Author, Editor of Memoir & Narrative Nonfiction
I have been traveling for days, one day on the train, a late night in the new place, a full day exploring, and then back to the train. It’s been a demanding schedule and not particualrly conducive to evenings of reflective writing for my website.…
I’ve begun again sojourning through Europe searching for the final pieces to complete my new book. It feels different now than it did on my first journey to discover my parents’ trail through Europe, which they made right after World War Two. That trip of…
I know these Hills. I have lived amongst the people of the Sandhills for over 50 years; criss-crossed this land on back roads no more than sand ruts covering thousands of miles, not a person in sight; and written a book about this ecosystem that was published by St. Martin’s Press (Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills, 1996).
I can tell you one simple fact. These hills are made of sand; they are porous. Whatever you pour onto them moves quickly through the sand and into the water table. That water table is the Ogallala Aquifer, a huge lake of water embedded in sediments below the Hills, ancient water, pure water, water that fuels the lives of people in seven states, water that attracts and sustains birds and waterfowl from all along the great Central Flyway.
The Sandhills are almost 20,000 square miles of unbroken prairie, treeless, elegant, pocked with hundreds of transient lakes, thanks to the remarkably high water table. The Ogallala Aquifer.
I know these hills, and to have a foreign corporation (TransCanada) tell people of the Sandhills that they are going to run a pipeline filled with Tar Sands oil across their land to refineries in Texas, a pipeline that will inevitably leak oil onto the Sandhills, so that that oil can be shipped overseas is simply unacceptable. It goes against everything we know to be true: you don’t take the land of US citizens for the profit of a foreign corporation, and you don’t mess with the Ogallala Aquifer.
Here’s the thing: the writing pours out of me in this old pirate ship of a cabin. I am pushing the arc of the narrative closer and closer to being a complete book manuscript. I never could have forseen this story. It has given itself…
Family. Home. What is left after parents are gone and you set out to find your life in the terrain that opens around you? I have returned for my annual writing retreat at The Big Six Country Club, our family cabin in the Sandhills of…
I’m finally settling in to my Santa Fe life, and loving it. As I unpack boxes each day I think about the manuscript I am working on and it mixes in with the manuscripts I read and edit for my clients—wonderful, brave stories of people in the trenches of life finding solutions, revealing their vulnerabilities, seeking understanding.
Today I finished up a 100 pages of a novel. The writer is a natural at creating scenes and dialogue that are so believable I watch the story like a movie in my head—hear it, laugh with the characters, hold my breath when problems rise. But one craft concern haunted the text, and it’s something we all need to be concerned with as writers, of fiction or narrative nonfiction. Are your characters believable?
It’s a common question you hear in writing circles, but what does it really mean? Do you buy their behavior? one might say. I can remember my teacher at Iowa saying: “Has the character earned it?” In other works has the author done the work to bring the character sufficiently to life for the reader to keep believing the unfolding action is plausible?
In this manuscript I read today I liked the narrator, and yet, there was not enough back story upfront in the book to allow the reader to fully believe the character’s actions. Why would he do that? I kept asking myself.
It is the job of the writer to fill in enough of the back story so the reader never questions the narrator. And yet, we do not want too much. There is a perfect balance, and no matter whether we are writing fiction or memoir we have to find the balance between not telling enough about how and why the narrator came to behave the way he does, and telling too much, and stall forward movement of the story.
Such are the fleeting thoughts of an editor between boxes . . .
I’m back in my home in Santa Fe following my teaching gig at the Yale conference. (Here’s the view from my front door the first morning I woke up in my house!) And now I am getting on to the business of being a…
What a heady week it was. My class on Memoir Writing at Yale was so big it overflowed the assigned room and we had to move across the street to an auditorium: Sudler Auditorium in Harkness Hall which is very near Sterling Memorial Library, the…
April 17, 2010
I am sitting in a wifi cafe in Florence. These are not nearly as common in Italy as in America.
I am freezing.
I had forgotten how cold cities constructed of ancient stone can be. They retain the cold, reflect the cold. I am wearing layers and still chilled to the core.
I’m supposed to rave about the sites of Europe, right? But the fact is traveling is full of minor inconveniences that often become so big they don’t seem minor—like I’m so cold I can’t get warm even under four blankets and a quilt at the hotel, i.e. a convent turned hotel. That translates into centuries of old stone, cold old stone.
A high point though is the garden, a square of pristine quietude in the heart of the city, wisteria vines tangled above walks, trunks the size of trees, blooms hanging low perfuming the gentle green of an early Florentine spring . . .
April 15, 2010 I sat for an hour in the Sistine Chapel today. I have been there before, and I felt blessed to be back a second time. It is a place people visit once if they are lucky. I have been doubly lucky. My…
Click here to read my latest blog post about Owning Your Story.
What I learned when the last of my family died . . .