Category Archives: writing process

What’s In a Name

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Juliet might have said, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but in the writing world titles matter.

Yet, up to now, I’ve been pretty blasé with my titles. Sometimes I can come up with a good title that adds some extra layers or a bit of wit, but when I can’t do that easily I often resort to something that’s succinct and just descriptive enough without giving away the store. And even then, I haven’t spent as much time as I might on a line of prose or poetry to make sure I’ve gotten exactly the words I want.

Maybe this is because I’m not that much of a title-reader. I often jump right to the first line to see if that draws me in.

But I’ve recently learned that if you send a poetry or short-story manuscript, editors will make snap judgments on the titles in your Table of Contents before they read a word of your prose. It’s a marketing world out there, and much as I might hate that, titles can be another form of clickbait. So, as I’m slogging through revisions for 30 Poems in November, I’m giving a bit more attention to titles and changing more of them than I usually do.

Poem #1: Becoming is now Evolution. Poem #5: The Answer is now Chasing Asclepias. Poem #13: Characteristics of Life is now Impossible Hope. Poem #27: In This Letter… is now In This Bottled Letter Bobbing in the Sea… And Poem #17: Family History is now Stick Figures on the Fascist Horizon.

I did have a few poems whose initial titles I liked as is: Van Gogh and Power Outages; Seeking the Moon; Fathers, Plants, Birds; I Am More than Seeds; and What Keeps Me Sane During Insane Times. As well as one I can’t take credit for because it was given in the prompt: Poem Set in the Present Moment Featuring My Mother’s Voice. 

Most of the rest of my 30 Poems in November titles are okay, but definitely on the mediocre side of okay. Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with a few more improvements–and I’ll make that a point for any I’m serious about and might want to put in a manuscript.

As for the rest, I hope there are other people like me out there who ignore the titles and jump right into the words.

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Leaning into the Unexpected

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Yesterday, at around 8:30 am, my partner, Shel, and I left Las Vegas, Nevada en route to Death Valley, a 2.5 hour drive. We arrived 8 hours later.

No, we did not have traffic or car trouble. And, in all fairness, we did have a couple of stops planned that we guessed would add two more hours to the trip. But the other four hours? Chalk it up to seizing the opportunities that the moments presented.

The first interruption came when we still in Vegas, on our way to load up on groceries at Trader Joe’s. This was one of our two planned stops–since we were told that Death Valley was a food desert as well as a physical one. Shel suddenly told me that instead of eating some of the food we’d brought from home (or that we were about to buy from Trader Joe’s) he’d really love to have breakfast in a down-home Mexican restaurant that catered to the local community. So when we passed this diner, we had to stop!

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

One large dish of guacamole, accompanied by one burrito, five plantains, and countless chips later (approximately an hour after schedule) we climbed back in our car and pushed on.

We were reasonably quick at Trader Joe’s, stocking up on our general staples (cereal, yogurt, hummus, bread, peanut butter, cheese)–and dithering only a bit in figuring out which produce would keep best and locating the hard-to-find chocolate almond biscotti, and may have made up some of the time we spent on breakfast. I was feeling pretty hopeful when we got in the car and saw it was only 90 minutes to Shoshone, CA, our next planned stop. If all went well, we’d arrive sometime between noon and 12:30, perfect for lunch at the Crow Bar Saloon, which had been recommended by a friend as the only good food in the area. We also hoped to take a quick dip in one of the local hot-springs before driving the last hour into the park, arriving well before darkness made it hard to see where we were going.

We had driven about two miles and were finally out of Vegas and on the open road when Shel saw the sign for Red Rock Canyon National Park. “Let’s stop,” he said.

I reminded him that we’d been there on our last trip 11 years ago when we’d driven from Las Vegas to the National Parks in Utah and hadn’t found it that impressive.

“But it’s gorgeous right now!” he insisted.

I couldn’t argue. The scenery was absolutely stunning. We agreed on a short stop. Thirty minutes just to walk around and soak it in.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

An hour and a half later we were on the road, though not at all disappointed that we’d tarried as long as we had, for the privilege of getting up close and personal with the rocks. Now we were scheduled to arrive at Shoshone at 2, which reset to 2:15 after a gas and bathroom stop. We took a brief sweep of the eclectic one-room local museum, and ate a hearty late lunch at the Crow Bar, but alas, there would be no time for hot springs. It was 3:30, the sun was already sinking pretty low in the sky, and we had an hour more to go.

The light was quickly fading by the time we arrived at our lodgings in Death Valley. As we got out of the car, we snapped pictures of the last smidgeons of sunset.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

And by the time we were done checking in, we had to find our parking area, our building, and unload all the suitcases in the dark. But, whatever! We had no problem with the driving and we had an amazing day!

As I thought about this story–a very typical one for us, as our children will be first to grumpily attest–I recognized how important leaning into the unexpected has also been for me in my writing process. In first draft free-writing, my mind often makes sharp U-turns or veers off the road entirely. And while I may not even understand why I’m making the association, it’s often those odd connections that lead me into the juicier more important places. And even in revision, I’ve sometimes found that breaking open a piece that isn’t working and going off in an entirely different direction can help me ultimately find my way back home.

I do feel a bit sad that we didn’t go to the hot springs. But we’ll go on our way back to Las Vegas. Or we won’t–but at least, that’s the plan!

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30 Poems, Now What?

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After writing 30 poems during the past six Novembers, my December project is always to clean them up before sending them all–the good, the unfinished, and the hopeless–to the people who have so generously donated to this fundraiser to support the Center for New Americans.

Center for New Americans: cnam.org

I wrote about this process last year in a post called Poem Wrestling, but each year, I come to the table with a bit more learning, and also more compassion for myself as I work on shedding the egotistic aura of perfectionism and the numerous ways it sabotages my life. So what, if someone reads a not well rendered poem of mine and thinks badly of me or my writing abilities. I’m a big girl. I can handle it.

If I’m taking the time to revise these poems, it shouldn’t be out of preserving some image of myself whose truth is already questionable. Instead, revising should involve getting down dirty with each poem and asking myself, as Northampton Poet Laureate Franny Choi said so succinctly and enigmatically in a recent workshop I attended, what does the poem want?

And there is little that gives me more joy than when a poem bursts open into exciting new directions I had never anticipated, or when I can see in a pile of mud, a glint of a hidden sparkling stone that needs to be excavated and polished.

But enabling poems to find those pathways to self-realization can be difficult, especially when there are 30 of them that were quickly drafted.

Here’s what has helped me:

First, I read through all 30 and sort them into three categories which I label: Close (has integrity but could use tweaking), Medium (there’s something here, but still needs substantial work) and Mess (which means either huh? or yuck! depending on how self-deprecating I’m feeling that day).

Then, for each work-shift, I try to work on one poem from each category, reading through a few until I find one that appeals at the moment. For those in the Close pile, I read the poem out loud and listen for jarring word rhythms to eliminate and sounds that resonate. Then I pick through, taking out words that feel prosaic and flat, or images that feel worn and tired. I especially look at where I can replace a common verb with a stronger more evocative one, and if there are places I can substitute a word with a different number of syllables or slightly different sound to keep the internal “music” more consistent.

For a poem in the Medium category, I will eventually do all of the above, but first I’ll ask myself which parts are the sparkling rocks and which parts are mud trying to disguise itself as a sparkling rock. I’ll often chop off sections, and then add to the sections remaining to see if that brings me closer to what the poem wants. 

The poems in the Mess category are the hardest to work with. These are the ones I’d likely toss if I hadn’t made the pledge to send all 30 poems to my funders. And often, I will file them in my Inactive archive after the whole process is complete. But sometimes a poem in this category just needs to emerge. For these poems, I first try to ask myself what the poem is really about, or remember what I was trying to say when I wrote it. Then, I look at what’s on the page and see which parts help reflect that message. I cut out all the parts that don’t seem relevant, (perhaps saving some of the images I might like for future poems) and start with what’s left. More times than I’d expect, I manage to rescue these poems once I’ve cut out the prose-laden, irrelevant and didactic places, and then continued revising according to the steps above.

Of course, my piles are fluid and sometimes a poem I first peg as Close gets demoted to Medium or even Mess. But this is counterbalanced by the Mess poems that eventually end up in the Close poems.

Does anything ever get finished? I’ll probably keep revising stuff until I die, but eventually poems fall into an additional category of Good Enough, and I offer them for publication.

And regardless, at the end of December, I send all 30 poems to my audience of funders, shoving aside any residual embarrassment. My revision process is effective enough that most of the poems by then are in the Close or Good Enough categories, with a few stragglers still in Medium and Mess. Most people don’t read all the poems, anyway, and I’m totally fine with that, giving them blanket permission to peruse or ignore. Life is short. We all have a lot to do.

And out of the 150 poems I started during these 30-poem Novembers between 2019 and 2023, 32 have been published. So, I guess someone somewhere also thought they were Good Enough. 

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FINDING VOICE

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The night after the election, instead of doing my regular piano practicing, I sat down with Rise Up Singing and played John Lennon’s Imagine. It’s become my anthem. Then I went through the entire book, and played a whole bunch of songs that give voice to hope–even if hope is so wispy right now, it’s hard to find enough to lift myself out of bed every morning.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

I played Let it Be, Love Call Me Home, The Rose, If We Only Had Love, and How Can I Keep from Singing.

And I sang along.

I’ve been struggling with vocal issues during the past couple of years, which has made singing difficult. But I’m now taking voice lessons and it has been thrilling to start recovering my singing voice. When I can sing without losing my breath or croaking into raspy-ness, I feel giddy with power.

And these things feel like what I need right now–giddiness, and, at least, a flicker of power.

In the writing world we talk a lot about finding or accessing one’s own writing voice. It can often take months or years before we find our “groove,” a way of expression that feels uniquely our own.

And in writing, our voice can change over the years as we experiment with new and different approaches. As in singing, we might at times lose our voice (writers’ block) for a while before we find it again.

Let’s trust that even in this very difficult and scary time we will find our voices and use them to speak our truths.

And let’s keep holding onto the vision of Imagine.

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Spiders and Rocks and Poems, Oh My!

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Once again, I’ve signed up to write 30 Poems in November to benefit the Center for New Americans, which provides English classes and many other types of advocacy for immigrants here in western Mass. And once again, as October draws to a close, I’m feeling that trepidation of adding one more item to my to-do list, wondering how I’m ever going to churn out 30 poems in a month–even poems that are unfinished and far less than stellar.

It hasn’t helped that my writing life has slowed to a crawl. Paperwork related to my father-in-law’s death, last minute election volunteering, putting the garden to bed, health issues with relatives, the Jewish holidays, my grandchild’s birthday, editing deadlines, and a flurry of visits with friends and family have made it hard to get to my desk as often and regularly as I’d like. Even this blog post–which I usually aim for mid-week–is late. (I just got a warning post from SubStack, letting me know that I had only two more days to fulfill my pledge of blogging weekly, LOL!)

But one of the things I love about writing 30 Poems in November is that permission to slow down. To make writing practice front and center again.

I find I’m most successful at birthing poems when I can be out of my to-do list and into what I think of as the fuzzier part of my brain. Then, I just let the pen flow and the words come–sometimes easily, and sometimes with a bit of effort, but the trick, for me, is not to try too hard to construct *a poem* as much as let myself sense what I’m sensing and free associate from there. And from that pile of words, I can often sift through and find the gems, threading my path forward.

The hardest part is to let the chaff fall away–the distractions, the judgment– and let myself fall into the “wow” of whatever is underneath all that detritus.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

And lately, when I need lessons in falling into the sensual wonder of discovery, I get them from my two-year-old grandchild Manu. Recently, he’s been entranced with the abundant display of Halloween decorations in his neighborhood: the furry spiders perched on the hedges, the life-sized dragon with the blinking red eyes, the pumpkin faces, the creepy hands sticking out of the ground, the lanterns hanging from the trees.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

Every day, he asks to see the dragon and the spiders. He takes his time, exclaiming, Oh, there’s another spider! before rushing over to investigate and dig his little hands into the fur.

 

After the “spider house,” we go next door to the Japanese rock garden, where he watches the brightly colored fish, and rains handfuls of small, cool rocks, listening to the pleasing sound they make when they hit the ground.

Poems are everywhere. Hopefully, some will come to me this November.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

And yes, please consider contributing to my fundraising page for this worthy cause. No donation is too small! Many thanks. Happy Halloween and Happy November!

 

New Year’s Musings: Forgiveness and Aspirations

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For the past five years, I’ve done a self-reflective practice during the month of Elul, the 29 days preceding the Jewish New Year (which we celebrated on October 2-4 this year) where I focus intensely on my aspirations for the coming year, as well as my current short-comings, places where I’ve “missed the mark” in who I want to be as a person. During that month, I try to journal more than I usually do, often in response to inspirational readings and self-reflective questions I find on on-line, or books written by spiritual leaders in various traditions.

Cathryn Lavery cathrynlavery, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

What comes through loud and clear, no matter how much (or how little) I journal, or what I choose to read, is that forgiveness—especially self-forgiveness–lies at the heart of personal growth. Even when I may be regretting something I’ve done that may have hurt someone else, and feel compelled to ask their forgiveness, I find that I can’t let the incident go until I’ve forgiven myself.

Forgiveness is a hallmark of many faith traditions, but even those of us who don’t follow a strict religious path (and I include myself in that category as a mostly secular Jew), can incorporate it into our personal growth plan. In fact, forgiveness can be kryptonite to the nudgy inner judge. What would our lives be like if every time that nasty voice reared its ugly head with some critical, self-deprecating comment, you simply answered by smiling and saying, yes, but I’ve forgiven myself for this.

The flip side of forgiveness is aspirations. When I went through old papers a few weeks ago, in attempt to create a more sacred space (while practicing forgiving myself for my messiness!) I was touched to find a journal entry from the past secular New Year in January. I wrote:

I was (am) a writer who is setting even deeper roots in a community of writers. The past year brought out that it is ok to be successful. That I have a voice that matters. That others have a voice that matters. That it’s important to me to nurture other people’s voices as well as my own. I value community. I stand for expression and an artistic standard that I would like to encourage others to reach for, and what I would like to keep improving in myself. I want to communicate what deeply matters—to humans, and to the world. My writing is now central to my life. It is what I am.

I followed this with a list of wishes. Some were pie-in-the-sky, like getting a story from Immigrants optioned into a movie. Others were possible, but not likely to happen, such as getting an agent who believed in me and my work and saw it as more than a commodity. But what stood out was this:

My biggest hope was to be taken seriously by everyone as a real writer whose craft is at standard and whose art and messages matter. I would like to be seen by others as a person of integrity and depth whose words and perspectives matter.

This is my New Year’s wish for all of you–in whatever you do. May your words, images, music, movement, actions, thoughts and perspectives matter.

Shanah Tovah!

 

Lying and Storytelling

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A few weeks ago, after the presidential debate, I was inspired to write about the topic of lying. And last night, I couldn’t help but thinking about the slickness with which Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance shamelessly delivered lie after lie after lie, complaining when corrected by moderators, that “they weren’t supposed to fact-check.”

And if you didn’t have the facts, it would be totally easy to be lured into Vance’s narrative, due to his polished, smooth delivery. He delivered his untruths so confidently, it left me wondering whether Vance believed his own narrative.

And this, I think, is a good lesson for fiction writers–even if the “lies” (which I’d prefer to call “stories” in this context are not intended to do harm or be taken as factual. Writer John Gardener in The Art of Fiction writes about the importance of creating “a continuous unbroken dream” where the reader is totally ensconced in whatever reality the writer has created–kind of like a virtual reality experience that’s dependent on words, rather than 3-D classes.

And to do that, you as a writer need–to some extent–to believe in your own narrative, to present it with complete and unshakable confidence.

How do we do that? Here are a couple of things to think about.

DETAILS: In an episode of Young Sheldon, Georgie tells his out-of-sync genius younger brother that lying well involves details. You’ve got to add enough heft to make the story stand on its own. Take a random subject-verb-object sentence (i.e. The spider crawled on the corn) and let us see, hear, taste, touch and smell the action as you relay it. Note: This involves more than adding adjectives, too many of which can easily weigh a sentence down. It can often involve just adding a couple of well-chosen words, or adding another sentence or two before or after to increase the stakes and add more context.

APPEAL TO EMOTION: Many of Vance’s falsehoods last night were clearly designed to arouse anger. And while in this context, this was a manipulative attempt to sway people’s votes, for our fiction to be successful, we often need people to engage emotionally by empathizing with our characters and the situations they are facing. This means we need to work hard to create believable and fully developed characters who are sympathetic and realistic, despite whatever flaws they might have.

KNOW WHERE YOUR PLOT IS GOING: I laughed as I typed these words because I’m often not sure where my plot is going until my second or third draft. But once I do know, I cut out the tangents that weigh my stories down. Last night I was both amazed and horrified about how Vance made Kamala Harris, or immigrants, or both, the villains in nearly every lie he told–a move that was clearly plotted in advance.

When I’m in my writing groove, I believe in my own narratives, even as I know they have no factual foundation, and even as, like many politicians, I might flip-flop on the details of their creation. But whatever changes my characters go through can be attributed to my getting to know them better, or their choosing to reveal more of themselves to me. Ultimately, the details, the characters, the plot are all there as props for me to reveal my truth–or my lie, if I choose. But in this context, I always choose my truth.

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Mattering and the Power of Witnessing

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Writing is easy, you sit at the typewriter, open a vein and bleed.

Paul_012, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

My aim in writing has always been to get to a deeper, grittier place, beyond the personal into some universal but often unspoken experience. Yet, getting to the central core of rawness isn’t easy. I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve looked at an unfinished poem or piece of fiction and said to myself, “Push!” a process that feels as difficult as giving birth.

And at least when one gives birth, there’s a baby at the end of the effort. With creatives, the labor continues—the question of what lies behind the next edge continuing to linger as we try to reach deeper layers of mattering.

It’s important to realize that despite these efforts, sometimes our creative expression won’t be easily discernible—or even appropriate—for an outside audience. Occasionally I write “private poems” solely for my own cathartic release in lancing some emotional clot.

Yet, having gentle, loving witnesses can enhance and deepen our creative confidence—as long as they stay in the role of witnesses, not judges. When a witness tells me what they liked or noticed, they tap into that shared place I’m reaching for and let me know that my words touched them—and mattered.

If you’ve never shared your art, music, dancing, writing, etc. with other people, or only had bad experiences because the people you shared it with gave you unsolicited and unhelpful criticism, I recommend finding someone who understands the difference between witnessing and judging. (Note: I’m not against and fully aware of the benefits of constructive criticism, but judging is a different process from witnessing, which should be done at a time when the creator is asking for and expecting it.)

There are many community writing and other creative-based class settings that use a witnessing framework. For dancers–or for anyone who simply likes to move–Authentic Movement is built on the model of mover/neutral observer.

If classes don’t appeal, find a friend you trust—perhaps someone who’s also engaged in something creative where you can both share the roles of creator and witness. Remind each other to keep comments to what you liked and/or noticed, and then bask in their affirmation that yes, indeed, you matter.