Non-Fiction Writing - 10 Essentials from Dawn Groves

Last night I started a Non-Fiction Writing class with Dawn Groves.  Readers will remember that Dawn taught a great class on blogging; in fact, this blog is a direct result from her class.

Here are 10 great takeaways from Dawn on becoming a successful non-fiction:

1. Stop waiting
2. Commit
3. Configure your data management system.  Hard copy, interviews (mp3 and transcription), websites, blogs, periodicals and books, aggregator websites and misc. data.
4. Plan for a goal and then release it. (Construct a timeline, word count goal, and outline.)
5. Submerge and indulge (Research).
6. Keep an idea pad handy.
7. Prepare for distractions.
8. Cultivate strong readers.
9. Establish an on-line presence,  preferably a blog and twitter account.
10. Join  www.writersmarket.com

Note:  I think I've found my non-fiction book combining what I've learned from urban farming, mental illness and finding personal peace.  Now to put these steps to use and get this done by August 1, 2012!

A New Favorite Blog: Brain Pickings

 

 

Slow Love Life  is one of my favorite blogs for great writing and reading.  In today's post, Dominique Browning "curated" several blogs she reads regularly.  I was drawn to "Brain Pickings ... the brain child of Maria Popova, a cultural curator and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Design Observer, among others. She gets occasional help from a handful of talented contributors.

Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are."

And what should I find but the post below, surely one of the most succinct pieces of advice on how to be a good writer?

Enjoy! 

10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy

by Maria Popova

“Never write more than two pages on any subject.”

How is your new year’s resolution to read more and write better holding up? After tracing the fascinating story of the most influential writing style guide of all time and absorbing advice on writing from some of modern history’s most legendary writers, here comes some priceless and pricelessly uncompromising wisdom from a very different kind of cultural legend: iconic businessman and original “Mad Man” David Ogilvy. On September 7th, 1982, Ogilvy sent the following internal memo to all agency employees, titled “How to Write”:

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.
Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.
Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:
1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.
8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.
David

This, and much more of Ogilvy’s timeless advice, can be found in The Unpublished David Ogilvy: A Selection of His Writings from the Files of His Partners, a fine addition to my favorite famous correspondence. 

Abraham Maslow, Self-Actualization and Writing

Happy Valentine's Day, fellow writers. If this day is about love, let us now love and cherish the "spirit" within us that makes us write. I have been thinking about what makes a writer a writer, and am looking forward to getting insights from Susan Colleen Browne tomorrow. 

And now, through loving synchronicity, up pops a biographical article on Abraham Maslow on my IPad.   I remember getting so excited in college as I read his theory of self actualization and hierarchy of needs.  This must be where we should all strive for, I thought, on top of the hierarchy.  If we were there, in that top golden  triangle, we wouldn't have war, we wouldn't be consumed with dominating others, etc.

What does Maslow have to do with writing?  This morning I read this excerpt from his 1954 collected papers, Motivation and Personality:

"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.  What a man can be, he must be.  He must be true to his own nature.  This need we may call self-actualization . . .(it) refers to man's desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become more actualized in what he is potentially.  This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one idiosyncratically is, to become everything one is capable of becoming."

I realize now, after nearly 50 years, that the work that makes me feels self-actualized is writing.  And self-actualization fuels the loving energy to do the work:  the daily practices that feel like piano scales, the editing and editing, the intense observations using all senses, the great reading and not so great reading, the emotional dredging that feels like you are wielding your own scalpel.

So much to learn, so much to do, so little time.

Nancy Lou Canyon's Creative Writing Class - 8 Compelling Ideas and Strategies for New Writers

Last night's class soared around tried and true strategies for gaining power as writers.  Nancy Canyon encouraged us to:

• Remember a novel can be written one scene at a time.
• Write 100 words about the subject you're writing about.  For example, if you were writing about a wagon journey in the 1900's, start a list describing the wagon and it's contents:  oxen, floorboard, tongue, cast iron pot, bonnet, whip, traces . . . .
• Try writing exercises that will tap into your right hemisphere.  For example, write ten minutes on "I remember" and take a break.  Come back and write ten minutes on "I don't remember" and see what comes out!
• Treat writing like a job.  Schedule yourself for writing hours and keep to that schedule.
• The more you write in the second or third person, the more you will believe in your own story.
• In the course of reading our story, we want to see a character become different.
• Consciously use dialogue, exterior monolog, interior monolog, stream of consciousness, etc. in your writing.
• Writing practice - 5 minutes short sentences, 10  minutes "chaining," 20 minutes long sentence release (do not lift your pen from the paper) and (finally) 5 minutes writing dialogue.

Aha, so THIS is writing!

Taking writing classes feels like being a well-fed young boy cat:  no stomach rumblings making him hunt, just the waiting, watching stalking, leaping and catching for sheer joy of it all.

So far, I am taking Creative Writing with Nancy Canyon, Blogging, with Dawn Groves, and Memoir Writing with Susan Colleen Browne.  I trust and respect these writer/teachers, and am glad to be in their classes.  I've learned that blogging is a different animal, much busier, much more constant, much more outward oriented, and of course, more technical.  And of course, sitting down to write a blog requires discipline, creativity, razor editing, and thoughtfulness.  But all the work involved aside, knowing I absolutely have to get out two posts a week for two blogs feels like I've created one of the best jobs I've ever had.

The extraordinary thing about writing practice is that it feeds back into reading practice.  Both Nancy Canyon and Susan Colleen Browne recommended reading Natalie Goldberg and Annie Lamott (it's really Anne, but to me, she's a friend of the heart, even though we've never met-hence Annie). Yesterday, I was thrilled to find Goldberg's Wild Mind and Annie's Bird by Bird waiting for me in section 808.2 at the library.  Before and after dinner last night, I inhaled Goldberg's fierce Buddhist prose in short bursts of chapters.  She's tough and worn like the mountains and canyons surrounding Taos where she lives.

And yet . . .she is clear that we need to approach our own writing practice with kindness, accept the monkey mind-and go deeper.  I learned that my consistent morning writing practice over the last two weeks (originally inspired by Nancy Canyon) has mostly been journaling, as different a fish as one of my albino corys is from my chichli loach, though both are still fish.  So, today I grabbed my pad and wrote ten minutes on "I remember" and ten minutes on "I don't remember."  Natalie promised that I would go so much deeper in "I don't remember" and she was right.  Extraordinary stuff, and it makes me think that if I keep doing this, if I keep trying, I will find lots of nuggets of gold underneath my frozen winter garden.

So this morning after practice, as a much anticipated reward, I picked up Bird by Bird, and began rereading my old friend.  How good she is!  Her prose, so energized, so honest, so precise without being stodgy, just flows from one insight to another, like Whatcom Creek slamming against boulders and banks and trees in the spring.

"...So I dropped out at nineteen to become a famous writer.  I moved back to San Francisco and became a famous Kelly Girl instead.  I was famous for my incompetence and weepiness" (p. xxi).

 Aha! She's doing chaining here, a writing practice that Nancy Canyon and Susan Browne and Natalie Goldberg all recommend.  You write a sentence, then use a word from that sentence in the next sentence and so on.  Here's, it's nothing but funny, sharp and carries the narrative along swimmingly.

Aha, so this is writing!  And of course, it's reading, too.  Here's Annie on THAT:

"Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth.  What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world at world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.  Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave.  They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die . . . My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean.  Aren't you?  I ask (p. 15).

You bet.  Thank you, Nancy, Dawn, Susan, Natalie and Annie.

Memoir Writing with Susan Colleen Browne- 6 More Great Ideas in the PM

No lack of energy after lunch for this writing workshop. 

• Avoid long expository passages; instead, link scenes with expository writing
• Have your characters talking and doing something
• Life is like a collage-your big task is to make it all coherent
• When you're writing fiction, use all your senses, including your sixth sense
• Writing a memoir is about figuring out who you used to be and how you became who you are now
• Anytime you make a decision, you are becoming a different person

Thanks so much to Susan Colleen Browne for being such a kind, knowledgeable and inspiring instructor.  She kindly agreed to let me interview her in the coming weeks and I'm looking forward to more of her insights.

Memoir Writing-Four Terrific Takeaways from Susan Colleen Browne

Susan Colleen Browne has written for years.  She wrote her own memoir,  Little Farm In The Foothills, is a professional editor, non-fiction writer and a popular creative writing instructor.  I'm taking a class with her this morning, and appreciate her wisdom, such as,

• Think about writing that you love to read and write THAT
• Brainstorm writing with your normal hand, then try brainstorming with the hand you normally DON'T use to write.  As soon as I did that, I switched to images and metaphor--it was amazing!
• Fiction is always a quest, and the main character has to want something
• The best memoirs have killer settings

These insights are from the morning session;  I'm writing this at a little Pho restaurant before I go back to class.  I'm inspired!