Writing Full Tilt

A question came up recently in one of my workshops: ‘Is it a good idea to share our work with family and friends?” My simple answer is: It depends. Of course the follow-up question is: Depends on what? And the answer to that is complicated.

There are a lot of pathways here and no real map. If we aren’t careful, we could get very lost. What’s the worst thing that can happen? The worst thing could be that we share our work before we’re ready to, and the response erodes our confidence. Even a lukewarm “I like it” without further discussion of specifics can leave us feeling unsettled. Even worse is to have someone pick apart our work when we don’t expect it, especially when the criticism comes from a friendly source.

But the real problem behind sharing our work with family and friends is that there is no clear structure to the exchange. The person receiving the piece of writing has little idea what is expected of them, but they intuitively expect that they are supposed to like the piece. They may not realize they have expectations about what they will read, but of course they do. They believe they know something about what you will write based on shared conversations and experiences. But the inner life of a writer is not the same as the person who sits down to dinner or goes for a walk and has a chat. Our writing reveals worlds that are mysterious and strange to those who think we are familiar. The upshot is that I think it’s often unfair to say yes or ask people close to us to read our work. Most people are not equipped to notice what fellow writers notice. And they are not experienced at commenting on the craft in the work, which is what we writers need both to affirm our skill and to help us develop it. I would advise caution and being prepared to protect your writing. Let your writing thrive in the company of those who know how to support it, notice its strengths, applaud its innovation and offer clear, respectful suggestions. Your Art is not casual, it deserves more than an unwitting or misguided response.

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Could the questions that unfold in Ernest Hemingway’s story “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” have happened anywhere else but a café? Possibly, but not as surgically and eloquently. The café is as much an essential character as the old man and the two waiters. Could Fiver, the heroic rabbit of Watership Down be anywhere but Sandleford Warren in southern England where questions of hierarchy and safety are lived underground? Unlikely, given that a rabbit’s world is all about visibility and hiding.

Place matters. It’s not simply a backdrop to a character’s behavior; it is part of what makes a character who they are and what they do. Weather is certainly a contributing factor: The oppressive soggy heat of Venice that challenges Donna Leon’s Detective Brunetti, or the wind scraped ranch of Cormack McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. But the weather happens because it occurs in a specific place. The storms that nearly kill Captain Ahab and his crew could only happen in a ferocious ocean expanse. Place is the architecture, the stage on/in which characters move. Landscape and environment act upon a character, perhaps from birth, perhaps as an outsider, perhaps as a force to confine, confuse, or comfort.

Placing a character clearly and firmly in a world where they not only exist but act and react gives depth and meaning to a character’s world view. Imagine your character in a rocky landscape, a sea of wheat fields, a maze of sidewalks overshadowed by skyscrapers, a tiny village, the inside of a submarine. Where do they fit? And what do they know or not know about their surroundings? How does their environment affect their mood and their decisions? What could only happen next because it happens within this precise space? Bring the presence of that space forward and the character will have more to work with and against. Give your characters a planet, a work room, a hive, a crow’s nest, a mountain range from which to enact their story. Let the place have its say.

Upcoming Events

Malibu Writing Retreat: Need a winter break? Need a time and place to set the world aside and immerse yourself in your words? It’s not too late to join me for a February Writing Retreat at Serra Retreat Center in Malibu, California! Beginning Monday, February 24th through Friday, February 28th. Writers of all genres and levels of experience are welcome. This retreat is tailored for those who do not love huge groups and who cherish the opportunity to develop their writing within a respectful structure. For more information: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/ or maureen@maureenbjones.com

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Winter, with its long nights and voices reaching across continents, is the time for ancestors. It’s a time for listening to the old stories, even the ones we’ve heard from our beginning. We hear them and we hear them, and so often we think we hear them wrong. Why are they told the way they’re told? Why are those exact words used as if they are on repeat? What is the story about, and what is the story telling really about? It takes lifetimes to decipher meaning—large, intimate, individual and familial.

My mother’s oldest sister, Dorothea, told two stories about the explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1917. Until her death, she was one of the last living survivors of that disaster. My mother would get exasperated with Dot, because one story was about being knocked off her feet, and the other about a large glass shard embedding itself in the wall. Only one of them could have happened to my aunt. “Oh, Dot,” my mother would say, a dismissive twist to her mouth. I heard these vivid stories about shattering windows and concussions, near misses and a direct hit. The details held veracity. My mother was right. Both stories could not belong to my aunt. But as I heard them retold over decades, and as I replayed them in my own borrowed memory, I began to understand. My Aunt Dot was telling her own direct experience of the disaster, and she was telling the stories she had heard, many about the ones who didn’t survive. She was a repository of lived moments, and was passing them on down the generations to any one of us who would carry them forward.

On the other side of the family, my grandmother Anna efficiently and calmly told the facts of her sister Loretta succumbing to the Spanish flu in 1918. It all sounded so distant, several wars past, a time before penicillin or television. My grandmother offered distinct truths about those days, and yet they felt remote. Then Covid arrived in 2020, and I knew from family history what would give my family a chance based on information encoded in a bygone story.

In Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko writes: I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories.   

As writers it is essential to remember the stories we are told, to tell them, retell them, carry them onward. These stories are about how to survive, how to endure what has and will happen. What we tell around the winter table of soup and crusty bread are messages of hope and caution, determination and invention. They are instructions for finding the light.

Upcoming Events

Malibu Writing Retreat: Need a winter break? Need a time and place to set the world aside and immerse yourself in the world of words? Join me for a February Writing Retreat at Serra Retreat Center in Malibu, California! Beginning Monday, February 24th through Friday, February 28th. Writers of all genres and levels of experience are welcome. This retreat is tailored for those who do not love huge groups and who cherish the opportunity to develop their writing within a respectful structure. For more information: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/ or maureen@maureenbjones.com

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Why is it so difficult for so many people to say they are writers? When asked what we do, shouldn’t it come naturally to say: ‘I’m a writer?’ The statement is true because, in fact, we write. We do it seriously, with passion, with intentions to develop our craft, and learn from fellow writers and by practicing. And yet, with all this effort and attention, we often struggle to say that three-word sentence to claim what is often the most essential thing about ourselves. Why? The answer I hear is that, well, we’re not ‘real writers.’ So, what then is a ‘real writer?’ What does it take to be a ‘real writer?’ What does one have to do to become one? Here are the answers I hear:

1. Have a degree in writing
2. Be paid for writing
3. Be published
4. Be published by an acclaimed publishing house
5. Be published, acclaimed, and make a lot of money
6. Know grammar and spelling perfectly
7. Be a tortured soul
8. Be addicted to a substance
9. Have experienced severe trauma
10. Be disciplined every day with a strict schedule
11. Know what the story or poem is before beginning to write
12. Write something original every time
13. Write only what we know
14. Always show and never tell
15. Be able to scan poetry
16. Understand our characters fully before writing a word
17. Be dedicated to only one genre
18. Know literary analysis and its vocabulary

I am exhausted and itchy. Nowhere in this list is the word delight. Nowhere in this list to be a writer is the concept of writing for writing’s sake, out of the need to express oneself about the conundrum of human existence. Nowhere in this list is the impetus of curiosity, exploration, mystery, drama, or danger that we contain within us and encounter everywhere in our lives and which transforms itself into what we most want to say. Nowhere is the fact that art arrives from the need to make sense of life and to share what we understand or what we question. Through her own art, Georgia O’Keeffe believed: Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unkown known is the important thing.

A writer is someone who writes. Through practice comes confidence and strength in our voice and skill, and with that comes the right to claim ourselves as writers. Every writer has agency through their writing to learn, earn money, find acclaim, offer comfort, challenge ideas, and entertain. The delight, even when writing tragedy, comes when we open through the act of creating. Writers begin with a spark, a possibility that tumbles onto the page and rambles until it becomes art. Over 2500 years ago Confucius said: To study something and practice it regularly, is that not joy?

Upcoming Events

Need a winter break? Need a time and place to set the world aside and immerse yourself in the world of words? Join me for a February Writing Retreat at Serra Retreat Center in Malibu, California! Beginning Monday, February 24th through Friday, February 28th. Writers of all genres and levels of experience are welcome. This retreat is tailored for those who do not love huge groups and who cherish the opportunity to develop their writing within a respectful structure. For more information: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/ or maureen@maureenbjones.com

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This week was all about the Autumn leaves rattling and crashing in the air, swirling on the ground, scratching and unwilling to settle as they were swooped, shoved, tossed, flung, and rocketed. I was trying to rake. I was trying to collect and make sense of the tumult and disarray, within a surge of confusion as colors fell around me.

This is what writing about trauma can be like. We try to put order into an experience that is senseless and has no proper sequence. I say senseless, because what happened shouldn’t have happened. Our logical mind even tells is it couldn’t have happened. Our words spew and tumble and we lose heart, we lose our conviction that anyone would understand. How do we share facts that are impossible to believe on their own? How do we include the dissociation, the shattering, and the primal will to hold to the self? Is it possible for words to carry everything we need to say?

In the experience of my own writing and in listening to others, I believe the answer is yes. And the yes lives in multiple versions of the story. All the elements of a traumatic experience do not fit easily into one telling. The story has multiple versions of itself, layers of meaning and underground tunnels toward fragmentation and survival. All of them need their time and air and expression. The trauma asks for patience, courage, and the willingness to examine the bird’s eye view and the microcosm. It asks for first- person terror and third-person compassion. Every writer who puts their words one after another owes it to themselves to experiment and try what feels authentic and true and cleansing. Even weird, because trauma is weird. With individual phrasing and images, the senseless can become the owned story through expression, through art, through claiming what wants and needs to be said.

I piled and bagged most of the leaves and will haul them to the composting heap. The escapees, the ones that refused to answer the rake, fluttered and lifted, settled in new spots or blew away. I didn’t need them all to be tidy and controlled. Like so many others who have experienced trauma and tried to write about it, I needed the leaves to become my re-creation, a narrative arc that shows the truth as I lived and live it.

Upcoming Events

Need a winter break? Need a time and place to set the world aside and immerse yourself in the world of words? Join me for a February Writing Retreat at Serra Retreat Center in Malibu, California! Beginning Monday, February 24th through Friday, February 28th. Writers of all genres and levels of experience are welcome. This retreat is tailored for those who do not love huge groups and who cherish the opportunity to develop their writing within a respectful structure. For more information: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/ or maureen@maureenbjones.com

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A trope is a repeated concept that appears throughout literature: an older husband with a young hot wife cheating on him. To write this story as a cliché would be every bodice ripper novel in the airport bookstore. So how do we use a trope and avoid the cliché?

In my literature classes I would ask students to define literature. I could tell they heard the word literature and gave it a capital L, because their answers were almost always the same: Stories about important people doing important things. When I asked them their definition of important, they said stories about royals making decrees or wars, notorious people doing nefarious things, brilliant people making discoveries, famous people becoming more famous. These are all tropes. And then the students would add, and here is where we get to the heart of a writer’s creativity–they would say that literature had to be a story that no one had ever heard: no cliché.

After this discussion, I would assign Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale, a classic but ridiculous story about an ordinary carpenter, his wife, their boarder, and the parish clerk. All these characters are entangled in an earthy sequence of lust, deception, slapstick, and absolutely no redemption. There are bathtubs on a roof and farts out a window. And yet! This is Literature. Why? Because Chaucer took the cliché of an older man with a much younger wife and made it his own. He told the story with several new elements: an added lover, a hilarious interpretation of the Bible, and vulgarity on top of bawdiness. But he also brought these characters to life–each is very much themselves in how they respond to the situation they are in, and the reader is on no one’s side. Of course, the fellow pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales were highly amused and had plenty to talk over on their journey.

I would ask the question again after the students had read and discussed the story. Eventually someone would say: Literature is how well a story is told. This is the craft in the art of writing. How and why we feel what we do when we read a poem, a piece of flash fiction, a novel or a memoir is a result of how well the author has told the story. My point is that cheating on one’s spouse is a trope, and that Chaucer’s rendition of it is high comedy and a brilliant parody of the medieval morality plays that made this kind of sinning a cliché. A cliché is boring and predictable, and Chaucer’s use of the trope is surprising and unexpected. It goes against a reader’s expectations. Avoiding cliché when using tropes is like setting up a punchline whether in comedy or drama, then leading the audience into the familiar only to take a sharp left. Tropes are the thread of storytelling; a writer’s reimagining makes new cloth.

Upcoming Events

Need a winter break? Need a time and place to set the world aside and immerse yourself in the world of words? Join me for a February Writing Retreat at Serra Retreat Center in Malibu, California! Beginning Monday, February 24th through Friday, February 28th. Writers of all genres and levels of experience are welcome. This retreat is tailored for those who do not love huge groups and who cherish the opportunity to develop their writing within a respectful structure. For more information: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/ maureen@maureenbjones.com

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You live in a dream world. For all the years of my childhood my mother’s words floated over my head. She wasn’t wrong. I consistently drifted out of my known world into surroundings full of imagined characters. Putting my shoes in the proper place was not a priority.

Living in a dream world is not usually meant as a compliment. It’s a statement of foolishness and impracticality. Creative people are often labeled this way and encouraged to grow up and get real jobs. Learning to sustain oneself is necessary, however, for many creative people the dream world is where they are most likely to succeed, because it’s where their best work happens. Dreaming and imagining are not about escaping or being unrealistic. These brain functions are part of a condition of being, a process that arrives on its own. Creative people step from one reality into another as easily and as fully as astrophysicists move from the room they inhabit into the realm of theoretical space and time.

It turns out that one in thirty people have what is often called a ‘very vivid imagination’ or an ‘extremely rich inner life.’ Imagination is a powerful way of knowing, so much so that creative artists such as Jonathan Swift, Sylvia Plath, Aristotle and, of course, Tolkein, talked about the balancing act of imagination and madness. But clearly imagining something is not mental illness and is quite different than being in a dissociative state or hearing voices. A vivid imagination is scientifically known as hyperfantasia. Writers with hyperfantasia are not removed from reality, they are accessing a part of their minds that operates like a film set in which they move freely, listen in, watch closely, and tap into the fears and hopes of the characters who populate it.

An article in The Guardian defines the phenomenon well. This essay attests that some brains simply move into fantasy as easily as stepping into the next room. Creative writers are not delusional, spacey, disconnected, or unrealistic. They are simply innately attuned to the free association of day dreams and the ability to turn them into story. Writers taste the sandwich a character is chewing and shiver when a character steps out into a winter storm without a coat.

I have learned to put my clothes away, to say excuse me when I bump into someone, and to always be polite to cashiers. I have successfully held many jobs and pay my bills. And I did listen to my mother; I heard everything she said, and now know that living in my dream world is about being my most grounded self. Link to Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/20/like-a-film-in-my-mind-hyperphantasia-and-the-quest-to-understand-vivid-imaginations

Upcoming Events

Need a winter break? Need a time and place to set the world aside and immerse yourself in the world of words? Join me for a February Writing Retreat at Serra Retreat Center in Malibu, California! Beginning Monday, February 24th through Friday, February 28th. Writers of all genres and levels of experience are welcome. This retreat is tailored for those who do not love huge groups and who cherish the opportunity to develop their writing within a respectful structure. For more information: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/

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In writing workshops I often hear people say as they are about to read what they have just written: “I didn’t get to where I wanted to go.” They say it with a bit of frustration or bafflement. It’s a statement that takes me in several directions. My first thought is, Where did you want to go? My next thought after listening to what they have written is, You got someplace wonderful!

So what is the frustration or disappointment about?

When we begin to write, something comes: an idea, an image, a sensation. Part of our mind begins to plan; it identifies steps to get both ourselves and the reader to the point. The Point! The Make-Sense Brain knows where it wants to go, begins to make a map that starts at the beginning and heads directly towards The Destination. End of Story.

But the What-Does-It-Mean Brain knows there are important way stations and whisperings in the underbrush. It wants to make stops, get off the road, wander around, pick up artifacts, and listen in on conversations. Which means the journey is longer, wigglier, stranger, heavier, more mysterious, and just plain not as straight forward or easy. Even worse, the journey is not what we thought it was going to be. We find ourselves following rather than leading, we are, maybe, a little or a lot lost. Details appear that we hadn’t expected or known, and they are marvelous ingredients for storytelling.

Of course both brains are valid. The issue is reconciling what The Story Line is with What Meaning We Want to Show. Both will arrive in the end, beautifully combined, if we trust our adventurous pens. Both are necessary for the melding of making sense and making meaning. The fear of ‘losing the plot’ is real. So, when beginning to write The Idea, jot down one or a few sentences that lay out the key elements. Set this map aside. It is the ticket for arriving back to a plan after the off-road excursion. Then get comfortable, notice what is rising first in the story and head off onto back roads, thickets, and waiting vistas.

Upcoming Events

Fantasy Workshop Online. July 6th & 7th 2024, 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m EDT 

When you daydream, what world are your characters in? Where are they in time and space? What forces are they up against? Who are their allies? Who are the agents of challenge? What are their resources? And what in this fantastic universe are they wearing? Join me for two days of generative writing to examine, explore, answer, and develop world building, conflict and tension, character development, dialogue and more!

We will write together in the workshop, listen and support each others’ work with respect.

Spaces limited. Cost: $400. Contact: maureen@maureenbjones.com 

Writing Retreat at Stump Sprouts in Hawley Massachusetts: August 5 – 9, 2024

Join me on a sunny, quiet hillside with views of the western Massachusetts hills for three days of imagining, remembering, restoring, and inventing. Writers with all levels of experience and genres are welcome. The retreat is firmly based in the AWA Method with respect for all voices and an atmosphere of adventure. Single rooms, shared baths, organic, home-made meals, and time to rest and wander. Fee is $1325 with a $200 deposit by June 1st. maureen@maureenbjones.com

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Does anyone write letters anymore? The question got me thinking and attending to what we actually do write to one another. But it also got me thinking about the difference between a conversation and a letter.

I have a notepad full of messages my daughter and I left for each other when I was working in a restaurant, and she was in middle school. They were short, direct, and full of everyday announcements: “There’s more macaroni in the fridge.” “Please clean out the cat box after you finish your homework.” “I’m over at Leanne’s—be back in an hour.” Each were also signed with love and funny little bits of news and drawings. They brought me back to when it was just us two, each doing our best to span distance made by necessity.

Those messages answered the question. We do write letters to each other all the time. Some people still write pages and put them in an envelope with a stamp. Most of us now write emails of one sort or another. We text and write on social media. We use emojis by the bucketful with as much meaning as any telegram or 1930s missive on thin blue airmail paper. The oldest known complaint letter is 4,000 years old, Babylonian, and stamped into stone. We write letters to the editor, postcards, Post-It notes, and letters of reference.

All these types of messages answer the second question: a conversation is an immediate exchange, but a letter is a message written when alone and focused, usually, to an audience of one. It is intimate and directed. A letter or message allows the writer to concentrate on only one reader and on themselves: What is it that most needs to be said? What can’t be said face to face? The thing about letters is that they instantly have a point of view, and they offer the writer an opportunity to choose a voice and tone. The message is internal: one voice speaking uninterruptedly to another.

Jane Austen first wrote Sense and Sensibility as letters between the sisters Eleanor and Marianne. Anne Frank wrote to her diary in the attic hideaway. Celie’s letter to God in The Color Purple wrenches the heart. And then there is Harry Potter’s acceptance letter to Hogwarts from Minerva McGonagall that changes everything. Letters are a literary genre unto themselves, from Biblical epistles to archival war letters to messages left on the moon: To Whomsoever Finds This. We are a letter writing species.

So, perhaps, when trying to help a character puzzle out a conundrum or if they find themselves needing to say the most important thing they will every say, try giving them pen and paper, or an electronic tablet, or a stick in the sand, and see what pours forth from their heart. Letters communicate so brilliantly because they reveal the voice within.

Upcoming Events

Fantasy Workshop Online. July 6th & 7th 2024, 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m EDT 

When you daydream, what world are your characters in? Where are they in time and space? What forces are they up against? Who are their allies? Who are the agents of challenge? What are their resources? And what in this fantastic universe are they wearing? Join me for two days of generative writing to examine, explore, answer, and develop world building, conflict and tension, character development, dialogue and more!

We will write together in the workshop, listen and support each others’ work with respect.

Spaces limited. Cost: $400. Contact: maureen@maureenbjones.com 

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What I want, more than anything, is a reason to write a postcard
from someplace not here. To spin around a tall wire rack of cards, select a few, tote them back to a rented room and scribble messages on them that vary from trite to cliché.

—Jan Haag from “Postcards”

Two friends of mine have run the Boston Marathon. One completed the 24.8-mile race in 2 hours 40 minutes and the other in 4 hours and 55 minutes. It would be easy to imagine the slower runner would be envious of the faster runner.

Envy is a wonderful plot theme, desiring what others have and we don’t. Longing for love or talent or wealth as if they are objects to be handed over. I often hear someone in a workshop say they wish they could write like someone else, but to envy another’s writing voice is to want the impossible. A writer’s voice is uniquely their own, forged out of a life lived and created from an internal music that combines with the alchemy of the creative process. Just as my runner friends have two different bodies, with different training regimens, different experiences, and different goals, writers have a distinct combination of innate rhythms, vocabulary, and internal imagery.

Both runners are skilled and determined athletes with different personalities and motivations. They are both to be admired for their accomplishment. No doubt, should they compare their strategies and racing techniques, they would learn from one another. And the same is true for writers.

To wish to write like someone else, is to do both the other writer and one’s own writing an injustice. Here is why:

1. Every writer learns their truest voice in the rhythms, vocabulary, and imagery at home, on local streets, in early school years.
2. As children, some writers have books read to them and have books available, so they can more easily absorb the belief that writing is valuable.
3. Some writers are encouraged and supported in their writing, learning to believe in their own voice and gaining confidence in articulating and experimenting with thoughts and imaginings.
4. Some writers have an education in naming elements of craft and identifying how and why a literary work pleases and succeeds. They can apply this knowledge to their own writing. Some writers learn that elements of craft are not a mystery but tools waiting to be employed and practiced.
5. All of the above are also true in the reverse. Some writers were not read to, did not have books available, were not encouraged or supported, and do not have a craft-based education. To write despite what was not provided requires believing that what one wants to say should be written. This is a mighty strength. There is also power in inventing a written way forward. Writing to define oneself, holds formidable authenticity. All writers are claiming their Art.

In a marathon runners say: Run your own race. So too in writing: Write your own write.

Upcoming Events

Fantasy Workshop Online. July 6th & 7th 2024, 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m with break for lunch:  Join me for two days of world building, establishing conflict and tension, developing characters and their point of view, using dialogue to deepen plot and themes. We will write together in the workshop, listen and support each others’ work with respect. Spaces limited. Cost: $400. Contact: maureen@maureenbjones.com 

AWA Write Around the World: The entire month of May Amherst Writers & Artists is offering workshops to people around the globe. These workshops will be led by AWA-trained facilitators. This is an opportunity to experience the AWA Method, to meet far-flung fellow writers and support AWA. https://amherstwriters.org/write-around-the-world/#!calendar/r

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Who is wishing, and what are they wishing for?