Personification in Prose

Personification is a device we most often associate with poetry. It means assigning human characteristics to nonhumans or inanimate objects, as in the classic, and probably overused example of Joyce Kilmer's trees.... Read More on Roses & Thorns..

Writing for Suite 101: My Guilty Pleasure

There are always people out there telling you what you should and shouldn't do as a writer. When I first started out new writers were criticized for writing for free. If we all stuck to that model now, most of our work would never see the light of day. Some will tell you never to pay for anything related to submissions, but then you 'd limit yourself to contests that carry little prestige and even less in prizes.

A while back I wrote about my experiences with a pay-per-click site, and how some writers think they are a bad idea. Well, bad or not, I've decided to go back to writing for Suite 101 and I am loving it. No, writing for pay-per-clicks will probably not get me a job with The New York Times or maybe not even with my community newspaper, and despite anomalies like the Suite writer who made almost $5,000 in one month, it probably won't put my daughter through grad school or even pay my grocery bill–-at least not the topics I write about. What it does get me is the opportunity to write on subjects I love but for which I do not have a "platform" as they call it in the business, and the chance to earn a few dollars while I'm at it.

When I delve into a subject, I go deep. While I never advanced beyond a BA in History, my studies imbued me with a need to go well beyond the surface. What started 10 years ago with Mari Sandoz's biography of Crazy Horse has grown into several hundred books on, not just American Indian and US Western History, but an understanding of current issues and the ability to argue some of the finer points of American Indian Law––that's what happens when you cross a wannabe historian with a wannabe lawyer. I've written book reviews for scholarly journals like Montana, the Magazine of Western History (which did feel pretty cool), but with no advanced degree or teaching position at a university, I'm not likely to get much published on that subject. That's why I took up writing on Native American/First Nations History  on Suite a few years ago.

Unfortunately the 10 article per month requirement for a Feature Writer (one who writes for and maintains the topic site) became onerous, especially for a meticulous researcher and fact checker like myself. Plus, even my deep well began to run dry. However, now Suite has something called a Contributing Writer. Not only are the production requirements less but CWs can contribute to any topic, meaning I can also write about writing and publishing–-think I know a wee bit about that––politics, healthcare, running a small business or any other topic on which I have something of value to contribute.

For me, Suite fills several needs:

• My need to write and express myself on various topics.
• My need to learn, because I always learn when I am researching details for an article.
• My need to be read, because otherwise what is the point of writing.

Maybe with more articles up on topics of greater interest, my earnings will increase too, but really the pittance I make is icing on the cake. I know that drives some professional freelancers nuts, and I won't even try to defend it except to say, I love it. I'm hooked, and others can jump up and down and scream until they are blue in the face.

Call it my guilty pleasure.

Craft: Keeping a Nature Journal

Have you ever been watching a sunset or hiking a trail when suddenly a description you read of just such a scene pops into your head? Yesterday, a brilliantly sunny day following an unusually early snowfall in my Philadelphia suburb, brought to mind the "lapis lazuli" sky Edith Wharton described in The Age of Innocence.  Last summer I posted about how including weather in your stories can add depth to your writing. The same goes for other natural phenomena like the light of a full moon or the way a streak of lightening appears to shatter a purple sky.

This past summer I began keeping a "nature journal." Not the kind people kept in the old days with drawings of flowers labeled with their scientific names.  This is a journal of short one or two sentence descriptions of a sunrise under various different conditions, such as a cloudy day vs a cloudless day, or the way the sky appears at sunset. I noted how a full moon shows everything in near daylight brightness and yet washed of color. I also cheated a little and added things I remembered from past years that I might not have seen recently like the way a crust of ice forms on top of snow after a freezing rain, or looking down a lane of trees following an ice storm when branches appear encased in glass.

I am lucky, as a writer at least, to live in an area that experiences all varieties of weather from humid to dry, from flash floods to droughts. I've never actually seen a tornado, but I saw the effects where one touched down nearby a few years ago, and I've never been in the eye of a hurricane, but the tail end was enough to help me project how it might feel.

We can't always restrict ourselves to writing exactly what we know. While I caution against writing about places you've never been, for example setting your story in LA when you've never even been to California, sometimes we may want to write about someplace we've been but in a different season. That's where cataloging our own experiences can come in handy.

Right now I'm writing a historical piece that takes place on the Nebraska prairie in the late 1870s. I visited the place I'm writing about, but in the summer. The historical event that frames my story happened at night in mid-January. I know there was a full moon and a light covering of snow on the ground. I have my notes on moonlight to refer to. Also I know the prairie is windy, and I know what it feels like when the wind sweeps a powdery snow over the ground so that it sprays into your face. Adding that small touch, I feel, brought realism to the piece.

Notice that I use the word "touch." Pre-movies and TV I imagine readers had more appreciation for long Hardyesque descriptions of dusk falling on the moors. Today, painting a picture with words is better thought of as a writing exercise. In the final version, just a line or two of description interspersed here and there is enough to give the reader a sense of place.

If you are like me, just the right words may come along once in a blue moon. That's the point of keeping my journal. When I need to describe a blue moon or a crescent or a night with no moon at all, I'll be ready.

Persuasive Writing: A Dead Art?

Last week at a party I had the opportunity to speak with a professor from the University of Penn who noted the difficulties in teaching persuasive writing in an era when shouting––literally and figuratively––passes for debate and logical reasoning is characterized as inertia.

What is persuasive writing exactly? You may know it best as the "essay test" where you are expected to establish a thesis or take a stand pro or con an issue and defend your position with facts. In the larger world the classic newspaper editorial or op-ed piece, at its best, is persuasive writing. The Declaration of Independence is  persuasive writing. It sets out the thesis that the time has come for "...for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another..."  then goes on to "declare the causes which impel them to the separation." The Federalist Papers were a series of persuasive essays written for the purpose of persuading states to ratify the Constitution.

 The Oxford English Dictionary definition of "persuade" is to "cause (someone) to do something through reasoning and argument" to "cause (someone) to believe something, esp. after a sustained argument." The implication is that persuasion is a slow, and somewhat low-key, process. After all, if you hold a strong opinion and you sense someone is trying to steer you in the other direction, you will simply shut them out. The true art of persuasion is much like fishing. The fish, enticed by the lure, swallows the hook. Then the fisherman slowly and smoothly reels the fish in to keep it from fighting and dislodging the hook or breaking the line before he can land it. And like a good fisherman who will give a large fish some slack now and then, the best persuasive essays rely not only on supporting facts, but will also note the facts that seem to support an opposite position and then shoot holes in them.

Unfortunately we see little of that nuanced art today. Though opinions fly, ad nauseam, from the mouths and keyboards of everyone from politicians to journalists to talk show hosts to the everyman blogger , few engage in the art of persuasion. Instead they bludgeon us with their beliefs and replace reasoned argument with visceral appeals, innuendo, and non-sequiturs, e.g. "the same people who want to save the whales care nothing about the life of an unborn child" or "the same people who call themselves pro-life don't care about inner city kids being gunned down in the streets." Such broad and uncorroborated statements would never have stood up in even my high school papers, yet these days I read those silly "arguments" regularly in the most prestigious newspapers and magazines, often written by journalists or "experts" with Ivy League educations. Is it a wonder students view persuasive writing as a relic perfected for the SATs and quickly cast aside like high school algebra?

The Internet puts facts literally at our fingertips, making persuasive argument that much easier over the days when our Founding Fathers needed to hold important information in their heads. It should also make writers more accountable for the "facts" they use to back up an argument, because we can easily call them out on their misstatements. Unfortunately, few Internet readers bother to find the original source, preferring to choose articles that reinforce their own views and spreading the misinformation exponentially.  Take for example the current healthcare debate with journalists as well as senators and representatives (who should, I believe, be held to a higher standard) regularly bandying broad phrases like "government takeover" and "healthcare rationing." No matter where you stand on the issue, I defy anyone to show me anything coming near that in the bill recently passed by the House or the one currently before the Senate.

Now, imagine a teacher assigning an essay on the topic and requiring students to back up a position with facts. Why would they see it as anything more than a useless exercise, like practicing handwriting in this day of word processing?

Third Omniscient: The Most Difficult POV?

 A couple of weeks ago blogger Kimberly Davis posted about choosing first or third person, and as usual she made some excellent points. While most of us automatically fall into the first person or third limited POV, third omniscient can add breadth and allow the author to use descriptive language that might be outside the cultural or educational realm of the characters. At the same time new writers may underestimate the difficulty of the third omniscient.

First, a quick review.

• In first person the writer is entirely inside one character's head and the story is written as though that character were narrating it. "I went to the store, and I saw Jim there with another woman."
• Third person limited is a step removed from first person, or maybe even just a half step. The character is not the narrator but everything is still told from that one character's point-of-view. This allows for things like description ("Mary's blue eyes flashed") not available in first person ("My blue eyes flashed"), but the writer still can only see things through one character's eyes and that character must be present for any action to take place, except when related in memory.
• In the third person omniscient POV, the writer can enter anyone's head and go anywhere, even without the characters. So, in a story about Hurricane Katrina, the writer can not only present various characters' perspectives, she can show us the devastation throughout New Orleans––even reaction around the nation and the world––while the characters remain stranded in the Ninth Ward.

Third person omniscient is both the hardest and the easiest POV for telling a story. It's very easy to go along writing a story and throwing in another POV whenever it's convenient to express some idea or provide a description a more limited POV wouldn't allow for. But third person done well, and for the right reasons, actually requires more thought and planning than any of the other POVs, including the oddball second person (you).

First you need to decide why omniscient works best. Is it the classic different takes on the same incident? Is it a more panoramic work spanning generations or continents? Is it a modest short story but one where you need to present several characters' thoughts that might go contrary to the dialogue?

Next you need to decide how many points-of-view you will use. Will it be just a few major characters, like the members of a family or a group of friends remembering a night they were all together? If the work spans generations or eras will the POV perhaps pass father to son or landowner to landowner? When dealing with multiple POVs you need to focus on characters of equal weight, otherwise you risk a confusing cacophony of voices.

How will you denote the changes in POV? Will each individual have a book, a chapter, a paragraph, a section of the story, or will they continually interact as they might in a short story depicting a conversation among friends?

Finally, if you are going to include POV shifts you need to find some kind of balance. In general each POV should get roughly equal time otherwise the differing POVs will feel like a device for convenience, or worse, a mistake.  This goes for stories as well as novels. If John, Jane, and Mary are conversing at a party, you can't have us in John's head through most of the story and pop into Mary's head only once when she observes John acting a little tipsy.

The third omniscient can be a useful and innovative POV, but it can also be the most challenging. New writers may want to master the discipline of limited point-of-view before venturing into the omniscient. It's a bit like learning to walk before you run.

Stop! Do You Really Want to Submit There?

You are going through a dry spell. It has been months, maybe even over a year since your last submission was accepted. You've been circulating the same two––three––five––stories all that time. You started with the journals everyone dreams about. You've worked down to the ones where you thought you had a fighting chance, and nothing––nada-–bupkiss.

These are the times that try writers' souls and when you need to exercise the most self control. You have reached the point where you want your work to appear somewhere––anywhere––someone can read it.

There's the site you found last weekend that is nothing more than a webpage with guidelines telling how they encourage new and emerging writers and are reading for their first issue to appear this winter. They are looking for "quality work." Who isn't? You have no idea who will be reading your work, what the website will look like when it's complete, or what style of work they will publish.

Then there's the online journal that did put out one issue and promises the next issue is coming as soon as they have enough submissions. That was a year ago last spring.

Last week you found a journal that has actually published several issues. They claim to want only your best writing but everything in it reads like a third grader's essay on "How I Spent My Summer Vacation."

So how low are you willing to go to get published? It is something worth thinking about.

There is nothing wrong with submitting to brand new publications that haven't yet put out a first issue. This is one way to improve your chances of acceptance, and if the publication develops a good reputation it will make a good future credit. On the other hand, if everything surrounding your work is junk, you have ruined your chances of submitting that piece elsewhere, and the credit is not one you'll want to tout.

Use your common sense when considering any new publication. I submitted for the inaugural issue of Sotto Voce, but they already had an attractive site, an impressive staff, and a sophisticated online submissions system. Oh, and they paid, which is always a good sign of staying power. When a website shows nothing but some guidelines and you suspect the "we" is really an "I" wait until they've published a few issues before submitting.

The same goes ten times over for journals without a regular publication schedule. While I am a huge supporter of online journals, the fact is anyone can start one. What could be more painful than having a journal publish your work and then disappear into cyberspace? When an editor appears to publish whenever he gets around to it, someday he won't.

Finally, and this is the toughest one, there are those journals where it looks like you'd have a good chance of getting published, but mainly because the writing simply isn't very high calibre. Is there really any point in publishing in a journal where all you have to do is spell correctly––and sometimes not even that––to get in?

When you've gone through a long dry spell, you may find yourself eventually submitting anywhere and everywhere, but think carefully. Do you know anything about the journal? Will the journal last or will it disappear? If your work does appear in that journal, would you want to send your friends and writing colleagues over there to read it? If not, then don't submit there. Instead, keep revising and if you run out of places to send an old piece, write something new and fresh. Sometimes just being published isn't  enough.

Try a Non-Linear Approach

Often I come across stories with all the right elements––good writing that includes varied sentence structure; well-developed characters; even a great plot line––and yet it bores me. Often this happens because the story is told in linear progression when another approach might work better. Simplified to the extreme a linear story is one where events are told in chronological order. First this happens, then that happens, then that happens, then it ends.

While this sounds like the obvious way to relate any story, not only can it feel tedious, but it is the main reason so many stories by new writers consume far too many words and first drafts of novels exceed a thousand pages. Told as an absolute linear progression the writer must start with backstory, which in itself adds extra verbiage and pages, but even the forward progression will require scenes and dialogue that could more naturally be summarized with a different approach.

Some non-linear approaches
The wonderful thing about writing fiction is you can play with time. There are any number of approaches, some standard and some a little more unorthodox, outside the linear. One way, and probably a little too challenging for a beginner, is telling the story backwards, starting at the end and peeling back the layers. Then there's the circle where the writer starts with an event, tells the background, then ends where the story started. This is often done is movies as well. The two most popular approaches are beginning "in medias res" and what I like to call zig-zagging. In fact, these two are often combined in the same story or novel.

In medias res
If you've done any reading about craft you already know about "in medias res" which literally means "in the middle of things." Just as it sounds, it means the story begins after some yet untold back story and  when most of the story is yet to come.  But while moving forward in the story is easy, how does a writer fit in the backstory without resorting to the dreaded flashback?

One mistake new writers make is assuming that backstory needs to be explicitly revealed in all its details. In some cases the backstory can be implied using just a few significant words or sentences. It also doesn't need to be revealed all at once but can be interwoven into the story.

One of my favorite classic writers is Edith Wharton. Recently I re-read The Age of Innocence. In this novel set during the Gilded Age protagonist Newland Archer begins to question the conventions of New York society when he meets––and eventually falls in love with––his fiancee's very unconventional cousin, The Countess Olenska.  Of utmost significance to the plot is understanding just how blindly Archer accepted those conventions before he met the countess. A less skilled writer might have begun with a chapter or two showing Archer going about his business. Instead, and much more effectively, Wharton starts the story at the opera the night Archer meets Olenska for the first time since childhood, and sums up both the rules of New York society and Archer's obeisance in just a few lines.

"There was no reason why the young man should not have come early... But, in the first place, New York was a metropolis, and perfectly aware that in metropolises it was 'not the thing' to arrive early at the opera.; and what was or was not 'the thing' played a part as important in Newland Archer's New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago. (p. 4)*

The zig-zag
There probably is a more literary term for this, but this is the term I use for moving forward and backward in time within the same story. This sounds awkward but done correctly it can be a seamless, usually unnoticeable way to summarize information. Again, since I'm immersed in The Age of Innocence I'll use that as an example once again.

Part II Chapter 2 begins with Archer and his new wife May eating breakfast while on their honeymoon in Europe. They have received a dinner invitation from an English friend of Archer's mother. Immediately, Wharton falls into an explanation of who the woman is and how Mrs. Archer first made her acquaintance, adding in some satirical explanations of the rules followed by New Yorkers when traveling abroad. She then returns to the present with May agonizing over what she will wear to the dinner. That scene ends with the newlyweds going out for some sightseeing, and is followed by an abrupt switch that takes us to the end of their trip and moves backwards in time to the actual dinner party.

Explaining it this way may have you wondering how in the world Wharton pulled it off or why. I'm not good enough to explain the how. Unless you've read the novel, you'll have to take my word that it works. The why is easier to explain. It allowed her to summarize scenes and dialogue she'd have had to show in detail had she moved in a linear progression. The kinds of things May said at the dinner party were significant in defining her character, but her actual words weren't crucial to the plot. A conversation Archer has after the women have left the dining room is crucial to the plot and therefore is covered in detail. Similarly, the way May behaved on the remainder of their trip was significant, but again, we didn't need to follow the couple through every museum and up every mountain. At the same time, had Wharton moved the story forward chronologically at that point, instead of backward, a wrap-up that amounted to "since May preferred physical over intellectual exercise, they spent the rest of the trip boating and hiking" wouldn't exactly flow.

Using non-linear approaches
For some writers non-linear approaches come naturally. Others, especially new writers, may find it easier to start the story with a straight beginning, middle, and end. After you've allowed the story or novel to rest, see if it begins in the right place. With short stories––both my on and those I edit––I find the real beginning is often somewhere around the third or fourth paragraph. Similarly with novels, if you are using the first chapter to tell backstory, consider how you could show that information in a better way. If your work is too wordy or dialogue goes on for pages in some places, consider approaching some scenes from a different point in time that will allow you to summarize more. You'll be surprised how this can save your work from being overly long and tedious.







*The Age of Innocence (Oxford World's Classics-Paperback) 2006

The Writing Sweat Shoppe

At the end of an earlier post about submission fees I mentioned a site that claimed to send you writing assignments for which you'd be paid a minimum of $150, but they first required a $20 deposit. That was an obvious scam, but today I came across something legit, but almost as bad––a site I'll call "The Writing Sweat Shoppe". 

I found the ad in a respected newsletter that advertises only paying markets. I have no quarrel with the newsletter as I know from my time at The Rose & Thorn, you can't investigate every advertiser. That's why newsletters and writing magazines always include a disclaimer telling you to use caution. Besides, this was a paying market, but there's pay and then there's pay.

First, some explanation. I think I am every bit as good––in fact probably better––at writing nonfiction articles and opinion pieces as I am at fiction. My first editing job was craft articles, and what I didn't already know about article writing I learned from the excellent writer and editor I worked under. However, with the exception of The Philadelphia Inquirer I don't have really valuable published clips because I hate researching markets and sending query letters. It's one thing to read literary journals to find a match for your work, it's another to slog through Fence Post Manufacturers of America. The majority of my clips are on pay-per-click sites that, while they may demonstrate my writing ability, don't count for much in the scheme of things.

That being the case, my interest was piqued by an ad for a site that assigned contract work. The writing jobs ranged from topics needing to be researched and written to putting completed research in readable form. You could take on as much or as little work as you liked. Most of it was ghostwriting, but that didn't concern me. Ghostwriting is a legitimate business, and while my name wouldn't appear on the article, I wasn't looking for name recognition, just some income to support my expensive fiction habit. The company owner offered "if your writing is good, I'll write a letter of recommendation."

That "if" should have raised my antennae. How could they run a ghost writing service with bad writers? Instead, I sent an e-mail expressing my interest. The reply came back immediately, asking me to return the attached nondisclosure agreement on any information I might be writing about and include two writing samples.

Worrying that my pay-per-click samples might not be good enough, and refusing to get my hopes up, I waited until I had some time to carefully choose the pieces I thought best illustrated my writing and research capabilities and e-mailed them with the agreement (which I read carefully to ensure it put me under no obligation and required no sensitive information), then settled in for a long wait or perhaps no reply all. After that I trekked to the mailbox to post the required extra hardcopy of the agreement calculating, along the way, how many articles I could write in a week and how much I'd make at what I assumed must be a minimum of $50 per piece.

To my chagrin a reply awaited me on my return. The owner was ready to take me on (had this person even read my clips?), if I was satisfied with the rates––$3.00 for 375 words and $6.00 for 650 words and as much work as I wanted to take on.

I was and remain dumbfounded. Needless to say, I turned it down. Considering even my blog posts often take more than an hour to write, what kind of hourly rate could I make at that scale? True, my pay-per-click articles pay a pittance, but they are topics I chose to write about, and I have the byline, which, I might add, has paid off handsomely from time to time with requests for re-prints. That couldn't happen here. This is mostly ghostwriting.

What really boggles my mind is knowing there are people out there who will take this on. They are so desperate to have their writing accepted, even if they can't claim it, or to receive some kind of pay for which they can now officially call themselves "writers" that they will jump at the chance.  Of course, one has to wonder how much this contractor gets paid on her end for these articles––ten times at the least, I'd imagine, or it wouldn't be worth it. She sounded pretty desperate to add more writers, so if no one accepted her offer, she'd have to turn over more of her take. Sadly, I'm going to guess she'll fill all the slots plus have some writers in the wings she can call on later.

Then again, we should be glad she wasn't offering the work for free, 'cuz I bet she'd get some people to do that too.

Do the Write Thing

Yes that is a play on words and not a mistake, in case you are wondering.


A few days ago I went rummaging through my hardcopies of assignments from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop searching for a piece I'd deleted from my Word files. Each day that week, we read our assignments aloud for feedback from the group. Then we'd turn our work in to the workshop leader Chris Tighlman and Fellow Tony D'Souza , and they'd return them the next day with written comments.

The interesting thing is, while our group were hardly snipers, I clearly remember just about every negative comment from that week. Yet, going back through my assignments I realized I did not remember, nor had I bothered to take a second look at, the largely positive written comments I'd received from Chris and Tony.

Focusing on the negative is a personality trait shared––while I won't flatter myself by saying most "good writers"–-at least by all those who aspire to good writing. In this instance I assumed they were making nice with a pretty mediocre talent out of necessity––no one wants to pay a couple thousand dollars to feel like a failure––by forcing themselves to find something positive in even the worst pieces. But re-reading those comments after more than a year, I realized what a mistake I had made. I clearly remembered comments about needing to bring more depth to my writing. I had forgotten, and at the time barely registered, two separate comments on one assignment. "Your details are always so rich" and "lovely details."

The piece was about a young girl who lies to her Mom about staying over at a friend's house, then changes from her school uniform into clubbing clothes in the train station bathroom. The details describe, among other things, the stained sinks, trying not to touch her panty hose to the slimy floor, and the gym bag stench that clung to her mini-skirt. While I cringed at the superficiality of the piece, I  also realized that ignoring positive comments can be as bad as ignoring negative ones. Because in fixing one thing you don't want to break another.

While I don't mean this post as an ad for CROSSxCHECKING, it is odd I should fall prey to this when the whole point behind my critiquing service is emphasizing writing strengths as well as weaknesses. I truly believe that building on strengths is as fundamental to good writing as fixing what we do wrong. At the same time I think about publications I worked for in the early days of online publishing, when the quality of submissions often wasn't as good, and we were required to comment on rejections. Often I struggled to find anything positive, and I suppose I now assume any compliment on my writing is given in the same vein.

Yet, when I consider it, even when I had to dig, the positive element I came up with was truly positive. It wasn't a lie. Even if the best I could point to was accurate grammar and spelling, heaven knows I've rejected many otherwise good submissions because the writer ignored both.

Since coming across that assignment I've made a point to go back through my portfolio and make sure all my work includes the "lovely details" Chris alluded to, and from now on I'm making it a point to pay more attention to positive comments. I hope you will as well.

The Bane of Being a Slow Reader

This post is for all those writers (and also to Amazon.com that regularly sends me free books) for taking so long to review your books. It's time I confessed. I am just an extremely slow reader. This is the bane of my existence as in most cases I do not agree to review books because I feel I should, but because I really want to. I want to see what my cyber-friend has been working on for the last two years or the memoir written by the gal whose essay I edited three years ago. And then there are those three or four books I find in the newsletter each month from the Vine program Amazon invited me to join last year. Even with piles threatening to topple on either side of my laptop I keep asking for more.

One article I read recently attributed slow reading to a mild form of dyslexia. People like me read slowly because, if we didn't, the words would get mixed up in our brains. I do read one word at a time. While, apparently, faster readers read word groupings.

When I was in grade school in the 60s speed reading was all the rage. Mainly because President Kennedy was a known speed reader. My Dad, also a slow reader, bought a kit with this contraption on which a little window––resembling a mail slot––sprung open revealing groupings you were supposed to read all at once. As you improved you were supposed to read longer groupings at a faster pace. Both my Dad and I would go back to it from time to time with the best of intentions, then get bored or frustrated and give up again.

When I was in sixth grade our middle school (called junior high school at the time) invested in a newfangled mechanism that projected words on the screen. The teacher could adjust the timing and then we'd be tested on our comprehension. Of course, since we did it as a class, we were supposed to raise our hands at the point it moved too fast for us to read, (which no one did), so I will never know if the other kids really could read at that super speed or if it was just me. All I know is I might as well have been reading a foreign language, and I felt like a huge failure, even though reading at my own pace I always gained high marks in comprehension.

That emphasis on speed reading skills seems to have died a well-deserved death, but still, for the sake of those whose books I review, and for my own sake, since there are so many books, both fiction and nonfiction I'm dying to read, I'd like to read faster. Well, actually, I would and I wouldn't.

This topic arose in a forum I participated in several years ago on the above mentioned Amazon when citizen reviews were a brand new idea. I learned there that many of the "fastest" readers really skimmed. That got me thinking about how all the best writers labor over every word. I myself, though I am certainly not one of the best writers, revise and revise and revise, not just cutting words but replacing them with others. Good writers look not just for meaning but the sound of words. All that work, so that someone can skim what they wrote and report back on the story? That seems a great waste of talent.

So really maybe an apology is not in order. Yes, I can understand why my writer friends would like as many reviews out there as soon as possible, but know that I am giving your work the attention all that sweat you put into it deserves. I am reading every single word for both meaning and sound, and when I review your book it won't be just about what you wrote but how you wrote it.

Don't Take Rules Too Seriously

Once again Hope Clark's Funds for Writers newsletter has inspired my post. In "The Don't-Do-That Rut" article from her Small Markets letter, she opines about those writers who "rattle off absolutes" in forums and chatrooms. I've visited those forums where (these are my thoughts, not Hope's) writers who reached their peak some thirty years ago spout outdated dogma like "never write for free" or "Internet credits don't count as much as print" to unsuspecting newbies. While I was on the losing end of that type of advice when I first started, Hope's article also got me thinking about the "rules" we read in just about every issue of popular writing magazines and how writers can fail as much by following those rules too closely as by ignoring them.

Show, don't tell
I recently read an article––unfortunately I can't remember where––noting that "show, don't tell" is not so much a rule as a fashion that is now becoming passe. That could be due to the realization that some writers are taking this to the point of extreme tedium. True, if a character plays an important role in a story, for example, an overbearing mother, you will want to show us instances where the mother is being overbearing. But if the mother is dead or Mary wonders, just in passing, if her mother's overbearing personality might have influenced the way she raises her own children, you can simply say that. You don't need Mary to flashback 20 years remembering her mother's words on the night of the senior prom. That's just added junk your story doesn't need.

Avoid cliche like the plague
Okay, I threw that cliche in there just for a little humor, but some writers think avoiding cliche means never saying anything the same way others have said it. A character's eyes can't "well with tears." Instead, "pools of water form and hang suspended above his lower eyelids." What do all those extra words accomplish beyond telling us the the writer has oh so cleverly found a different way to describe a common phenomenon. We've all seen someone's eyes fill or well with tears. You really can't add any clarity to such a standard image, so just say what you need to say and move on.

Always use active rather than passive voice
This is one Hope mentions as well, and it is another rule that, taken too seriously, can ruin your writing. Again, this is partially a matter of fashion. Writers of bygone times often made more use of passive voice than we do today as do many writers outside the US. More important than sticking to the active voice is making sure the voice you choose fits the story and the time in which it is set, and varying your sentence structure. Just like anything else, now and again we need to slow the pace for our readers, and passive sentences are the best way to do that.

No run-on sentences
One of my favorite authors, Edith Wharton, wrote sentences that took up entire paragraphs. She wrote mostly about the Gilded Age in America, and I can't imagine writing about those times with anything other than her perfectly crafted sentences that swirled this way and that, circling back to where they started. Even Ernest Hemingway, king of the minimalists, whom we usually associate with the short, declarative sentence, in reality often used very long sentences peppered with conjunctions, especially in his descriptions. Here's an example from For Whom the Bell Tolls,

This officer shot two men as they lay and still they would not get up and he was cursing them and finally they got up, one two and three at a time and came running toward us and the train.

Speaking of rules, notice the unorthodox use (or lack thereof) of commas in that excerpt.

It's good to read a few magazines or books about writing to get a general flavor of the current writing "fashion." However, writers will learn even more by reading the actual work of contemporary writers as well as older writers whose styles could add a little variation to our own writing. By doing so, writers develop an ear for what works and don't need to rely so heavily on the "rules."

Overdosing On Simile?

Is anyone else feeling overdosed on simile these days? I just read a prize winning story in a very high tier online publication where the word "like" showed up five times in one paragraph describing a woman walking down the street. Her hair looked like this. Her skirt swung like that, etc., etc., or should I say, yada...yada, because that's how it read for me.

Simile, according to the Oxford English Dictionary is

a figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid.

As such it should be a way to conserve words by creating an image with one sentence. Yet it seems in much literary writing these days similes amount to extra words tacked onto a description for effect with no added value.

In the paragraph I mentioned above, I felt so bombarded with "likes" that I decided to go back and analyze each one. Of the five similes, I'd say one somewhat enhanced the image already created by the author in the lines preceding it. Three didn't detract but didn't add anything either, and one, on close examination, wasn't really accurate. The simile compared the movement of a piece of clothing to the wings of a certain insect, and, when I thought about it, the image was kind of upside-down and backwards.

Obviously I'm being purposefully vague about the story. In all other respects it was great, and I don't want to pan this particular writer for doing something that is––going by what I read in the most selective journals––strongly encouraged. In fact it often seems that a generous peppering with similes is a basic requirement for acceptance at many literary journals, yet at the same time, the effect has been so watered down by overuse that I suspect even the editors skim them like readers skim dialogue tags. (Hey, there's one.) How else would these ineffectual additional words slip through?

Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather see writers go back to using similes sparingly and to greater effect. When it's not part of their natural style, I'd rather writers skip the simile all together rather than come up with something that sounds strained at best.

Soap Opera Writing

Sometimes I come across a submission that is what I like to call "soap opera writing." By that I don't mean melodrama, but a story that reads like it's being made up as you go along.

If you're a fan of soaps as I was once, you'll understand this example.

Cody and Nevada are characters on As the Tears Fall. Suddenly, one day we learn that Nevada gave birth to Cody's baby 20 years before and put the child up for adoption without telling him. Nevada has been a regular since the show began, but until a 20-year-old blond bombshell showed up in town looking for her birth mom, viewers never had a clue about this secret in Nevada's past. Not only that, but when Cody joined the cast two years earlier, there was no indication that he and Nevada had ever been in a relationship let alone an intimate one.

The literary term for this is "foreshadowing." Soap opera writing lacks foreshadowing, in that it fails to lay the groundwork for what will occur later on in the story. In the real world, during all those years the soap was on the air, someone––Nevada's now geriatric mother or her sister or her best friend––would have known and probably mentioned something about the pregnancy. At the very least, when Cody came to town, Nevada would start acting strangely, like she had something to hide.

Soaps get away with this seat-of-the-pants style because it's hard to think up plot lines years in advance, but novels and short stories need to be more than just a series of unconnected shocking events. In order to keep us reading, the events need to be linked however tenuously. It's kind of the reverse of "Chekov's gun."In this case, if a gun is fired in Act II, it better have appeared in Act I.

There are many reasons why writers fall into soap opera writing. The most prevalent is simple laziness in not going back and doing the proper revisions. While some writers have the entire story in their heads before sitting down to write, and others outline, there's nothing wrong with making things up as you go along, or as some would prefer, letting your characters take the lead. The problem is, if you don't know in advance the path your characters will take, you won't be dropping bread crumbs along the trail.

If we wanted to turn As the Tears Fall into a novel or a good short story, as soon as the character of Cody was introduced the writer would drop hints of his prior relationship with Nevada and a secret she hasn't revealed. They don't need to be broad hints and for greater impact they shouldn't give too much away, but when the reader learns about their baby it shouldn't come totally out of the blue.

Another common reason writers don't foreshadow is a misunderstanding of how surprise endings should work. Back to our soap analogy, this is like Cody and Nevada getting married and sending their new found daughter off to college. After which, Nevada reveals that Kristina isn't really Cody's daughter after all, but the daughter of Dr. Gordon Rice whom she slept with while Cody was fighting in the Gulf War. (Another standard plot line soaps watchers will recognize.)

This is like the blindside surprises with which inexperienced writers often end their stories. They're working for "I didn't see that coming," when the reaction to a well-written surprise is "I should have seen that coming."Reread a classic surprise like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," and you'll find it's full of foreshadowing. The mastery is in the sleight of hand that leads the reader to misinterpret clues that should have been obvious.

Once the adrenaline rush of getting the whole story down on paper has dwindled, it's hard to force ourselves into revision mode. With short stories that oft repeated advice applies here more than ever. Let the piece rest until you can see it with new eyes. Since novels are written over a longer period of time, it can be a good idea to go back and revise as soon as you add something new to the plot line. If Cody suddenly enters the story in Chapter V, go back to Chapter I and place his yearbook photo in Nevada's dresser drawer.

That's the difference between writing for soaps and writing good fiction. Well, that and the money.

Adding Depth to Your Writing Through Layering

Painters working in oils will often layer, painting the basic picture then adding colors and brush strokes to create shadow and light thus adding depth. This same method can add depth and texture to your writing.

The majority of submissions I read for Sotto Voce or through CROSSxCHECKING tell great stories. Unfortunately, that's often where it stops. The stories have no more depth than something a friend might relate over lunch or I might overhear while engaging in that favorite passtime of writers, eavesdropping. Good stories do more than simply relate what happened in chronological order, they pull us into the world the characters in that story inhabit.

This is where the layering comes in.

Let's say you have an idea for a semi-autobiographical piece about a mother dropping her daughter off at college for the first time. The story might start out with packing the car at dawn, then driving down the road where you write in both bits of conversation and poignant silences. The story ends at the parking lot outside to dorm or when the mother leaves her daughter behind for the first time.

So far so good. Some of those reading your story will be parents who share the experience and they will immediately identify, but if you want to hit the larger group, readers with young children or no children or the unmarried, you need to make that world real to them. You want them to feel like they are sitting in that car with the mother and daughter. You can do that by layering in detail.

Here's how it works. After your first rush of inspiration, put the story aside for a week or two. The next time you pick it up, think about some details you might add. I find it best to start broad and work down to the minutia. For example, the first thing you might consider is where the mother and daughter live and where the college is located. These can be real places or generic city/suburban/rural settings with an idea of the distance between the two locations. It will make a difference to your readers whether the college is nearby allowing the daughter to visit often or so far she can't even make it home for Thanksgiving. It will also make a difference if the place she is going is vastly different than the place she grew up, or if the young woman grew up in a middle class suburb where going to college was alway in her future, but the leaving is painful nonetheless.

Moving in a little closer, your next layer could be something like details about the weather. Is it a typical crisp fall day reminding the mother of her own first year at college or the day the daughter started kindergarten? Maybe the weather is unseasonably warm and muggy, allowing for contrasts. Maybe there's a sudden rainstorm that makes driving a challenge and almost causes an accident.

Your next layer could include sights and sounds. Does the scenery change along the way? Are the silences between the two characters filled with the sound of a blasting radio or traffic noises? Maybe the cracking of the daughter's gum gets on the mother's nerves or vice versa.

Moving along, it always helps to include external details that provide insights into the characters' personalities, like the kind of car the mother drives. Is it an expensive SUV or a clunker or something middle of the road like a Ford Focus? What items are packed in the back? Are they things like a TV, refrigerator, microwave, popcorn popper, skis? Or just a couple of suitcases? Is the car packed carefully or do items shift and tumble?

Finally, you'll want to finish with at least a few details about the characters themselves, not an info-dump describing each one from head to toe, but little distinguishing features like hair color or clothing, body type, etc.

Depending on what you want to convey with your story, you probably won't need to include all of these. It works more like a Chinese menu, picking one or two things from each category. You don't have to add your layering all at once either. Personally, I find it works better to continually put the story aside, then come back and add more detail each time––kind of like letting the paint dry on the canvas before adding more. You also need to know when to stop. Unlike the 19th century, readers today don't want every detail of a room from the color of the walls to the curve of the sconces over the fireplace. A few telling descriptions are all that's needed.

Layering can make the objects of a painting jump off the canvas. It can also make your words jump off the page.

Grammar Matters, Or Does It?

On her blog Tender Graces, my writer/editor/blogger friend Kat Magendie has been posting a useful series on grammar. Writers vary greatly on how much weight they give to grammar in their writing, from the college kid who thinks what he says is oh so much more important than where he places the commas and periods (if he places them at all) to the gal who writes dialogue like "Yes, Officer, he is the person to whom I spoke."

First off, it is far more important to know and use proper grammar than most young writers think. Submitting a piece filled with grammar mistakes is like going to a job interview in flip-flops and cut-offs. At the same time, putting stodgy dialogue in the mouths of your characters simply because it is grammatically correct will also mark you as an amateur. That applies to your characters' internal dialogue as well. Most of us don't try to remember "to whom" we were speaking the other night.

Punctuation is another tough one. Going strictly by the rules we would all use semicolons much more than we do. When was the last time you used a semicolon before "however" or "therefore?" About the only time I use a semicolon these days is Rule 4, to separate a series when one or more of the units contains a comma. Speaking of the comma, I have been accused of both over-using and under-using this little bit of punctuation at different times in my life and once regarding the same piece read by two different people.

Whether a comma should go before the last unit in a series (Meg, Susan, and I) can be arguing too fine a point. Certain stylebooks say it should, but at least one that I know of, The AP Stylebook, says it shouldn't. Only a very picky editor will deny a piece based on her disagreement with that last comma, but she may deny a piece with no comma between Meg and Susan, especially if that type of error appears more than once.

Flexibility in grammar rules will also vary depending on the genre. While I noted that "whom" often feels stilted in a short story, the sentence "He couldn't remember who he talked to about it" sounds inappropriate for a news article, unless the journalist is quoting someone.

Then there are the words misused so often the misuse becomes acceptable. I can't tell you how many times I've read that "the car collided with a pole." For objects to collide, technically both have to be in motion. And the term "comprised of" used to be considered poor English, not to mention redundent. One should say "The housing development comprises two streets with townhomes and one with single homes." Yet the former has become so common as to be acceptable.

So what is a writer to make of all this?

Before you begin submitting you should be aware of the major rules, the ones no one should break. These are rules like putting a period at the end of a declarative sentence and a question mark after a question; putting punctuation inside of quotation marks; putting the period/question mark outside parentheses unless the parenthetical phrase is a separate and complete sentence. (You will notice my use of the semicolon because "and" appeared in the first unit of the series.) You must understand subject and verb agreement, i.e., plural subject with plural verb and vice versa. An editor might let you off the hook for "The group are going" instead of "The group is going," but you won't ever get away with "They was going" unless it is the dialogue of an uneducated character. You also have to know how to format dialogue correctly.Break any of these rules and your writing will appear too sloppy to take seriously.

Beyond those rules, don't sweat the small stuff. The big stuff is knowing to place a comma before or after the tag line or start a new paragraph for each speaker.

Mary said, "I'm going with you."

"Oh no you won't," said John. "You won't be ready in time."

The small stuff, at least in this editor's mind, is something like how you would punctuate the same dialogue if you reversed the word order of the tag to "John said" in place of "said John." Is it

"Oh no you won't." John said.

or

"Oh no you won't," John said.

I've seen it both ways, and to tell you the truth, I couldn't give a rat's tail which way the author decides to punctuate it. I leave that to the grammar mavens. Some people will debate the fine points of grammar like lawyers debate Supreme Court decisions. For the rest of us, it is more important to keep writing.

See You In September: Many Literary Publications Will Re-Open

In my post Reading Periods: Think Before You Send, I warned against rushing to submit just before a publication closes down for the summer. Hard to believe, but now summer is almost over, at least in the academic world, and that means many of those literary journals associated with colleges and universities will soon re-open for submissions. (If you are one of our readers from Down Under, just reverse everything I say––I know you folks are used to that.)

So do you have your cache of stories all ready to mail out or submit online? Neither do I. Though I have some decent excuses. My Dad passed away the end of April, and I've been involved in the paperwork of transferring things to my Mom's name and helping her take care of the day-to-day. I started a newsletter from my editing/critiquing site, CROSSxCHECKING, re-designed the site, and had some bigger than expected jobs. For the past two weeks I've been blogging and volunteering for healthcare reform, and then...Okay, I still could have fit some time in, but I didn't.

I know many of you have to wait for the kids to go back to school. I'm not there anymore, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, summer does provide so many things to do out of doors or away from home. One thing I do have is additions to my list of places to submit and some good notes. They aren't notes for stories, but back in June I suggested using weather in stories so I took my own advice. Spending so much more time outside, this summer I made a point to observe how the morning light hit the tops of the trees in my backyard, and the differences in light between a nearly cloudless day and a hazy humid one. I noticed how the morning sounds changed from early summer's cacophony of bird song to late summer's chittering of cicadas. I noted how a warm dry breeze felt like silk against my exposed skin while sticky August air felt like an itchy wool sweater.

I also did what I'd suggested in another post––caught up with my reading. I didn't review many books this summer, because much of my reading had been sitting on my shelf too long to be considered new, but I did make the acquaintance of an old writer, in the rediscovered Thomas Savage. I found The Power of the Dog totally riveting.

So it hasn't been a total waste. The fact is, I tend to still be on that academic schedule myself. The year for me starts in September, not bleak January. A couple more weeks of cleaning up my desk, emptying my bookshelves of the books I don't need to keep, sharpening my pencils––though I don't write in long hand––and I'll be ready.

Researching an Article: Dig a Little Deeper

No matter how many times I use it, I'm still in awe at the ease of doing research on the Internet. At the same time, the phrase "dig a little deeper" has taken on a new more literal meaning in addition to the figurative one.

Every time I look up a statistic to back up a point in an article or a fact that will add realism to a piece of fiction, like the day of the week Christmas fell on in 1875, I think how, just a few years ago, I'd have to visit libraries and archives, and possibly weed through nausea inducing microfiche. That hands-on experience can still be fun when researching a scholarly paper or a novel, but for a blog post or a short story, it is so much more efficient having the information just a click away. And the search keeps getting easier. No longer do we need to leave out articles and add + or - between words. Looking for a study to quote for a post on my new healthcare reform blog (shameless plug inserted), I typed in "statistics on uninsured by age" and found a wealth of listings apropos to the subject.

However, that embarrassment of riches can also be a problem as the arcane workings of SEO often cause articles about articles quoting statistics to rise to the top while the actual study or poll they are quoting shows up somewhere on page 3. Unfortunately, in doing research, many don't bother to dig down that far.

There are many reasons we often stop short of the original source when researching. Aside from sheer laziness––which can account for a good bit of it––less savvy researches can mistake top billing in search engines for a badge of authority––like Wikipedia, the site I love to hate. It is also very tempting to pick an article that supports the point of view we are espousing with our own article and rely on their citation of the "facts." Of course, those writers may be quoting the parts of the study that support their view and ignoring significant information from that same study or poll that either doesn't support them or isn't quite so sensational. Secondary and tertiary sources may also slant information. Notice how the same statistics with different modifyers can make contrasting points.

"As many as 1 in 5 abortions is performed on unwed mothers."

"Only 1 in 5 abortions is performed on unwed mothers."

(Note:These are totally fabricated statistics I made up just as an example.)

With information literally at our fingertips these days, one can hardly complain about having to sift through one or two pages of listings or perusing a few short articles, many of which could be eliminated from the first line. There's a lot of misinformation and distorted facts out there, both in blogs and forums and even in the mainstream media, but why join the crowd, when it is so easy to just dig a little deeper.

Pay-Per-Click Sites: Another View

I highly recommend C. Hope Clark's Funds for Writers newsletters. Not only are they filled with valuable paying markets, but Hope also provides great advice for those trying to make money freelancing. In a recent newsletter, she "got on a soapbox about pay-per-click sites." I agree with some of the points Hope makes, but not all, mainly because I've had some pleasant little surprises connected with the site I wrote for a couple of years ago.

I won't name the site, because, suffice it to say, if there weren't certain things I didn't like about that specific site, I'd still be there. However, there were also enough benefits that I wouldn't condemn all pay-per-clicks out of hand.

Writing on a topic you know and love
Say you love gardening or testing recipes in your kitchen, but you don't have the credentials that would open the door to a regular column. Maybe it's just a hobby and you never thought to make any money from it anyway. I loved the opportunity to write once a week on a topic I cared deeply about, and the 650 word limit was great discipline I've applied to my writing and editing ever since.

The value is in the eyes of the beholder
I agree with Hope that if you are looking toward a successful freelancing career, you should not see pay-per-click as the first rung on the ladder. As she noted, it really doesn't count for much on your resume and the pay is a pittance. On the other hand, if you already have a successful freelance career but don't get to write what you like or if, like me, most of your published work is short fiction for which you were paid two contributor copies, the $10 every couple of months can feel like an added bonus.

Feedback
Okay, I'm a soft touch for feedback, which is why I like publishing online so much. From time to time I will have someone contact me about my articles, often asking for recommended reading. Since the topic is near and dear to my heart and I want readers to take an interest and learn more, this really provides me with that warm fuzzy feeling.

Maybe I've just been lucky but...
I have been approached twice for reprints for which I was paid more than I made from the site in a year. The second request was from a charter school publishing a textbook. They paid me $250 for a six hundred word article I wrote in less than two hours right off the top of my head. And I still get paid every time someone else clicks on it.


Still and all, writing for pay-per-clicks has its drawback or I'd still be doing it. The demands can be high for what you get. As noted, I could write articles off the top of my head and the research I did do, I enjoyed. Even with that, outside of those two pieces I sold, the hourly rate was ludicrous.

Before signing on you should also investigate the non-writing requirements. Often your page will need to conform to a particular format. In my case this meant finding non-copyrighted graphics to illustrate each article and then trimming it down to size. I'm all thumbs when it comes to graphics, and while I could find historical photos at the Library of Congress site, by the time I trimmed them to the required size, no one could tell what they were. You know I caught grief for that at review time.

Then there's the SEO (search engine optimization), which is one reason why these sites don't always make good clips. Titles, especially, need to be written with search engines in mind, and repetition is bigger than it should be in good writing.

It is also extremely important to know what rights the site claims. The site I wrote for asked for one year exclusive rights. That's more than a lot of print publications, but I thought it fair considering this was pay-per-click so they wouldn't want their articles showing up all over the web for free. Had the site claimed all rights, it would have been worthless since I made more from the reprints than I did from the site.

Some see pay-per-clicks as the sweat shops of the web, others see them as a fun hobby you get paid to do. It all depends on what you want and what you are willing to put into it.

Twitterature?

OMG, according to this article in P&W, Penguin is going to release a volume "that pares classic books down to a series of tweet-sized chunks." I'd love to know what readers think about this.

For more on my thoughts you can read my earlier post.

Everybody's Doin' It: The MFA Rag

Interesting blog post by David Lynn editor of The Kenyon Review. He references an article in the New Yorker re: MFA aka Creative Writing programs that, in turn, is a review of a book on the subject by Mark McGurl. Full disclosure, if you've read my blog at all you know I spent a week at the Kenyon Writer's Workshop a year ago. I loved my week there and learned a lot from Chris Tilghman's input, but then again, I had a lot to learn, which brings me to some of the differences I have with David Lynn's remarks. So, for this post, allow me if I may, to play devil's advocate, addressing Lynn's points one-by-one though not necessarily in the order in which they were presented.

The noble cause
Lynn makes it clear that an MFA, at least today with 822 programs available, no longer guarantees publishing success and/or a prestigious teaching job. However, his contention is that a creative writing program, unlike a job-focused program, can be an end in itself.

To an extent I agree with Lynn. Outside of a handful of fields––engineering and software development come to mind–-few four-year grads walk into a job these days. The world does need engineers and software developers and doctors and lawyers, but I also believe a grounding in the Liberal Arts is a necessity for living and learning well. However, when we're talking about the additional expense of time and money on a graduate program, most applicants require more than enrichment when they get out. It's sad to think that these programs will be limited to the wealthy or those few underprivileged talented enough for scholarships to the best programs, not too far from home, that will guarantee income on graduation.

Rise in Excellence
Lynn bases this point on a quote from McGurl,

"...far from homogenizing literature or turning it into an academic exercise, creative-writing programs have been a success on purely literary grounds. “There has been a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period..."

Unfortunately, just saying it doesn't make it so. On what does McGurl base that conclusion? What objective criteria does he use? Certainly there are many readers outside of academia (and many within as well) who disagree. Check out this thread on P&W's Speakeasy Forum regarding BASS anthologies. Many believe that over the past few decades literary writing became far too focused on style and far too little focused on interesting themes or plots. This seems to be changing, but I'd suggest it is more to do with the growing popularity of online publications over the past few years than the over-proliferation of writing programs since the War.

Community and shared purpose
According to Lynn, while writing programs cannot provide a guaranteed job, what they do provide is "a sense of community and shared focus." Of all the justifications in Lynn's post, this is one I find most troubling. Writers do benefit from a sense of community, but a two-year program requires a lot of time and expense for something writers once shared with each other for free. Unfortunately, most literary writers today depend on teaching to pay the bills. Not that I blame them, when there is so little money to be made from their craft. However, many would argue it is the needs of the instructors rather than the needs of the students that mothered so many creative writing programs.


Which leads me to my main issue with all degree programs in creative writing. That is, by their very existence they have turned writing into just another career for which an advanced and very specialized degree is required, and only a degree from the best programs guarantees success. No, you will not find a magazine that requires an MFA for submission, but you will also not find a top-tier, and now many mid-tier journals, where the majority of contributors (often all) are not MFA grads or candidates. Editors will deny it up and down, but this can't be a coincidence as the slush pile has to be filled with non-degreed submitters.

Certainly one could argue that programs screen for the best applicants, so naturally the best writers will come from writing programs. However, one can't help but wonder if these applicants weren't writing publishable work before receiving their MFA ticket into the big leagues or whether there aren't equally good writers out there who simply can't afford a program.

The following quote in The New Yorker from the prestigious Iowa Workshop's website seems to bear this out:

"The fact that the Workshop can claim as alumni nationally and internationally prominent poets, novelists, and short story writers is, we believe, more the result of what they brought here than of what they gained from us...Iowa merely admits people who are really good at writing; it puts them up for two years; and then, like the Wizard of Oz, it gives them a diploma."

I have no problem with writing programs per se for those who want and can afford them. But whenever success in a field comes to hang on the letters after one's name, whether it be MFA or MBA, the oxygen can get sucked out. Those schooled within the box naturally favor others schooled within that box and pretty soon thinking outside the box becomes ever more rare–-and at worst is suppressed.

This lack of innovation and initiative brought the US auto industry to its knees and is limiting our options for healthcare reform, just to name two. If we aren't careful it can sap the creativity from creative writing.