Chip's Writing Lessons #48
IN THIS ISSUE
Writers Speak | Frederick Manfred on the glee of hitting a wall
Interview | 4 Questions with Nancy Ludmerer
Craft Lesson | Under my feet: why writers should walk
Writing to Savor | “Her Time” by Katie Engelhart
Tip of the Week | Where credit is due: avoiding plagiarism
WRITERS SPEAK
“I rub my hands in glee whenever I hit a wall in my manuscript and I don’t know where to go next. There’s a damn good reason why: it’s something I don’t want to look at. If I can push through and get into that area, I’ll find something not only about myself, but something that may be of real value to someone else. And inadvertently, everything you need, the theme, the plot, will jump out at you as you go along.”
— Frederick Manfred
INTERVIEW | 4 QUESTIONS WITH NANCY LUDMERER
Nancy Ludmerer has fiction in Kenyon Review, Carve (where her story “A Simple Case” was the fiction winner of Carve’s 2019 Prose & Poetry Contest), Electric Literature, the Saturday Evening Post, Litro and other places. Her flash fiction has been reprinted in Best Small Fictions, translated into Spanish and read aloud on NPR-affiliated radio. Most recently, her flash fiction received an honorable mention in Gemini Magazine’s annual flash contest and first prize in Streetlight Magazine’s contest. Longer stories have won prizes from Masters Review and Pulp Literature and will appear in Spring 2021. Her short memoir “Kritios Boy” (Literal Latte) was cited as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2014. She practiced law for more than 30 years before turning to writing full time. She lives in NYC.
Nancy Ludmerer doing the crossword with Sandy
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
Over the past year or more I have shifted from writing mostly flash fiction to longer works. During this time, I have worked with a wonderful fiction writer and writing coach, Karen Bender. When I show Karen a story, she often asks me a series of questions. Why am I telling the story? What’s important to me about it? Where does it come from? What’s at stake for the characters? Sometimes I can’t answer these questions at the time. Sometimes it takes weeks or months to get to an answer. There is no magic, only hard work. But when I finally get there, the story will begin to come to life.
What’s been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
I.B. Singer described art as escape: “a means of forgetting the human disaster for a while.” In the past I’ve escaped through reading, but not writing, which always seemed too hard and deliberate to be a way of forgetting anything. Recently, though, in the midst of the pandemic, my husband and I had to say good-bye to our beloved cat Sandy. The guilt and regret I experienced afterwards was worst at night, when I couldn’t fall asleep, or when I woke up at 3 a.m., heart pounding. I found that if I focused on the short story I was drafting, writing new scenes in my head, it helped. This is different from my usual writing process, in which I sit down to write with a purpose or plan, whether working on a scene, starting a new one, deepening a character, etc. Writing fiction is generally not an escape for me (I’d probably take a walk or a nap to escape from the writing!) so I was surprised and gratified to discover it could be.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer what would it be?
How about an egg? Specifically, a double-yolker: when a chicken releases two yolks into the same shell. Sometimes the hen is a young, inexperienced egg-producer; sometimes she’s near the end of her reproductive life; I feel like both at times. Then there’s the doubling in my writing: dual story lines, doppelgangers, and twins. I’ve been fascinated since childhood with doubling. My favorite classic was The Prince and the Pauper; my favorite movies and TV shows featured twins or identical cousins; my most-loved doggerel poem was Henry S. Leigh’s The Twins, which my dad and I would recite together until dissolving in laughter at the final verse: “And when I died the neighbors came and buried brother John.” I have a yet-to-be-published chapbook (essays and flash fictions) called Some Things Happen Twice. The effect of this metaphor on my writing (and life) is double-edged: it can foster indecision and regret, but is also about trying doubly-hard to get things right.
What’s the best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
Many years ago, I took a writing workshop at my local YMCA with Sonia Pilcer. Sonia assigned weekly prompts and, on the first day, wrote on the blackboard: WRITE. WRITE STUPID. WRITE UGLY. WRITE. Along with Sonia’s advice, the number of stories required in week-long intensives led by terrific teachers like Nancy Zafris and Pam Painter (who sometimes demanded two stories a night), dispelled the notion that you must produce something good every time. I still find it nerve-wracking to be among a new group of writers, especially writing to prompts. What will they think? But I cling to that initial advice. Writing is a craft you get better at by doing, even doing badly.
CRAFT LESSON | UNDER MY FEET: WHY WRITERS SHOULD WALK
I rise before dawn and dress in the dark, so as not to wake my dog. This is my time. I dress for the weather, step outside and begin my morning walk. A while ago, I slipped on a rain-slicked sidewalk and banged my big toe. It wasn’t broken, but seven days went by before I could walk without pain. I felt like an addict in search of a fix.
Healed now, I power walk for an hour through my tree-shrouded neighborhood, swinging my arms high, as the sidewalks under my feet pass in a blur. Some mornings I listen to podcasts or audiobooks, but the best times are when I shut off everything but my mind. As the house, gardens and yards on either side disappear in a blur, I think about stories—those I’m working on, dreaming about writing or stuck on. As the sun begins to rise, sentences sometimes take new shape. Puzzling leads tease their way to fluency.
During the day, more leisurely walks also furnish opportunities for inspiration as my dog, Leo, leads me along the alleys that crisscross our neighborhood. Only when I feel a sharp tug on his leash do I realize I’ve been lost in thought; ruminating about pedestrian seeds that someday may germinate a story or help with a bedeviling rewrite.
Walks, many writers have found through the centuries, are fertile drivers of the imagination, summoning forth the stories they want to finish, or the ones they want to start. Walks help writers reconnoiter through all their senses, collecting plots, details and characters as they move through the world.
“Walking, like reading and writing,” says columnist Danny Heitman, “is an unending source of surprise.”
James Joyce was an inveterate walker, roaming the streets of Dublin to map out where Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom went about their lives in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and “Ulysses.”
Virginia Woolf, the English novelist, loved tramping through the Cornish countryside and the Bloomsbury section of London where her literary circle gathered.
Charles Dickens’ legendary long walks—fact-finding missions to soak up the sights, sounds and smells of the streets of gritty 19th century London—usually measured 12 miles a day in two-and-a-half hours, his biographer Peter Ackroyd reports.
“Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing,” science writer Ferris Jabr says in “Why Walking Helps Us Think,” in The New Yorker.
He quotes from Henry David Thoreau’s journal: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”
Methinks he was right.
Science reveals, Jabr says, that changes in our body chemistry explain why walking triggers our imagination. Our heart pumps faster when we walk, sending blood and oxygen not only to our muscles, but all our organs, including the brain.
Among the many health benefits, walking improves our memory and attention, studies show, protecting the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped brain organ critical to remembering.
Regular walks elevate “levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them,” Jabr says. Even mild exertion, like my walks with Leo, studies show, helps with memory and attention.
Since walking doesn’t require much conscious attention, our mind “is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre,” Jabr says. “This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight.”
That was true for Virginia Woolf. In “Moments of Being,” a collection of posthumously published autobiographical essays, Woolf recalled a special journey: One day, “walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, ‘To the Lighthouse,’ in a great, apparently involuntary rush,” an epiphany cited by Rebecca Solnit in “Wanderlust: A History of Walking.”
In “Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking,” Duncan Mishnull has collected 36 testimonies to the literary inspiration that walking provokes.
“In a 1975 reminiscence about New York,” Michael LaPointe wrote in an Atlantic review of the book, “the novelist and essayist Edward Hoagland recalls how he stalked the streets of his hometown, first “to smell the yeasty redolence of the Nabisco factory” and then “to West Twelfth Street to sniff the police stables.”
The author was inhaling the raw stuff that would fuel creativity: “I knew that every mile I walked, the better writer I’d be.”
LaPointe also gives a satisfying summary of the salutary benefits of perambulation from “Walking: One Step at a Time,” by Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge, the first person to have completed the Three Poles Challenge (North, South, and Mount Everest) on foot, as well as underground journeys through the New York City sewer system.
Kagge, who cultivates “inner silence” along the way, says he appreciates “a healthy stretch of [the] legs, a kick of endorphins,” his thoughts “bubbling between my ears, new solutions to questions that have been plaguing me.”
For writers who spend hours sunk into their chairs staring at a screen with an imagination deficit, a good walk, whether fast or slow, may be the best exercise to kick those endorphins into action and get your creative juices flowing.
In a society dependent on cars for transportation and treadmills for exercise, a walk—long or short—gives writers the chance to stretch their imagination. The next time you’re wrestling with a story, or even a single paragraph, pull on your sneakers and go for one.
WRITING TO SAVOR | “HER TIME” BY KATIE ENGELHART, CALIFORNIA SUNDAY MAGAZINE
“Her Time” is a riveting story about a woman with dementia who is determined to end her life, by herself. I had the chance to interview author Katie Engelhart and produce an annotation of the narrative for Nieman Storyboard. The analysis takes readers behind the story of this absorbing excerpt from Engelhart’s new book, “The Inevitable: Dispatches from the Right to Die.” It can be a painful read. But the graying of America has left millions of older Americans suffering from dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and chronic physical and mental illnesses and who are looking for a way to die away from the traditional settings of hospitals, hospices and nursing homes. With six profiles of would-be suicides and doctors committed to the right to die, Engelhart offers a clear-eyes look at the debate and the people caught up in it.
TIP OF THE WEEK | WHERE CREDIT IS DUE: AVOIDING PLAGIARISM
Plagiarism is taking someone else’s words or ideas and passing them off as your own. The first plagiarists stole not words but rather human beings. Using a net, called a “plaga,” they were thieves who made off with another’s child or slave. Now the word means the theft of someone’s writing.
It’s easier than ever to plagiarize. Before computers and scanners, you had to copy someone’s words—by hand or with a typewriter. Now you can lift text verbatim by using the copy and paste functions of your word-processing software. If you’re not careful when you’re doing online research, you may find yourself accused of plagiarism. Like many writers caught using others’ words, you will claim the defense of carelessness or sloppy note-taking. Still, you may get fired or, if you’re lucky, suspended. Here are ways to avoid that fate.
Give credit where crediit is due. Thomas Mallon, author of Stolen Words, an engaging history of plagiarism, says writers should follow a general rule: “If you think you should attribute it, then attribute it.”
The only way you can use a quote from another publication is if you attribute it. (“The mayor is crazy,” Smith told the Daily Blatt.) The need for attribution should be enough to make you realize you should do the interview yourself unless that is impossible. (“The mayor is crazy,” Smith told the Daily Blatt the day before he disappeared.)
Consider using a sidebar or paragraph describing your sources or online links. It’s a positive sign that more news organizations are crediting other publications for information. Some stories point readers to source materials for the story if they wish to pursue the subject further.
Always identify the sources of your information as you are gathering it. If you copy something verbatim, be sure to put it in quotes and identify the page number and source, whether it’s a book or magazine or page on the web. If you are paraphrasing, be sure to include the source. It sounds tedious, but it could save your job, even your career.
Manage your time wisely. Plagiarism is a desperate act. Writers behind on a deadline, exhausted, anxious, may delude themselves into believing that what they’re doing is nothing more than a shortcut.
When in doubt, check with your editor.
The bottom line: Be honest about where you got your information.
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Nulla dies sine linea / Never a day without a line
Black Lives Matter.