Writing Full Tilt

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

Prompt Photo

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

Prompt Photo

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/

Prompt Photo

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 

Prompt Photo

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?

Teachers, editors, agents, and publishers all tell writers to find The Hook, better known as the first line of any piece of writing, to lure their readers into a story, a novel, a memoir, or a poem. What arrests and rivets a reader’s attention? What compels someone to keep reading? Most importantly, where does one find such a creature?

There are famous ones aplenty:

“124 was spiteful.”  Beloved by Toni Morrison

“Reveille was sounded, as always, at 5 a.m.—a hammer pounding on a rail outside camp HQ.”  one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“Not while, but long after he had told me” “Each Bird Walking” by Tess Gallagher

“It was a brilliant day, and instead of going straight home from school, Pearl dawdled.”  The Amazing Bone by William Steig

“The girl sits on the hard ground” “Photograph of the Girl” by Sharon Olds

“He means, I think, there’s an out” “Door to the River” by Mark Doty

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” Their Eyes Were Watching God by Nora Neale Hurston

“The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.” Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

“You have broken the path of the dragonfly” “Pearls” by Rita Dove

“Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. Waiting by Ha Jin

Who wouldn’t continue reading?! But I want to propose that instead of starting from the idea of what catches at the reader’s curiosity and imagination, we should start with what captures the writer. Inspiration comes from a kind of startle, a recognition that has just arrived. We follow it like children after the ice cream cart. It entices, lures us to want more, ask more, imagine more. Our hook is also what will hook the reader. What is the phrase, image, question, clarity, or reversal that instantly arrives in our minds and takes us headlong into our writing?

It’s true that as we write we may create the hook that will work for the reader, often embedding it within initial drafts, and have to search it out later. But the impetus for the writer begins with what grabs the writer’s focus and creates the spark of excitement that propels each of us down the pathways of our pages. Whatever shows up, write it down raw, in its original state. Don’t try to iron it out or make it what you think it’s supposed to be. The sudden flash speaks volumes, with depth, mystery, and emotional complexity. Listen for the charge of excitement in a waiting story or the nascent bud of a poem. Your urge to write it down is what will compel a reader to also feel the tug and pull toward all the following words.

Upcoming Events

Writing Beyond the Academy: Scholarship as Storytelling.

Join me online, July 7 – 13, 2024, to write freely, in your genre, your voice, with your experiments from facts, memory or imagination. Leave the curriculum and publishing pressures behind. How do you create metaphor, lyricism, and plot in scholarly work?

I follow the Amherst Writers & Artists Workshop Method closely. Every writer is treated with respect and all writing is treated as art and separate from the writer. I offer writing prompts, not assignments. We listen acutely for what uniquely engages and surprises the reader.

Sunday – Saturday, 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. EDT. Cost $1000. Non-refundable deposit $250.

For more information: maureen@maureenbjones.com   www.writingfulltilt.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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Writer’s look for stories. But just as often stories find us. And sometimes the stories wait within until we have the capacity to let them speak, whether we turn them into memoir or fiction or poem.

The first morning of a trip to visit my sister in California, she looked at me across her kitchen as a deep rumble and hard shake disrupted her sentence. Under the table, she said, and I never questioned. Now we wait. This was not our first time in at the epicenter. Fifty-five years earlier to the day, we had woken in our twin beds as the phone rang and heard our aunt say, I’m so sorry to our mother who was calling. Our younger sister had died from leukemia after being diagnosed three months earlier.

As we crouched under the table, I don’t know if either one of us thought of that long ago moment, but the body memory was there of holding together when the world tilts. When the earthquake subsided, we went ahead with our plan to drive to Ventura. We walked to the pier and along the length of the boardwalk, headed up into Ventura center, walking for hours. Back at the car, I realized my 3”x 4” slide wallet was gone. We retraced every step. Several shop keepers took my name and phone number. I called the Ventura police and left a message. I cancelled my two credit cards. I couldn’t accept the loss, my identity and stability swept away. The odds of finding it: nil. I have tried to accept the truth that nothing stays the same, and to ride the thudding boulders of grief. I thought I knew this insistent and displacing lesson. Every time I feel loss, I look up and my sister’s eyes are waiting, clear blue, the light steady and penetrating.

We drove back to my sister’s house. I called my daughter, told her the story, and asked her to mail my passport so I could fly home. As we talked, she suggested I check Instant Messenger, which I never use. I did. There I was looking back at myself from my driver’s license photo. Is this you? We drove back to the Ventura Pier the next morning, and there was a young man waiting with my wallet. I had dropped it on the pier, and he had walked along the boardwalk calling my name.

A circle of losing and searching and finding, of being willing to let go and learning what to hold onto: my older sister, Caroline, and my younger sister, Colleen. We find ourselves because we find one other. Stories find us whether we ask for them or not. What we writers do with them is our choice. We have the tools and the skill to turn a set of facts into a life lived on the page filled with metaphor and meaning. We carry our steps into shared arrival.

Upcoming Events

Writing Beyond the Academy: Scholarship as Storytelling.

Join me online, July 7 – 13, 2024, to write freely, in your genre, your voice, with your experiments from facts, memory or imagination. Leave the curriculum and publishing pressures behind. How do you create metaphor, lyricism, and plot in scholarly work?

I follow the Amherst Writers & Artists Workshop Method closely. Every writer is treated with respect and all writing is treated as art and separate from the writer. I offer writing prompts, not assignments. We listen acutely for what uniquely engages and surprises the reader.

Sunday – Saturday, 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. EDT. Cost $1000. Non-refundable deposit $250.

For more information: maureen@maureenbjones.com   www.writingfulltilt.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

Prompt Photo

Here we are just entering the small touch of the new year’s light. And yet, the skies and our creative spirits can still hold gloom. It’s hard to believe in the spark of ideas when we feel closed in. So what can we do in the dark? What flicker can we find to keep us inspired? We can go further in and further in toward what illuminates us from inside out.

The James Webb Telescope is sailing the galaxy. Farther and farther, out and out, its mirrors asking the stars to show themselves by the light they created billions of years ago. The telescope is sending us images of galaxies, clusters, and nebulae that had a presence in creating what we now know as the universe. These images are telling us about ourselves, the time and place we inhabit in reference to before we arrived.  

Isn’t that how our own inspiration arrives? Our lives are a multitude of sensory, emotional, and intellectual experiences all stored within us and informing our memories and imaginations. We can sit in subdued winter, waiting for the sun to rise earlier and set later, or we can let our inner wing span spread, voyaging into the deepest dark like the James Webb Telescope. That interior universe holds a multitude of sparks: a face across a table, a spoonful of cookie batter, a voice that jangles the nerves, fingers tangled in a shoelace, a dab of motor oil, a last pill, the smell of salt marshes, or sleet pinging the side of car. Any one of these or a billion, billion other specifics are reflections of moments that turn into questions about what matters, and why anything catches our attention and causes us to wonder. 

Our internal galaxies are vast and deep. Sending our own telescopes to search out the flickers, the black holes, the nebulae, and the dying suns will give infinite material to fill the staring pages of a winter afternoon.

Upcoming Events

Writing Beyond the Academy: Scholarship as Storytelling.

Join me online, July 7 – 13, 2024, to write freely, in your genre, your voice, with your experiments from facts, memory or imagination. Leave the curriculum and publishing pressures behind. How do you create metaphor, lyricism, and plot in scholarly work?

I follow the Amherst Writers & Artists Workshop Method closely. Every writer is treated with respect and all writing is treated as art and separate from the writer. I offer writing prompts, not assignments. We listen acutely for what uniquely engages and surprises the reader.

Sunday – Saturday, 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. EDT. Cost $1000. Non-refundable deposit $250.

For more information: maureen@maureenbjones.com   www.writingfulltilt.com

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Critique: borrowed from French, borrowed from Latin critica, borrowed from Greek kritiké: discerning, capable of judging. What does it mean to be capable of judging the art of writing?

In college I was given an assignment to choose a writer I did not like and write a critique of a poem, essay, or short story. I chose the English poet and satirist Alexander Pope. I dislike him primarily for his misogyny. As I studied his writing, however, I saw his craft. We have him to thank for Fools rush in where angels fear to tread; To err is human, to forgive divine, and Hope springs eternal. I despise his opinions but admire his genius with language.

A friend of mine wallpapered her living room with patterned paper. It wouldn’t have mattered if she had used plain white, the result would have been just as disastrous. Everyone who came into the room immediately saw the flaws, how the pattern didn’t match up, the bubbles at the edges, the slightly askew alignment of the strips. Everyone and anyone could identify what was wrong with the job. It did not take an expert to see what was wrong. I once worked for a professional painter and wallpaper hanger, mostly cleaning brushes and doing prep work. I watched the careful application of glue then “booking” a strip of paper by folding the ends in to meet the middle and letting it rest before beginning to hang the strip. And I learned that hanging patterned wallpaper doesn’t start at the corner. I watched an expert paper around the windows and doorways with diagonal cuts and work away from the light.

What does wall paper have to do with Alexander Pope? The art of critiquing is not to find all the ‘errors.’ It is to notice what is going on, both what is successful and what is not successful. From both my experiences of examining Pope’s work and watching a master wallpaper hanger, I learned that almost anyone can find mistakes. It doesn’t take a lot of skill to notice when something is out of whack. But it does take skill to recognize when something contains precision, balance, lyricism, exacting care, and achieves a masterful effect. We call a well wallpapered room seamless because the seams are invisible except to those who know the craft. We call a powerful poem timeless because we are still quoting it today. A useful critique is based on knowing the craft and then knowing how to deliver that knowledge so it can be used, not to claim authority over someone else’s work, but to share knowledge so the writer as artist can add to their repertoire of skills. A good critique ends with every writer inspired by what can happen next.

Join Me For Five Days Of Writing!

February Writing Retreat in Malibu! Two spaces available: February 12 – 16, 2024. The hills overlooking Malibu Bay are the perfect setting for a writing getaway. Bring your already-started or your not-yet-begun writing ideas! All writers are welcome, no matter the genre, no matter the level of experience. For more information: maureen@maureenbjones.com https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/

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