Lisa Romeo Writes (the blog)

Read the other 15 installments of  Stuff My Writing Students Say.

Image:  Flickr via Creative Commons / mootown

This summer has been good to me, publication-wise.* Excerpts from my memoir manuscript have been appearing in literary journals with a bit more frequency, including the narrative piece, "Old Men Who Write," which is now part of the first online issue of Under The Sun.

It traces my experience several years ago when a writing class I offered at my local library brought me into contact with two elderly men who -- what else? -- reminded me so strongly of my father, and the confusion this caused me as I worked hard to maintain our respective roles.

Here's a bit of it, which picks up in the middle of a class, and focuses on one student, Robert, who is 90 years old:

...I begin a discussion about reaching back in our lives for stories, and I notice Robert’s brown-flecked big hand resting on a small diary, the once-black leather worn to dull brown on all edges. I ask him about it. 

“This is my diary from when I was a boy, in the 1920s. Oh, there’s a lot of stories in here, you bet,” he says.  I expect him to say more, but he quiets, nods, and taps his fingers on the book.  For a second, I want to reach across and push open the clasp (does it still lock, I wonder?), but of course I do not. 

“I hope you’re thinking of writing about some of those times?” I ask, stupidly impressed with myself. 

“Oh, I don’t know. It was all so long ago. I’m pretty old, you know,” he says, his hand stroking the book, his eyes averted to a shelf of nearby reference books. 

“Well, that’s okay,” I say, not knowing what else to say. 

Robert throws his arms up in the air and smiles. “It’s okay that I’m old? Well, thank you very much!” The lightheartedness is back in his tone, the tease returned to his watery eye.Everyone laughs. I notice he’s crossed his stilt-like legs one over the other at the knee the way my father used to and, also like my father, that on his eyeglasses a frayed Band-Aid cushions the part over the bridge of his nose. I am glad to have my notes to concentrate on, printed out, slid into plastic sheet protectors, in a neat three-ring binder, because I don’t know what will happen if I keep looking Robert’s way. As I discuss writing, I glance at each student and try to ignore Robert’s slow nods, the way he raises an index finger in the air and dips it slightly to signal his agreement. 

I can’t look, and I can’t look away.

You can read the whole thing here.

There's a bit of a full-circle moment about this. It comes just as I'm preparing to present brief, interactive writing workshops at a bunch of senior citizen centers in southern New Jersey this week. 

Life is like that sometimes.  Writing too.

*Oh, the rejections still arrive too; but when there's a good acceptance/publication run, and it coincides with an otherwise stressful couple of months, you bet I'm going to brag just a little bit!

One cool aspect of teaching online is reaching writers across the country and globe (Mexico, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Australia, and Canada so far). But often, writers enroll who live within a few miles, and when that happens, we have a coffee together when the class ends. That is how Nancy Gerber and I met in real life a few months ago. Nancy is the author of Losing a Life:  A Daughter’s Memoir of Caregiving (2005), which chronicles the aftermath of her father’s massive stroke, and “My Mother’s Keeper” (2010), an illustrated chapbook about her mother’s descent into dementia.  She holds a doctorate in English from Rutgers University and taught English and Women’s Studies at Rutgers-Newark for eight years.

Please Welcome Nancy Gerber. 

I was nine the year I fell in love with poetry. Ellen Lane, my fourth grade teacher at Woodside School, introduced me to the power and beauty of poetic language, a lesson that has stayed with me to this day.

Ellen Lane was a tiny woman, maybe five feet, small framed with curly gray hair and steely eyes behind her wire-rimmed glasses.  She wore starched blouses and sensible shoes. We thought she was ancient and called her Miz Ol’ Lane behind her back, but she was probably in her sixties, not that much older than I am now. Even then, I was uncomfortable with this show of disrespect toward her but I was trying to get in with the popular girls and went along.

Mrs. Lane loved the work of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Carl Sandburg and I think she saw it as her patriotic duty to teach her young charges about the literary contributions of great Americans. I recall her standing in front of a beige laminate desk in our cinderblock classroom, reading with such precision and force that “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” or “I’m Nobody. Who are You?” became etched into my developing brain. 

One of her favorites was Sandburg’s “Primer Lesson.”  She had us memorize it:

"Look out how you use proud words.
When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back.
They wear long boots, hard boots: they walk off proud; they can’t hear 
you calling ---
Look out how you use proud words."

       The poem contains an important truth for fourth graders fond of name calling, as we were.   Come to think of it, it’s a good lesson for adults, too.

That year I blossomed as a writer. We wrote weekly book reports for Mrs. Lane,  an assignment that encouraged reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. The discipline of writing those essays paid off. That same year, during Jewish Book Month, I won an award from my Hebrew School for a book report I wrote on a biography of Henrietta Szold, founder of the organization Hadassah. The committee chair called my mother to ask if a parent or teacher had helped me, and my mother assured them no, this was my own work. I still have the prize, a copy of The Book of Jewish Knowledge, inscribed: "To Nancy Frankel, 1965, from the Ada L. Goldberg Library of Temple Emanuel, Westwood, New Jersey." 

       That early success in literary criticism and the satisfaction of being recognized as a writer were important early influences that guided me on the path to pursuing a doctorate in English. I wrote a chapter of my dissertation on one of the longer works of Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in poetry.   

I’ve looked for traces of Ellen Lane on the Internet. She must have passed away years ago.  I found a street named for her in River Vale, New Jersey, where she lived and taught, and also a service award in her memory sponsored by the River Vale Fire Department. I think she’d be pleased to know that her legacy as an inspiring poetry teacher lives on.


Note from Lisa:  Nancy suggests that teachers looking for online poetry resources consult 180 Poems a Day, sponsored by the Library of Congress, or the educators section at the Academy of American Poets.

► If funding develops, Chicago will become home one day to a planned American Writers Museum.

► Attention memoir writers and personal essayists who are sincerely concerned about how what we write will affect other people – Rights of Others is a blog you'll want to bookmark.

► Shelf Awareness, the excellent daily enewsletter for those in the book trade, now publishes a not-so-frequent, but equally wonderful one for readers, chock full of reviews and other news.

► I wonder why more out-of-work, experience investigative journalists have not applied for these grants, which are still available.

► Promoting a book of poetry can test even the most creative sort. That's why I love this idea: For a week or so, you can call the author, Heather Christie, and she reads you a poem. Maybe she was trying to avoid the (reality or perception?) that "no one cares about your (bookstore) reading"?

► Whether you are a closet science geek, or need new places to find ideas about science-related topics for your writing, you'll be interested in Scientific American's new venture, grouping some 60 science blogs in one place. I took a very brief, casual tour around and read some truly interesting stuff.

►There are so many places, ways and reasons to teach writing outside of academia, and I am always interested in the people who do so, like this woman.

► I love, love this comingling of poetry, prose, brevity and developing a daily writing practice. Think about joining me - dive into the river and write a "small stone" every day that remains in July.

► In 21 days, you could transform some aspect of your life, by breaking an old habit or creating a new one, according to loopchange (and science); so I'm thinking, for those struggling to establish a daily writing habit – might noting your intention on this new social site, cheering others on in their new habit goals, and reaping members' encouragement, get you going?

►Finally, just for fun, what if a women's magazine wrote headlines and articles that truly reflected real lives?

Have a great weekend.

"But I don't want to write about X."

I understand this complaint, I do. I've been there. Twice, during my MFA program, two different faculty members insisted I write about topics I had rather not. The assignments annoyed me. I had no time to waste and wanted to stick to my own writing agenda. But I had also made a commitment to myself at the start of the program, to try anything, to say yes, to remain open to creative possibilities.

One assignment was to write an essay about the "danger of memory." I wanted to vomit. Not only was I not interested, I found myself strongly resisting. At the time, I was working on memoir pieces rooted in my childhood and far from viewing memory as dangerous, I thought of it as my ally. Yet, I reasoned this mentor must have a reason. I wrote the piece, which was an unwieldy mess at first, but then, as I revised and researched and rewrote, a strange thing happened. Something in the memoir pieces I thought of as my "real" work, began to shift. Something about the process of writing that piece had moved the rest of my work to a different, and better, place. I was connecting to my own memories in a different, more complex and much more self-aware way.

The other time, a faculty member who had been offering critique on several of my pieces, circled a reference, in each of four pieces, to a relationship in my life which up to that point I was not writing about, and had no plans to ever write about. "This," she said, "is what you are avoiding. Write about it."

I growled inwardly and on the one hand felt she was wasting my time on something insignificant, but on a deeper level I must have known that she'd hit the one nerve I was trying – obviously awkwardly – to protect. Later, after I'd written the long and surprisingly satisfying essay, she explained: Always go where you are resisting. Write what you are avoiding. Write what you don't want to write about. Write what scares you. When you think, "oh I can never write about that," that's what you need to write. There's a reason you have those feelings.

Fast forward a few years. A writer I was coaching, who I'll call Jim, keeps turning out lovely essays about various aspects of his life as a husband, father, son and friend. Each one has publication potential and he works hard on them, but somewhere in the revision process, he always loses interest and sets the piece aside. After about four of these pieces, I notice something. In each, whether it seems connected or not, there is always a line or two, often buried and mostly as an aside, about how, years before, as a new father, he was working in a highly-paid position at a prestigious company, exactly the sort of job his Ivy-league business school education has prepared him for, yet it had made him profoundly unhappy.

Finally, I gave him an assignment: Write about that job and how it sapped your soul and affected your family and how and why you eventually got out. He resisted, strongly. He was done thinking about that period of his life. He had moved on. It had taken a huge emotional toll to break free. He had a great job now, a balanced life. He didn't want to go there.

Go there, I advised. He did. Not overnight and not happily at first. Eventually though, Jim began to produce a series of pieces around this topic, pieces that were so much more nuanced and energetic than his previous work that he was able to place one in his alumni magazine, one on a men's website, and another in an essay collection.

Now, let me be clear. I take no credit for Jim's success. Eventually someone else would have given him the same advice. Or he may have noticed it himself. He'd have gotten around to it at some point, whether out of frustration or curiosity, or an annoying urge to scratch some vague but persistent itch.

Or, maybe not. Maybe what we all need is someone to say, "Hey, how come you aren't writing about…."

Take a look at your work. What keeps showing up? What often seems to be missing? What do you tend to skip over because you just can't quite figure out how to deal with it on the page? What are you dead set against writing about?

When I say one can grow as a writer by writing about what one is avoiding on the page, I don't always mean that you must write about some painful topic you'd be happier leaving alone. Maybe you are funny in short bursts but avoid (or just won't let yourself) try an entire humor piece. Perhaps you unconsciously keep sneaking in small references to a favorite deceased relative, when what you may truly be itching to do is write about how much she influenced you or why you miss her. Or have you made a conscious decision to never write about X? Hmm.

I have a favorite saying which I believe stems from Confucius: What you resist, persists.

Sometimes the more we avoid writing about something, the more it haunts our work. We avoid writing about certain topics or in certain ways for a number of reasons. Fear that it may lead nowhere. Fear that it may lead somewhere we're not sure we want to go. Habit. Feeling inadequate to the task. Being uncertain about where or how to begin. Thinking it's not really all that interesting. Knowing it's so complicated, if we start, we may never have the time or energy to write about anything else.

And we may be right, about any or all of these reasons. Or, we may be ducking a rich source of material. Chances are good that if someone else notices something, especially if it's a repeated quirk, there's something there worth exploring on the page.

Here's the thing. It might not work out. But what if it does?

The first two installments of the Stuff My (Writing) Students Say series are here.

I hear some variation of this, again and again, usually when a class is working on revisions (translation: always) --

“I think I’ve been too married to my words -- once they were written down it felt wasteful not to use them.”

Anyone relate?

I think at various times all writers feel this way. After all, the words in the notebook or on the page or screen represent our investments in time and mental exertion. Whether we dash off fast first drafts, or laboriously craft a second (or 22nd) draft, what we have to show for it is just that – words. Is it any wonder why we cherish them so?

And yet – so often those words simply must go. We discover (sometimes with the help of an editor, writer friend or teacher) that they just don’t work, for a very specific reason, or for a thousand reasons.

And yet. We try our best to hold on to them. By the time we’ve written and read and reread them a few dozen times, those words, those dark marks on a light background, seem far more than mere arrangements of shapes and sounds. Suddenly, those words are it. The words – instead of the vision or the idea or the concept, theme, or STORY – become the piece, rather than serving the writer as she creates the piece.

But they don’t work.

And so they must go.

Where? Anywhere but in the piece where we at first thought they were such a perfect fit. A separate computer file folder marked “extra material”. A notebook you can label as “overflow” or even – think about it --“possibilities for future work.” One writer I know fills an empty dresser drawer with hard copies of any “good stuff” that’s had to be culled; he randomly tosses in the pages (some with only a few sentences on them), and every couple of months he sifts through in search of new (again) ideas. Another stockpiles it all in a fat three-ring binder, separated by tabs for various themes she returns to again and again in her work.

Don’t throw those words away, in any case. What writer alive can’t point to something edited out of one piece which one way or another led to another, perhaps even more important, piece of future work? If this hasn’t happened to you yet, maybe you’ve been a little too married to those not-quite-right original words. Divorce them please.

When I learned last week that he had died, I had not seen Bill Glavin in about 26 years. I had tried- sort of – to see him about 10 years ago, but the colleague in the office next door to his told me I’d missed him by 20 minutes. I had his home number, but didn’t use it, figuring my one-time college magazine journalism professor would not want to swap tales with me when I had my husband and two young sons in tow. I was wrong of course, he would have, I know, welcomed the whole tribe because he was much more than a teacher – Bill Glavin was a mentor.

Three times I was privileged to sit in Bill’s classroom at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, where for 37 years he taught in the magazine journalism department (part of that as department chair). It’s still sort of astounding to me that, nearly three decades since graduation, when I sit down to write and especially when I edit, so many of the most important aspects of craft at my fingertips were first learned in Bill’s classroom. It’s often his booming voice and incisive advice I hear in my head even now. Plus, he was riotously funny, a rare and wonderful commodity in any teacher.

Bill was still in his 30s, a relatively new face at Newhouse in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and, though he’d worked for more than a dozen years by then in newspaper and magazines, he was still closer in age to his students than most of the other faculty. This kept things interesting in the classroom, where Bill strove to recreate real-world journalism scenarios for the wannabe feature writers and magazine editors he taught. But he did so with a twist.

At the time a major country music fan, Bill once assigned us to fact check, restructure, line edit, copy edit, lay out, and write headlines and subheads for a disorganized piece about singer Willie Nelson. The Willie Nelson who was Bill’s idol.

He must have written the piece himself and then dismantled it, because even in its chopped up form, it was loaded with so much obscure information about the super star, that the fact-checking portion of the assignment alone sent many into paroxysms. It turned out the information was not so obscure, but buried under the more well-known prattle that was normally written about Nelson. In those pre-Internet days, however, that much fact-checking research meant dozens of hours, and not only in the library, but also in record shops (where we went, two or three at a time, to read every word on the backs of Nelson’s albums), and in one insane afternoon (resulting in a sobering bill), on the phone with assorted secretaries and one confused PR person in Nelson’s manager’s office. Ferreting out the easily confirmed facts from the less-easily-confirmed, and from the apparent untruths Bill had tossed in to challenge us, became a contest as much as an exercise in completeness.

Nelson was a singer I enjoyed but didn’t think much about and yet acing that assignment meant more to me than a lot of other more traditionally "important” college projects. In hindsight I can see that it was one of Bill’s gifts to not only teach the fundamentals of magazine writing and editing, but to mold students into the kind of curious, meticulous, insatiable, probing people who would not only be good at, but be happy, to work with words for the sake of shaping them into stories that in turn are gifts to readers.

Bill was honored as the Meredith Professor of Teaching Excellence—Syracuse University’s highest teaching honor—the first year it was awarded. His office door was forever open, his schedule always flexible enough to handle any student’s urgent question, perceived dilemma, or half-baked idea, and it seems nothing changed since I was a student. He got excited any time a student landed a real-world magazine article assignment, and made himself available as a pre-submission editor, if that’s what the student wanted. When I was about to graduate, students were making the strange transition to computers and word processing, and I recall Bill attacking that with both eager curiosity and a curmudgeonly resistance which I always suspected was a bit of a show. No matter what was happening around Newhouse, in technology, or the media world, when you talked to Bill, it was always about helping students learn how to tell the story.

Later, when I was living in Syracuse training for the horse show circuit and working as a freelance writer, Bill briefly dated a friend of mine, and a group of us each weekend tried out one country music club after another, over the course of one particularly languid summer. To cap off that halcyon time, Bill scored tickets for us all see Nelson perform at the New York State Fair, and while I can’t remember how it transpired, we found ourselves, after the show, in Nelson’s trailer for 10 minutes, sharing a drink and listening to his stories. And while I never knew Bill deeply or for long, it was one of the few times in my life (pre-motherhood), when I was truly, completely, incomprehensibly happy watching someone else grabbing life.

After a few years of full time freelancing (and part time worrying if I’d clear enough for rent AND food that month), I took a more lucrative job in public relations in Manhattan. When I told Bill he sighed a little, but never chastised me for abandoning journalism or my writing goals, and ever the mentor, gave me this advice: Just remember, always find the real stories and tell them with art, honesty and grace. Not always an easy thing to do in PR, but his words stayed with me, even as our contact grew more sporadic and then pretty much ceased.

Twenty years later, when I did return to my writing roots to pursue an MFA in my 40s, I let Bill know and he wrote me the most effusive, supportive email, which of course I failed to print out and is now lost. In the low residency MFA program I attended, one is assigned to work with a single faculty member over the course of a semester, and that faculty member is called, officially, one’s mentor. Bill wasn’t officially my mentor, he was simply my professor, and then later, for a short time, my friend. But I like mentor. When someone taught you, guided you, cared about your life as well as your writing and your career, that’s a mentor, and even if you haven’t spoken to or seen that person in years, you miss him when he’s gone.

Will it always take me this long?

For someone who didn’t think she would ever teach writing, I am continually amazed how much I actually love doing so. Sometimes I am stopped in my tracks by something a writer in a class asks or observes. I thought I’d share some of these gems with my blog readers, along with my take on the issue.

One writer, commenting on the draft-revision-rewrite project she just completed, asked:
“Will it always take me this long?”

Yes. And, no.

Yes, because even though the more you write and consciously work on your craft, the better a writer you will become, the flip side is that the more demanding you will become of yourself as a writer. So completing a well-crafted piece will take you longer, but maybe not in actual time at the keyboard (although I doubt it). You will be aware of the need and value of pre-writing, and spend more time doing it. Before you actually put the first word on paper or screen, you will know that you probably need to spend time, both consciously and purposely, and unconsciously and randomly, with the idea “marinating”.

Once you begin writing, you will then also understand a lot more about the power and importance of successive drafts, revision and rewriting; so you will spend more time than before on those parts of the writing process. You will build in time for letting a piece rest between drafts or rewrites. You will come to expect more of yourself and be less easily satisfied with the words you put together. You will think about things which perhaps before you didn't consider, perhaps characterization, dialogue, structure, tone, rhythm. Which means you will agonize and sometimes second guess yourself (and perhaps “waste” some time that way).

You will know that reading is critical and you will build time in, to read the books or shorter pieces you believe are essential to your current piece of work. You will know that excellent pieces of writing don’t simply happen, are never first drafts (and might be 4th, 14th or 40th drafts), and even when you are tempted to rush something through, you will not allow yourself to do so any longer (except in extreme cases of unreasonable deadlines and/or cash flow crises; and then you will be upset with yourself afterward).

All of that takes time. Sometimes a long time.

But then again, no, it won’t always take you so long.

The more you write and consciously work on your craft, the better a writer you will become, and so you will develop a far more nuanced understanding of your own particular creative process. You’ll know, for example, if you tend to be more successful (and less stressed) when you allot more time for say, pre-writing, or at the first draft edit stage, or in deciding on structure. When necessary, you’ll know at which points in the process you can move faster (and maybe that the speed energizes your work).

You will know a lot more about what you are doing, based on feedback from instructors and/or editors, an agent, publisher or readers. You will have taken the time to educate yourself, read more widely, perhaps taken the submission plunge (and emerged unscathed, or maybe only a little bit scarred) and so now you probably know what category of writers you wish to emulate and what you need to do to get there, and you no longer waste (as much) time wandering off in unsatisfying literary directions.

As you move along as a writer, you also do learn a few shortcuts, or perhaps I should say, you figure out what works for you consistently, on the page, and see how those skills, techniques and craft methods can play out to your advantage across various pieces, genres, or forms. You will develop an understanding of what kinds of material you are personally capable of “churning out” when need by, and what you simply must slow down about, no matter what.

Finally, writing will have become so habitualized that you will be able to increase your “inventory” at a steadier pace. If you are very lucky, instead of one day agonizing over how long something took to write, you will instead lament that it was such a great experience writing it, you wish it hadn’t ended so soon.

Except of course on days when you type “the end” or hit send and think, “Thank goodness! I never, ever want to work on that piece ever again.” Until you reread it later, or an editor sends it back with “suggestions,” and you find yourself – yes – spending even more time on it.

In the margins, the writing teacher wrote: “Cute story so far, but where’s the conflict? C-”

The writer was my 11 year old, who had, during a timed fiction writing exercise, crafted a solid if derivative little tale of waking up one special morning to find it was his day to enter wizard school. He had details, description, authentic-sounding dialogue, two distinct characters, and a linear narrative arc that made sense. (No I didn’t help.) Alas, no “conflict.” Everything had gone right for his protagonist, who was able to read and understand the letter, find the supply store without knowing where it was, purchase his supplies and make it through the magical wall unscathed and just in time.

My little writer was glum.

“Why does there have to be a BIG conflict?” he asked.

I offered that conflict could be just another word for problem, obstacle, challenge or frustration and that perhaps it didn’t have to be huge – maybe the store could be closed, or he misjudges the place to jump through the wall and gets bruised, or his mother loses the letter right after it arrives…

“Oh, you mean like he wants to do something, but can’t! Or he tries something but it doesn’t work?” the kid said, grinning. “And then he has to figure something else out.”

"Yep.”

“Okay, I get it now.”


All writing problems should be so easy to solve.

Liz Sheffield, one of the hard working and talented writers who participated in one of my recent Online Memoir and Personal Essay Four by Four classes (we tackle one key topic each week for four weeks) put up a series of posts about her experience in the class. One is about the lesson on Beginnings and Endings, in which Liz observes why writers often "write past the ending." You can read what Liz has to say on her blog here. She also chronicled what she took away from two of the other weeks in the class, in posts here (about the "I" narrator) and here (about dialogue).

I hope every writer has at least one teacher or mentor about whom he or she can say this many good things as did one writer, about her one-time teacher, all-time mentor, Liz Christman.

That is all.

I love questions and observations from writers in my classes. They make me think, and what writer doesn’t like that? Lately, I’ve been thinking about word counts, because lately I've been dealing with: (1) Can I exceed the word count? and (2) It’s not possible to do this assignment within the stated word count. I get the same thing, regardless of the focus of the class, type of assignment, and whether it's a 300 or 2500 word limit.

The short answers are: (1) No, you can't; and (2) Yes, it is.

The longer answer is a bit more involved.

Word counts impose discipline. When we write, we make something. And sooner or late, like any other created “product” it needs to fit in a particular space. Writing with the goal of eventual publication means we come up against word counts imposed by editors and publishers, agents, and industry standards.

It’s true that word limits were more strictly enforced when everything was in print form, and that many online venues have more "space" and are more flexible. Yet I’ve found that even (and sometimes mostly) the most well-designed, heavily trafficked, best-edited sites adhere to word counts, too.

When you accept an assignment, or an editor accepts your submission, word count comes up. If the assignment is 700 words, you don’t write 900. If the column has room for 900 words, you don't submit 1200. If a literary journal's submissions guidelines say under 6000 words, you don’t send 7000. If you submit an unsolicited piece and an editor wants to buy/publish it, and it's 559 words, and you are asked to cut it to 500, you cut it. End of story.

Word counts are something writers engage with over an entire career, a language a writer needs to be fluent at, a universal code among those who write, edit and publish. Many media venues still pay according to word count, and whether that's a dime or two bucks a word, you need to do the math before deciding if you want to spend your time on the piece.

Write a book manuscript and you will have to speak of it in terms of word count – to agents, editors, even other writers. You’ll need to know that most X-type of books fall in the Y word count range, for example.

Some writers insist they are creatively inhibited by word counts, or that it makes the writing process feel too technical. Well, some parts of writing are technical. Sorry. Others want to write freely without thinking of word counts. That’s great, I say. Do that – write until your fingertips fall off. And then, cull and revise the words which make the finest 400-word dialogue exchange, the most sparkling 1500 word essay.

Sure, I have turned in 711 words when the limit was 700 (but I wouldn't send 725). Editors do have a small window of “more or less” which they will accept without hitting the roof; a skilled editor can so deftly delete such a small overage, within minutes and without harming, and usually improving, the piece.

Once, to my horror, when I had three personal essays due to three different venues the same week (may the freelance Gods so bless me again some day!), I mixed up word counts. Editors A and B wanted 1,000 words each, and Editor C asked for 1,500. I sent everything off, only to discover that Editor B was more than a bit put out at having received 1500 words instead of 1000, and Editor C wanted to know why the piece was one-third shorter than we had discussed. Needless to say, it was easier to add 500 words to the too-short piece than to excise from the bloated one. It was no fun being me that week.

Practical considerations aside, word counts also impact craft. Mark Twain was famously credited with paraphrasing Blaise Pascal about a wordy missive: I’m sorry it’s so long. If I had more time, I would have written a shorter one. The implication is that crafting a finely honed succinct piece of writing takes time – and skill, craft, patience, and revision. Being verbose on the page is easy.

Another reason I insist on firm word counts is because at the root of many writing problems is not writing tight. Adjectives proliferate. Adverbs abound. (Don’t even get me started on my kill-all-the-adverbs rant.) Descriptions which should take one sentence go on for paragraphs. Dialogue is bloated. Writers spend entire opening pages clearing their throats. A rigid word count will make thinking writers question everything in their prose. Is this necessary? What about that? Can’t I condense here, or maybe there?

In writing, as in life, the answer so often is: Cut. Three cookies and six hungry toddlers? Cut. An appetite for designer shoes and a small paycheck? Cut. Another rejection, nosy in-laws, and a fight with your spouse? Cut (your hair or, the leftover cheesecake). Word counts will force a writer to make cuts, often painful ones; which will turn out, in most cases, to be the ones which propel better drafts, successful revisions, more focused final versions.

I’ve rarely had the experience, after having to trim a piece, of thinking it was better in the original longer version. But I often have the opposite experience, of a piece turning out so much better once I lop off a bunch of words (along, sometimes, with my own puffed-up idea of how wonderful my original prose was.)

Write tight, fellow writers. And yes, those who teach and coach writers do have another reason for sticking to word counts. We’ve got other stuff to read. Like all those concise Twitter updates (140 character limit!) and wonderfully brief Six Word Memoirs.

The other day I posted information about my online memoir and personal essay class offered in early 2010. Now, here are details about the in-person class for local northern NJ folks who want (need?) a firm push to get a writing project(s) and/or routine in gear in 2010.

Filling the Blank Page: Creative Writing Boot Camp
for Procrastinators and Busy People

Does a procrastinating writer live at your desk? Someone who promised to start, revise, edit, or finish a writing project (or two)...when you have time, on Monday, in the new year? I'll help you find ways to create the time, develop and maintain a regular writing habit, find confidence, deal with mental clutter and stumbling blocks, enhance craft -- and enjoy the process, too. Class combines instruction, discussion, examples, in-class exercises, weekly assignments, and opportunities for feedback on your writing. This one is open to fiction and nonfiction writers.

Four Monday mornings, 9:30 - 11:30; Jan. 11, 25, Feb. 1, 15. $110. We meet in Cedar Grove.
For more information and/or to register, email me using the link on the left column, or: LisaRomeoWrites (at) gmail (dot) com.

For NJ nonfiction writers who want a more intense class focusing on craft, check out my Memoir & Creative Nonfiction class in the Rutgers continuing education program. Designed as a hybrid, you only need to be on the New Brunswick campus three Saturday mornings over 8 weeks, and we do the rest online. Begins Jan. 9.

Tomorrow, I'll get back to regular posts. Thanks for putting up with the promotion of my teaching activities.

►In an interview, writer and northern New Jersey neighbor Alice Elliot Dark talks about the writing process for her essay, The Quiet, which appears in the new collection, Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums that Changed Their Lives. Her essay is about George Harrison and Meet the Beatles!

►The Fall issue of Mississippi Review Online is all nonfiction.

►Copy editors, fact checkers, and proofreaders save writers more often than they torture us. I loved this behind-the-scenes interview with Mary Norris about copy editing at the New Yorker.

►Printers Row is the Chicago Tribune's blog about "readers, writers and books," and also lists Chicagoland literary events.

►Wonder what a conversation might be like between editors of a literary journal who passed on, but really liked, a particular piece of work, and the writer who submitted it? I give you the Potomac Review's blog experiment, The Maybe Dialogue. Reading the four-part series is a combination of eavesdropping on an excellent workshop exchange and an intimate writer-editor conversation. In order, you can find parts one, two, three and four.

►A generous-minded writer shares royalty statements from his traditional print publisher and Kindle, and how they translate into actual profits. In a side-by-side comparison, the results are eye-opening.

►If you've ever had a writing teacher make a huge impression on you and, in turn, a big impact on your work (and I sincerely hope you have had this wonderful, and often upsetting, experience), then like me, you may also love Alexander Chee's piece about studying with Annie Dillard.

► I heard Jack Wiler read a few times and always found his work interesting, unusual, and a more than a little in-your-face. The New Jersey poet died last week.

►If you are a mother and teach in higher education (and, for that matter even if you’re not), check out the Mama PhD blog over at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

►Beauty salons and books. Hey, the Pulpwood Queen may be on to something. Whatever keeps America reading.

►For your weekly dose of writer envy -- publishing deals scored by recent Iowa Writers Workshop grads.

Have a great weekend.

Last week a writer in a nonfiction class asked a really good question about how to move the writing from her head onto the page. In the course of that discussion, I asked others if they noticed themselves "pre-writing" -- did ideas, personal essay themes, or memoir passages tend to bounce around in their brains for a while, percolating, marinating?

As for me, the more I write, the more I discover that the amount of time a piece of writing spends "marinating" – which I define as hanging out in my head before a word goes on the page – is almost totally out of my control. The rough material seems to have a mind of its own and will migrate to the page when ready. I'm talking here about substantial long essays or memoir pieces, or even book reviews and shorter pieces with some depth to them.

I've learned to trust my gut more when it comes to this stage. Certainly that doesn't mean I don't get frustrated, though lately I also notice that when I move too quickly from idea to first draft, I get just as frustrated, but for different reasons. And yet I'm not the type of writer who believes I must know precisely what I plan to write or where I stand on every facet before writing; very often I've discovered interesting nuances in my own thinking as I write.

I don't always have the luxury to let an idea marinate till the desired state of doneness, nor can I always trust that my thinking/composing/pre-writing process is working in my best interest. Whenever a deadline is involved, or when I think that the marinating process is morphing into procrastination, or when one of my *accountability* writing friends reminds me that it's been a bit too long since I've made any tangible progress on an idea, then I sit my big butt down and get words on the page.

I may not necessarily write the first draft, but I'll make notes, write bits of dialogue, record key phrases, images or details, make lists of important things to include, and even, very occasionally, make a rough outline (shh – I wouldn't want that last bit to get around). Or I'll do what I call a "mind dump" (or the pre-first-draft) – randomly pouring out everything I think I may ever want to say on the issue, but without any regard to how it reads (an activity more like typing or transcribing than writing).

Lately I kind of like the phase when a piece is bouncing around my head but not yet on the page. Used to be, it drove me a little bit insane, because it was usually accompanied by a finger-waving Greek chorus chanting: You're so lazy!...or…It's not going to write itself!...and my personal favorite line of self-recrimination: Anyone can write in their head!

These days, however, I holler back to that chorus: Shut up already!* And, by the way: A. Lazy people don't think about what they are going to write; they sit around thinking they could write. B. Actually yes, if I do think about it carefully and for just the right amount of time, the first draft will more or less write itself. and C. No, in reality everyone CAN'T write in their heads.

Now, the right length of time to marinate? Oh what say you, gods of prose?

*(And, yes, that just about uses up my quota of exclamation marks for the balance of 2009.)

►Advice, tips, and seminar round-ups from the Writer's Digest's conference, The Business of Getting Published, held last weekend in New York City, are gathered here.

►Contemplating a city without free public libraries is terrible enough. And somehow, that city being Philadelphia, historic home to many publishing initiatives, it was even worse to consider. Massive budget shortfalls in the Pennsylvania state budget meant this was slated to occur on October 2, but fortunately letters, pressure, and special legislation eventually prevailed.

►In case you're not caught up with the week's news, the MacArthur Foundation announced its 2009 list of Genius Grant recipients – individuals from various disciplines each receive half a million bucks, no strings attached, just to continue being creative in their respective fields. Literary names include Edwidge Danticat, Deborah Eisenberg, and Heather McHugh.

►I'm happy to know that The New Yorker is going to be exempt from the mandate apparently issued this week to all other Conde Nast magazines to cut expenses by 25 %. I'm a fan of TNY, and want to see it thrive. And I understand that most literary endeavors need funding not tied to profits to survive. Still, I keep hoping someone – and the folks at CN seem massively qualified – will one day work out a way to both support literature in a mass-market publication and be fiscally successful, too. Meanwhile, Go Remnick!

►Speaking of magazines, Web Designers Depot compiled some of the most controversial magazine covers of all time. Agree with the choices? [update: broken link here has been fixed.]

►Attention MFA students, alumni and faculty: What do you think MFA students should expect (demand?) from a program? Erika Dreifus is collecting opinions about this over at her Practicing Writing blog.

►Shelf Awareness bills itself as "daily enlightenment for the book trade." I'd say it's an interesting destination for anyone interested in books, period. My favorite feature is the daily run down on which authors are slated for TV appearances that day.

►At The Rumpus, in a review of Jill McCorkle's new short story collection, Going Away Shoes, Skip Horack notes: "Writers who are able to make us laugh out loud are often viewed with unjust suspicion, as some readers seem to fear that humor is somehow “unliterary,” that what makes us laugh cannot also be profound. That’s nonsense, of course, and the dark humor contained in these stories testifies to what Shakespeare knew well: that humor has the power to expose as much about our struggles and our pains as it does about our triumphs and our joys."

►I'm a sucker for anything British. Don't know why and no longer care. I just go with it. So I'm enjoying a new blog find for all the reasons any procrastinating activity ought to make one both giddy and guilty. It's written by a British author of young adult novels, and she's long winded, funny, honest, a bit crude, no-nonsense but also whimsical, and loaded with Britishisms some of which I still can't puzzle out. She calls herself "crabbit". Just read her and you'll get that one. Start with the recent post, Why Do I Write At All?"

Have a great weekend. Laugh.

From the department of shameless self-promotion:

I'm proud to let you know that beginning this September, I'll be teaching creative nonfiction through the Rutgers University Writing Program Extension, which offers a rich and varied roster of in-person, online and "hybrid" writing courses covering journalism, technical and business writing, writing foundations, and creative writing (fiction, poetry, and CNF)

You can find my class here; it's one of the "hybrids" – three in-person class sessions, and five weeks of online instruction, critique, support, and interaction. My class focuses on the craft of writing and revising memoir, personal essay, and other creative nonfiction. I'm so very excited to have been invited to join the accomplished faculty of this dynamic program which reaches adult writers who span the range from beginners to ready-to-publish.

I'm slightly embarrassed that as a (nearly) lifelong New Jersey resident, I was unaware until quite recently, of the valuable resource the Rutgers WPx classes offer to writers not only in the Garden State, but elsewhere, through their online offerings. The entire list of classes starting in late September can be found here.

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I am a big fan of the submission process and the role it plays in a writer's development, craft, and business. (Even if one's writing is not meant to generate income, I still think of every writer as having a business).

Whether you are submitting completed pieces to literary journals, query letters and manuscript chapters to agents, or queries to obtain article assignments, I believe that having a submission plan, routine, and a healthy attitude toward the process can only be a good thing. Regardless of what stage, phase, or malaise you find yourself in, I think it's a good idea to keep the submission muscle in play.

Well.

I must fess up. It's been a while since I took my own advice. A few months, to be exact. (I know this because I checked my very efficient Excel submission tracking spreadsheet – did I mention you must have one of these?)

The lull had to do with a combination of being in a major push to get to a new stage in my teaching efforts while at the same time being in a stubborn phase of not feeling too confident about the "completed" pieces and ideas in my to-be-submitted pile. Then there were paying clients whose work had to come first. And (non-paying) houseguests. Rudderless kids galumphing about. And rain, rain, rain. Oh, and did I mention the three friends who scored major literary coups recently? Yes, I'm happy for them -- truly, madly, deeply happy. But.

So, late yesterday afternoon, after the house cleared of menfolk headed to a Giants preseason game, I got back on the submission stick. First, I had to face some of my "reasons" for the hiatus.
• Confidence in completed work. The truth is, even after a piece is accepted for publication and after it's published, I'm still not really confident about it. Not really. Not completely. Is any writer?

• Energy targeted in another direction. Spending the time and focused energy on branching out in my teaching efforts is important. (And worthwhile - I'll be teaching one class at a local university this fall, but more about that in a future post.) Still, I want to stay tuned in to students' publishing goals, and to set an example by continuing to chase my own.

• Paychecks vs. possibilities. Yes, paying clients are freelance gold, but continued attention to publication builds my list of "calling cards", keeps me personally aware of the challenges my editing clients face, and of course -- published work (whether well-paid or not) usually leads to other paying work.

• Home office vs. B-&B. Working at home while relatives are staying with me for weeks, all I can really manage is to get to the stuff marked editor's-waiting-for-it / client-wants-it / program-director-needs-it. Shoot me.

• Summer & the living is...different. When they are kicking about the house, my kids are, thankfully, very considerate of my work time/space; they don't ask me to have lunch with them, play against them in a few games of Wii Sports, or discuss the plot of their summer reading books. Those things are all my ideas, and you know what? It's a good trade-off.

• When good things happen to good people. The three writer friends whose recent success I applauded but secretly envy? One won a major contest, another was published in a coveted spot, and the third signed with an agent who sold her book within two weeks. So I asked myself: Is there any real reason to feel that their accomplishments say something negative about my own work? And the answer was, frankly to my own surprise – NO! I had not entered the same contest as my first friend (though I will, next year). I had not submitted anything in three years to the column my second friend was published in (though I could have, and maybe should). And, I am not agent-shopping at the moment (though I may be soon). So my friends' coups should do nothing more than give me hope, right?

Even if my friends' good fortune were in exactly same arenas in which I had also tossed my hat – well, so what? Letting that keep me from pushing on helps no one. What helps is to get back into action.

And so I did, sending my words off on wireless wings.