Sarah McCraw Crow

Failure

2011-10-20T09:57:00.000-07:00

I took a break from my WIP today, and spent the morning working on a short story. I'd already written fifteen pages or so about this character (a secondary character from a previous, still unfinished WIP), mostly backstory.

Today I made this character return to his hometown for a funeral of a woman he was close to in his youth, to see what would happen. But after a morning of writing and thinking, I'm no closer to the story; I haven't even gotten to the funeral yet.

A smart writer would say to give the story more time and thought. Yes, but I wish I could write more efficiently and productively. So many writers seem to crank out stories quickly, but maybe that's an illusion -- when I read a story in a literary mag, I have no way of knowing whether the story took three weeks, nine months, or six years to write. Or maybe some people are fast learners and fast writers, and others, like me, are just slow.

So to Speak journal

2011-07-28T08:51:00.000-07:00

My short story "Flight" has won first place in So to Speak's fiction contest. It will run in the fall 2011 issue. I'm glad this story finally has a home, and just as glad that I can stop revising it.

And still the snow falls...

2011-04-04T07:01:00.000-07:00

April 4: more snow. This photo is from about a week ago, when the new snow looked pretty with the maples turning pink at the top and the hills turning green. Now it's snowing again, and it's just messy out there.

Another snow day in New Hampshire

2011-04-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

I should be writing on this snowy day, but instead I'm daydreaming about summer and gardening. This photo is from late last spring, mid-June, before everything gets out of control.

But today the snow continues to fall -- 6, 10, or 12 inches total, the weather reports say. Ah, April in New Hampshire.

Novelist Stewart O'Nan

2011-03-31T07:39:00.000-07:00

Novelist Stewart O'Nan will read at Gibson's Bookstore in Concord this Sunday.

Here's Ron Charles' recent review of O'Nan's new novel Emily Alone. And here's a link to O'Nan's amusing, telegraphic timeline ("How I became a writer when I used to be an engineer").

2010-11-10T09:21:00.000-08:00

Languishing stories, when to let go

How is it that some stories never escape from my “stories in progress” folder, languishing there, only halfway through a first draft, for months or years? I’ve been thinking about this question this week because a similar issue came up in a recent writing class.

“When is it time to let go?” a woman asked. She meant, “when is it time for me to stop my endless tinkering with this story and send it out?” But the discussion centered on something else: whether and when to plod through a draft to some kind of ending, for the sake of seeing it through, even when it feels forced. We didn’t come up with a good conclusion, but we commiserated with the student who talked about the multiple novel drafts that she’s gotten stuck on, with no apparent hope of moving forward.

I think there’s no real answer to this kind of question. No one else can say to another writer with any certainty, “your draft will never become a story, so give it up now.” True, some scenes, concepts, images, even half-drafts may turn out to be just practice, just exercise. Still, you never know: I had a partial draft of a story, blurry and short, about a lonely woman working nights in a lab and getting into a fight with her friend/co-worker. I couldn’t figure out what the narrator might want, or even who the narrator should be. This story draft sat quietly in the “stories in progress” file for a year while I did other things, worked on my novel draft and wrote two other stories and sent some things out.

Then, not too long ago, I opened the file for this languishing draft, rewrote the first scene, and then kept going. Now I have only one or two more scenes to write, and after that I can start revising it. I wish I knew what got me to start again on this draft, whether it was a barely remembered dream, something in the news, something overheard, or just the passage of time.

I know there’s a lot of advice out there on getting through stalled stories. Here are a few more thoughts:

-- Juggle. Stop working on the draft. Move on to another project, or go read the novel or story collection that’s sitting on your bedside table, waiting for you.

-- Walk, listen, look. If I go out and watch or listen to other people, I usually end up spinning new story ideas rather than returning to the stalled story. But walking, doing something physical like gardening, or eavesdropping on other conversations might bring you back with renewed attention.

-- Leave it alone. This has worked for me a couple of times, to come back to some half-written, messy thing months later. I think this works best when I’m procrastinating, avoiding something else like the novel draft, or some household work like bill-paying, so that this sad, languishing draft suddenly feels fresh and full of potential again.

-- (Maybe) get some feedback. In my writing group, we tend not to share stories or manuscripts when they’re brand-new. But occasionally I’ve shared something half-finished, and gotten surprising thoughts – for instance to try turning a draft upside down, making the beginning scene the thing that everything else leads up to.

2010-10-15T06:50:00.000-07:00

I’m in Panera on this rainy Nor’easter morning, along with about a thousand other people. So much conversation – one man pitching his plumbing supplies company to another; a woman trying to get a man to buy ad space in her magazine. Two other men talking about their health issues, a broken wrist and rehab for one, and a tonsillectomy for a perpetually swollen uvula (!) for the other. A table of six older ladies with their mugs, laughing about something, and ten feet away, a corresponding table full of older guys in windbreakers and sweatshirts. (I wonder if the women and men notice each other, an echo of long-ago middle school.)

Still others, like me, alone with their laptops. They laptoppers look intent, focused on work, maybe writing, but it could be that they’re just FB-ing or e-mailing. And yet work does get done in places like this; I know a woman who wrote her entire dissertation at Starbucks. Maybe it’s just me, distracted by all the activity – milk steamers shrieking, pagers buzzing, bread racks banging onto counters, cell phones chirping – and all this talking.

I had planned to write another scene for my novel draft, and to take some notes and start a new story, but so far I’m not doing that. Think I’ll just listen and look for a while.

Lovely looking-back essay in the American Scholar from William Zinsser, who's in his mid-80s now. I don't usually read American Scholar (it's sent to Phi Beta Kappa members, and I was not one of those), but this week the website is running five new short stories from some stellar writers.

Paul Harding in Concord

2010-09-20T06:48:00.000-07:00

Paul Harding, author of Tinkers, came to Concord last week for a reading. Our independent bookstore Gibson's hosted him, and it was a full house, maybe fifty people, a mix of book groupers and writers.

Harding read a passage from early in Tinkers (tinker Howard's wordless relationship with Gilbert the hermit, Gilbert the improbable Bowdoin graduate and friend of Hawthorne). Afterwards, he answered questions about the book and his writing path. He was good-humored, at ease, and self-deprecating, and he made some interesting points:

-- His manuscript was rejected over and over, in short because agents and editors were pretty sure that no one wanted to read such a quiet novel (ostensibly) about an old man's death.
-- Harding had a pretty good life as a mostly unpublished writer, with his Iowa Workshop degree and his jobs teaching creative writing to Harvard undergrads and extension-school students, and reading nineteenth-century fiction.
-- Tinkers was originally published by Bellevue, a small nonprofit medical-issues press affiliated with NYU (and maybe affiliated with Bellevue Literary Review?).
-- And one larger point: Small independent presses are taking over the mid-list authors, as large publishers shed their mid-lists. Which gives me hope.

Helpful posts for writers

2010-08-23T15:06:00.000-07:00

A few blog finds:

Jim Harrington's Six Questions For... blog runs brief interviews with editors at literary journals and small presses (Coachella Review, Crab Creek Review, Our Stories, Dzanc Books, Prime Number -- mostly newer, less-known lit mags, it looks like).

Check out this recent post from novelist and teacher Alexander Chee, on the whys and hows of author blogging -- maybe it's all been said before, but he says it all so beautifully. I like to read his blog now and then for the his thoughts on writing, politics, literature, teaching. He did a great three-part series a while back when/whether to get your MFA.

And a response to Jennifer Weiner's noisy irritation with Jonathan Franzen and his literary darling status. (Franzenfreude, she calls it on Twitter. Pretty funny.)

Hilary Mantel: Writer as shape-shifter

2010-08-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

I'm kind of obsessed with Hilary Mantel right now. Wolf Hall was such a feat -- historical fiction about Thomas Cromwell, his rise from abused blacksmith's son to Henry VIII's closest adviser. It's in close third person, and even though the book is hefty and runs hundreds of pages, it feels economical and quick.

This interview ran in The Telegraph (UK) about six months ago. Here's a quote from it. She is talking about the intersection of her difficult childhood and her long writing life.

'As a writer you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way. You have no business saying, “My character is this and my character is that. This is my habit, this is what I am like.” That is no good for a writer. You have got to be absolutely fluid. You have to become everything your material demands of you. You have to be mutable. You have to be constantly ready to change shape.’

Writing tips, historical fiction

2010-08-09T14:22:00.000-07:00

Janet Fitch (White Oleander) posted these ten writing rules on her blog last month, and then the LA Times reprinted them, and after that the piece went around to other writing blogs. These are helpful revision tips, even if you've heard them all before. Fitch posts writing exercises and and craft tips on her blog. She also teaches at USC

The Guardian (UK) has a great books blog. A recent entry, The Lying Art of Historical Fiction, caught my eye. I've been thinking about Hilary Mantel's book Wolf Hall since finishing it, all those wonderful details of Thomas Cromwell's life that she had to have made up.

The writers you love

2010-07-26T09:42:00.000-07:00

Christina Baker Kline's thoughtful blog recently featured a lovely guest post from writer Justin Kramon. He described the trouble he had with his first novel. He diagnosed his problem as wanting to be a great writer. Reading the great writers, the important writers, he says, "made me feel like a slow runner in sixth-grade gym, sweating and hyperventalating while everyone else rushed by. They were doing something I could never do, that I wasn’t built to do."

So he went back and made a list of the writers he loved, writers like John Irving, Charles Dickens, and Alice Adams. (Alice Adams! Gone but not forgotten.)

Kramon writes: "Part of the process of becoming a writer has been acknowledging my own limitations, the things I don’t know about. And also being honest: about what I like, what I enjoy, what moves me." Good things to think about.

Domestic pleasures and perils

2010-07-22T15:54:00.000-07:00

Two recent novels -- Jane Smiley's Private Life and Helen Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand -- examine married life, coming to pretty different conclusions. Smiley's new novel follows main character Margaret through fifty years of marriage to Andrew, an eccentric, Aspergian astronomer, while Simonson's novel (her first) follows buttoned-up widower Ernest Pettigrew as he falls for Jasmina, a Pakistani widow and shopkeeper.

Smiley's novel feels essentially like a tragedy -- marriage is a life-long trap for Margaret, who watches Andrew's flashes of brilliance and then his slow unhinging. Simonson's novel is part satire, skewering petty racism in small-town England, and part comedy, a contemporary Jane Austen with a 68-year-old man as heroine. For Major Pettigrew and Mrs. Ali, marriage is a deep, remembered pleasure.

Both writers have such good-humored affection for their introverted, slow-to-act and slow-to-change characters. Simonson's novel is slighter but optimistic; Smiley's is heavily researched -- we follow Margaret from the late 19th century to the 1940s -- and in the end, kind of sad.

2010-06-22T12:12:00.000-07:00

I'm looking forward to reading Tracy Winn's new book, Mrs. Somebody Somebody, a collection of linked stories set in Lowell, MA. I've read only the first couple of pages of the title story, which is set in 1947, but the first sentence is pretty great:

"Lucy Mattsen was nobody -- like all the women I worked with -- until the day the baby fell out the window."

I think readers will likely compare it to Olive Kitteridge, another linked story collection set in a small New England town in the present and near past. But the title story made me think of an earlier Elizabeth Strout book, the novel Isabelle and Amy, which is set in a fictionalized New Hampshire mill town in the late sixties.

Winn will give a reading at Concord's independent bookstore, Gibson's, on July 1. Winn's website also offers the title story from the book in PDF.

Help for procrastinators

2010-06-20T14:22:00.000-07:00

I was procrastinating and not writing and feeling sorry for myself, and I came across this post, which struck me as funny and helpful. In her writing-advice column for The Faster Times, Nancy Rawlinson shares the way she settles down to work: a start-up list. She prints it out and checks things off (things like 1) make a cup of tea; 2) check e-mail; 3) turn on Internet-blocking software). Sounds obvious and simple, but it's a routine that works for her -- maybe it's the act of checking a few things off, or maybe it's just blocking her Internet access.

Unusual conference-type things

2010-05-18T07:14:00.000-07:00

The Hedgebrook Foundation, which sponsors all-expenses-paid residencies for women writers, has a new (new to me, at least) program of small workshops with writers like Jane Hamilton, Carolyn Forche, and Theresa Rebeck, each at a different time of year.

It sounds pretty great -- seven days in your own little cottage on Whidbey Island, WA, and a five-day master class in fiction, memoir or poetry. It's expensive ($2000-$2500) but the workshops are limited to six participants, and the fees help support the regular residencies.

And Crazyhorse Journal runs the Crazyhorse/Tupelo Press Publishing Institute at the College of Charleston in June. It looks like a kind of brief internship in which students read manuscripts, learn about the editorial and publishing process, learn about judging a contest, and have one of their own manuscripts reviewed by an editor.

Crazyhorse is one of my favorite literary mags -- I enjoy their fiction and poetry sensibility, and it's nice looking, too -- the cover art is beautiful, and it's a nice hefty size and shape.

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

2010-01-29T06:49:00.001-08:00

A writer friend sent me Maile Meloy’s new short-story collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It. Here’s the first paragraph of the first story, “Travis, B.”:

“Chet Morgan grew up in Logan, Montana, at a time when kids weren’t supposed to get polio anymore. In Logan, they still did, and he had it before he was two. He recovered, but his right hip never fit in the socket, and his mother always thought he would die young.”

Not your usual contemporary story beginning. Meloy is still in her thirties, but she writes like an older person, someone who’s seen it all, a kind of Munro-Hemingway hybrid. Her writing is spare, translucent, vivid. These stories feature characters going to the edge of something – betrayal, murder, a love affair – sometimes plunging off that edge, but more often pulling back. Eight of the eleven stories feature male narrators, inarticulate but deep-feeling guys in complicated situations. She’s even written a short-story version of a Bruce Springsteen song (“Lovely Rita”): lonely, orphaned Stephen, who’s stuck in his beater Rhode Island town working on the new nuclear power plant and falling in love with the wrong girl. It’s set in 1975 and refers to “Born to Run,” and it’s a terrific story. (Though in my book a great Springsteen song will always beat a great short story.)

Many of these stories are set in Montana, which has probably led readers to compare her to Annie Proulx. I see more of a resemblance to Ellen Gilchrist, with Meloy’s close focus on family: middle-aged brothers who can’t stop fighting, even on double-black-diamond ski trails; teenage girls who adore their fathers and get subtly betrayed by them.

Meloy is a novelist, too, but I hope she keeps writing short stories. I can’t wait to read more of her work.

New (to me)

2009-12-27T06:19:00.000-08:00

An online journal and some blogs that I've come across this month:

The Summerset Review: this online journal has been around since 2002, and the current issue features a story ("Off the Map," by Jon Morgan Davies) that's told almost entirely in flash-forward, speeding through the consequences of teenage love.

Raintaxi features book reviews and essays. The winter issue (online) includes an interview with stellar nonfiction writer/naturalist Terry Tempest Williams.

MotherReader ("the heart of a mother; the soul of a reader; the mouth of a smartass") comes from a children's library assistant who's also mom to two school-age girls. She seems to be blogging anonymously. Lots of reading recommendations for kids' books, plus she's funny. She devotes a recent entry to Festivus, airing her grievances.

And What Women Write, a rotating blog from a group of writers in various stages of their careers, mostly fiction, it looks like. Short essay-like posts, and interviews with writers and agents.

A slightly different best books list

2009-12-09T09:10:00.000-08:00

The Guardian (UK) has come up with a best-books-of-the-decade list. Fifty books, including entries from writers highlight some of the books (Julian Barnes on Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Lorrie Moore on Obama's writing). Interesting mix of British and American titles, with a handful of other nationalities, and a mix of fiction and non-, and high and low.

Writers claiming the bad-mother mantle

2009-12-08T12:20:00.000-08:00

Sandra Tsing Loh's recent piece in The Atlantic is another of her long, personal-essayish reviews, this time focusing on Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother.

I enjoy her writing -- she's funny and vivid -- though sometimes Tsing Loh tries to turn her personal experience into dubious trends (as in an essay from last summer, when she suggested that leaving her husband because she fell in love with someone else indicated something larger, culture-wise).

In this latest piece, Tsing Loh first puts herself into the bad-mother camp, and along the way she lets us know that she thinks Ayelet Waldman isn't much of bad mother. Not too surprising. What's surprising is how Tsing Loh describes the year that her own sister-in-law dropped to the floor and fell into a coma. Tsing Loh and her two little girls went to live with her brother, to help out with child- and house-care. How Tsing Loh mothered during that time, how she managed to get all the kids to enjoy visiting the comatose sister-in-law, is really wonderful. She outs herself as a stellar, though reluctant, mother, and reminds us that it all could be so much worse.

Meanwhile, there's a lot of blog chatter out there, like this one from a Politics Daily blogger: Bad Mothers? What Are We Talking About?

Pondering the MFA

2009-11-30T09:47:00.000-08:00

Too often, instead of writing, I pretend to write: I think about writing, writers, writing programs, and conferences. I also spend too much time checking out writing programs and conferences, poking around MFA programs' and writers conferences' websites (like writersconf.org), as well as blogs like After the MFA.

I haven't yet answered my own question of whether/when I'll go back for an MFA. But here's another procrastination place to bookmark: writer Nancy Rawlinson's MFA links, which Practicing Writing's Erika Dreifus pointed out last week. If you're so inclined, you can spend hours checking out these many links, instead of writing.

Write anyway

2009-11-18T07:08:00.001-08:00

My writer friends and I spend an awful lot of time talking about procrastination, our failure to write, the way our kids' needs and our messy households seem to get in the way of writing. We know we need to stop talking, stop complaining, and start writing. Still, it helps to know we're not alone in our many forms of procrastination, and day after day we do tell each other to go sit down and write.

Writer and writing coach Elizabeth Stark offers some wise words about the daily writing routine. Don't let it be a choice; write no matter what. Write anyway, she says. And now, that is what I am going to do. One thousand more words before I go get the groceries and my mind has to focus on kids and dinner and piano lessons and laundry.

Word of the year

2009-11-17T10:44:00.001-08:00

"Unfriend" is the word of 2009, according to Oxford New American Dictionary.

Long-form journalism on the web

2009-11-17T10:06:00.000-08:00

Nineteen thousand words about the Mumbai terrorism attack -- is that too many words for a blog entry?

This week, Virginia Quarterly Review begins a multi-part series on the Mumbai attack, running it on the VQR blog. Ted Genoways, VQR's editor, wants to know if people will read such long pieces online. Certainly more people will at least take a look on the web than will buy or order a copy of VQR. (You can't even buy VQR at our Borders or local bookstore up here in NH.)

Writing moms

2009-11-16T06:54:00.000-08:00

A couple of helpful posts on writing through parenthood -- rules to live and work by. Here's one from memoirist Louise deSalvo, at Christina Baker Kline's blog

http://christinabakerkline.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/guest-blog-louise-desalvo-on-why-having-kids-is-no-excuse/

And here's a response from creative nonfiction writer Lisa Romeo:

http://lisaromeo.blogspot.com/2009/11/writing-and-kids-not-so-mutually.html

It's good to have a room of one's own, but if you're the primary caretaker, it helps to learn to write anywhere, rather than being bound to that one place/method. Notebook in the park; laptop at the hockey rink.

The old days

2009-11-13T07:21:00.000-08:00

Almost twenty years ago, I was a young assistant editor working on book excerpts, short stories, and essays for Ladies' Home Journal. The older editors complained that times were tough, that magazines were folding, that editors could hardly make a living. All true -- the magazine recession started a year or two before the early-nineties recession.

Still, that was a golden time for fiction. Every month, a short story or novel excerpt showed up in the well or in the back pages of LHJ. And not just icky mass-market types like Danielle Steel. LHJ ran stories from both literary unknowns and big names: Sue Miller, Bobbie Ann Mason, Elizabeth Berg, Marianne Gingher, Anne Tyler, Anne Rivers Siddons, Amy Tan, Allan Gurganus. Sometimes the stories were what we called women's-mag fiction, shorthand for a story about a woman at a turning point, who goes through or over that turning point or change in a way that surprises her. But not always. Allan Gurganus' story was about an angel who falls to earth in an old woman's backyard, and the angel lets her touch him. (I think. Will have to look for that story.) And in my memory, there was a ton of fiction getting published -- novels, short-story collections, not to mention the short stories running every month in lots of other big, mainstream magazines.

My kingdom in those days was the slush pile, the mountain of paper-clipped unsolicited stories that I could never get to the bottom of. But those writers (not the crazy ones, who wrote about receiving alien transmissions through their dental fillings) actually had a chance of getting published, and getting paid a lot for a story -- I passed along some of those stories every week to higher-ups, with my little reader's note.

Now mainstream magazines are thin, and laying off people, and disappearing one by one. The conventional wisdom used to be that you could sell an ad against almost anything -- health, beauty, food, psych articles -- just not fiction, but magazines were still willing to publish fiction, because readers liked to read. Along the way, calculus must have changed to "no one wants to read short stories in magazines anymore; they want short/quick/helpful lists and charts, not long, slow, not particularly helpful short stories."

I can't really imagine going back there, to a time before the Internet, when half the editors were frightened of computers. A time when there were far fewer literary mags, writers' conferences, MFA programs, or online ventures. A time way before Kindle. But even so, I miss those days.