chapter-a-month challenge

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death of a project

August 6, 2010 in chapter-a-month challenge, writing | 16 comments

I’m killing off the chapter-a-month challenge. Right here, right now. Line right up and get photos while the guillotine comes down.

I decided to put the project out of its misery, rather than count off the months that had passed while I did not write a chapter a month.

It was a noble little project, it was. Write a draft of a chapter for my book each month. Sounds good, sounds proactive, sounds, maybe, doable. And I was sure that making the project public here would make me diligent.

Nope. Not even for you, my faithful readers, could I crank out a chapter a month.

A few words in my defense: I have been writing. I have! Except during June, when vacation excused me. But other than that, I’ve been busy. Just not writing chapters. Oh, I’d set out to write chapters. But then suddenly my words would drift off into unexpected directions, leaving the park confines, calling back to taunt me. Silly writer lady! You thought you’d write about audiobooks. Ha HA! We lines here are gathering amongst ourselves and striking out for new territory! This paragraph here is running off with that paragraph there, and they’re secretly spawning an entirely new chapter, maybe two! Just you try to corral us by the end of the month for your little project!

“But something happened when I actually started to write. The book took on a life of its own and told me how it wanted to be written…I didn’t fight the current. On the contrary, the writing of the book proved one of its central points: that we write to find out what we know and what we want to say. I thought of how often as a writer I had made clear to myself some subject I had previously known nothing about by just putting once sentence after another–by reasoning my way in sequential steps to its meaning. I thought of how often the act of writing even the simplest document–a letter for instance–had clarified my half-formed ideas. Writing and thinking and learning were the same process.”

William Zinsser, Writing to Learn

It’s nice to know that I’m not alone in having my writing mutiny against me. I’ve decided to take Zinsser’s advice and not fight the current.

I know I’ve used this analogy before, but I like it so much that I’m hoping you’ll indulge my repetition: The trouble with this writing thing is that writers don’t have a medium to work with, as other artists do. Not, at least, until we get some words down. A sculptor can take out a block of clay and start shaping it; she can work her hands in the clay and hear the clay tell her what it wants to be. But a writer has nothing until she sits down and writes and makes that clay. Then, after all that work the shaping starts, and the words start whispering what they really want to be.

I think I’m still in my clay-making phase. I could start up a lump-of-clay-a-month challenge! But somehow that doesn’t have the right ring.

The good news is that last month, while I dutifully tried to write a chapter, my writing gave me a new idea. A new model, really. It has to do with Zinnser’s notions above, with the idea that you learn as you write, that half-formed ideas are clarified as you try to explain your thoughts. It also has to do with you, fine readers, and your feedback. It’s all part of that little secret I alluded to in my last post, that I’ll be starting up here in September. But that’s all I’m saying for now.

So goodbye, chapter-a-month challenge. You were an admirable idea, but you just didn’t work for me. Off with your head!

(What? I hear you saying. No photos? Nope, I couldn’t think of a visual to accompany the post, short of showing my notebook and a big set of shears. But there’s always something new and visual happening on my flickr page. You can get there via that little flickr widget on the right…)

chapter-a-month challenge: april

May 11, 2010 in chapter-a-month challenge, learning, writing | 10 comments

I almost forgot that I owe you my monthly update. I can just see you bouncing in your seat right now.

Thanks for indulging me. These posts keep me sticking to my goals.

learning to play guitarThey learn from us. We learn from them.

You may remember that my plan is to use the first three chapters to write about what each of my three kids have taught me about writing. I’ve shifted my ideas with each kid, and these reflections form a sort of nutshell history of how I went from a classroom model of teaching writing to something completely different.

The big lesson I learned from Lulu was the importance of helping a child develop a voice as a writer.

When I first began taking writing classes as an adult, I was always baffled when instructors used the term voice. How could an auditory term have anything to do with the written word? Clearly it was an important term: not only did all of my instructors use it; every one of my writing books had a chapter on voice (or sometimes one on style, which seemed essentially the same thing.)

Definitions of voice differ, depending on which writer you’re reading, but I came to understand voice as having personality and style on the page (or screen). In What A Writer Needs, a book for writing teachers, Ralph Fletcher offers this helpful definition: “When I talk about voice, I mean written words that carry with them the sense that someone has actually written them. Not a committee, not a computer: a single human being. Writing with voice has the same quirky cadence that makes human speech so impossible to resist listening to.”

I rarely took dictation from H, except when he was very young–before age six or so. With Lulu I began to do it more regularly, but I always felt a little guilty about it. I felt like she probably ought to be writing herself. But when she was eight, she dictated a story that started to set me straight on all that.

This time L. took a character from literature, Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby, and dictated her own, original chapter in Cleary’s style.  At the time L. had been reading the Ramona series–the first series of longer chapter books which she’d slurped down on her own–and listening to audiobook versions of the stories in her room.  L. gave Ramona her own grandmother’s real-life experience of putting hand dishwashing liquid into the dishwasher, only to have it foam out in billows all over the kitchen floor.

Here’s how L.’s story, titled Oh Ramona, begins:

Ramona Quimby walked in through the back door.

“How was kindergarten?” her mother asked, in a tired voice.

“It was fine, except I gave Davy one of my worm rings and he said, ‘Yuck!’ and threw it back at me.”

“Oh Ramona,” Mrs. Quimby said.

“Will you read me a story, Mama?”

“Oh Ramona, I’ve got a headache and look at all those dishes I’ve got to put in the dishwasher.” She groaned as she pointed towards the sink full of dishes. “I’m going to lie down in the bedroom. You go play and stay out of mischief!”

Mrs. Quimby walked into the bedroom. Ramona looked from the kitchen to the bedroom and back to the kitchen.

“I can help Mama by putting all the dishes in the dishwasher and running it!” Ramona tiptoed into the kitchen, and as quietly as she could, began to load the dishwasher with the dishes. Ramona knew that her mother used soap in the dishwasher, so she climbed up and got the bottle of soap down from the counter. Ramona filled the dishwasher tray with soap. “Maybe I should put some more in, ’cause these dishes are really dirty.”

Of course, soon bubbles are oozing across the kitchen floor, and instantly Ramona is putting on rain gear to scoop up “bubble snow”, placing foam “whipped cream” on plates for a bubble feast, and having a “foam war” with her buddy, Howie. I was astounded as L. dictated this passage to me over the course of a few days, and I said so, something along the lines of, “You sound just like Beverly Cleary!” Which she did. Cleary’s style is all there: the weariness in Mrs. Quimby’s “Oh Ramona”; the worm ring detail; the way Ramona talks to herself; and, of course, her boundless, imaginative mischief.

I knew from my writing books that professional writers often start out by mimicking their heroes.  Annie Dillard’s words bear Thoreau’s whispers; Michael Cunningham let Virginia Woolf’s ghost guide his pen. Michael Chabon writes about how, as a boy, he modeled his comic book club newsletter on the editorial pages of Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee. “I wrote it in breathless homage, rich in exclamation points, to Lee’s prose style, that intoxicating smartass amalgam of Oscar Levant, Walter Winchell, Mad magazine and thirty-year-old U.S. Army slang.” This, often, is how writers learn their craft. L. was learning by imitating her own master–and she was able to do so because I took the time to take dictation from her. I’m certain that she couldn’t have adopted the nuances of Cleary’s style if she’d had to do the writing herself. She was still struggling with basic spelling at that that point; content took a backseat to form when she wrote on her own.

The Ramona story in particular was enough to convince me to continue taking dictation from L. as long as she wanted it. I was an aspiring writer myself, still striving to find my own voice as an essayist. I knew how hard it could be to write in a consistent style–to balance humor and insight, story and analysis. I knew how hard it was to be captivating on a page. Even back then, I sensed that helping L. develop her own voice mattered far more than worrying over whether she knew how to start sentences with capitals, or punctuate contractions, or spell sufficiently for her age.

Kids. They wear me out sometimes, ’til I’m ready to collapse on my bed like Mrs. Quimby. But I learn from them every day. Every day.

Next month: what I learned about writing from Mr. T, the kid who never does anything the way you’re supposed to.

chapter-a-month challenge: march

April 6, 2010 in chapter-a-month challenge, the bees, writing | 8 comments

Another post on writing?  I know, I know, it’s a shame. Especially since so many exciting things are happening around here, like college-choosing, and climbing chain-link fences to capture swarms with intrepid beekeeping friends. But I promised to get back to you each month on my book project, so I’ll try to make this quick.

Writing in March was good. All the cutting and reassembling of last month seems to have worked, and my little Frankenstein of a chapter can breathe. It’s alive! I shared it with some very dear writing friends, and the feedback was positive. It still needs work, but I think I have the format and voice of the book worked out. Which is no small thing.

So much of this book is influenced by my experiences as a perpetual student of writing. My own struggles with learning to write have given me a different perspective on kids’ writing, one that’s very different from the traditional school model. I think that writing educators often don’t have much experience writing themselves, and they forget to use professional writers as models for how to go about the task. I’m not sure I’ve written much about this here, so I thought I’d give you a little excerpt of my work-in-progress that addresses it. This is from a section about advice from writing books and how it seemed at odds with what I was trying to do with H at the time.

“…Almost all of these books offered similar advice to beginners: If you want to get past that first barren page, you must write without considering spelling, or grammar, or the next paragraph, or what your mother might wonder, or what your sophomore English teacher might slaughter via red pen. Nearly every book on my shelf encouraged me to begin with uncensored word-spewing.  In one of my favorites, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions for Writing and Life, Anne Lamott writes, “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something–anything–down on paper.”

         I drank down this advice like a courage-bequeathing cocktail; it was what I needed to get past the censor that I’d picked up in school, and to finally begin.

         Lamott also writes this: “The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.”

         This was the sad paradox that I didn’t recognize outright, but that must have nettled me on some level:  H couldn’t write playful, childish drafts despite the fact that he was a child.  He couldn’t romp on the page because he was burdened with the very tasks that professional writers tell adult would-be writers not to fret about. His words did not pour out; instead they got snagged and stuck as he learned to form letters in conventional shapes, facing conventional directions; as he learned to cluster those letters into words that others could read; as he began to string those words into lines others could comprehend. And he couldn’t take comfort in the fact that no one would see his work; instead he had me hovering over him, watching and worrying over what he was doing, and whether he was keeping up for his age.” 

The plan for April: So now I’m on to the next chapter, another cut-and-reassemble affair, about what I learned from Lulu on the importance of developing one’s voice as a writer.

And, just because I hate to post without photos, here’s a little preview of all the promised excitement. Photo by stefaneener.

I'm stuck!

I never was any good at climbing fences. And the hiking boots didn’t help. Ouch.

(edited to add: Lest you think this photo has nothing to do with the post above, read the comments to see how smart my readers are. Everything is connected.)

chapter-a-month challenge: february

March 10, 2010 in chapter-a-month challenge, learning, writing | 10 comments

I’m a little late, but here’s how I’m doing with my project.

It always feels a little funny sharing a work-in-progress. I read a post from ysolda on her fabulous knitting blog, about her qualms with sharing her designs-in-progress. She does share, saying, “Personally I think it’s pretty interesting to see a project build and gain some insight into the development process.” (And doesn’t the sweater she’s working on look gorgeous? Check out the post with the wrist detail. I want to knit that!)

I’m always fascinated with the creative processes of others. I’m hoping that some of you out there feel the same. If nothing else, if you don’t write yourself, what I share here might help you see what a messy process writing can be. It might help you understand your kids’ frustrations when they write.

Anyway, I don’t have a chapter this month. But I have an awful lot of stuff.

I kept starting new parts, but nothing came together. It was like trying to gather up a ball of bread dough that didn’t have enough moisture. I finally realized what was holding me back.

I had this idea–which I still like–that I wanted to write very short chapters for this book. Break down my ideas into small bits, followed with practical suggestions, so parents could pick up the book and consider one small idea at a time–or they could read several.

But here’s what I realized: I don’t write short. Gee, I’ll bet you’re thinking, no duh. Have you ever seen a short post on this blog? What I’ve always loved about the essay form is that it imitates the thought process. It takes off in unexpected directions, incorporating story, analysis, argument and wonder. It’s a little unwieldy. That’s my style, and I think I need to go with it.

That realization opened up the possibilities for me. Instead of not knowing what to do with those chunks in which I’d written about each of my kids, it occurred to me that each of those sections was part of a bigger idea. With each kid I learned something new about writing with homeschoolers:

  • With H, I learned that the traditional school model of having kids take on their own writing at age six doesn’t work very well.
  • With Lulu, I learned that what’s most important is to find ways to help kids want to write, and to develop their voices as writers.
  • With Mr. T, I learned that homeschoolers can put the previous notions into practice differently. We can use an entirely different model.

Suddenly, I realized that I could write a chapter on each of those ideas, incorporating the sections I’d written about my kids with the newer sections I’d been working on. I could try to carry my readers along my own evolution of thoughts about kids and writing–assuming that many readers might follow a similar evolution–leading them right into the practical ideas that will form most of the book.

And I knew what I needed to do next. It was time for a cut-and-paste session.

cutting and pasting in the back of the car

Cutting up and rearranging my work in the back of the car, while Mr. T was at his wilderness program.

This is one of my favorite techniques for when writing isn’t working. Take what you have, cut it up and play with the order. It’s fun, and it almost always leads to new ideas. If nothing else, it gets you up from your writing chair and moving, which is always helpful.

I helped a homeschooled friend on her college essays this fall. She’d written a nice essay on her love of cycling, but it wasn’t quite capturing her passion. It wasn’t lively enough. I remembered a beautiful poem she’d written in our writer’s workshop, a very sensory, tangible poem about one particular ride. I suggested that she might want to cut up her essay and her poem, and see if she could work them into one. 

Her resulting essay was unique and vivid and wonderful. I hope it helps get her where she wants to go.

At any rate, my own cutting and pasting session was just what I needed. Suddenly all my ideas are coming together, and I have a big, shaggy ball of dough to knead. It needs work, but it’s working.

This month I hope to write a good draft of the chapter on H and the traditional school model of writing (and why it often doesn’t work). I’ll let you know how how it goes.

Most likely at painstaking length.

chapter-a-month challenge: january

February 9, 2010 in chapter-a-month challenge, homeschooling, writing | 16 comments

It’s time for me to report back to you on whether I deserve a pat on the head or a kick in the butt on my book project.

writing at night

Finding interesting photos for this project is sure to be a challenge in itself.

My goal is to write a draft of a chapter each month. I gave myself an easy start for January, since I had just the last part of a sort of triptych of three shorter chapters to finish up.

I felt compelled to start with a brief history of how my views on kids and writing have evolved over time, with each of my own kids. (Brief history sounds troublesome already, don’t you think?) So I wrote a short chapter on each kid, following the shifts in my thinking.

With H, I was still pretty locked into the school model, and felt that kids at six should begin doing all their own writing.

“On a bookshelf in our family room is a tiny yellow book, hand-stitched with dental floss by H. at six, and titled–with a backwards J–My Journal. Only a few pages are filled, with lines like I oent to a rastrant. I had pancacs.  (I went to a restaurant. I had pancakes.) My articulate boy couldn’t manage more, didn’t want to manage more. Now, flipping through the empty pages that followed, I wonder: why didn’t I transcribe what he really wanted to say? Why didn’t I write for him more often? I know the reason, and there was just one: it wasn’t how schools did it.”

I go on to tell how at seven, H. slammed his pencil to the table and hollered, “I hate writing!”

Lulu’s chapter is all about cheating as a homeschooling parent:

     “Any parent of more than one child knows what happens with the second. You learn to cheat. You learn to slacken the rules that meant so much with your first. You permit pacifiers past first birthdays, you let bedtimes creep late, you let broccoli be snubbed and allow ice cream anyway. You know it’s cheating, but you try not to care. Anything to bypass a tantrum, to speed up a grocery trip, to let you sit at the table until you’re ready to deal with the dishes.”

With Lulu I knew that, more than anything, I didn’t want her to hate writing. So instead of forcing her to write, I cheated: I often took dictation from her. Still, I saw my transcribing as a temporary fix, just a little help until she could write on her own without difficulty.

Mr. T came six years after Lulu, and almost ten after H. That’s how long it took me to realize that all the times I’d thought I’d “cheated” with homeschooling had really been homeschooling at its finest: me, offering my kids just what they needed at the time. I took dictation from Mr. T as I’d done with Lulu, but this time around I began noticing what he seemed to be learning from the process.

     “T. narrated his tale, his head whirling with ideas, and I took notes, my head whirling with my own.

     I compiled quite a Post-It list at the kitchen table that morning. Slowly, I began to realize that T. had intuited an awful lot about writing from our dictation sessions. Not merely rules of grammar, but also the writerly choices that authors make, like using strong verbs such as tore to describe a character eating his food quickly, or ending a chapter with a cliffhanger.”

That was when I first began to see that taking dictation has real potential as a writing tool for homeschooling families.

So now I have three chapters–but I’m not sure I’ll use any of them. Part of me thinks telling my stories as the start of a book is too self-indulgent; part of me thinks readers love stories, and long to see how others trip up and figure things out. And that my history is a necessary lead-in to what I’ve come to believe about kids and writing.

I don’t know. This may not be my beginning. I may take stuff from these chapters and insert it elsewhere. I may not use it at all. I think I just need to keep writing and see where the pages settle, see what form the book wants to take.

One thing I’ve learned with writing, that I tell the kids in my writer’s workshops, is that the beginning you start with may not be your ultimate beginning. So often we feel compelled to start with something that drums at our minds, but that may just be a warm-up, a way into our true beginning. Our first efforts may simply be what I call making clay. Unlike the sculptor who begins work by taking out a block of clay and shaping it, the writer has nothing to work with, no clay at all, until he or she writes a draft and makes some. Only then can the shaping start.

the plan for february:

I’m forging ahead and starting a chapter on voice. To me, the most important part of a writing education should be nurturing a child’s written voice. If you’re baffled by the term as I once was, if you’re befuddled at how an auditory word like voice can have anything to do with writing on a page, stick around. I’ll try to explain.

thoughts on a year-long project (or, boring my readers for one last time)

January 25, 2010 in books, chapter-a-month challenge, learning, my year of essayists, writing | 16 comments

my excellent essayists

On New Year’s morning, I woke to find a message in my inbox telling me that Scott Russell Sanders had left a comment on my blog. Sanders was my essayist for October, and reading his message was such a thrill, and a closing more satisfying than I ever could have imagined for my year-long project. 

This wasn’t the first time a writer had left a comment on my blog, but it was the first of my beloved essayists to stop and say hello. I’m not sure I would have ever had the gall to put these thoughts out in public if I’d ever dreamed that the writers themselves might show up to read what I’d written. And I’m not sure I would have ever started this project if I’d realized what a time-consuming creature it would become.

Oh, it was time-consuming. There was at least one book to read each month. (And not a lick of fiction all year–not a lick!) After reading, I had to go back over my highlights and select favorites. Type them in and explain what I admired about them. And then write a little nutshell overview of what I thought about the writer. Those posts took me hours to write–usually over several days. Somehow they got longer and longer as the months went on, yet they consistently received far fewer comments than any of my regular posts. What was I thinking? What kept me doing it, month after month, like that dutiful teachers’ pet in the front row that makes everyone cross their eyes? 

I’m not entirely sure. There was something about declaring the project in public that fueled me. Who wants to fail on the stage of the World Wide Web? But more than that, I think, it became clear in the early months that I was learning an awful lot from the project. Here’s what I wrote when I first started out:

“The idea of studying essayists came to me in late December, when I was reading some writer’s list of favorite writers. And I realized, with plenty of despair and loathing, that although I’ve been reading and writing essays for thirteen years now, I would have a hard time coming up with a list of favorite essayists. I could give you a couple names, but a couple is a set, mere salt and pepper shakers. Not a list.”

And now? After twelve months of being a good student, sitting as I am in the front row, I can rattle off a long list of favorites. I can even tell what I’ve learned from each one. (Not that I can apply what I’ve learned. But I’m trying.)

Annie Dillard showed me how to observe, how to make every word in every sentence count; Michel de Montaigne  showed that in an essay, it’s more important to raise questions than to answer them. From Sue Hubbell I learned how to approach instructive writing using the essayist’s toolbox, and from Joan Didion how to work the telling detail, and the rhythm of a paragraph. I will always love Anne Lamott for her humor, her heart, and her wacky, spot-on metaphors. I’ll always appreciate Molly Wizenberg for showing me how to leap from the blogging world to the literary one. E.B. White showed me how an essayist can be witty and intelligent yet still downright charming, while Pico Iyer taught me how to pay attention to the details in the world around me, whether I’m in Iceland or my own kitchen. M.F.K. Fisher showed how insight into people is as important as details about things–and how to be sassy. Scott Russell Sanders taught me how to craft beautiful lines about pain as well as joy, and Michael Chabon showed me how to craft beautiful lines, somehow, from the most mundane bits from our culture and our days. And Adam Gopnik, well, Adam Gopnik will always be the Scarecrow to my Dorothy, my first favorite essayist.

This project has been so satisfying. I’m thinking of slurping all the posts into a Blurb book, so I can revisit all those fabulous lines until they burn themselves into my brain and fingers and make me a better writer.

Recognizing the power that a public year-long project seems to have on me, as the year wound down I began considering a new project for the new year. As good as it would be for me to read another dozen essayists, to finally get around to studying Virginia Woolf, I’m not doing it. It just took too much time. I thought about doing something completely different, something with photography, because I want to take better pictures.

But eventually I realized that the natural follow-up to this project would be to take what I’ve learned this year and to try to apply it to my own writing. And to make some progress on my book idea, since it’s the project that matters most to me right now. So I’ve come up with something I’m calling my Chapter-A-Month Challenge. I’m going to try to get a draft of a new book chapter completed each month.

I have no idea if I can pull this off. I write s-l-o-w-l-y. I write about as fast as Mr. T brushes his teeth, because he spends most of his brushing time making faces in the mirror. But at least I can try to write slowly more often, right? Once a month I’ll report here on how it’s going. Maybe I’ll share a few lines; maybe I’ll just whine about how hard it is to wake up at 5:00 am on Tuesdays to write. I’m not sure.

I’m putting the challenge on my blog for the kick-in-the-pants effect I hope it will have on my writing, not because I think you, dear readers, will find it interesting. I hope you don’t mind indulging me once a month.

The week I finished off my essayist project, I read one more essay. This one was by Alexander Chee, from Mentors, Muses and Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives. It’s an essay about the time Chee spent in the classroom of Annie Dillard, my January essayist from last year. By the time you get to the part where Dillard tells her students that whenever they’re in a bookstore, they should put their finger in the place on the shelf where their own book would be, you are guaranteed to have goosebumps if you’re an aspiring writer yourself.

“If I’ve done my job, she said in the last class, you won’t be happy with anything you write for the next ten years. It’s not because you won’t be writing well, but because I’ve raised your standards for yourself. Don’t compare yourselves with each other. Compare yourselves to Colette, or Henry James, or Edith Wharton. Compare yourselves to the classics. Shoot there.”

After nearly twenty years of trying to teach myself to write, I’m sure I won’t be satisfied after another ten. But after twelve months of reading some pretty excellent essayists, twelve months of sampling them and savoring them, now, when it comes to my own writing, at least I know what I’m shooting for.