Join Morning Seeding & Tending
For a ridiculously low price, do something nice for yourself! Get an accountability group, a warm morning beverage, and time to write.
Hello, friends!
My new Morning Seeding & Tending group has been going strong now for two weeks. Every weekday morning, I open the Zoom Room at 10am ET sharp. I read a prompt, share it on the screen for the next five minutes, and all present yawn their hellos, with cameras on or off. We all type our intentions into the chat, and then we write for an hour.
What do we write? Whatever we want! Some of us are working on ongoing projects—novels, memoir, a collection of poems. Some post updates to their social media to build that all-important “platform.” Some do longhand journaling, others work on their query letters. It’s our time to devote ourselves to the writing parts of our lives.
I have to admit, I was resistant to my own excellent idea for the first few days. What? I have to stop everything at 10am to write? What if I get the sudden urge to, I don’t know, clean out my attic?
Then I noticed. Being present every day for a good hour of writing, I get a lot more done, I see how much clearer my new draft is, and how beautifully this accountability group sets me up for the day’s work.
At 11am, I turn on my camera and so do others, we say a quick farewell. The beauty of this group’s low fee ($50 for the next eight weeks) is that if people miss a few days a week, they’re still getting a good investment on their dollar-to-word count ratio.
Oh, and a very timely time to join since we’re about to enter the wild and wooly and writerly month of November! Doing 30 Poems? I am! (see below). Doing NaNoWriMo? Well…I’m not, but I am working on finishing a novel. In any case, I and this group will support you for your big stretch.
Morning Seeding & Tending: open writing time with no strings attached! All for the price of a weekly latte. Zoom only. Weekly, Monday-Friday 10-11am ET.
November Kali Retreat November 4-6, only two spots left. In person, or Zoom.
30 Poems in November
I hope each of you signs up for this wonderful annual fundraiser for Northampton’s Center for New Americans. As usual, I plan on writing a combo of poems, song fragments, prose poems and, I hope, at least one complete song by the month's end. Either way, I'll be writing in the poetry genre every day of November, and I'll also be exploring the differences between poems and song lyrics. You can sign up here, or if you want to support another poet, say…I don’t know… me, you can do so here.
In my third novel, Pimmit Run, which is currently about halfway drafted, the reader will witness two growing songwriters (siblings Peter and Rhodie Becket) who are developing their art and craft during (what they believe is) the rock and roll wasteland of the 1980s. The songs they are writing are meant to stand on their own, but they are also meant to inform the reader (and themselves) about some of the subtext of the plot and of their own struggles in coming of age, and their overwhelming desire to form a band of their own.
The songs need to form a soundtrack that evolves along with the characters and their growth as artists, their growing understanding of songwriting. The songs should act as mini-texts to give insight into their psyches. That’s the goal, anyway. Or, to quote a long-ago NYTimes critic, the ideal of song in musical theater is to have “no separation at all between song and character, which is what happens in those uncommon moments when musicals reach upward to achieve their ideal reasons to be.” (Ben Brantley, 2008 review of the musical Gypsy).
I’ll be hosting a 30 Poems workshop at Little Blue on Sunday November 20. Stay tuned for updates!
What I’m reading!
13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, by Jane Smiley
This generous book is such a wonderful resource for novelists, and I have been re-reading many sections. In her chapter on novel revision, Smiley writes:
"As you aim for perfection, don't forget that there is no perfect novel, that because every novel is built out of specifics, some cancel out others. For example, it is very hard to achieve both broad and deep. The prime example of deep is, of course Madame Bovary.…" [and also the novels of Henry James]. "James takes very seriously the idea that the unexamined life is not worth living. I may feel strongly that the unlived life is not worth examining, but when I am reading Henry James, I am learning how to examine in greater detail, with more refinement of sensibility.
“....the important thing [about the protagonists of "deep" novels] is not what their feelings mean, but what they are, and whether the reader empathizes with them.
"In the end, novelists who want both broad and deep are constrained by the form of the novel — prose elaborating and elaborating — to go on into multiple volumes, as Proust did. And as length increases, readers get intimidated and works become the property of specialists rather than of the reading public as a whole. Even Tolstoy had to make a choice in Anna Karenina — he had to limit himself to two couples, Anna and Vronski and Levin and Kitty...
"You may prefer broad. If so, you have plenty of company…but your critics are going to complain that your characters are stereotyped, thinly realized. or not very engaging. Some readers are happy to give up depth for pattern and breadth, for the sparkle of the author's vision, wit, and intelligence; others will tar you with the Dickensian brush — your works or not quite refined enough to be truly great, your psychological insights aren't very astute, you deal in types rather than real people, and finally they don't care as much about your characters as they do about the deep ones.
“But broad necessarily makes a pattern and so is intellectual and abstract. Deep necessarily hides the author's theories about psychological causes and effects beneath an illusion unfolding humanity, and so is more emotionally appealing but perhaps not very interesting. Your job is to understand which you want to emphasize and to make the best of the possibilities of that alternative." [Emphasis mine].
-Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, p. 239-241.