I’ve been listening to a podcast of Michael Krazny interviewing vintner and writer Randall Grahm on KQED’s Forum. Here and on his own website, Grahm talks about a French idea of two different kinds of wine making. Vin d’effort is a wine made by the effort of the winemaker—it bears his or her stamp, is made according to his or her will, but can only be as intelligent and interesting as the winemaker. Vin de terroir, on the other hand, depends on and expresses the place where it is grown— the weather and the nature, factors, in other words, that are out of the hands of its maker. This made me think about writing.

Is your book a van d’effort or a vin de terroir?

Grahm admires wines of place more than wines of effort. They embody originality as a collaboration between the grower and the place. (I’m elaborating here for my own purposes.) I love the idea that a writer in conversation with circumstance, place, with the sometimes random occurrences and objects that populate our lives will produce a more original book than one that is tightly controlled, carefully executed. The creation in the vin de terroir is one sparked against the unexpected, against chance and the external world.

How do you let the world around you join you in writing your book?

“Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say  yes.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

A client writes:

“I’ve struggled all week trying to modify/open/deepen/clarify/intensify [these] chapters. I agree that they would benefit from it. Yet every time I try, I wind up being didactic, expository, redundant. Never organic. Never fresh. Never vital.

“This is not a new phenomenon…I’ve always had a tough time acting on critiques. In fact the only time I’ve been able to modify my work is when it’s being published or produced and I’m dealing directly with the editor or director and even then the changes are usually pretty minor.

“It seems my writing is like a jigsaw puzzle and if I pull out a piece I just keep looking for something the same shape to fill the space. And go slightly crazy while I’m looking for it.  So this is really my own process dilemma. I’m in a bit of a quandary…

“Any helpful hints about how  to  better utilize a critique would be greatly appreciated.”

One of the most important ways to support yourself as a writer is to understand yourself, your way of working, and to support that way of working. Critique is a complicated animal. If it comes too early, it is often just a way of teaching a writer basic technique: how to turn ideas into action, summary into scene, how to cut what’s not dramatic and raise the stakes on what is. If it comes in too vulnerable a moment, a writer, anxious to please, may make changes in reaction, in fear.

In order to be helpful, critique must be absorbed. What is unhelpful must be disregarded, and a writer does well to build up a strong instinct for what must be disregarded. What remains, then, is an arrow, pointing to a hidden door in the text that needs to be opened, or a hidden wall that needs to be removed.

This kind of critique must be put in conversation with the storytelling instinct, processed until something vital and fresh emerges. This goes beyond response.

If one of my basic writing rules is “whatever works,” another is, “doubt efficiency.” Anything that seems easier or appears to be a short cut will inevitably frustrate, impose, divert. Instead, you must meditate, absorb, integrate and finally return to the creative state and see what emerges.

One final note: we rarely know if what we are writing is good or significant while we are writing it or shortly after. The voice that judges the work is not that of our deep reader self but the anxious harping of some face concerned about the public eye. So you will not know right away if the changes you are making work. That, too, will take time, will take absorption, will lack efficiency.

Breathe into it. You are writing, and that’s the point.

So . . . my therapist told me I was “dating around” on my books. Yes, I have four novels-in-process I’ve been juggling, and my writing group agrees: it is time to settle down. Make a commitment. Go deep.

My writing group members have been celebrating phenomenal successes in the world of writing, successes that suggest that the doomsayers are wrong. So finishing a book seems like a good idea right about now.

Of course, I took a look at my four books–my writing group around me in a circle–and I picked the biggest, unruliest, excitingest one of the quartet.

Should I be scared?

I guide other people through this process all the time. It’s easier to see clearly what someone else’s manuscript needs–and how wonderful it is. It’s easier to encourage someone else to be brave, to set and keep goals, to . . . well, to . . . commit. It’s kind of silly, but I’ve often wished that writer-me could have editor-me as a coach and confidant. Instead–and better–I am turning to you–all the wonderful writers and readers out there, electronically connected to me and to each other.

What works best for you? I’m looking for advice, encouragement and your own commitment to your own courageous goals. Help me to be brave, single-minded and stubborn this year, won’t you?

What are your own writing plans for 2010, and what’s your best take on how to get to where you are determined to go?

I’ve been on a wonderful reading binge as I prepare to dramatically rewrite my current novel project. I’ve been reading in order to learn something new about plot and structure, to gather some ideas around me and inspire me. Here are three tips that will keep your reading productive for your writing-self and still pleasurable for your reader-self.

1) You have to find a way to divide yourself. One part of you will inevitably get caught up in the story. If this is a book you want to teach you something, it had better hook you, right? So you have to hold back a part of you that is watching the whole process. This can feel a bit like the famous scene in Annie Hall when she rises up out of her body during sex and wanders around commenting on the activity.

2) It helps to hold the big picture in mind. Keep track of where you are in the unfolding arc of the story. See the underlying structure–the bones or the architecture, whichever metaphor you prefer.

3) Notice what you are wondering. Your questions, as a reader, drive you forward, seeking answers. So look at how the author raises those questions.

You have to fill the well, as Annie Dillard says in her wonderful book The Writing Life, and reading–more even than living–provides the plenty you’ll need to keep that well full.

We all want the perfect family and the perfect day, but the stories come from the problems and troubles. We want it to be easy; we want it to be simple; we want it to be pure joy. But life is more complicated than that, and your stories should be, too!

Here are some more tips for writers that holiday celebrations drive home:

1) Unwrapping half the fun? Worrying about being able to smile and thank Aunt Matilda for the horrible present keep you up at night? Anticipation is more involving than payoff. See my blog on withholding.

2) Shared childhood? Hardly! Each person remembers different moments, different aspects of what happened and who did what and what pieces of the world around mattered. Hence the interrelation of point of view, plot, character and setting. Who tells the story will determine what gets recounted, what gets noticed and remembered.

3) When everything is happening all at once, it’s exciting, but it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on, let alone appreciate it. Sequences and causality support the creation of meaning.

No matter what kind of holiday (or childhood) you had, you can use it to strengthen yourself as a writer. The interior narrator, like the interior soundtrack, can get you through a lot until you’re back to the wide expanse of your own blank page.

Julia Cameron’s popular idea (featured in her book The Artist’s Way) of writing three pages each morning–just dumping on the page–can teach a lot of things about writing.
1) The habit can teach you that the world will not end, your vacation companions will not abandon you, your children will not starve, if you write three pages before you get out of bed.
2) You will learn that you have an endless stream of words running through your head and that any “block” is about the arrangement and worth of those words (not to be belittled, those things, but good to shelve at certain times).
3) True for me at least: whatever you do first thing in the morning is the one thing that always gets done each day.
So, what if you want to write more than a fragment of last night’s dream, a harried “to do” list in narrative form, and grousing about your date last Friday? You need “Morning Pages with a Twist.” Give yourself a little loosening up room–a page, say, to moan, rant, angst, mumble . . . and then switch gears: Focus the rest of your morning pages on the project you are actually supposed to be writing. Start by writing about it. If you wrote two or three pages about your book every morning, you’d get farther than you can imagine. Then move on, as you feel moved, to sketching particular scenes, capturing images that arise, and so forth.
What to consider writing about your project:
1) Ideas you have for plot, character, setting, etc.
2) Concerns or stumbling blocks: what about . . .? what if . . . ? (Write: Maybe . . . and then list various ideas. Have a conversation/ brainstorm with yourself.
3) A specific breakdown of your goals–page counts, planning, daily chunks that will rise to weekly sections that will lead to monthly achievements that will contribute to successful completion.
In sum: start by writing about whatever’s on your mind. Then write about writing. Then write about the fictional world you are developing: about the people and what they do. Voila–you’re writing scenes!

Quick:

What do you remember about March 7, 2005?

What do you remember about September 11, 2001?

Now, for all I know, you were a teenager giving birth on March 7, 2005. Or, like someone I know, you lost your spouse of sixty years on 9/11/01, and that’s what you remember. But if you are like me, nothing special happened on March 7, 1995, and you don’t remember it at all. Whereas on a day, some years earlier, everything seemed to be changing, and you remember where you were, what you were doing, who you called, what you did next . . . unless you were so traumatized that you’ve blocked major portions of your day. Memory is a storyteller. Or perhaps it would make more sense to say that stories are patterned after the human mind and soul, which is to say, the human memory.

What can the storyteller learn from human memory?

1) Not all events are equal. Not everything is part of the story just because it happened, too, just as not all the marble in the block became part of Michaelangelo’s David.

2) Details become very important when life is in crisis. The memory zeros in on the physical world. (See #4)

3) Build up, backstory and filling in the in between stuff are NOT important: jump cuts are part of human memory and serve story well.

4) Actions reveal character. You are fascinated by what you and everyone else did. Interior monologue is largely left out of memory. What you wore, who you touched, where you went–these are what stick and carry all the meaning.

5) Change–or the enormous and powerful possibility of change–are at the heart of memory and story.

Story and memory are the heightened bits, repressed or vivid, that move us to peer closely or to turn away. Everything else is just another day.

Authenticity note: I was living at 12th Street and Avenue A in the LES on Sept. 11, 2001 and teaching at Pratt in Brooklyn that morning.

What will you always remember? What have you learned from memory?

This is a magical time of year. Everyone in my family has a cold; I can’t hear anything except the sloshing in my head. It snowed this year, but most of us in Berkeley weren’t dreaming of a white Christmas, and the idea that global warming might in fact be leading to strange climate change haunted the ecstasy of building small snow-people with my children a mile from our house. My clients are panicking, packing, moving (more than one!), trying to pull of being Santa (even the Jewish ones because everyone’s in an interfaith relationship) and vaguely wondering how writing is supposed to fit into all of this celebrating.

Here are five sure-cure tiny miracles, when the colorful lights glimmering in the distance hail from the top of a police car:

1) Write a sentence. Just one. You can do it on a post-it if you want to. Or in your journal, if you can find it. Or on a napkin. Just. Write. One. Sentence. Ah . . .

2) Give someone a sentence as a gift. Say, “I wrote this sentence for you. Here.” Then read it to them.

3) When your hands are full–of groceries, plumbing tools, children, tissues, moving boxes–daydream about your book. Ask your storyteller for a little tale about your characters and let it wash over you. The world in your head is still growing even if your manuscript is not.

4) Ask for time as your holiday present. An hour in a cafe with your laptop. A bubble bath with your journal and favorite pen. Ask your partner, ask your children, ask yourself. Take the yes and run with it!

5) In any given moment when your story world seems miles away, take a moment to discover three things:

1) human passion, right there in the room with you, in the fight between your kids, in your partner’s insistence on checking email, in the way the dishes stack up because of our ceaseless and delighted appetites.

2) obstacles, the meaty stuff of plot, right there in the street with you, in the bus that doesn’t stop, the parking place that doesn’t emerge,

3) human dilemmas, the choices that seem insurmountable in the grocery store, in the few minutes and many responsibilities of your day, in the way that you are pulled in so many directions because you want to write and want to pull of your holiday celebrations and even want something to make for dinner tomorrow night . . .

You are learning and growing as a writer all the time. See? To master creating trouble you have to live through some and keep connected to your writing self  . . .

What miracles do you want? What miracles have you stumbled across?Please post a comment and let me know!

I just read The Da Vinci code at the advice of someone great in my writing group, since I am about to (re)write an intellectual mystery/ quest, and that’s a big quest book, if not as intellectual as it might like to be. But hey, I’m not knocking it. I’m not imitating it, either, but I am studying it.

One of the things that struck me strongly over and over like a blunt object was the use of withholding in the book.

My class and I have been talking about withholding. We did a great exercise drawing from the techniques used in Michelle Richmond’s gripping novel No One You Know. She uses withholding a bit less bluntly than Mr. Brown but to great effect.

The main point is this: readers read, in part, to find out what is going to happen. E.M.Forster, sighing, agreed that this was the mechanism behind plot and that plot, though a lowly creature, was a necessary one. Questions pop into readers’ minds and stay, compelling the reader through the pages in search of the answer. Workshops tend to point out the causes of these questions as if they were a big problem: holes, as it were, in the story. In fact, answering those questions, filling in those holes, might well seal up everything breathing about your story and suffocate it. Hmmm . . . moving on . . .

Withholding can operate in many ways. Here are some examples:

1) Withholding from the reader. As when the chapter ends just as the characters (but not the readers) see what the murdered man wrote on the floor before he died.

2) Withholding from the character (and the reader). As when one character thinks, she was not yet ready for this information. Or she was not ready to think or talk about the terrible thing she’d seen ten years ago. And thus none of us get to know it yet.

3) Misleading the reader. As when a character is referenced as flashing his official badge, which would make you think he was the cop but he was the knight. Or when a character goes into the back of the car to take care of the person you believe is tied up in there, but in fact . . . well, in case I was only the second-to-last person in the world to read this book and you, my reader, are the very last, I won’t give it away . . .

My favorite kind of withholding is simply immersing the reader in the immediacy of the scene such that backward glancing explanations (why?) and forward glancing suppositions (what next?) are eliminated in the characters’ minds and left only to the readers. The character, for example, sees an old friend but does not think, “Ah, there is my college roommate. That time we stole the pig together and . . .” but instead sees this person crossing the street and throws open the door shouting, “What are you doing here!?” OR slinks down low in the seat and quickly turns a corner. In other words, the action reveals that there is much to know but the story is too caught up in the action to stop and explain. Not my strong point–I am a teacher, after all–but a great way to pull the reader through your tale.

All of these kinds of withholding–and many others–set up the story for revelation after revelation, and writers from Shakespeare to Dickens to, yes, Dan Brown, have kept audiences turning pages and not throwing tomatoes this way for centuries . . . Did you read The Da Vinci Code? Did you read it fast?

Brainstorming: when the storyteller rushes the brain for as many ideas as possible. Requires getting past the censors–the modest censor and the critical censor–and letting it rip. Here are five ways to move past stuck.

1) Mindmap. Put each idea in a circle with related ideas connected by lines, and sub-ideas coming off of the main idea like petals off a flower . . .

2) Make lists. Don’t cross off while brainstorming. Just put everything down. Organize and cull later.

3) Draw. Use pastels or crayons and big paper and let your intuitive “child” brain figure it out through play.

4) Write the five worst ideas you can think of–what you DON’T want to write. Then look at the specific opposites of each of those ideas and see if they appeal to you.

5) Borrow/ steal. Use models–books and movies you love–for structure ideas, and insert your own original content. It worked for Shakespeare. Come up with several models, not just one.