TOADS in Writing Classes

I sprung a little surprise in my classes this week--plopped a live European Green Toad on the seminar table. He's a sweet little creature that I've become a bit attached to.

Here's the reason: when I teach characterization in first person I sum up the methods as: the character's Thoughts, the character's choices of what to notice or Observe, Action, Dialogue, and Sensations.

These add up to the acronym: TOADS. Very handy, I think.

The weather has been cold here, though, and I've only seen a few tiny frogs on one warmer day recently and they moved far too fast for me to catch. So I bought Toadsie at Pet Smart. And he, like me, is now guest faculty.

After I'd put him on the table--followed by a wide range of reactions from class members--I asked the students to write about a character surprised by a toad and show the response through the character's bodily sensations, actions, etc.

The idea is to help people to monitor what bodies actually do in response to emotion. So that they have a vocabulary for such moments in their writing and don't have to resort to cliches, like "my heart was in my throat."

I was pleased with the way the classes went. In the group today, several students read their reactions, which were all strikingly different in both language and content, which makes for distinct characters. Plus, the class was kinda fun. At least nobody was phobic or allergic.

More Notes on My Life at Duke

Note One: My four-month teaching appointment here has a wonderful bonus. My office building is a mere 82 steps from the front door of the main library. In this building alone (pictured at dusk when I'm heading home) there are 3.4 million books. It feels at least as big as cyberspace. And the medical school library is only ten minutes walk. All of which is pretty handy, since I'm doing research on my biography.

The locked stacks on the history of medicine have given me quite an insight into what my subject's life must have been like during her three years in a mental hospital starting in 1917. I feel very wealthy having all this material so close at hand.

Note Two: I love public speaking, and almost always feel relaxed doing it. Uncommonly relaxed, in fact. I feel the only obligation I have, in most cases, is to be mildly entertaining.

With teaching, however, I've always felt that it's my duty to get across what I'm supposed to be teaching; the students are supposed to know how to write a pretty passable short story by the end of April.

The weight of this responsibility often makes me try too hard. I'm overly careful about how I say things in class. My speech, when I'm presenting an idea, gets all halting and tentative, which I hate. Must do something about this.

Note 3: I haven't heard any mention on campus of the infamous sexual assault accusations against three lacrosse players or of the prosecutor who is now under investigation. The subject is in the newspaper, of course. But I've heard no buzz at all in the buses, halls, or on the quads. It's a relief to me. I graduated from this school; I love it; I don't want it reduced to this court case, whoever is right or wrong in the matter.

And should you be longing for my opinion, based on nothing but the newspapers and local off-campus gossip-- I think these guys are innocent of sexual assault. However, a party that features low-income women of color stripping is a shameful misuse of privilege.

Anything is Possible: The Tale of the Growling Beauty

Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau told The Week magazine HOW HE GOT HIS CONFIDENCE.

He was 16 and looked 12, was walking down a street in Manhattan. A phenomenally gorgeous twenty-something woman was approaching in the sidewalk traffic. Her beauty was creating quite a stir on the street. "'Guys were gawking, cars were slowing.'" He was too shy to look at her as she came closer. "'My discomfort must have been obvious because as she passes me, she leans over, her breath is warm, and she softly...growls in my ear.'" From then on, he considered anything to be possible.

On a related subject: you know that More Magazine senior model contest I so brashly entered? I learned that last year there were over 19,000 entries. This is going to be my excuse for not being even a semi-finalist. Although-- anything is possible.

First Week of Teaching at Duke

Off to a good start, I think. The intro class (in fiction writing) was slow to start talking, but I feel the potential. And the next level of the course, which met for the first time yesterday--that class is already on fire.

Also I met yesterday for the first time with both of my independent study students and got off to a good start, I felt. Though there was a meeting time confusion with one, which I regretted. He was waiting for me for quite a while.

I'm a bit staggered this morning. Yesterday, in retrospect, was intense, though it felt pretty relaxed at the time. The students are impressive.

It does feel like a triumph and a great pleasure to be back on the campus I loved so much as a student myself. It's A TRIUMPH OF THE B-MINUS STUDENT to come back with a title like "scholar in residence." In my defense, though, I did do well in my major. And got A's in writing classes.

I'm finding that I'm much more diligent as a teacher than I ever was as a student.

Official Start of My Spring Academic Career

Today was the first day of classes at Duke, and the official start of my semester as scholar-in-residence in the English Department there.

My first class isn't until Friday: intro to writing fiction, 2.5 hours meeting once a week.

However, I have already taken possession of my 2 classrooms, half an office, and a location in Duke's piece of cyberspace, on which I have just posted a syllabus. I have also received the much-needed advice of the department's computer expert. I hope I teach my students as kindly and effectively as my computer advisor has been teaching me.

What I'm most accustomed to is working with writers privately, in groups and one-to-one. I now feel as if I'm setting sail on something gigantic.

So you feel free to SEND HAPPY-SEMESTER VIBES to me and the 30 undergraduates who are traveling with me these next four months.

Senior Model?

This may be THE CHEEKIEST MOVE of my recent years: I'm entering the More/Wilhelmina 40+ Model Search: open to women in the 40-60 age range who feel they have a few trips down the catwalk in them.

I'm 58 years old tomorrow, and I never took the first walk down any runway.

When I've told people I'm doing this, I've sensed:
*a whiff of disapproval (this isn't going to feed the hungry, you know)
*fear for my feelings being hurt when I don't even make it to the semi-finals
*glee and you-go-girl enthusiasm.

Or maybe these are just my own reactions, the first two of which I'm hiding from myself. All I feel is THE GLEE. I love the idea of being whisked to New York to be surrounded with pampering professionals devoted to my getting the most out of my eyeshadow. Oh, baby!

Most particularly, I love the idea of strutting around at the lofty age of 58.

Plus, I'm used to rejections: I'm a writer. I can't imagine even blinking at not making the cut. My books are much better than my looks, anyway, and they've all faced some form of disapproval along the way. I'm rarely wounded for more than a day.

So, I proceed. And I'm taking delicious pleasure in filling out the little form and sending the picture, the very one I use on this website. Doing this brash thing is for me a highly personal vote in favor of vivid life and delightful possibilities--and fun--at every age. Who wouldn't be in favor of that?

More, by the way, is a cool boomer-babe magazine, and Wilhelmina is a modeling agency. It's not too late to enter, if you're the right age.

Getting Started with Fiction

This morning I fiddled with fiction again for the first time in months. I'd been doing research on the Chant biography and working with clients and, in recent days, preparing to start teaching fiction writing at Duke for this semester that starts next week.

On the strength of the wonderful short stories I've been reading to prepare for the two courses, and the fear-blasting effects of Unlock Your Creative Genius which I reviewed in my previous post, and excitement about the idea that cropped up during the week of vacation I took between Christmas and New Year's--I jumped almost-first-thing today into THE MOST DAUNTING PIECE OF WRITING I COULD CONTEMPLATE. I didn't even bother to take my coat off. Just sat (checked e-mail) and started work.

It came out pretty well. I was pleased with what I did in this crack at it.

I didn't feel I was driving with the brake on, as I very often initially do. I had no conscious fear or hesitation. I did, however, eat FISTFULS OF ANIMAL CRACKERS while I worked. If that's what it takes--fine! I don't mind a crutch that works. I count it a very good morning.

And now back to work on the class syllabus.... I hope it will inspire the students as well as it did me.

Real Solutions to Problems with Creativity

I'm so excited about recommending a book I was given at Christmas. It has the somewhat hypy-sounding title of Unlock Your Creative Genius.

But the fact is: the approach described in this book works. It's working for me in dealing with moments of thinking: I can't do this... and variations on that. Or moments of not even thinking, but instead feeling a leaden drag when I approach a daunting bit of work.

If you ever had a moment's procrastination in starting your creative work, buy this book and use it. (And add a comment on this blog about how it works for you.) I've never seen such a practical answer to the problem pulled together anywhere else.

Also, the chapter titles offer little epiphanies in themselves. The one I most identified with was "No One Is Going to Tell Me What to Do--Including Myself." That sure hit home.

To give credit: the author is psychologist Bernard Golden. The publisher is Prometheus Books in Amherst, NY. The person who chose this book for me was my columnist sister-in-law Ruth Sheehan. She said it was just the kind of thing I like to write about on my blog.

The 5 Things

A "virtual happy hour" on Toby Bloomberg's Diva Marketing "tagged" me to answer this set of questions that's making the rounds: What 5 Things You Don't Know About Me.

So here I go:

1. I love celebrity gossip, watch E!, subscribe to People magazine and Vanity Fair, etc. Annual highlight: the Oscars.

2. I was a pretty decent fifth-grade tap dancer.

3. While I'm reading on my sofa, I eat vast quantities of Raisin Bran dry out of the box.

4. I long to get an artist to paint blue morning glories all over my '92 Camry.

5. Sorting things into piles--putting all the apples together, all the oranges together, etc-- is soothing to me.

Okay, now here's who I'm tagging to take up the challenge: Billie Hinton, Sarah Blackmon, JA Konrath,and Budd Parr.

Dancing in the Streets

Ever gone herd dancing? That's when a group of people dances (fast-dances) together, without regard to gender or couples. It's a great thing. Not that the two-by-two thing isn't good too. But a gyrating group is exhilarating.

That's the subject of Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Dancing in the Streets--or, why we don't indulge more often in what she calls "collective joy."

According to a review in the January Elle magazine, "she accumulates a compelling case for the benefits of serious partying." She finds that our forebears were much more likely to take part in group dancing and chanting, and that in more recent centuries, elites have attempted to discourage that kind of behavior, in an apparent effort to KEEP THE MASSES UNDER CONTROL and hold onto their own dignity.

Well, I've never responded well to being told by someone on a stage to hug the person next to me, or some such.

But I do like voodoo drumming (and old rock and roll) and group dancing that goes on and on. Don't do enough of it either. Perhaps I'll arrange a change.

Today's bit of boldness: My wear-under-sweaters white turtleneck was too long for the sweater I put on this morning. So I cut about six inches off the bottom. There's nothing sacrosanct about the way it came from the store.

Thought for the future: Next time boldly measure first.

Topnotch Reading List

The Raleigh paper's book editor Peder Zane has a new book coming out from Norton next month that is essentially a recommendation of a lot of very good novels, plays, and poetry: "The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books,"

In the meantime go to the Top Ten website and have a look at the list. Some titles are predictable, some are surprises.

Then POST YOUR OWN LIST there. I found it an interesting exercise. I was startled to find that in addition to my beloved Henry James, V.S. Naipaul, and Anita Brookner, I also listed Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon, the retelling of the Arthurian legends from the women's point-of-view. Sentence by sentence, the language in that book isn't up to that of my other favorites. But so what? It's mesmerizing, and it is one of my favorites. So -- my little bold act of the day.

Feel free to post your list here as well.

How to Become Great

"To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great." Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

This Hegel quote was part of the signature of an e-mail I received from a staff person at Penguin Putnam dealing with some bit of business about my novel Sister India.

It's tough to hang onto this philosophy when one has been for long involved in the publishing business. We've been having a lot of conversation lately on this blog about market requirements, and what to do about them.

To meet Hegel's standard of indifference to public opinion and to get published would require one of several STRATEGIES, it seems to me:

1. Make the work of such transcendent quality that it might eventually be recognized for its value, though not necessarily in the writer's lifetime. And trust to either luck or young proteges to see that that reevaluation happens.

2. Self-publish, like James Joyce, among others.

3. Do such amazing and relentless self-promotion that a new standard, a new market is created.

4. Rely on accidentally meeting the requirements of publishers while doing one's own thing.

5. Meet enough market requirements to get in the door, while ignoring others. Make only the tolerable compromises, without damaging what feels vital. Promote like crazy.

Number 5 is my current choice.

How about you? OTHER OPTIONS?

(Every time I think I'm going to write for only a line or two, turns out that I'm wrong, I go on...)

Holiday Innovation

We're all aflutter at my office building today because this house, built in 1910, is on Raleigh's 35th annual Historic Oakwood Candlelight Tour.

The queen and owner of the building, Carrie Knowles, shares my views about creativity and self-expression. Her studio and writing office are called Free Range Gallery. Here's what she just had painted so that you see it as soon as you come in the front door.


And here's the Christmas/holiday/winter solstice tree: it's made of cans of food that will be given to a soup kitchen when the tree comes down. This construction, a piece of art in itself, was made by Carrie's 16 year old son Cole Leiter and his friend Wilson Sayre.

Happy holiday preparation!--whatever you celebrate. I hope you'll take pleasure in doing it your way.

The tree of cans is a good demonstration that self-expression isn't necessarily selfish at all, can be quite altruistic in fact. For more on this, see The Healing Power of Doing Good.

The Luminous Egg: Visual Suggestion

Remember that floating orb I wrote about? It's the piece of art I bought by/from my artist-buddy Carrie Knowles. I had to have it because it looks like the image of a floating ball of light that inspired both the biography I'm working on, and the new novel (tentatively "Pascal's Fire") that I have also (barely) begun.

Here you see the ball of light, in the center of the mantel in my office. I'm delighted to have it there. And it's not just to make the place look more interesting.

I find if I put a visual image of a goal before me, I'm more likely to reach that goal. CONSTANT SUBLIMINAL SUGGESTION works wonders on my typing fingers. I've found it almost magical.

Anybody else had any experience with this sort of thing?

Please Note

Good conversation going on in the comment section of the post titled: "An Extremely Bold Question."

The subject has evolved to WRITING FOR THE MARKET: is it damaging to art? and if not, how do we psyche out the current market requirements.

Do join in with your own view--here, or in the comment section to the earlier post.

Do you tailor your writing to what you perceive market requirements to be?

Authentic Speech

Check out a feisty blog, Inventing the Rest of My Life, on the More magazine website.

More is an excellent magazine aimed at women over forty. I think the More articles would be of interest to a much larger group, but then I also read a number of men's magazines, and, more shocking, some aimed at 20-something fashionistas: "Drew, Ashlee, Kelis... share their secret shopping lists...," etc.

"Inventing the Rest of My Life" is written by 65 year-old Suzanne Braun Levine. "Recently," she writes, "an invitation to speak to a large national women's organization was withdrawn when the planners visited my Web site and saw the phrase 'the fuck-you fifties.'" That's the lead-in to her discussion of "appropriate" language and behavior.

I love her conclusion: "What I hope to see is not that the coarse language becomes commonplace, but that we get to the point that we Second Adulthood women don't have to call attention to ourselves in order to be noticed. Then each of us can find the words to speak out in her own voice and on her own terms." That's my wish for everybody.

The Courageous Miss Chant's Cottage on Cottage Lane

The exceptionally bold Miss Elisabeth Chant, the subject of my biography-in-progress,lived in this house about 70 years ago in my gorgeous and charming hometown of Wilmington, NC. I was there for Thanksgiving with my family and took a few pictures.

I especially want to show the house, because one of her descendants turned up in the comment section of my previous post, the one where I asked: why don't more of you comment? I'm so glad I asked that question.

Chant, a painter, was exceptionally BOLD in that she was a full-time artist, and single woman, who traveled the world alone in the first half of the 20th century--and she had the nerve to go around in my small Southern town in medieval clothes with hair like Princess Leia--and to confide, when it wasn't fashionable, that she was being led in her choices by Athena and several dozen other spirit guides. Any one or two of those situations is enough risk for most folks.

An Extremely Bold Question

How come most of y'all come and visit and let me blather on and yet don't comment?

Has this blog attracted all of the world's shy people?

I'd love to know. And I'd be grateful to anybody who answers here about the reason he or she keeps silent. You can even be Anonymous. Or Startlingly Revealing. Or Controversial. Or...you tell me....

The Fundamental Trick of a Writing Career

Underlying most of the decisions I make about my work is this: to what degree will I alter the work I feel called, even created, to do, in order to meet the requirements of the marketplace?

My standard for myself is that, in revising for the market, I figure out how to, at the same time, make the work better overall. I find a way to do what an editor wants (or that I'm guessing an editor wants) that better serves my own purposes as well. And what a wrestle with the work that can be!

On the other hand, if I'd gone farther in the direction of the market in my career so far, more people might well be reading my work. It's very hard to see the line between too much compromise and not enough. By the time we find out, it may be too late. The work is diluted and published, or the work is rejected.

I'm not one who is opposed to revising, to working with an editor. Not at all. I believe in selling, in publishing. Part of the job I feel I've somehow been assigned in life is getting the stories, not only written, but published. So the question rolls on, I've had to resolve it anew with every new project.

I never quit until the work both meets my standards and is published. But damn, it's right wearing sometimes.

At the same time, I'm grateful for my strong clear sense of mission. If I didn't have it, I expect I'd be wrestling with whether I was doing the right work.

"Take each day with no backward look."

That advice -- "Take each day with no backward look." -- just jumped out at me when I went to visit Scott Burkhead's site, Daily Spiritual Guide.

It's from Hazelden's Touchstone Meditation Series. What a VIVID and LIGHT-AS AIR life I'd live if I thoroughly managed to do that!

If one is prone to a bit of scrupulousity--did I say the wrong thing? Did I say the wrong thing that day 18 years ago?--this could be a LIFESAVER. With the aid of meditation, medication, and exercise, I'm about 98% better at that than I used to be.