A Note On...Writing That Is Personal

Dean Nelson, in his familiar position interviewing guests
at the annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea.

Another in the "A Note On..." series in which I ask writers I know or hope to know to blog about lessons they've learned about writing, the creative life, or just general topics they have an interesting insight into. Today's comes from my prolific friend and colleague Dean Nelson. The question at hand: are our lives interesting enough to write about? 

In the first few sessions of the Creative Nonfiction class I teach, I generally hear observations from students that they haven’t lived very interesting lives yet, so they don’t really have much to say.  I don’t try to dissuade them from that idea overtly. They might even be right. But my guess is that that their lives are plenty interesting, and others would love to read a well-crafted story from them. Wasn’t it Flannery O’Connor who said that anyone who had survived childhood has plenty to write about?

So I don’t force it. We just read things I hope will connect with them deeply. There is the story from the LA Times where the college girl describes the most difficult and easiest food items to throw up when she needs to play her meal in reverse (cinnamon-raisin bagels are toughest, in her experience; mint chip ice cream the most gentle). And we read about a boy whose very conservative mom takes him to a jazz club for his 13th birthday, setting aside her view of those places in an effort to make him happy. And there is the story about the subway ride where a man fell and was as afraid as a wounded animal, and the others rallied around him. And there’s that one about the priest who assures the little boy dying of AIDS that “it will be all right,” when the priest knows it won’t be. 

Those stories usually focus on something that happened over a period of maybe an hour at the most, yet they are so well told, and they point to a bigger story, and they draw similar kinds of stories out of the students.

In recent years I have read student accounts that include: wishing for Skinny Girl respect while standing in front of one’s closet; charting her growth as a female by the kinds of hair styles she’s worn; attending the funeral of her boyfriend, and then trying to take her own life; trying to tell the girl he’s scheduled to marry that he is gay; describing a sexual assault; seeing one’s favorite band; worrying that one’s parents are getting a divorce; going to chemo treatments with one’s mom; finding out one has the breast cancer gene, and, well, you get the picture. These stories are interesting. They really happened. And they’re told in such a way that others want to read them.

I think that kind of raw, true writing comes from reading other raw, true writing, and from an atmosphere where there are no taboos, no judgment on content, but plenty of feedback on craft and storytelling. Most good nonfiction stories are true, in that the account and the facts are accurate, and are True, in that the story points to something bigger than itself, like fear, love, grace, forgiveness, guilt.

And so it matters greatly where one starts when one writes. Instead of writing about eating disorders, write about one time when you struggled with this issue. Instead of writing about racism, write about that time you were a racist. Instead of writing about God, or the American People, write about – well, you get the picture. This is all just a riff, of course on E.B. White’s advice, “Don’t write about Man. Write about a man.”

My last couple of blog posts at www.deannelson.net try to do this. They have also appeared on Donald Miller’s Storyline blog. The bigger the issue, the smaller the focus. I don’t know who said that. But I’ve repeated it often enough to make it mine.

I get a lot of examples in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, on the last page, called “Lives.” Check them out. You’ll see specific stories about people you don’t know, and they will make you start looking at incidents in your own life where you’ll say, “I should write about that.”

Yes, you should. They’ll be interesting. 

Dean Nelson directs the annual Writer’s Symposium By The Sea, writes occasionally for the New York Times, and teaches at Point Loma Nazarene University. 

Of books, and lives, uncovered.

By Heather J. Clark, Guest Contributor

You know what they say about books and covers, but in the ways life unfolds as a story it’s often hard to reserve that judgment.

Last week I was standing in front of the unmanned lifeguard station at dog beach watching my two-year-old up on the tower enjoying his independence and making sure he didn’t jump off. Suddenly, the people watching the beach from behind him all stiffened as people do when they’re witnessing something socially unacceptable. I turned to see a man, at least 70 with his pants gaping and round belly flopped over the open zipper, squatting down over the jetty rocks with a grunt.

Ocean Beach has a large homeless population, so I’m sure I wasn’t the only one wondering if he was about to use the rocks as his toilet. Happily, that wasn’t the case, but proceeding to take off his pants and socks continued the moment’s awkward trajectory.

Sometimes, though, there are storylines we still feel drawn to even when the cover is disconcerting.

At this point, the man simply waded in the water. And when the first wave hit his bare shins, he turned around with the widest Cheshire grin on his face. Another older gentleman, still fully dressed, stepped closer to take pictures as the first waded deeper into the water.

Content that nothing inappropriate was happening, I turned most of my attention back to protecting Judah, but something about this scene in the water kept drawing my eyes back to the scene in the ocean. The partially-undressed man had tucked the legs of his boxers up into his waistband to walk further out into the water, and he paused to flash his large belly to his friend for a picture as he took off his shirt.

The man on the shore gestured for the man in the water to go out deeper. He did. And when the wave hit his belly for the first time, a whoop of excitement from deep inside him sprang from his mouth. This playfulness continued as he wrapped seaweed around his neck and did a muscle-pose for his friend. The grin that lit up his face the moment he’d stepped into the water hadn’t left, and he was clearly and fully enjoying every aspect of the moment.

His vulnerability reminded me that the best stories are those that catch us by surprise when we uncover how invested we’ve become in the characters, because their stories give us insight into our own.

Within minutes, my perspective had shifted from wariness to being choked up with emotion. I have no idea what the man’s story was. I can imagine a few possibilities, but it doesn’t really matter. What I saw was a person so intent on being completely present and enjoying his moment so fully that he didn’t care what anyone else on the beach thought. I envied him and found myself worried that someone might stop him before his mission was complete.

I have spent far too much of my own life story worrying about how my audience perceives every situation. And as this tale unfolded before me, I felt God talking to me, telling me it was my time. Don’t worry; I’m not going to get naked on the beach. But my story is about to take a turn. I will be brave and vulnerable and expose my desires. I will be more afraid of missing my moment than of how people might perceive me. And I will worry less about the outcome and focus more on experiencing the journey as the story unfolds.

I will live, uncovered.

For the latest piece of original work, I found a writer hiding if my own home. Heather Murphy Clark teaches composition and raises the three children we call ours. A big fan of YA, she usually prefers to be a reader of stories, so I'm thankful she was willing to share one of her own reflections here.

On being "a soul in transit"

A shot from last night's concert off of Switchfoot's Facebook
page. Pictured are Jon and Tim Foreman, pro surfer and guy
I grew up around, Rob Machado, and my old friend Drew Shirley.
Check out the band at 

https://www.facebook.com/switchfoot 

Last night, I got the chance to see my favorite songwriter, Jon Foreman, play a show with my favorite band Switchfoot. It was amazing.

Jon (I'll call him Jon, because we shook hands at the post-concert meet and greet, so we're friends now) is a great writer, and not merely of the poetry that makes his songs speak. In many ways, he is a thoughtful observer of the way time slips past us when we're waiting for meaning to find us. And in that, he lives in tension.

When he visited the Writer's Symposium by the Sea here at Point Loma in 2008, Jon described writing as the process of returning over and over to an irritant, a thought that even after several attempts to articulate it demands more attention. In essence, it's not repetition but living that drives us back to the topics we can't put down.

And so it is with doubt and belief in his work.

The "opening act" for last night's concert as a screening of the group's new surf and concert documentary, Fading West. I'll be writing more about it later, but there was a comment Jon made in it that matters here.

"I know what I believe, but I have my questions and my doubts. For me, that is the journey. I'm looking for the melody....I'm a soul in transit."

If I think about it, this is where writers live. The world is neither complete certainty or doubt, but the conviction that the space between the two is what matters most. And in that is meaning.

There's a notion in storytelling and poetry that is not linear. Writers don't have a plan so much as an intention. They make maps rather than follow them. Somewhere along the way, they make meaning - for themselves. And then, if the story they're telling makes it beyond the walls of their preferred writing device, others make their own meanings of the story. Those meanings are neither their nor the writer's, but a fault line between the two.

And that's what makes story necessary.

Back in 2008, Jon Foreman visited Point Loma as part of the 2008 Writers Symposium by the Sea. Watch the entire video here.

This is the second of a series of posts with reflections on writing from past participants in the Writer's Symposium by the Sea, an annual event at Point Loma Nazarene University where I work. This year's guests include Siddhartha Mukherjee, Jeanette Walls, and Anne Lamott. For more information, visit here. 

If You Build the House, You Should Get the Keys

As technology dependent as my new class is, some groups
still return to the classics - in this case, a chalk board - when
planning their next week's story lines and concerns. I love it.

If I’m honest with myself, I think my hybrid fiction class is built, at least in part, on a small amount of petulance on my part. It never fails that I have a few students each semester, generally those unhappy with their grades, who tell me they wish they had more control over the coursework and experience.

It usually sounds a bit like this:

“You know Dr. Clark, I think I struggle because I don’t get to choose anything about what we do.”

Snarky comments about overreaching word choice and hubris aside, I think my response is this class. You want some control (which, if they were paying attention, these students would realize they’ve had all along), well let me make you very, very aware that you’re in control.

Hence the 9-week, self-directed small group writing process in which my students, in collaboration with the other groups in the class, are writing a novel-in-stories that I will publish electronically after the semester ends. With their names on it.

As I expected, this was at once and exciting and sobering, “you-got-what-you-asked-for” moments. But it has also led to inventive solutions on the part of my students who feel the need to jailbreak even a system designed to give them almost all of the creative control. And I love what I’m seeing as they work outside the systems and platforms I provided or required.

Some groups have created their own SMS repeater groups so all their texts automatically go to every group member. Others have created their own Google circles for the class, enabling the use of Hang Outs for meetings if they want to work remotely or if a group member is unavailable in person. They’ve even tried gaming the story constraints I put on their work (if I have to kill one more zombie storyline…).

In total, I left some gaps in the process to see what they’d do, and it has paid off in a number of ways, some of which I’ll likely build into the next iteration of the class. I can’t wait to see how the next group looks to break the system productively.

This is another entry regarding the student-driven hybrid fiction course I’m piloting at the moment that is testing both my notions of teaching and my students’ understanding of how the classroom is supposed to look. From time to time, I’ll reflect here on what I’m learning along the way.

A Writer’s Prayer

Photo by Heather Clark

Maybe we can’t plot the moment when we were changed irrevocably; when we ricocheted off of greatness along a new course that would become our trajectory; when we saw, for a moment, what we wanted to reach for before we died.

Or maybe, if we look closely enough, we can.

I read a lot growing up. I don’t know a writer who didn’t. And, given my context, I read a broad swath of material. Hemingway when I was eight. Stephen King when I was nine. Catton and Hughes when I was ten. Austen when I was eleven. Didion when I was twelve. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Shakespeare by the time I was fourteen. Alice Walker almost got me kicked out of high school when I was a freshman.  

Somehow, though, I missed Walt Whitman until I was a senior. Or, more precisely, until I was almost done being a senior.

Uncle Walt was like one of those bands you knew that you needed to “know” but you didn’t know how to “know” so you just pretended you knew what people who actually “knew” them talked to you.

Random Dude in High School: “You like Bad Brains, right? I mean, those guys were like pioneers.” 

Me: “Totally. I mean, I’m kinda partial to Black Flag because, like, Henry Rollins is a poet or something, but…”

Random Dude: “Totally.”

So it was with Whitman, until that sappy moment when, at the end of the senior slide show at the end of prom, when the Walt truck hit me. Let me set the unlikely stage. Kids in tuxes and formal gowns. On a paddle boat. Almost to the after party. Video slide show with Whitney Houston as a soundtrack. And then – cue the synth orchestra – the words of “Oh Me! Oh Life!” roll up the screen.

And there I was, through the swirl and clatter of gossip and teenage nostalgia and plates being cleared, transfixed by a poem I should have already known.

Oh Me! Oh Life!
Walt Whitman

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
                                       

                                                        Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
Source: Leaves of Grass (1892)

This. This was my moment. I always loved to read. But this, this simple profundity, this small moment of stable clarity in a world that felt like it just wouldn’t stop shifting under my feet. This was it.

I’m fairly certain this is the beginning of my journey as a writer, not that I knew it at the time. There were other influential points on the plot line, but this was my genesis moment. My garden and my fall and my intention to journey toward making sense of it all for someone else.

Twenty years later, I’m still working. Still grinding. Still trying to be even a cut-rate Walt. But I’m still certain of these things:

I am here.

The actors are still on the stage.

And my verse may still yet get read.

What was your moment? Who authored it? Let me know.

I Need a Role Model

No, seriously. Help me.

Recently, I’ve asked publicly, nay begged, for people to punch me in the throat if they hear me utter the following words aloud:

“So, I have this great idea for a class…”

Consider it a cry for help.

This hybrid fiction class is awesome. It’s pretty much all a creative writer working in academia could ask for – the freedom and encouragement to chase down a new way of helping students grow. In many ways, it’s like writing the story of the exact type of class I really want to teach and then enacting the story with real-life actors.

But the class is also extremely overwhelming, in that I had almost no models to work from when creating it and no body of reflections from others because there isn’t anything for them to reflect on in this vein. At least, not in creative writing circles.

My friend Trent created a somewhat similar course, but his aims and mine are vastly different in terms of student takeaway, which means the architectures of our courses diverge quite a bit. And outside of some standalone activities I’ve read about, I just haven’t run across this type of class.

This is not a subtle brag. It’s the reason for the bags under my eyes. Every class session, traditional or virtual, carries its own learning curve. Every flaw in the system, no matter how hard I worked to eliminate them, requires almost immediate attention.

And if this class is novel for me, the guy who spent more than a year researching and constructing it, then just imagine the combined apprehension and nervous energy of 20 students who thought they’d signed up for a traditional lecture and workshop fiction class.

It is no tired business metaphor to say that while I am not building the plane while it’s in the air, but I’m definitely still bolting down the seats.

I just hope that all the work I've done makes the next redesign I'm planning - I'm looking at you Literary Nonfiction - a little bit less insane.

This is another entry regarding the student-driven hybrid fiction course I’m piloting at the moment that is testing both my notions of teaching and my students’ understanding of how the classroom is supposed to look. From time to time, I’ll reflect here on what I’m learning along the way.

The Sentences of Saul (Sorta)

Dave Eggers makes interesting comments. He needs eight uninterrupted hours or he can't write. He knows how much it costs to ship a cannonball through the mail. He would classify his readings earlier in his career as performance art.

In terms of writing advice, I was taken with an off-handed comment he made at the 2012 symposium. He said that he has been greatly influenced by Saul Bellow's sentences, but you wouldn't think that by looking at his writing.

Counterintuitive a little, no?

When an artist says they have been influenced by another artist, we expect to see signs of it. If a painter says Banksy influences her, there should be more than just a general street-flavor to her work. If a guitarist claims Eddie Van Halen as a model and he doesn't drop in a heavy dose of tapping, we (well, at least I) question that. If a politician invokes Reagan or JFK, they'd better be doing more than biting nostalgia.

So, when an author lists another author as an influence and then seemingly distances themselves from their style, it's worth considering. How can someone be an influence and yet not "show up" in the work of someone who they are influencing?

And yet, this is probably the best piece of writing advice from the evening with Eggers. Let your influences be just that and not patterns you try to manipulate your work into replicating. Take a cue from the annual Bad Hemingway contest. Don't try to be your favorite author. Try to be what you admire in them.

In Eggers' case, he acknowledges Bellow's brilliance at the individual sentence level and aspires to pay that kind of attention to crafting his own. In the age of memes, we may be losing sight of the simple beauty that comes when we take in the art we consider great, strain it through our senses, intellect, and soul, and then produce our response to it rather than our sincerest attempt at repetition.

This is the first of a series of posts with reflections on writing from past participants in the Writer's Symposium by the Sea, an annual event at Point Loma Nazarene University where I work. This year's guests include Siddhartha Mukherjee, Jeanette Walls, and Anne Lamott. For more information, visit here. 

Friday Fiction

That's me, writing in the middle of the day on a family
camping trip this summer. I'm not sure it
was Friday, but on vacation, I feel like every day
is Friday, so I'm calling it one.
Also, the sippy cup is not mine, I swear...

I am fairly convinced that all writing work done on a Friday that is not under a specific deadline should be considered a double victory. The end of the week, with all its closing ceremonies and its proximity to the weekend, is a composing quagmire littered with the best of writing intentions. So, regardless of your word count, you should celebrate what you did get down today. 

So, whether you wrote 5 words or 500, I salute you. Job well done. 

Murder Was the Case They Gave Them

One of the reasons I love teaching the collaborative fiction class I'm piloting this term are the wonderfully creative and awkward emails it's creating. In that vein:

Hey group.
Just so you know.  Colton has informed me (Group 3) that they want us to kill off their character in the hit and run.  The only problem is that their character is male.  What do you think?  Can we accommodate them?  Interesting eh? dk 

I love the way students are looking at each other's work in ways that are not merely theoretical, but in the very practical and functional context of creating of their own story and the larger novel it will be a part of. Getting students to understand that they are part of a larger narrative and must care about the other stories they come in contact with is really the aim of any writing course, or literature class for that matter.

However, this hybrid collaboration is really proving to be a very effective environment for producing that kind of insight. Even better, the desire to find it comes not from me or an assignment, but from the students themselves. 

The Show Must Go On (Without Me)

This is another entry regarding the student-driven hybrid fiction course I’m piloting at the moment that is testing both my notions of teaching and my students’ understanding of how the classroom is supposed to look. From time to time, I’ll reflect here on what I’m learning along the way.

When I was a kid, I was a performer. A singer to be exact. I was five the first time I sang in public, 11 when I had my first Peter Brady moment and 18 when I was a small part of a performance in front of more than 100,000 people. And then, singing went away, and not by choice.

I can still remember the doctor telling me, “Well, it looks like you won’t be singing anymore.”

“For how long? A month? More?” I’d had to shut it down before, go on what voice coaches call “vocal rest” while my throat calmed down. I went a week without talking once. Almost killed me.

“No, no more singing. The way your system is, you just aren’t going to be able to sing without ending up doing permanent damage.”

And that was it. No more singing or concerts or that part of me that identified me as the singer. I was lost to say the least.

Years later, I had not found a replacement for that part me, an outlet for the side of me that likes to get up in front of a room and put on a show. And then I found teaching.

Every day, I faced five tough crowds of high school freshmen and seniors, and I did the dance. I taught grammar with stories and literature with jokes. I moved in and out of the desks, singling out students and tailoring a comment just for them before moving back out to the whole room. I shot down hecklers.

The Laugh Factory, it was not. But I was in my element. And that’s still what enables me to enjoy my job. Sure, my audience is older and my jokes include more references to post modern theory, but the basis of my day is the same. I’m on a stage.

Which is what makes my hybrid class so challenging for me. After four weeks of f2f training and instruction on fiction, I turned my class of 20 writers loose for nine weeks, moving into the role of digital management while they own the class experience, shaping it to suit their needs and the needs of the book they are writing collectively.

In essence, I’ve made them the performers and I’m now sitting in the audience. And the shift has been jarring.

But my hope is that in my sitting down, my students will be forced to stand up. And if the part of my new class designed to help students see the marketability of their talents is going to work, I have to do it. 

And take up a hobby to deal with the performance withdrawals.