Are You a Novelist?

“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten – happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.”
Brenda Ueland

Every morning when I wake up, I lie in bed reading my email on my iPhone.  It’s a gentle way for me to take stock of what’s on my schedule, put out any immediate fires, and get a chuckle from the silly things my friends and students send to me in the middle of the night. 

This morning, I woke up to a really uncomfortable email.  A parent of an ANI alumna asked to be removed from my mailing list and told me that she wouldn’t be recommending the program because she didn’t think that everyone who puts a volume of words on a page should be called a novelist. 

My heart wrenched and my stomach twisted into a knot. 

I was offended, hurt, angry: a festering boil of emotion.  Immediately, I thought of all the painting classes, piano lessons, baseball leagues, swimming lessons, dance classes, and any number of enrichment activities that kids participate in.  Do we not call our little painters artists?  Our little sluggers baseball players?  Our little dancers ballerinas?  My students didn’t write 50,000 word grocery lists, they wrote stories with beginnings, middles and ends.  They wrote novels and so deserve the title novelist.  They’re not professionals, sure, but who cares?  And does that really matter?

And then I started thinking of all the novelists whose books weren’t published before they died.  Was John Kennedy Toole not a novelist?  What about Steig Larssen?  Anne Frank?  Just schmucks with pens, I guess, because they were just writing a volume of words. And on that note, I suppose Emily Dickenson wasn’t a poet, either.  I had to take a deep breath and walk away from the computer so I wouldn’t reply in true hot-tempered, redheaded fashion.

ANI is not only my business, it’s my passion.  And I believe so whole-heartedly in what I’m doing – in what my students are doing – that I’ve bet my life on it.  I quit my job, invested my savings, and I devote more time than I probably should teaching kids the value of the written word.  Of THEIR written words.

Throughout my journey as an educator, I’ve come up against many people who think my ideas and practices are too hard on kids.  I ask too much, I expect too much, I prod too much.  I’m a too-much person.  And I don’t disagree with them.  But my kids, they rise to the occasion.  And even the parents of students who don’t finish their novels tell me their kids’ confidence with words is better, their grades improve, and they stress less about assignments.

But what most of my detractors don’t realize about what I do in the classroom is how I support my students outside the classroom.  I make myself 100% available to them all day, every day.  Even when I was teaching composition to college freshmen and juniors, I gave out my personal phone number and email address.  These days, I respond to 3:00am text messages from overwhelmed kids, plot and plan their novels with them, I give them challenges, pep-talks, moral support, high-fives, stern looks, and hugs every single day.  I love them like I love my own children, and I make myself just as available to them after the program ends as I did during their time with me in the classroom.  I even listen to them when they need a safe place to talk about a divorce or a death or a difficult decision.  How many teachers can say that?

I think the personal attention I pay each student is why my feelings were so hurt by this parent’s email today.  In fact, this particular student was someone for whom I went above and beyond my usual role of muse-mentor-coach-friend-teacher-guide-confessor.  I just can’t imagine not wanting to celebrate the achievements of young writers, especially a young writer who happens to be your child. 

When I was in the sixth grade, I went to an awards ceremony for a program called Writers’ Showcase.  It was a personal project of a wealthy Nashvillian who created a writing competition open to all Nashville students and awarded cash prizes for the best examples of writing in many categories and age levels.  I participated every year, and worked at winning like I now work at making a living.

This particular year, an author handed out the awards.  He asked us all to stand and repeat together, “I am a writer.”  He called us peers.  He said our words were now published in the little Writers’ Showcase anthology and that we had been paid for our work.  We were professional writers, and we should be proud of ourselves.  I cried. My mom cried.  It changed my life.

From that experience, and others like it, I developed my curriculum.  I spent years teaching college students, I spent summers teaching reading and writing development to preschoolers, grade-school students, and adults.  I honed my people skills, earned advanced degrees in creative writing and kept current on educational best practices. 

What I found in the process was astounding.

Each year in my classroom, students’ test scores went up, but their ability to express themselves in writing deteriorated.  Their confidence with the written word was damaged because their exposure to writing was limited to short projects that got shorter and fewer each year.  The last year I taught, one of my best writers told me he’d never written anything longer than 1,000 words during his entire career in school. 

My anecdotal observations were backed up by science, too.  While nationally, SAT scores are on the rise, SAT Writing scores are suffering a decline.  I wondered if perhaps I could apply the theory of immersion language-learning to writing.  If I gave students an opportunity to write volumes and volumes of words, would they start to self-correct their errors?  Would they seek out rule of grammar they may not have ever encountered?  Could I teach them how to write first and edit later?  And would their fear of writing start to wither and die without the constant pressure of grades, anxiety of red-pen mark-ups, and comparative forms of achievement that our test-obsessed culture imposes?

The short answer is yes.

Yes, they do write better at the end of a month-long writing-intensive program.  Yes, they do ask many questions about grammar, usage, and punctuation.  Yes, they do increase their vocabularies.  And more importantly, they gain a confidence with their own use of language.  They become fluent communicators.

And beyond the tangible academic achievement, my students learn to reach out for help.  They learn to make an allies of their teachers.  They learn to ask questions, to research, to manage a big project and see it through to the end.  They learn to be self-starters and self-motivators and self-congratulators.  They also start to see school writing assignments as opportunities to flex their writing muscles.  And instead of writing the minimum required number of words, they write until the project, assignment, or paper has reached its logical ending, wherever that may be.

This is the real Novel Idea: my students learn to trust themselves.  They learn to trust each other.  And they learn that they’re not alone out there in the world, in a cabin in the woods, scribbling in the dark.  The world is full of awkward teenagers struggling to make sense of their adolescence, and writing about those struggles has to be one of the healthiest ways a person can cope with their life. 

Last summer, one parent raced toward me with open arms and hugged me just a little bit too long.  She told me her daughter had struggled with self-mutilation, but since learning to write long-form fiction and giving herself permission to call herself a novelist, she’d stopped cutting.

That’s enough for me. 

Sporty kids have a million opportunities to be part of a group and develop their athleticism.  Social kids have even more opportunities to get together and share experiences.  Arty kids can find classes galore where they can try out pottery and sculpture and painting and photography and mixed media or whatever their arty hearts desire.  But nerdy writer-types, we get the shaft.  We’re the oddballs in class, the weirdoes in the hallways, and the geeks waiting for the next ComicCon.  I’m not apologetic about creating a program where kids who love words can learn to turn those ideas into a novel.  Because watching them learn the parts of a book, and then using those lessons to create the structure, the outline, the shape of their own stories is like watching children discover lightning bugs.  Their wonder is overwhelming.

Giving kids permission to see their struggles as part of a story – part of their story – is a gift I’m happy to give over and over again.  Even if you don’t like what I call them.

 

What would you say to this parent?  Do you agree with her assessment that calling everybody who “writes a volume of words should not be called a novelist?”

Solution for Generational Warfare: Empathy

I have horrible neighbors.  They’re crabby, they complain loudly about completely irrelevant things – like my friends parking their cars on the street when they come to visit – and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get a smile out of them.  They’re older than my parents, and there’s a soft spot in my heart for older people.  I miss my grandparents, and I’m always searching for positive older influences for my boys.  How I’d love for them to have a sweet elderly neighbor that they could go visit every now and again.  These are not those neighbors.  My husband says, “to hell with those old coots!  What are they going to do to us?  We own the house next door!”

While it’s true that they can’t fire me or call my landlord to complain (I’m the landlord!) or force me to move out, it bothers me tremendously that the people who share a property boundary with me find my family so incredibly distasteful.  They sneer at my children when they run and chase each other in the back yard (their house sits on a hill and overlooks our property), they talk loudly about how our dog is a nuisance (she’s a 3-pound Yorkshire Terrier we rescued after the flood), they leave copies of the Association’s by-laws in our mailbox with sections highlighted and sticky notes that say, “just making sure you have a copy of this.”

I wrote them a very long and passionate letter about how we’re good, honest, hard-working people who happen to have two toddlers and another baby on the way.  I told them I envied their lovely lawn and their retirement time and how one day I hoped my property looked as tidy and well-groomed as theirs does.  Then I reminded them that everyone they know is fighting a hard battle and asked for their kindness and respect.  In the letter, I told him that I feel out of sorts, and I feel oppressed, and I feel so sad that I can’t make them empathize with my situation, however silly they think it might be.

They called an “emergency HOA meeting” in response.  Oh, my neighbor is the VP of the HoA. He’s proposed imposing fines for street-parking, excessive  noise, and pets “not under the control of their owners.”

This left me thinking about something I heard on a political talking-heads show.  “If you’re going to engage in generational warfare,” the pundit said, “you’d better side with the generation that always votes.”

I think my neighbor assumes I won’t come to the meeting.  He assumes I won’t be searching out every single swing set in the neighborhood and making sure every family under 60 shows up.  He assumes that because I’m young and busy that he can push me around simply because he’s older, he has a position on the board, and he shows up.  Well, he’s wrong.  If I’ve learned anything from my students, it’s that when you kick a hive, you get a swarm.  And he’s kicked my hive one too many times.

I’ve been driving around in the boat of a minivan that makes me feel bloated just dreaming up ways to dismantle the HoA by-laws, and I have a pretty good argument put together.  I’ve also been fantasizing about what kind of HoA-approved shenanigans would get the better of that old goat.  I’m really a fan of letting my husband’s Appalachian roots show for a few weeks.

And this morning, while I was sitting in a restaurant having breakfast with my two-year-old, it hit me.  I feel like a teenager all over again.  I feel like that mean old seventh-grade math teacher – Mr. So-and-so, the one with the permanent scowl and impossible temperament – is out to get me once again.  Or I feel like I did when the pack of popular kids decided to throw dog-food at me n the hallway during my freshman year.  I feel trapped, just like I did when I was in middle and high school.  I couldn’t change schools, couldn’t change teachers, had no control over my own daily schedule, and I had to live my day side-by-side with people who I felt hated my guts for no rational reason.

Being the pleaser that I am, I tried all sorts of things to get those hateful people to like me.  I showed up to school with cookies for mean teachers.  I volunteered to do homework for cruel popular kids.  I was even more miserable when my attempts to make peace were ignored, ridiculed, or used against me.  It made me feel hopeless and powerless.  So instead of standing up for myself, I retreated into myself, into my journals, into my writing.

Those terrible experiences made me the reflective, kind, empathetic person I am today.  They also steeled my spine against people who might act in a cruel way toward my own children.  And while I tried the nice way – cookies and friendly gestures, and a well-written letter, now it’s time to get my dukes up.

As I was leaving that restaurant with my little boy this morning, a group of WWII veterans stopped to say hello to him.  He shook their hands and said, “Oh, hi!” to each of them.  They were delighted.  They cooed over him, patted his head, and commented about how he was “cute as a bug.”  One old guy in a US Navy ball cap with the name of his ship embroidered on it pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket and handed my son a dollar bill.

“OH!” he said, “Dink you!”

The old guy patted his head and said, “now don’t you spend that all in one place.”  Then he turned to me and said, “I’ve had a tough morning, but that little fella sure did cheer me up.”

My heart melted.  I missed my own grandparents, of course.  My granddad was a Navy man aboard the USS Fessenden during WWII.  But more than that, I felt so angry that I couldn’t replace my jerk neighbors with these sweet old people.  If empathy is the lubricant that keeps the generations happily coexisting among each other, why is it so difficult for some people to muster?  How can it be so hard for my neighbor to remember back to a time when his life was just beginning, when his children were young and his days were filled with worries and errands and bills.  How is so hard for some people to find kindness for those right next door?

I just hope my kids aren’t missing out.  I’d love for them to have a neighborhood where they’re appreciated for the charming, smart, delightful young men they are.  Generational warfare serves nobody.  But a pat on the head, a dollar in the pocket, and a hug from a little boy can turn a dreary day around.

Missing: Lost and Found

August 4th was my grandmother’s birthday. She would have been 85 today had she not passed away nearly three years ago. And I find myself struggling again today, wishing I could just pick up the phone.

But that’s where life is right now – in flux. I have been kept from my own writing by circumstance and by my own body – so worn out and exhausted that it demands I sleep. But I can’t sleep. And I can’t write. And despite my best efforts to launch my inner editors, quash my worries, and focus on restorative decisions that make me feel happy, I’m left staring at walls.

My husband is away on business, and the kids spent the night with my mom last night. I had several hours to myself in my own pretty house. A meatloaf cooled on the stovetop. I watched an Elizabethan film that my husband would have instantly vetoed. I mopped the kitchen floor without two wild boys running through the clean, smudging the shine. And as I was washing the dishes at my sink, there she was. My Mammy. Or her memory, at least.

I hadn’t realized her birthday was right around the corner. Or at least, I hadn’t said it out loud. And I’m fairly certain that her presence was triggered earlier in the evening by a giant smudge on my living room wall where Shephard, who had been standing in time-out for ages, had wiped a long, spaghetti-colored handprint. I found some Pine Sol and a paper towel and scrubbed it and realized I was “warshing walls” as she would have said.

It did not escape me either, in my night of solitude and rest, that my grandmother was never alone. And rarely rested. Her evenings were spent watching the news or a movie, but she always had sewing in her lap. If she sat at the table with a cup of black coffee, she had a pen and paper handy to make a list of things to do that day. If she shopped, it was with a purpose. And a budget. And I was being positively indulgent last night.

It also does not escape me that Ruby, the character in the book I haven’t been working on, talks as my grandmother might have spoken when she was a teenager in Lebanon, Kentucky. They’re like bookends to me now – a child and an old woman – both specters who haunt me, relentless in their urging. Mammy who never tired. And Ruby who has never had her story told.

Had my grandmother been a writer, she probably would have published hundreds of books, applying her unflagging work ethic to the art and the craft of word-smithing. And if Ruby were a wall to warsh, I would have done it already.

But she’s not. She’s a story. And I’m just so tired that I worry I don’t know where to start.

I wish I could pick up the phone and call my grandmother. I’d ask her about how her old Kentucky Home smelled at the start of springtime, when Ruby’s story starts. I’d have her tell me about walking and riding a bicycle around town. I’d ask her to tell me about someone in town she didn’t trust. Or didn’t like. I’d have her tell me what her mama used to to cook for supper on Saturday nights.

It seems incredibly cruel that when someone dear passes away, not only do you lose their physical bodies, but also their phone numbers, their birthday cards, their reassurances. Somewhere, it seems to me, there should be a consolation prize for loss. A once-per year phone call from Heaven where she could say something, anything. I’d settle for a chiding reproach about why I don’t call more often.

To Ruby, I’ll start writing soon, girl. I promise.

And to Mammy, Happy Birthday, you old thing.

Listening

Ruby was born about seventeen years ago. She was quirky and witty and she spoke in an accent that sounded a lot like my grandmother’s. She had a tough life and didn’t have the advantages that my own kids now enjoy. I loved her take on her small life. I loved her so much that I wrote her for nearly three years, though I never figured out her story. Ruby was my constant traveling companion. I knew what she’d order at a restaurant, or what she’d say if she were insulted, or how she’d handle an awkward conversation. Ruby was my own better half, the girl I always hoped I could become one day.

Ruby stopped talking to me after a number of disparaging comments from a very self-assured group of writers in an advanced fiction class at Tufts University in Boston. They were all juniors and seniors. While I was technically a junior, it was my first semester away from home as an 18-year-old student, and despite my prolific writing career to that point, I was really impressed at how old the other students were. And how curt they were. And how biting their comments could be.

I was also really impressed with their third-person POV stories. And the names of their characters. And the audacity of their bourgeois protagonists. Because they were Yankees, I had decided very early on that they were better educated. Some of them asked if I wore shoes in the summer in Nashville (I said I did, but the truth is that I avoid shoes when it’s hot). Very few would give up their forced façade of elitism to be friends with a girl whose hair and accent were both out of control.

So I shut Ruby up. Quick-like.

I switched my subjects from dog-fights and messy divorces and front-yard bathtubs to more refined things like women wasting away in domestic solitary confinement. I judged my heroine too simple to describe the finer points of the Italian paintings I was learning in my Renaissance Art History class. She was too full of hollers and hills to ride the subway. I couldn’t scrub the dirt from under her fingernails. So I wrote about high-brow protagonists who were over-educated, under-stimulated, and taken for granted (Hello? Mister Freud?).

For the next seventeen years, if I had tried to write in first person to save my life, I don’t think I could have done it. I missed Ruby terribly, and I thought about her all the time. But I had said some pretty awful things about her when I abandoned her for my glamorous new protagonists. I couldn’t blame her for holding a grudge.

On Wednesday, I was sitting in the dentist’s office waiting for my husband to finish his cleaning. In a flash of inspiration that non-writers might confuse with schizophrenia, I heard a voice in the back of my head. Chills ran down my spine. The hair on my arms stood on end.

It was Ruby.

After a full year of writing again, of working the academic and legal junk out of my creative veins, of teaching kids to write what they know, of pontificating about writing and education and the power of the pen, I think I’ve earned her respect again.

Ruby, I want you to know that I’m listening. Go on and tell me your story, baby girl. I promise I’ll never laugh at you again.

Writing What I Know

A writing teacher’s favorite adage: write what you know.

I’ve found that few teachers – or writers for that matter – actually understand what that phrase means.  I know lots of things.  I know about raising two baby boys, I know about being married to my best friend, I know about being abandoned by my father and the heartache of losing grandparents too soon.  I know about hot summer nights in the South, and I know about walking to work in a Chicago blizzard.  I know about being an older student who goes back to law school.  I know about teaching. I know about doing my taxes.  And I know about cooking dinner.  And I know about a million other things that I’ve experienced in my lifetime.

So does that mean that my writing is restricted by those experiences?  Or that I can only create characters who have walked those same steps?

In a word, no.

Because writing what you know isn’t about writing the events that you know as they happened.  It’s actually about emotional truth.

Let me illustrate.  One day before a spelling test when I was in second grade, I was taken to the hospital complaining of chest pains.  My mother panicked, of course, and told the doctor she feared I had heart trouble.  After a few routine checks, he declared me healthy and gave me a new nickname, “Sarah Bernhardt.”  I felt ashamed, and worried that my friends and family members would think of me as the girl who cried wolf.  Or, worse yet, that they would think I was a devious child, prone to dramatic outburst, seeking approval or attention.

For years I carried these worries with me, like a pack animal laden with unnecessary supplies.  I minimized my concerns, buried my worries, and kept my mouth shut more than I would have liked to.  That is, until the day I was riding in a subway car in Chicago and I felt the world crash into my chest and bury me like a corpse.  I grabbed at my heart and panted, felt my head spin in circles, and when I finally reached my stop, I ran up the stairs and all the way home where I collapsed into my husband’s arms, sobbing.

It was a panic attack.  And while I had struggled with anxiety for much of my life, I had never felt the crushing weight of a full-blown panic attack until that moment.  At least, I didn’t realize that I had.  And as I was sitting in the waiting room of the hospital, I recalled the day that I was unprepared for my spelling test in second grade.

Whatever the details of the fictional universes I create, I know I can write honestly and convincingly about the feelings of anxiety, of pressure, and of panic.

And I don’t just have to write about girls whose expectations of themselves are too high.  Or of students who find themselves facing a test that they don’t know how to navigate.  I could, quite convincingly, write about a tiny fairy who is caught in a mason jar by a happy child out collecting fireflies.  I could imagine myself in her place as the lid is screwed on, feel the crushing pressure of the glass walls closing in around her, and balance the weight of my own panic attack on her tiny wings.

Even though I’ve never been a fairy trapped in a jar, I’m writing what I know.

Today I got news that a friend of mine took a job in a city far away.  She’ll be selling her home and moving away in less than a month.  I’m thrilled for her, of course, because she’s getting exactly what she needs at this point in her life.  But again, I felt the walls closing in, the panic starting to build, the pressure growing.  And I told myself what I tell my students every single day: write it down.

So the character I have created to explore these feelings of loss won’t look like me.  Her loss won’t deal with a friend moving away and getting the job of her dreams in the town she probably never should have left behind.  But I will use the emotional truth that I know to infuse my fiction with honesty, with reality, with the seed of my own knowledge.

Because I know friendship.  And I know love.  And I know yearning.  And I know writing.