outing of conflict in literature allows us to validate that Tonka truck. As Sol Stein says in How to Grow a Novel, “Readers enjoy conflict because it is in fiction and not in their real lives.

“Successful writing is permeated with an adversarial spirit demonstrate in suspicion, opposition, confrontation, and refusal,” Stein says. “A writer has to look only to his own humanity to find the material for conflict.” Those seven deadly sins? Wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony are all about conflict of one type or another.

Speaking of types, we all know these three: person versus person, person versus nature, person versus self. We also know that for conflict to matter, there must be something at stake, and that the obstacles need to stack up – in other words, the conflict gets complicated. What’s trickier, perhaps because of those suppressed Tonka truck impulses, is probing the emotional tension that accompanies conflict. Even as we love our characters, we have to prod them through hell and back.

In an article in the The Writer (“Get the Emotion into Your Fiction,” September, 2007), Eric Witchey suggests making at least three agendas for each of your characters: an overall agenda, as in her broad goals and hopes; a scene agenda; and a compulsive agenda fueled by deep needs known to others but not acknowledged by the character herself (pane 3 of the Johari Window). Conflict tests a character’s need to succeed, Witchey says, and it forces her to play out her own deep psychology.

“Conflict is not merely obstacle,” Witchey points out. “Conflicted characters can’t win. The best they can do is choose well. That makes them real to the reader and much more compelling.”

Conflicts unfold in many ways – that’s part of what makes them so interesting. Where do your readers first discover the conflicts your characters will grapple with? If it’s not early on, why are you holding out? Are the conflicts obvious? Why hide them?

From page one of One Mississippi (by Mark Childress), here’s the first indication of one of the conflicts young Daniel Musgrove is up against (overall agenda): “My father was a good man – I can say that now, after all these years and everything that happened – but on a day-to-day basis, he was about as fun as Hitler.”

Two pages later, after the father announces the family will be moving, Daniel’s oldest brother bluntly objects (scene agenda), and we learn the conflict runs deeper (compulsive agenda – the reader sees complications that Daniel appears not to realize): “Bud took my breath away saying things like that, things that would have got me backhanded and sent to my room. Dad darkened and loomed in his corner, but stayed silent. Bud looked like Dad, and Dad respected him for that.”

Chapter One seeds additional conflicts within Daniel’s family, complicated when along the highway they come upon the moving van loaded with all their belongings, wrecked and on fire. After refusing to admit he’s driven past their destination, Daniel’s father turns abruptly into a motel parking lot and comes back with a key. The chapter ends like this:

I don’t know why I felt moved to speak. It was like when I was little, playing hide-and-seek – I could find a good place to hide, but I couldn’t stay hidden. I always gave myself away.

I got up on my knees in the backseat to peer out the window. “Dad,” I said, “are you crazy? We can’t stay here. The pool doesn’t even have a slide.”

It’s a good thing there are laws against killing your kids. What I will never know is how he managed to hit me all the way from the car to the room without making a sound of his own.

A literary version of the Tonka truck? Maybe. Conflict doesn’t require such overt acts of violence, and you may favor a more lyrical style than Childress opens with. Regardless, the conflicts should be clear, to propel the reader forward.

In the Beginning

How to start? This isn’t a question of motivation or of how to get ideas on the page, though these are important considerations. It’s a matter of those essential first lines, the ones on which all your readers, including agents and editors, will judge your work.

Author Sinclair Lewis learned firsthand the importance of beginnings. Cruising the Atlantic aboard the Queen Elizabeth, he was pleased to see a fellow passenger settle into a deck chair and open his latest novel. She read the first page, got up, and dropped the book over the railing, into the ocean. “If I didn’t know it already,” Lewis told his assistant Barnaby Conrad, “I learned then that the first page – even the first sentence – of one’s article, short story, novel, or nonfiction book is of paramount importance.”

Suppose you hand the first 250 words of your manuscript to an actress, who then reads it before a panel of four agents and editors. Each agent raises a hand at the point where his or her interest fades. When two hands are raised, the actress quits reading. Yours doesn’t get read to the end? Don’t feel bad: only 25 percent do.

This was the scenario that played out at a recent “Writer Idol” event. As reported by Livia Blackburne on the Guide to Literary Agents, there were many reasons the panelists rejected the beginnings. They were generic, or slow. There was too much unrealistic internal narration, or too much information. There were too many clichés, or the writing was unfocused, or the writer seemed to be trying too hard. In her PubRants blog, agent Kristen Nelson elaborates on this latter problem, pointing out that too often authors trying for active beginnings overload them with action.

The fundamental purpose of a beginning is simple: it must entice the reader to want more. In Learning to Write Fiction from the Masters, Conrad suggests several types of beginnings that, skillfully rendered, will lure readers into the prose. Conventions of the nineteenth century allowed the luxury of beginning with setting, or a combination of setting and character, strategies that are tougher, though not impossible, to pull off with today’s attention-challenged readers. If you begin with setting, Conrad warns, you need to be masterful with it, as was F. Scott Fitzgerald in launching Tender is the Night, using specific details, imagery, dynamic verbs, foreshadowing, and a hint of conflict.

You can also begin with a provocative thought, though you’ll want to follow it directly with specifics of the story. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” says Jane Austen in the opening of Pride and Prejudice. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” opens Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

By no means do beginnings need to be elaborate. The Old Man and the Sea opens like a news story, with the straight facts: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” The appeal can be more emotional, as in the opening sentence of Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps: “She would leave him, she thought, as soon as the petunias bloomed.” Or the novel can open with action: “They threw me off the hay truck about noon,” begins James Cain in The Postman Always Rings Twice. In each of these examples, there’s enough said to engage the reader, and there’s enough left out for the reader to want to know more.

With some beginnings, the reader dives with grace into the story. With others, it’s more of a cannonball splash. In media res takes the reader directly into the middle of a scene. Opening with dialogue has the same effect. When you’re suddenly immersed in a scene, you grab for bits to hang onto. You want to puzzle your way to some clarity. In short, you’re hooked.

Character beginnings prove equally enticing. Look no farther than Conrad’s Lord Jim or Nabokov’s Lolita for proof that a book can open successfully with character. Also endearing is the author’s appeal to the reader, as in Melville’s “Call me Ishmael,” or Twain’s “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that don’t matter.” Conrad calls this author-to-reader appeal “disarming, confidential, effective, and somewhat old-fashioned,” but given today’s emphasis on voice, it seems more than modern.

A final caveat: it’s all too easy to get attached to our beginnings. Because they come to us first, they soon feel indelible.  Remember - they’re not.

The Confident Writer

“There is in you what’s beyond you.” Paul Valery

As a self-doubting teen (weren’t we all that, once?), I developed a passion for politics. For this I blame my parents, who before I entered kindergarten took our family to march for civil rights in our small Illinois town.

One of my deep childhood memories is holding a charred fragment of a Mississippi church that was burned by the Ku Klux Klan during Freedom Summer in 1964. My parents, like many others, were moved to action. My father traveled south to assist the civil rights movement there and brought back a piece of the church.

Though deeply shy, I grew up believing that activism mattered. Impassioned by Senator George McGovern’s bid for President, I volunteered, going door to door and making phone calls – lots of phone calls – to get out the vote.

McGovern lost, badly, but I came out a winner. I got hung up on and yelled at. I got scolded and ridiculed and cussed. In a word, I got tough. I learned that people could think and say what they wanted. At the end of the day, I was still me.

As it turned out, all that rejection was excellent preparation for becoming a writer. Our calling demands courage and confidence, even and especially in the face of all we don’t know. In this, it’s like parenting. You’re never exactly sure that you’re doing the right thing. Sometimes you’re not even sure what the right thing is. Yet you carry on. You don’t falter. You give it your best, and you try to get better. You stay open. And in the end, you let go.

Confident writers are not brazen or blustering. Even in doing the necessary work of promotion, they don’t brag. Bluster, brazenness, and bragging are thin disguises for the insecurity that accompanies a poorly formed sense of self and, in the case of writers, a poorly executed manuscript.

In The Poet’s Companion, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux offer wisdom on the topic of confidence. Though they address poets, their truths apply to all writers. Don’t dwell on your failures, they advise: “In the literary life, which is full of rejected manuscripts, lost awards and prizes, and critical judgments of your work, it’s essential to develop some self-appreciation – to delight in your successes, wherever and however they arrive.”

Eschew competitiveness, they say. “Poetry, ultimately, is not a competition, in spite of the competitive nature of achieving publication and recognition. If you see it as such, you’re likely to feel unhappy, instead of being nourished by it.” Another pitfall to avoid: equating your self with your writing. As committed as we are to our craft, as much as we may bleed on the page, we must not wrap ourselves so completely into our writing that we are crushed by rejection and criticism. “The truth is that good poems come from a combination of things: awareness, talent, persistence, persistence, native and acquired language abilities, luck, persistence, knowledge, imagination, persistence,” note Addonizio and Laux. “Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn’t identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you’re the one who bleeds.”

And finally, this good advice: “If you want to write poems, you have to acknowledge that that’s what you want to do, and quit sabotaging yourself. Don’t give in to doubt; feel it, recognize it, and then quit beating yourself up and get to work.”

Check This Out: The study of poetry is good for all writers, and this “guide to the pleasures of writing poetry” is among the best. Divided into sections on subjects, craft, and the writing life, The Poet’s Companion also includes twenty-minute writing exercises and four useful appendices.

Try This: In The Poet’sCompanion, Addonizio and Laux recommend this exercise: write down all your doubts about yourself as a writer. Once you’ve got it on the page, counter that voice. Argue back. Include why you write, and what you know to be true about your creative self.

Hearing Voices: Point of View, Perspective, and Narrative Distance

“I have wanted you to see out of my eyes so many times.” 

― Elizabeth Berg, The Pull Of The Moon

Point of view, perspective, and narrative distance: these aren’t difficult concepts, but they do trip up writers. Jarring switches in point of view or a character’s sudden omniscience are mistakes that imply you’re a novice.

Who narrates? How much does the narrator see and know? What perspective, including biases and blind spots, does the narrator bring? How close is the reader to the narrator, and how close is the narrator – we’re talking psychic distance here – to the story? These decisions are generally embedded in a narrative from the very first sentence.

Every author works differently, and for most of us, the process shifts from project to project. These days, I don’t generally begin a story until I hear the narrative voice. When I first began my novel Cold Spell, I heard sixteen-year-old Sylvie loud and clear. The novel began like this, in first person:

Kenny promised a new start at the glacier, where the wind blew mean and cold off the ice.   You’ll love it, he promised my mother, and being eager to love, she believed him. 

As the novel began to take shape, I felt it needed to be told from three points of view: sixteen-year-old Sylvie, her mother Ruth, and Kenny’s mother, Lena. For a long time, Sylvie’s portions stayed in first person, reflecting my strong connection to her, along with the fact that she’s sixteen, an age that favors a certain amount of self-absorption. Ruth and Lena narrated from the third person limited.

But as the novel came together, the shifts from first to third person began to feel lopsided. It’s not that such a thing can’t be done – Jayne Anne Phillip’s award-winning Lark and Termite is a great example – but I wasn’t achieving the intimacy I wanted with each of the three characters, and adjusting the point of view seemed one way to balance things out. Early readers concurred. Now the novel begins like this, still with Sylvie, but in third person:

I am a poem, Sylvie once thought, swollen like a springtime river, light swirled in dark, music and memory. Then her father ran off and her mother became obsessed with a glacier and she realized this was what happened to girls who believed themselves poems, poems in fact being prone to bad turns and misunderstandings.

In shifting from first to third person, no intimacy is lost. Third person can in fact allow for more latitude with voice and perspective, including self-insight. Sylvie herself wouldn’t have said “poems in fact being prone to bad turns and misunderstandings.” She’s sixteen, and that’s not how she talks. 

Consider how the process works in reverse, when the change is from third to first person. “Changing POV like this involves a great deal more than simply turning all the she’s into I’s,” explain Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter in What If? “The author must step out from the middle and let the I’s voice speak for itself.” There’s much to be said for the power of a strong, sustaining voice, rendered in the first person. But first person can also the most limiting of the point of view options. You can only tell what one character experiences, and it must be through her own set of filters, in her own voice.

I’ve had plenty of misadventures with point of view and perspective during my years in publishing. It felt like my first novel, A Distant Enemy, wrote itself, and it happened to be in third person, from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old boy. Buoyed with unearned confidence, I decided I’d be strategic with my second novel, which began with an idea instead of a voice: I’d write about a girl’s experience in the wilderness. I drafted and redrafted the whole novel a couple of times before my editor, the venerable Virginia Buckley, pointed out that it wasn’t the girl’s story after all. Before it was all said and done, I wrote four different versions of Out of the Wilderness, each with a different point of view: girl first, girl third, boy first, boy third. You might say I’m a slow learner.

We build intuition about point of view, perspective, and narrative distance through careful reading, awareness, and flexibility - a willingness to revise. As we grow in skill and confidence, it becomes easier to juggle pov, perspective, and distance. It took me a good long time to get comfortable, for instance, with the limited use of second person as part of a narrator’s voice, and with multiple points of view. In Cold Spell, the narration shifts completely in the final scene, as does the tense, and the characters aren’t referred to by name as they approach the glacier:

You feel it first in the dry sucking wind that shivers past shadows, empty and defiant, the air mean and low, siphoning warmth, the ice a large and perpetual testimony to cold. Two figures creep toward it, dwarfed by raw-edged mountains that chew at the sky, the illusion of ice so close you could reach out and feel the wet melt of it under your skin as you press as if for a pulse.

“The closing scene is especially masterful in this regard,” says one of my readers.“Taking Brody's and Sylvie's names out renders them both as the anguished, grasping, not-yet-fully developed characters we know so well AND spiritual archetypes.” Commenting on the multiple points of view in the novel, this same reader says, “I love the way you weave together the overlapping voices of the characters--a narrative technique that can easily come across as gimmicky, but that you manage beautifully.”

While multiple viewpoints can add layers of tension to a narrative, there are other pitfalls besides the gimmick. “A novel dominated by point of view often lacks the feeling of space and freedom, of security in the world, that permits the reader to transcend themselves, to grow and change by living for a period in the narrative,” notes Rachel Cusk. 

A more dire pitfall is what author and former literary agent Nathan Bransford terms head jumping. “Whatever perspective you choose,” Bransford says, “it has to be grounded. The reader has to know where they are in relation to the action so they can get their bearings and lose themselves in the story.” He likens point of view to a camera, noting that writers need to be mindful of the potentially jerky, dizzying effect of swapping perspectives within a scene.

Like so much else in writing, your skillful handling of point of view, perspective, and narrative distance earns you the trust of your readers, proving that they’re in capable hands, and that the narrative you’ve fashioned through a wild, messy, hair-pulling process now flows confidently in all its aspects.

Try This: In What If?, Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter suggest you write in 550 words or less about an early memory, something that occurred before you were seven years old. Use the first person and the perspective of a child. Keep the distance tight by not analyzing, reflecting, or interpreting.  Let the narrative speak for itself. Then write about the same incident in no more than two pages, this time with the distance created by time, and an adult perspective, in either first or third person.

Check This Out: What If? by Bernays and Painter offer a multitude of exercises for the fiction writer, on beginnings, memory, characterization, perspective, dialogue, plot, story elements, resolution, transformation, and mechanics. There’s even a section on games, and another on learning from the greats. With each are student examples.