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Can spring be far behind? Or, a different happiness

March 22, 2013 — Leave a comment

“A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.” ~ Leo Tolstoy

Ge_TolstoyEveryone is talking about the prolonged winter weather. On this second day after the vernal equinox, with spring break and baseball’s opening day only days away, we are still dealing with icy sidewalks and mounds of frozen, dirty snow. When I woke up yesterday morning and realized that the wind chills were in single digits, the phrase “can Spring be far behind?” came into my mind like a gift, without my bidding. While the poem the words come from, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” is about autumn, the final lines give shape to my current feelings:

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like wither’d leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Last night in class we talked about Tolstoy’s theory of happiness and read sections from his short story/novella “Family Happiness:”

“I often lie awake at night from happiness, and all the time I think of our future life together. I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor—such is my idea of happiness. And then, on the top of all that, you for a mate, and children perhaps—what more can the heart of man desire?”

I was happy; but I took that as a matter of course, the invariable experience of people in our position, and believed that there was somewhere, I knew not where, a different happiness, not greater but different.

To love him was not enough for me after the happiness I had felt in falling in love.

…I was in excellent spirits. They had once been even higher at Nikolskoye, when my happiness was in myself and came from the feeling that I deserved to be happy, and from the anticipation of still greater happiness to come. That was a different state of things…

Below is a clip from Into the Wild, in which the main character, Christopher McCandless, reads from “Family Happiness” on his quest to reveal the inner workings of his soul.

What lines from literature stay with you to reveal your thoughts and feelings?

 

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Homeschooling for High School: Choose Your Own Adventure

March 19, 2013 — 1 Comment

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking to and with a group of homeschoolers (children and parents) about writing and being a writer. Afterward, in an impromptu adult circle time, we talked about homeschooling for the high school years.

This particular homeschooling group is the one we participated in for many years, so being there felt like coming home. As I listened to the concerns and questions of some of the parents whose children are nearing the teen years, I also remembered many of the same feelings of uncertainty from that time.

866860_unknown_pathHow does one homeschool for high school? That was the main question. The hard part about the question is that there isn’t an answer. We homeschooled for high school by doing what we’d always done: following our son’s lead, allowing for plenty of unstructured time (more than you might imagine), being willing to stitch together a crazy quilt of outside activities, including some online and classroom classes, but always with our son’s input or instigation. No year or month or week was exactly like any other.

It’s an approach that was often messy. On paper or screen, it sounds much more “together” and planned than it actually was. It required at its core a trust in the process of learning. It worked for us in part because I am personally one of those Myers-Briggs “P” types, comfortable with more uncertainty than most, and in part because, whatever our worries about our son’s academic future, we saw every day how well homeschooling fit his learning needs and his personality. Different parents, different children, different educational goals, different priorities—all would require a different approach, a unique approach. The hard part, I found, was not in the actually homeschooling, but in making decisions based on one’s own child and family and having the trust and courage to tune out the critics, both real and imagined.

The answer to “How does one homeschool for high school” is neither multiple choice nor essay. It is choose your own adventure.

Anyone already homeschooling or thinking of homeschooling will want to be sure to read Rebecca McMillan’s “Unschooling and the Benefits of Unstructured Time – Part I” as well as the other posts from the Unschooling Blog Hop (sponsored by Gifted Homeschoolers Forum).

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Writer, Who Are You?

March 18, 2013 — 2 Comments

956734_desolationMore and more, I am realizing that I still have much to learn about who I am, who I am not, how it differs from who I want to be, and how all of that affects my writing. Self-knowledge, however, requires something harder and harder to come by these days: solitude.

In one of his “Letters to a Young Poet,” Rainer Maria Rilke advised, “What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude”:

“[W]hen you notice that [solitude] is vast, you should be happy; for what (you should ask yourself) would a solitude be that was not vast; there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along, the most unworthy. . . . But perhaps these are the very hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring. But that must not confuse you. What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours—that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grown-ups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn’t understand a thing about what they were doing.” ~ Rilke

Solitude is often vast and painful because it forces us to turn from the busy distractions of life and society with their fleeting satisfactions to confront ourselves as we are. This self-knowledge that must precede self-acceptance goes beyond thinking of “the good and the bad” within us. Those categories just get in the way of seeing life as it is and ourselves as we are. No, what we are seeking is the nonjudgmental nature of mindfulness.

Finding time for even a little mindfulness practice in the middle of our busy days not only helps us to know ourselves better but also, as Andy Puddicombe says in his TED Talk on the topic, gives us “the opportunity, the potential to step back and to get a different perspective, to see that things aren’t always as they appear. We can’t change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it.”

Watch Puddicombe, below, talk about how to add 10 minutes of mindfulness to our days (then, if you are a fan of The Who, listen to the ultimate “Who Are You?” meditation).

 

 

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on-writing-stephen-king-tenth-anniversary2“I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day…fifty the day after that…and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s—GASP!!—too late.”

~ Stephen King, On Writing

Root Out Those Adverbs

Posted on March 17, 2013 In quotations, writing tips
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When School Is the Problem

March 13, 2013 — 4 Comments

1326285_graduation_2In only a few weeks, our son will graduate from college. I can hardly believe how fast his growing-up years have gone, and I have spent more than a little time recently recalling with fondness his childhood and adolescence. I feel lucky, because homeschooling allowed us to spend more time as a family than a traditional school schedule would have allowed, so my memories are rich and filled with quantity time as well as quality time.

Our primary reasons for homeschooling—both at the end of his second grade year and later in our son’s decision to homeschool through high school—were not primarily academic. They were more about giving him an environment that best matched his personality, social needs, and drive to learn (which, unfortunately, is often different from academic progress). Until recently, I was most grateful for our homeschooling years for how well they nurtured our son’s social and emotional life.

Only now do I see how well homeschooling also prepared him for the critical and creative thinking and the long-term planning required in higher education classrooms.

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not saying that he did well in college because of what we, his parents, taught him at home. We were not teachers in the classroom sense. Not even close.

I’m convinced that his thinking and study skills developed because we—and school—got out of his way.

He has told us that he feels homeschooling made him more ready for college learning than classroom education would have provided, in part because he wasn’t already burned out from a college-prep high school diet of jam-packed class schedules, AP exams, and spoon-fed but unrelenting assignments. He had practice in the slow, deep studying needed at the university level and the long-term planning required for end-of-term projects. He was used to giving himself his own assignments based on larger goals, and he had the luxury of time to make occasional missteps and learn from what did not work as well as from what did.

Two recent pieces in The Chronicle of Higher Education make me more grateful than ever that we stumbled into homeschooling early in our son’s education. First, in “Top Students, Too, Aren’t Always Ready for College,” Elaine Tuttle Hansen writes of a trend I see all too often in my own classrooms: “The truth is that not all of the smartest kids who have jumped through the hoops required for selective college admissions are ready for the demands of college-level work.” She continues:

“Evidence suggests that academic talent is quite specifically diminished, not developed, by the school experience. A Fordham Institute study of how young American students testing in the 90th percentile or above fared over time found that roughly 30 to 50 percent of these advanced learners lost ground as they moved from elementary to middle school, or from middle to high school. And the focus on low­-achieving students in public schools has disproportionately left more smart minority and low-income kids behind, creating a well-documented ‘excellence gap.’”

Michele Goodwin voices similar concerns in “Law Professors See the Damage Done by ‘No Child Left Behind’.” Goodwin argues that “a culture of test taking and teaching to the test has dominated elementary and secondary education in the United States, even at elite public and private schools. And now its effects are being felt by professors.” She writes that law professors have found that the “challenge of learning on their own is so overwhelming to some law students that it has become far more common for students to demand their professors’ notes.”

The ripple effect of the emphasis on testing at the expense of critical thinking, from elementary school through high school and college and into graduate programs and careers, will take years to undo. One partial answer for some high school graduates may be to take a gap year, as Dona Matthews suggests, not as a way to prepare further academically but so as to spend some time working and learning without the influence of out-of-control standardizing testing.

Other families might want to take a closer look at getting school out of their child’s way.

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Erin Reel on Writing with Focus

March 12, 2013 — Leave a comment

“It may be a book that will change the course of my life… I have yet to discover a micro-chapter or 140 character status update that holds my attention or imagination.” ~ Erin Reel

Erin ReelThe following guest post by Erin Reel was first published in 2011 on my former blog site, and it is an excellent reminder of the power of focus in today’s fast-paced world: “Good writing is still good writing.” Erin Reel is a wealth of resources and wisdom about writing, from craft to career, and she assists executives, entrepreneurs and experts in creating books to assist them in their business pursuits. Learn more at her website, Erin Reel Publishing Services, and in the bio below the post. Take it away, Erin!

The Power of Focus and the Length of Brilliance: My 35 Year Relationship with ADHD (in more than 140 characters)

by Erin Reel

I recently read an interview with marketing guru and bestselling author, Seth Godin (Poke the Box) on Publishing Perspectives that both inspired me and brought me to pause to consider my 35 year relationship with ADHD, what brilliance is and the state of writers today in this brave new world.

In the interview, Godin discusses his new Domino Effect publishing plan in partnership with the great bookseller in the ether, Amazon, the sluggishness, dated and anxious way traditional publishers do business and the role of the book, physical or E, in our oh-so-modern book reading and thought blinking society. I read the trades every day. I hear about new advances in the way we read and connect with books every day. I read about how authors are taking on the role of marketer and publicist every day (though this isn’t new). I read how if we as authors and entrepreneurs who work with authors don’t embrace the speed at which we connect and process information, we’re as good as yesterday’s news. Okay, already! We get it! The world is fast, the publishing industry is the new wild, wild west and we had better move quickly enough to claim our stake on the frontier.

My concern is this, while all the E movers and shakers, all the media and marketing gurus and all the social entrepreneurs are screaming at us, “Think fast!” as they launch their super-creative hot potato to us, all I want to do is hold on for a moment longer than I’m allowed and consider what’s in my hands…not where I’m immediately going to launch it next.

Godin says in his interview upon reflecting on the role of this ancient medium, the clunky physical book:

“Now, I think there is huge opportunity to help people think clearly by going slowly, by having 40-page long chapters, with footnotes. But those ideas aren’t going to spread. And so, I’m happy to leave the Pulitzer Prize-winning to other people. What I’m trying to do is use this medium that I love and that I’m familiar with, to come up with ideas that actually have impact and can be used as reliever. And so, yeah, my chapters are now down to 2-pages long, or 3-pages long, and the reason is that’s the way we have trained people to think. We think clearly at a different rate than we did 80 or 90 years ago.”

Now. Godin is very good at what he does. He certainly knows marketing and book packaging. But really? Does he assume the message in a Pulitzer Prize-winning book doesn’t spread and influence the lives, thoughts and possible careers of many who will go on to replicate that level of success because the means by which it’s brought to us is…clunky and slow…and more than 100 pages?

Let’s take a look at a short list of Pulitzer Prize-winning authors whose ideas, words and song have had and continue to have an impact on our nation and beyond:

  • John F. Kennedy, for Biography
  • Margaret Mitchell, Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, William Faulkner, Upton Sinclair and Toni Morrison for Fiction.
  • Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim for Drama.
  • Roger Ebert for Criticism
  • Alice Walker for The Color Purple; Cormac McCarthy for The Road; and David Mamet for Glengarry Glen Ross.

Godin says we think clearly at a different rate than we did 80 or 90 years ago. That would place us back in the roaring twenties and early thirties. I have a feeling they held a similar sentiment.

All I know is that now, I have far more distractions screaming for my attention than I had ten years ago. And I have no problem shutting them off. Why and how? Because for the past 35 years, I have been forced to harness and direct my ADHD brain to focus so that it is possible for me to take a book like Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, read it cover to cover, learn from it, recall important and impactful information therein, draw parallels and connections to my world and the world around me and allow that brilliant book written by a brilliant man to become a part of my social and professional consciousness. It may be a book that will change the course of my life. It may be a book that inspires one of my clients into writing the next great American novel. Who knows? I have yet to discover a micro-chapter or 140 character status update that holds my attention or imagination.

The trend now for authors and entrepreneurs is to be multi-present in the marketplace because the internet is our oyster—that there is power in multi-tasking, brilliance in quick thinking and quick acting. I recently watched a PBS special where high school and college students were observed doing their homework while their internet browser remained open, maybe a few documents were left open on their desktop and with their phone beeping new texts at their side. The students claimed they were able to get a lot of “work” done quickly and with ease. The result? The scientists who studied these students concluded that, yes, they were focused on many things simultaneously, but the work produced was disjointed and the quality of the work mediocre at best.

Writers, who are forced to be multi-present in order to succeed as authors, are faced with more distractions now than ever before. And they’ve become a lot savvier in the last ten years, to boot – they read the trades and the latest publishing news right along with me. But I can tell you with certainty, they are not thinking clearly because they don’t know which noise to consider and which noise to turn off.

My answer to them is simple: know the difference between trend and marketing and the solid stuff publishers and readers are looking for. Never write to meet a trend. Good writing is still good writing. Craft is still craft, and the process of revision and editing has not changed despite all the other changes you hear buzzing around out there about how we read and how authors are taking their publishing destiny in their own hands and are finally making enough money to support their families. Writing a work of fiction (and nonfiction) takes months and years of real time to plan, outline and execute. The writer must be armed with a tremendous amount of persistence, patience and most of all focus.

Whether you end up reading the finished, polished work on your e-reader or as a physical book is up to you. One choice is not smarter than the other, and length should never indicate the timeliness or importance of the message.

More About Erin

Erin Reel is an internationally-recognized independent publishing consultant with clients throughout the United States, Europe and the Pacific Rim. She began her career as a literary agent working the high profile book to film market in Los Angeles over a decade ago, and later, as the head of her own agency, successfully published books with the “Big Six” publishing houses as well as smaller publishers throughout the United States. In addition, she contributed to Making the Perfect Pitch: How to Catch a Literary Agent’s Eye and Author 101: Bestselling Secrets From Top Agents, two of the most widely read and respected resource books for writers.

Erin is a frequent contributor to news analysis and commentary on the publishing industry and is the co-creator of “The Writers’ Kitchen” a feature on Rainn Wilson’s, SoulPancake.com which has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Network. She is also regularly seen on LitReactor.com, a popular writer’s resource site supported by some of the most important writers today. In 2012, Erin launched a new venture focused specifically on assisting executives, entrepreneurs and experts, what Erin calls the “E3″ market, in creating books to assist them in their business pursuits.

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The Brain Science of Cliches

March 11, 2013 — Leave a comment

8135755109_93f9bd833cDead as a doornail. We’ve all heard the cliche, but what does reading it do to your brain?

According to some neuroscience research, not much.

In the AWP 2013 session “This Is Your Brain on Fiction,” Susan Hubbard discussed the 2012 New York Times article, “Your Brain on Fiction,” which references several recent studies of how our brains respond not only to literature in general but to metaphors specifically. Metaphors—comparisons between dissimilar things or ideas—add depth and complexity to our writing. When a metaphor is overused, however, it becomes a cliché—hackneyed, meaningless, dead as a doornail.

In “From novel to familiar: Tuning the brain for metaphors,” published in NeuroImage in February, 2012, researchers suggest that as metaphors become commonplace, our brains lose interest and show decreased activity in not just the meaning-making right hemisphere but in the language-centered left hemisphere, as well. We read a cliché as though it were literal, without any added mental activity on our part. Fresh, new metaphors, however, “require suppression of the literal sense of the sentence” because we must understand abstraction or similarities drawn between otherwise unrelated domains (E.R. Cardillo et al., NeuroImage 59 (2012) 3219).

It’s the difference between the phrase “the sea was angry,” which we read literally because we have heard it so often, without anthropomorphizing the sea in our mind, and the words uttered by George in a famous Seinfeld episode, “The sea was angry that day, my friends, like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.”

Readers, writers, and teachers have known for a long time that clichés flatten language and meaning, and science is now showing us the how and why. This research doesn’t change what makes writing powerful, but it might poke us into taking the extra time to write with more care .

7364908998_3e96afb6ccWhat does dead as a doornail mean, anyway? Used as long ago as the 14th century in Langland’s Piers Plowman, the phrase probably refers to large nails used in doors, as Gary Martin explains:

“Doornails are the large-headed studs that were used in earlier times for strength and more recently as decoration. The practice was to hammer the nail through and then bend the protruding end over to secure it. This process, similar to riveting, was called clenching. This may be the source of the ‘deadness’, as such a nail would be unusable afterwards.”

Being dead as a doornail implies that something is no longer usable for another purpose. And, with that, the commonplace metaphor becomes fresh again, at least for a little while.

Brain scan photo by Tim Sheerman-Chase: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tim_uk/. Nail photo by Stewart Black: http://www.flickr.com/photos/s2ublack/. Both photos made available by Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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Writing: Going Forward

March 10, 2013 — 2 Comments

As I wait to leave for the airport, taking advantage of the free WiFi in the hotel lobby, I’m going to spend about 15 minutes trying to gather my general thoughts on the AWP conference. This will be an unedited rough draft, so here goes (I will write in more detail about some of the sessions in the coming days).

My main takeaway at this point is this: Without being able to cite specific statistics or prognostications, I am surprisingly heartened about the future of writing and publishing.

Maybe it is being in the company of so many word lovers, whether novelists, poets, non-fiction writers, writing teachers, or primarily readers.

Maybe it is the realization that I attended three days of diverse, smart, informative sessions and readings, only one of which included a PowerPoint presentation (and that one was creative and enhancing rather than distracting).

Maybe it is the dozens and dozens of presses at the book fair, large and small and every size in between, that are eager to find new writing talent to publish.

Maybe it is the subtle advice (backlash?) repeated in session after session to trust in the process, or, to paraphrase Andre Dubus III as he quoted his father, to keep the writing work and the writing career separate in our minds and hearts, and not to focus too much on the latter.

Maybe it is the delicious slowness of the conversations that developed between sessions, or the lack of obsession (at least in the sessions I have attended) during the question period on publication and the focus instead on the act and craft and art of the writing itself.

And maybe it is simply wishful thinking, since I truly cannot imagine doing anything else with my life.

In the end, maybe that’s all the answer and affirmation I need.

There is nothing to wait for. Let’s write.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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“If the soul
has a smell,
it’s the smell
of old books.”
~ Andre Dubus III, speaking at AWP 2013 of the 40 boxes of his father’s library

image

If the soul has a smell

Posted on March 9, 2013 In books
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Why I Love #AWP

March 7, 2013 — Leave a comment

Walking into the AWP conference center this morning, I was reminded of why I fell in love with this conference last year. As I walked with another attendee who was looking for the registration area, we talked a bit about memoirs, and I mentioned that I am working on writing about the experience of reading and transcribing my great aunt’s diaries. She immediately recommended a book by poet Dawn Potter, Tracing Paradise, which is about her experience of copying every word of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

When I searched online for more information about the book, I learned that Dawn Potter is also a rural writer, and I can hardly wait to read about how she tackles the topic of engagement with another’s words.

On a different note, my husband is also in Boston to speak at the Long Eighteenth Century and Romanticism Colloquium at Harvard tonight. His talk is titled “Editing Gulliver, Moll, and Pamela: A Practical Guide.”


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Location:Boylston St,Boston,United States

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