Friday Feedback: Where Will Your Spark Come From . . . ? And, THE RULES.

Dear readers
(campers/teachers/librarians/aspiring writers),

here is what you might want to know about me as I lead you through a summer of writing:

I have no idea how I've written well over ten manuscripts, sold half of them, had four already come out in traditionally published form.

None.

Like, zero.

Zilch.

I mean, yes, sure, fine: I know I did certain things, dug down, persevered, sat "ass in chair" for endless hours, hitting keys, and so on. But the stories themselves? Still after all this time, I have NO idea how those come.

Here's the hard cold truth:

I am not a person who has stories spilling out of my pores.

The world interests me -- moves me infinitely -- but it's the small moments I get caught up in, sort of free-floating curiosities -- beginnings, perhaps, but not more. Sparks of ideas, clearly without middles or ends.


A father walks out.








A boy too young to swim dives into a pool.

A tower comes down changing everything.














Someone draws a mark across someone else's artwork.





There is a moment of breaking.

A moment of healing.

Possibly, a moment of falling in love.




That's it, people. That's all I have when I enter into my stories. That is what I dive in with.

And, so, each time I find myself having finished one and back at a beginning, I doubt my ability, not to write the story once it arrives, but to have the story -- any story-- come in the first place.

And when it does, and I reach a middle and, finally, a shining end, I'm never quite sure how I got there.


So, HOW do I do it? Well. I can tell you how I don't. I don't sit at a blank screen willing shit to come. For me, that would never make it happen.

For me, for story to come, I take myself away from the computer and I swim.

I swim.

I swim.

And while I am swimming, I start asking myself questions:

What triggered this moment? And why does this moment matter to me? What does it say about life? About the world around us? About being human?

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

And more questions: What do I have to add to that? What do I have to explore or impart?

What do *I* have to say?

Here's how some of the above moments might expand outward in that way to hint at story:

A father walks out.
A boy has to step up. Stop burying his head in the sand and learn how to be an adult.

To stop running away and come home.

How do we do this alone?
Maybe we don't. We find a friend.

I have something to say about friendship.




A boy too young to swim dives into a pool.

A girl is frozen, can't help him.

Why?

What has happened to make her afraid?

She has failed somewhere. Failed mightily. And now she has no self worth.

What will help her feel brave again?

Ans what do I have to say about this? Something about forgiveness:
Forgiving others and ourselves. . .

Someone draws a mark across another person's artwork.

That someone is a boy who wants to be an artist. He knows this is wrong,
so why?

He's hurting and desperate for connection.

He's got good reason: he needs help. Too much hurt and pain have piled on.

What do I have to say about this?
There are ways to seek help. There are good, skilled people who want to help us. And we also have the ability to help ourselves.


So, if you are about to embark on your Teachers Write/Friday Feedback summer, and have no story idea in mind, start looking for moments, asking questions, and walk away from the screen and jump into the proverbial or literal water and swim.

And if you already have that story started? Ask those same questions. Ask the louder and harder, over and over again. And keep answering them. Ask them through first and second drafts, and endless drafts of revisions.

AND now, without further ado, Friday Feedback Summer 2018 and THE RULES (they are there for a reason. Please read AND follow them!)

FRIDAY FEEDBACK SUMMER 2018.

How does it work? Easy peasy:

Every week, I -- or one of my awesome guest authors -- will share a tiny bit of writing wisdom followed by an excerpt of our own ROUGH, UNPUBLISHED writing for your feedback. In return, we offer you the same opportunity: to share a brief excerpt in the comments for feedback from us -- AND from other campers!). 

See? Simple and exciting. There are just a few RULES: 

1. The Feedback should be specific and always be given in this order:

• WHAT WORKS (and why)?;
• WHAT MIGHT NOT BE WORKING if anything (and why)?; and
• ARE YOU COMPELLED TO KEEP READING?

Please note the order of those. Here at Friday Feedback, our first goal is to be encouraging. We appreciate the gems in one another's writing before we offer up constructive criticism.

2. The excerpts should not exceed three (3) paragraphs, if long, five (5) paragraphs if mostly dialogue or otherwise short. This rule holds even if I, or my guest authors, post a longer excerpt. 

There may be 30 - 50 excerpts up here on a busy week for me and/or my guest authors to read. If you put up more than the requested length, we do not promise to read beyond the stated limits. You may post excerpts through Saturday and I will check in, but I do not require my guest authors to read past close of business Friday. 

3. We ask you to remember this: there is only so much we can realistically glean from a brief excerpt out of context. Friday Feedback is intended to be instructional and inspiring, but please know our feedback out of context of a full work must always be taken as merely that. Your job here is to take in the information as you will. Keep what you like. Toss what you don't. In the end, you are the boss of your own writing.

4. You may be the recipient of one of my patented "Superspeed Flash Edits."

Okay, fine, they're not patented, whatever. Sometimes, if your excerpt lends itself to me doing one of these, I will do so: namely, zip through your piece editing for passive voice (where not intended) unneeded words, wrong punctuation, repetition, etc.

I will NOT edit your own unique voice or substantive writing. This is an exercise intended to demonstrate how revision/clean up/intentional writing can truly make our voices pop and shine. And this is almost always SECOND DRAFT STUFF -- the stuff of REVISION -- and is merely intended to make you aware of potential tics and such that take away from your own beautiful worl.

If you do NOT want to be the recipient of a Superspeed Flash Edit for any reason, please message me at g.polisner@gmail.com and I'll remember not to edit you. :) 

5. I know many of you work summers and may not find time to post your excerpt until late Friday evening. I do not ask any of my guest authors to return Saturday, but some of them are willing. I will often return Saturday morning to give stragglers feedback. Please don't post beyond that. Please note that Friday Feedback takes a lot of work -- often a whole day's work, offered to you for free as a source of inspiration and encouragement. If you participate here, please either order my newest title, IN SIGHT OF STARS, and the newest title of my guest authors, or if you are unable to purchase a copy, please reach out to your local library and ask them to order it in! And if you are an audiobook lover, I HIGHLY recommend Michael Crouch's stellar narration of IN SIGHT OF STARS. 

And, now, since I always go first, I just happened to have written a potential new beginning to my next novel (for those who have known me a while, you have seen this title floating out here for a long while now....), JACK KEROUAC IS DEAD TO ME.

I'm doing a major revision under the guidance of my fab editor, Vicki Lame, and playing with some voice and technical stuff in the story, so I'm anxious to hear what works for you, what doesn't, and whether you are compelled to keep reading?

-->

The day is hot. We are running through a sprinkler in my backyard, dodging in and out of the water that fans over us, shrieking gleefully as cold droplets rain down on our tanned shoulders, our stomachs, our legs.

You push me closer as the arc of water returns, and I fall onto the grass, laughing, managing to take you down with me. The sod under us is new and soft, and the freshly mown blades stick to our limbs, our bodies, our faces.

We don’t care; we have no one to impress but ourselves. We are giddy with summer, with each other. We are still on the cusp of everything.

After, you turn off the hose, and we lie on faded chaise lounges we have dragged to the middle of my yard. Our chests heave with rapid, satisfied breaths in our barely-filled-out bikini tops.

You reach out and take my hand.

“You are perfect, JL, you know it?” you say. “I have never had a friend as perfect as you.”

“No I’m not, don’t be stupid,” I snap back, wanting to untangle my fingers, detach for a moment, but you only squeeze harder.

“Well, I think you are. I wish I were more like you, pretty and free, and not afraid of anything. Like your mother. Plus, I can tell you anything, all sorts of secrets and they’re safe with you – with us.”

You think it’s a compliment when you say this, to tell me that I am like my mother. To think I am unfettered in that way. Yet even as you say it, something else lurks at the edges of your words. You have judged me, decided who I am. And, at some point, I will prove you wrong and fail you. Something scares me deeply about this truth.

“I am not,” I say, my face reddening in protest, but you don’t look to see, and even if you did, you couldn’t tell my blush from the spreading color of heat from the sun.

“Are too,” you insist. “I wish I could be more like you.”

So maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe you’re not judging me at all.

I squeeze your fingers back, wanting to agree with you instead, to get back to the lightness, and hold onto whatever spell has you so enamored with me.

Or maybe I’m weak and don’t have the heart to call out the lie, or tell you how afraid of everything I really am.

Obsessed!

My blog post is here today.

I think it's worth reading.

- gae

READ THESE BOOKS/Trying to Make the Good Moments Stick

As writers, and as humans in general (presuming writers fall into that category), we tend to hold on to the negative moments, the defeats, the upset (the one bad review amidst ten good reviews *crosses fingers and prays for this ratio*), while the good ones -- the things we thought nearly impossible but strove for and accomplished-- seem way more slippery and fleeting, somehow devalued, or at least harder to internalize and hold on to.

It's the human condition. In buddhism, it's referred to as Samsara.

I know more and more, as I embark on this sometimes-fickle journey toward publication, it is important to take the time to bask in the good things. I'm not good at it. At all. Instead, I'm always quickly thinking of what I didn't do, what more I could have done, and how much better I should have done it.

So, I'm making this post to memorialize for all the world (read, me) to remember: whatever the sales numbers, whatever less-than-glowing reviews the future may hold, here are four remarkable things that have happened already to The Pull of Gravity so far, and, by extension, to me.

As they say, if I die tomorrow, I should die happy*:

1. My family and a few friends read it and liked it a lot, and believed in my writing and the story (if you are amongst them, thank you);

2. My agent did the same;

3. The remarkable Frances Foster of Farrar Straus Giroux read it and loved it and then fought to acquire the manuscript;

4. KL Going and Francisco X. Stork, two of the young adult authors I admire most in the world, read it and liked it enough to give me a blurb knowing their names will be on its cover. That last part humbles me to no end.

And if you have not read The Liberation of Gabriel King or Marcelo in The Real World, and their many other magnificent books, you should. READ THESE BOOKS.

So, here's the deal. I'm walking away from the computer for an hour or so to internalize and really appreciate the good. Plenty of time for all the negative stuff later on...

and for burpees. Ugh. Yes, those too. ;)

-gae

*prefers not to die tomorrow.

inspiration and signs

Once you get a book published, people want you to talk a lot about your inspiration. And not in cliched generalizations. What made you write that book? How did you come up with that story. Writers should keep process journals, only because, by the time that book comes out, you've written one or two (or three) other manuscripts and the stories and reasons that were so clear at the time (if they ever were) have faded with time.

The Pull of Gravity (FSG, May 2011) has an Of Mice and Men theme running through it. Why I picked a classic, I definitely know, but why that classic, Of Mice and Men, I'm not completely sure, except for some vague and minor reasons.

All I know is once I picked it, I knew it was exactly the right choice. Not only for internal reasons, but I started to get small outward signs. I'd run across a sudden reference where it was seriously unexpected, Or, the biggest sign, while researching values on rare (scant even) original signed first editions with what's known as The Pendula included, I came across a copy inscribed by John Steinbeck to a man bearing the same unusual first name as the missing father the teens are searching for in the book. Even the last name was similar.

A few days ago, I woke up with an idea for a new young adult manuscript in my head. As always, I use the word idea loosely.

All I really knew is that it would be about two troubled teens and that it would have some important tie-in with Van Gogh.

I got the kids off to school and signed on to my computer to start writing with that overwhelming urge to get first thoughts down that any of us who write, know. I jotted three quick paragraphs and switched screens to attend to my morning ritual of email and facebook.

And there it was, my friend Lori's status update for the day: a quote by Vincent Van Gogh. And not any quote, but one that seemed to clearly resonate with the first paragraphs I'd just written, to mesh with the nebulous ideas swirling so frantically in my head.

Friday evening, I left Long Island for Washington DC for a whirlwind wedding weekend (and ten-plus hours of driving). Saturday morning, after breakfast -- and given that my mother, a talented artist, was with us -- we decided to squeeze in a visit to the Phillips Museum which happened to be around the corner from our hotel. We had heard it was a great museum (it is!) and my mother had always wanted to go.

As we reached the front entrance, I could see it was draped with a building-sized poster of Van Gogh's House at Arles. Sure, Van Gogh is a reasonably-obvious choice for any museum, on the other hand the museum was chock-full of amazing masters: Renoir, Cezanne, Degas, Monet, Manet, Bacon and Rubens, to name just a few.
  
When I reached the actual painting House at Arles, I stood for a while, feeling strangely connected. I've never spent a ton of time studying Van Gogh or anything, but certainly his paintings have always moved me. In person they are more beautiful.

There was no glass covering the work and I kept thinking how I could simply reach out and touch the very same paint Van Gogh touched and how magical that might be. The museum guard seemed to read my mind and hovered close by.

At any rate, I'm inspired now, and I hope the small signs continue. I believe in some minor way they let me know I'm on the right, if somewhat, mystifying path toward a new book.