OYSTERS AND ANGELS
AND WRITING AEROBICS
A WRITERS JOURNEY AND STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE ON WRITING AND PUBLISHING A BOOK AT ANY AGE.
BY BARBARA ROSE BROOKER
Anyone at any age can write and publish a book.
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Barbara Rose Brooker
Smashwords Edition License Notes
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Table of Contents
PART A – YOU’RE GETTING READY TO SHAPE YOUR CONCEPT INTO A BOOK.
PART B – LAYING OUT YOUR BOOK STRUCTURE AND BEGIN
Chapter 20. Silent Angels And Oysters
PART C – THE PUBLICATION PROCESS
Chapter 21. YOU FINISHED. WHAT NEXT?
PART A
YOU’RE GETTING READY TO SHAPE YOUR CONCEPT INTO A BOOK.
Listen…Float.
Draw imaginary maps of your dreams.—Yoko Ono
YOU’RE READY TO START
Take another breath and then stretch. Maybe change the water in your vase of flowers, there’s nothing like fresh flowers nearby when you write. Did you ever notice the light floating along a bouquet of yellow roses? Flowers provide an endless source of beauty and energy and imagination. Like birds, they live above nature, with beauty and intelligence. Creativity is like a bird, it takes flight and fights risk and obstacles as it soars towards a destination. You’re now going to develop that book concept you’ve always had. I always say writing a project from concept to the end, is like a birth. Your truths and other voices, more than grammar and commas in the right place, are what you need to begin your flight.
listen to the music…
float…
I close my eyes and submerge down the sea and float on the bottom. It is dark and green and peaceful. Fish of all colors, and sizes swim by, some in schools. Art can never imitate nature. It transcends. It is quiet here, except for the fish sounds. I like the quiet and often before I write, I imagine that I’m on the bottom of the sea, letting images from my unconscious float to my conscious. It is these images and pieces of memories that I jot in a notebook and integrate into my writing. Memories and pieces of recollections, no matter what they are, are important. I kept secret notes in a notebook. I was never one of those creative writing students who stood out in a class. I was a mouse in back of the class, a midlife, single divorced mother of two daughters. I recall a time I was in poetry class.
Writing Is A Joy
To capture one’s soul is like trying to catch a bubble softly flailing in a breeze—careful it doesn’t pop. But use your soul.
It contains a myriad of stories. It’s storage.
—Barbara Rose Brooker
Your life is a best seller. I’ve personally witnessed success stories by men and women from all walks of life. Writing is constructing something from nothing; a simple incident—a chance encounter with an old friend, a neighbor’s story, an old letter, and clouds changing formation—can develop into a great book.
Everyone is working out their bodies, but not their souls. Creativity does not mean, as they say, being “creative” or “bright.” Labels are meaningless. We are all born creative. Creativity is about angels and oysters and craft. It is about everything and anything. But then our culture places labels on creativity: good, bad, right, wrong, and early on we get the message that creativity, especially writing, is only for some people and should be only a hobby.
Believe in yourself, trust your other voices, and you will write a book. You can take all of the classes in the world, learn all of the craft, read all of the books on writing but if you don’t believe in yourself, then it doesn’t matter. With the exercises in this book and the audiotape, my goal is not to teach—you can’t teach creative writing—it’s to enable collaboration between you and your honest inner truths. We learn from each other.
Anyone can write and publish a book. All you have to do is want to, then identify what you want to say, and let your emotions reveal the story. This applies to any genre. For nonfiction material, you want the same passion and original point of view as you want for fiction, screenplays, and poetry and for all genres.
In my years of teaching creative writing to adults, I hear the same fears: “I have a story, but I need a ghostwriter.” “I don’t know how to put together a plot.” “The market is flooded.” “I don’t have the time.” “There’s no money in it.”
All fallacies. There are no rules in art. When you’re true to yourself, you’re true to your creativity and to your craft. Break the rules. Create your own angels and oysters and follow my writing aerobics. They work.
There are no obstacles in art. Creativity is music. Creativity asks new questions. It is perpetual discovery.
Let your imagination take you into unknown journeys.
Imagine you’re under the sea, slowly diving into your self.
You are my spirit mate. We are on an exciting new journey—beginning a new climb. Relax and let your inner voices go. I will take you through the outside steps while you float in the sea, alone with the sky and the secrets of nature and with your wildest imagination.
God did not single out Mozart, Einstein, or Tolstoy. Creativity is in all of us in different ways.
* * *
Remember, this book is not about “how to write” or what metaphor you should use, it’s about identifying your personal voice, finding what you want to say and feel, and why and then to let go of your creativity.
Find a private spot for your journey. It is important to pick a place that you find comfortable. Isn’t this better than being in a dusty, overheated classroom? Next, pick your notebook. I recommend a loose-leaf binder or a clear plastic folder, one of those that you slip the plastic binder down over the edge. This is to keep your hard copy and to make your book seem real.
When I’m drafting a book, I always buy a binder or plastic folder. I design a cover for my book, with the title, and paste it on the binder or slip it into the plastic folder. As the book evolves, I keep my hard copy inside. This makes it real. Imagine that this binder is your book. You will see it take shape, and like I used to do, it won’t be lost on various documents, or pages dropped in a box. As you go on writing, the draft will change, but you will have this real folder. If you’re in a café or a coffee shop, you can always work on it. You will see what I mean. This binder will provide a shape for your book. Will make it real. You can carry it; see that your book project is in process. When you convey your writing to a computer, keep a hard copy of your work in this first binder. Or if you’re writing by hand, or typing on a typewriter. Whatever your process is.
Music.
Go under the sea.
* * *
Open your workbook. Think about what you want to say. Need to say. What is your message? Your concept? What I mean is that writing is not knowing, but discovery. To get started, to exercise your creativity, it’s good to shape out your project, just as directors, and screenwriters, storyboard. Later, when you’re writing, then you can break the rules, and you might not even use your blueprint. What lies behind your motivation to write? What secret conflicts do you have? What message do you want to say, or do you want to just write about someone who fascinates you? Or, your family? Conflict is the bones of your book, and sets up your story, and plot points. Conflict is wanting something but setting up obstacles to get it. It’s a war with the soul. I always write with a Walkman on my head. I have to have the music on. Some writers like complete silence. I think of writing as producing and directing my emotions. Emotions, not proper commas or grammar, create great book projects.
Take a few more deep breaths. Relax. All you have to do is to believe in yourself. I don’t want you to think that this book, and the exercises that I call Writing Aerobics are rules; they’re just models to get you into your own process, to guide you from a beginning, middle, and an ending. Consistency, and awareness will bring your concept to fruition. The aerobics will help you find your premise, themes, the beginning, middle and end, and all other elements of structure, which will get you started. Structure is only a blueprint, to give a shape, but the creativity you will use when writing your book, is free falling and within the structure, it will change. It’s like an architect first works with blueprints, before the free flow of design.
When I had been called upon to write a screen treatment for my nonfiction book God Doesn’t Make Trash, I had to figure out the structure, identify the inner and outer plot, layout the storyline. As a tailor tears apart an old suit, or dress, I had to tear apart the book I had spent years writing without an outline and only then did I notice the holes, and how it could have been more powerful if I had thought about structure first. So anyway, remember: There are no rules.
I am remembering parts of my journey as a writer. The memories are not linear; they are not on a time line. I am submerging under the sea. It is quiet under the sea. Fish sounds are different from the array of sounds of traffic, sirens, dialogue of from strangers. Fish sounds are like a mantra, a wail, like old gates opening and closing. I think more clearly, when I’m under the sea. When I’m above, I have blocked so many memories of my life, I can’t remember. Sometimes, I can’t feel my feelings so I have to write images to open the doors to my memories. My memories aren’t linear, and they go back and forth in time. Right now I am recalling a day, when I was a reentry student at San Francisco State University and I was in the poetry department as I loved writing images any that came to my conscious from deep dark dreams, or my unconscious that stores my thoughts, dreams, and life. But I didn’t understand structure.
Little Musings about me-
Know that my anecdotes will not have any order, any linear direction. I just don’t think that way. I am living this book with you.
I’m not supposed to be a poet; I’m not supposed to be anything. I’m invisible. I write my name on the notebooks. I love Plath. Her images are odd and tell stories about her inner life. I lived in a life that wasn’t supposed to be mine. I wish I could spend the rest of my life by a window, like a seamstress, sew my life into words, into a whole thing—I search for my life in my dreams like a child searches for a lost toy.
So I can write a first draft, I arrange the snippets into a shape, and eventually into a book.
By the end of this book, you will have a binder with a title and cover, a table of contents, a logline, a premise, a blurb, a story line, a three act synopsis, an outline, and a treatment, all of which can be integrated into a movie treatment, story board, and screenplay. You will have the beginnings of a full draft and your book will be ready to start shaping and revising.
You are your life’s collaborator.
PART B
LAY OUT YOUR BOOK STRUCTURE AND BEGIN
The most pleasurable thing in the world, for me,
is to see something and then translate how I see it.
—Ellsworth Kelly, painter
We are going to begin with structure. It is an unpleasant word. Just as you don’t want to spoil love by knowing its outcome, you don’t want to intrude on the surprise that exists in creativity. However, to get to that free fall of creativity, just as a modern dance, or ballet, or poem, has a structure, it’s good to have a plan before you begin. Then you can feel free about breaking it. You are digging the parcel of land from which you will develop your book. As I told you, I had never thought about structure. I was stubborn. If I write, it will come.
A flower has a structure. Whether your project is nonfiction or fiction, an essay, poems, a screenplay, you need the same elements of structure. These elements will be the main tools, the steps, you can say, that will guide you into writing your project, flowing easily and simply. Tools need a toolbox or they get scattered all over and lost. You will carry your tools around in your Story Box. You can make a Story Box, or carry an imaginary Story Box. No matter how many books about writing you read, how many writing classes you take, you will sort out what you’ve learned, and add discoveries and tools of the trade to your own process.
Every book has a beginning, middle, and end. In the beginning of starting a book project, whether or not it is fiction or nonfiction, your narrator will begin by wanting something. Metaphorically, whether or not your book project is about love, gardening, family, or an episodic novel, I call this desire, the Holy Grail. But how are you going to get it? What events are you going to set up, to find it? What are you putting up for stake? This desire occurs in the first part of the book, then in the middle of the book, your protagonist, narrator is trying to get it, facing obstacles, revelations, discoveries, pitfalls, crisis, then on the ending, there is resolution, and new questions. I don’t believe in resolutions, but I believe in new choices, new ways of what had happened, or what had changed. (More later) So I divide every book into ABC/--beginning, middle, and end.
A Story Box is a box that I draw with a tool handle and I divide it into ABC, writing the elements of structure in each section. Sometimes I add to it, and sometimes, I delete. You’ll end up with a fully equipped writer’s toolbox that will serve you well from one project to the next.
The Moonlight Sonata is recording. I turn the music louder. It is so beautiful, so orderly, yet its variations of theme along with passion and lyrical beauty are captivating.
WRITING AEROBIC
STARTING YOUR STORY BOX
Create your Story Box. Make a box on paper. Divide it into three parts: Beginning, middle, and end. In parts A, B, and C as we go along, write into your personal STORYBOX, the craft elements you are learning and this way you are building your personal process and own writing aerobics. As you go along you can add, or delete. Remember: There are no rules and you’ll make your own discoveries to put in the box. So far, your Story Box contains only a few of the tools you need.
Again, I repeat. I used to dive into books without the first idea or thought about a storyline or central idea. The structure will come, the magic will follow, I used to say. No! Just as you decide to take a drive, without any sense of direction, or destination, you’ll often drive in a circle or experience a bland and stressful experience when you expected high drama. Construct your maps before you start writing. You can do this on paper, or talk to yourself, or just jot ideas. Nothing formal. Remember: When you actually begin writing, it’s like riding a magic carpet and never stopping and of course a lot of what you’ve planned will change. Like, love. It is fun to make a Story Box, it saves years of not knowing where you’re going—it will be filled with everything you need to structure your project. Draw a story box on a small blackboard. You can add to it, and change the tools as you go along. Some of you will make fantastic graphics; I drew one with a handle. I pinned it to a bulletin board and I’m always changing the tools inside it.
Take a deep breath. Listen to the music, go under the sea, and we’re ready to go on.
You’re starting.
* * *
To copy the objects in a still life is nothing; one must render the emotion they awaken in him.—Matisse
The TITLE of your book reflects what it is about. If you can’t name it, you can’t claim it. A fake title will reflect a fake voice. It’s like naming a baby. A title can be in a single image from your book project, or from an image that reflects your themes. It is important to title your work before you write it. It can change later, but naming your project is acknowledging your self. You are the author of your concept. You are beginning your journey.
Your title contains your theme. It makes your book project real. A title contains the premise. Which is the central. It is why you are writing this. You know how you hear people say ‘I have an idea for a book. It’s a this… or that.’ That is their premise.
Keep the title short. Let it sell! Think about it. Think about your idea and your working titles that will reflect your premise. I am writing too. I am trying to find a new title to fit my new premise for a new book. I turn the music up. Let your mind go. Memories and any disjoined thoughts produce other voices. Often these little out -of- context memories will end up as tiny flashbacks or scenes.
Open Your Memories-When one floats along your mind as you are writing, jot them down. It doesn’t matter how small, or disjointed or even if they’re just pieces of memories.
A swirl of memories is coming through Billie Holiday’s smoky music.
I flash to myself at ten years old sitting in the closet in my bedroom, away from the crazy household where everyone was shouting and angry. My closet was small and dark and I was tall for my age and clumsy so I sat with my knees to my chin, and my diary balanced on my knees. I loved this closet, its privacy, its imaginary castles, romantic lovers, boxes of leaves and odd rocks I collected at Ocean Beach. I had a small flashlight attached to a silver chain and a red leather diary. It had a zipper. In it, on the thin green lined pages, I wrote pieces of ideas, thoughts, and sometimes-tiny stories. When I wrote I felt energy, and I felt passion which when otherwise, I didn’t. I easily detached and, like a snail curls into its shell, I’d curl into isolated empty places. I hid the diary. I wasn’t supposed to be smart. I wasn’t supposed to be good at anything. “Except when you’re pretty someday you’ll marry,” my mother had advised.
I remember the steady buzz from my grandmother’s sewing machine and hear the thumping sound from my brother’s rubber ball hitting the wall and my mother’s high heel slippers clicking on the hardwood overly waxed floors and my father’s tired sighs as he arrives home from his weekly sales trip. He was a film distributor for Universal but he wanted to be a screenwriter. I close my eyes and see the thin brown hairnet bobby pinned to her thin gray hair. Her hands are red and swollen. She was once a violinist.
I remember when I titled my first novel. I was a re entry student in college. Learning was hard. Everything was hard, and both my daughters were ill with the mumps. In back of my soul, I wanted to write a novel. I was too scared. Let me tell you how it began for me.
* * *
Anecdote…the title
I was at the kitchen table, typing a paper on Jane Austen for my literature class. The girls were squabbling in the next room and the wind was snapping hard, leaking through the cracks in the windows. Suddenly I felt a presence. My skin prickled, and a small shadow flickered along the page as if telling me something. The silent ordinary images in our lives are often the most important messages… angels, one might say. You can’t fool your psyche—what you desire, your regrets, your secrets, all will come out.
Almost automatically, as if a presence was leading me, I pulled the page from the typewriter inserted a clean sheet of paper, and as if something were guiding my hand, I felt energy so vibrant that my skin was hot. I wrote the first lines: It was 1960 and it was summer. Blue Moon played from the radio. It was summer. It was my wedding night. I closed my eyes and waited for the moment I had waited for, dreamed about, a moment that would make me a woman and no longer a virgin. Only Charley had stopped. He was moving away and he lit a cigarette. What did I do wrong? What had gone… wrong? I watched the smoke ring rise, then fade.
After all the years of playing back this incident in 1960, little had I known that at this moment I began writing my first novel. I opened the novel with the most painful incident in my life; one, which I had kept, buried, about Charley, my first husband, who had jilted me on my wedding night. I had been a nineteen-year-old virgin and he had refused to consummate the marriage. He made a “mistake,” he said and took me home the next day. I couldn’t stop writing. Scenes were unfolding like cards and I could feel my protagonist Dianne’s heart beating and her shoes heavily touch the pavement when she walked. I was electrified and I felt alive. For the first time since that night I felt desire, I wanted something, I wanted her to tell her story. I didn’t even look up when twilight poured into the cold kitchen, or when my teenage daughters shouted for me to answer the phone, or to cook their dinner. Without hesitation, and energy, I wrote the first chapter about the wedding night that took place in summer, 1960. I wrote:
Airplanes were taking off from the airport nearby. A piece of moonlight dangled along my naked body. “But why? We only married a few hours ago. Why?”
“I made a mistake. I don’t love you.”
“You vowed to love me till death do us part.”
I watched three smoke rings converge into one.
I was writing fast, reliving pain that I had buried. I typed until my fingers were cramped and spots floated in front of my eyes and the cold unheated air went through my bones. What would I title this book? I wanted to name it or it would disappear. I needed to name it.
I got up and made coffee. Coffee always makes me feel good. My two teenagers were still squabbling. My oldest daughter Suzy was preparing to go to New York University the following year. My younger daughter was jumping rope. The clanking sound from the washing machine sounded like iron gates opening and closing. So much time had evolved since that wedding night in 1960. I sat at the table, drinking coffee, and shivering from excitement. At last, I was writing a novel. I was trembling. I had started my novel with the incident that changed my life, the incident from which the story would build… resolve. I had started with the Inciting Incident. Where would it go? At that point I didn’t know much about development, arcs, storylines, and just trusted that I knew the story and it would write itself. I wanted to write about a girl who was denied her true self, who had been programmed and rehearsed to marry, to seduce, to be provided for. To bury her own desires. After her brutal rejection, slowly, she evolves through an evolution of painful events and marriages into an artist, into a being. I wanted to write about the tragedy of her family. Jewish American Princess meant that she was supposed to please, to become a product and not a person. But how? I don’t understand the many how to books on writing. I’m not there yet. Okay, I would just write, I decided. I hate outlines, though later on, I learned how to storyboard. (More later) At my decision to someday write a novel about my past, I felt alive. Something in me, in my past had opened. I titled the book, The Rise and Fall of a Jewish American Princess. This title gave me the direction to go further into the book and to write fast and with energy.
A TITLE makes your book project real. It reflects the story line and premise.
The days passed in a blur. I couldn’t stop writing. Memories that had been buried for so long were emerging in my sleep. I’d be at the grocery store, or cooking dinner and a tiny memory would come over me, sometimes an image—a rabbits foot that I had as a child and always carried, my paper dolls unevenly cut and placed in shoeboxes, my father’s sad eyes, worn briefcase, my brother Robbie spending days in the basement in a locked tool room, the subsequent days at home, when I hid from the annulment and the shame and the blame. The memories became scenes and they began to get fuller. It was as if my life had been tied by a maze of wires and one by one they were activating. I felt on fire. The memories were both exciting and disturbing. In the middle of the night, I’d wake and rush to the typewriter to write. It was as though the novel was writing itself. The book consumed me.
At that point I had no craft awareness, the emotions, the rage, I had buried for so long, swept to consciousness—and my protagonist Dianne had a strong voice. When you’re writing from the heart, you will find a voice. We all are born with other voices. We have lots of other voices and each book you write has a different voice… maybe a similar tone, but a different voice. Your book has a life. If you have the energy the voice will follow. I promise. In my sleep I saw scenes with Charley, at restaurants, standing under the Chuppa and marrying, dancing to It Had To Be You, my train wrapped three times around my arm and my eyes half closed. I jotted memoirs and pieces of scenes that came to mind.
Two years later I finished it. That book was the closest relationship I had ever had. I had just graduated from San Francisco State University with a B.A. in English literature, and I wanted to enter the creative writing graduate program. I submitted The Rise and Fall of a Jewish American Princess as a thesis. I was accepted into the program. A professor encouraged me to submit Rise and Fall to literary agents, which I did. After many months and a lot of rejections (more on that later), a well-known literary agent in San Francisco loved the book. On the phone he sounded smooth, literary. He invited me to lunch. I was ecstatic. It all started. He invited me to his office, and then to lunch. I was excited.
Anecdote…the lunch
It was a foggy day in San Francisco. I dressed carefully in my best black jeans and brown leather clogs and gray fedora hat. I arrived at his slick office on Union Street. He was tall, handsome, and elegant. He spoke with a Boston accent. He had this aura about him; one of Eastern prep schools and well read books and literary magazines.
“I love the book,” he repeated for the fourth time. “You’ll make a fortune.”
“I could use a fortune. I’m broke. I have two daughters. I’m in graduate school and—”
“You have some work to do on the novel,” he interrupted, exhaling a long impatient puff of smoke. A perfect smoke ring floated to the ceiling.
He didn’t like the first person point of view. He decided it should be third person. “No one is interested in your biography.”
“It’s about… me,” I meekly said. “I can’t change it, now.”
“If you want to be an author, act like an author. You need to separate from yourself. Third person. Confidence is very important. Now, I’m a busy agent. I’ll be in touch.”
Against my better judgment, I assured myself that he knew best, and that I would do this. Little did I know that this shift of point of view would take more years.
* * *
Point Of View
I rewrote the novel in third person (more about point of view later). A big mistake. But having no self-esteem and feeling like an impostor, I easily gave in, even at the risk of sabotaging my work. Again, you have to believe in yourself. I rewrote the novel in third person. But it meant tearing apart my book; and just sticking “she said” over “I said” doesn’t work for patching it back up. So I had to rewrite the book, following what I had already written but third person (she, he) was changing its tone. Point Of View changes the voice, tone, and pace. Point of view is important and it reflects your narrator’s voice. It’s how you decide to tell your story and convey your material. It contains pace, and tone and the emotionality of your narrator and it its nonfiction, of the author’s voice. The problem was not the point of view; it was that I didn’t have confidence and had changed my original point of view. It worked in third person but I still feel it was better and more energetic in my original first person. Don’t let anyone ever change your work. You are its master. Trust and know yourself.
It took me another year and a half to rewrite the novel. I submitted it again. I liked it in third person but it had lost its original freshness. Of course what third person had allowed me to do was go into the minds of other characters and I expanded other characterizations, and even changed the setting in parts of the book from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It was a learning experience but one I should hot have practiced on my already fresh intact novel. Editing and development are one thing, changing point of view and the tone, are another. I made a mistake.
“That’s better,” the agent said. “Now no one will think it’s your autobiography.”
Can you believe there’s prejudice against first person voice?
So while the novel was sent around to publishers, I studied for my orals on Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. I chose those authors because of their unique voice and original use of language and how they’re inner stories and other voices and true emotions seep through their images and language like the sun sifts through clouds. They go so deep into the soul and show perceptions and stories through language.
I began writing poetry. I love to tell a story through an image, a short line. Then I began writing lists of images into notebooks. Next to each image I wrote a theme and an emotion. I began writing little snippets about ways to get into my memories and into my truths. They were the beginnings of writing aerobics. I read everything I could about writing, from Eudora Welty, to Robert McKee. But finding my own process and keeping lists of the aerobics was my rehearsal. Just as a ballet dancer seems as if floating and is expressive, behind this dancer is discipline, study, and hard work. I began writing notes about the process of writing. I hated graduate writing classes. I dislike writing workshops. They remind me of clubs. Of bad clubs where hurt feelings are parts of the process, and too many rules. I don’t believe writing can be taught; nor should it be bandied about and critiqued from one student to another. Writing is a private process. I struggled with my thesis on Sylvia Plath’s ‘Bee’ poems.
Meanwhile, my agent sold The Rise and Fall of a Jewish American Princess. I couldn’t believe it. Me. Mouse in the class. I was excited out of my mind, and my agent informed me that I had to go to New York to meet my publisher. I received a ten thousand dollar book advance. They were very excited, he said. The novel was going to be edited, prepared for auction. “Where the big bucks are,” he said. I got ready to go to New York to meet the publisher. I’ll never forget the day I got the news that my novel had sold. My family was a middle class family, who thought that money, things, “good marriages” meant more than accomplishments and that my desire to write for a living was a social aberration and happens to only the “very smart.” Certainly they thought that my reentry college consumption was an aberration. Or they had never wanted to identify me as anything more than a “fluff head.”
At my mother’s house that night, the family suspiciously sat around my mother’s Queen Ann dining table. My brother Robbie, who had never lived away from home, sat across from me with his friend Mark. My other brother Dick sat on the other side, along with an array of Aunts and Uncles who had never seemed interested in me. They questioned me about the sale of Rise&Fall. “What about the check?” they repeated. But I didn’t let them bother me. I wouldn’t. I was going to get out of my past; I was going to be an author.
Now, everything would fall into place. Suddenly, my brother Robbie had an “announcement.” He stood, a glow on his chalk-white face. “I’m gay,” he said, to an eerie quiet. I was happy. At last he was going to live as who he was and not a prisoner in my mother’s house. I applauded. My clapping hands sounded like thunder in the disapproving silence. I watched Robbie slowly fade, then fold into a crouched position in his chair.
“Sit down. You’ll get over it,” Mother shouted at him. “No son of mine is a queer.”
When I got home, I wrote this incident in a notebook. Themes of homophobia, repression, esteem, rejection, murder, later integrated into all of my books. An incident can affect you so much that the incident can develop into a storyline, a novel, nonfiction, a poem, an essay, a movie, a painting, and all forms of art. Remember. You are your life’s narrator. You are on a treasure hunt. Write your insights, thoughts, ideas, memories, and pieces of dreams in your notebooks. Find a process. When you feel passionate about something—an idea, memory, something visual, don’t let it go. In this society we are trained, unconsciously, not to trust our instincts. Instincts, ego, esteem, are the seeds of creativity. Passion, not perfect phrases, are at the root of a great book, and film.
Now. Get a notebook. I like the three hole binders as you can keep your hard copy in it, and insert a cover on the front. Design a cover. Write a title on the front. Imagine this as your book. As you compose, draft your book, always print out the hard copy and place it into your binder. This keeps it real. The notes I keep, at first, are on postits, scraps of paper, and index cards. I carry around a notebook that fits in my purse. They’re not these fancy journals with images of Renoir paintings on the cover; rather they are little fat notebooks that I buy at Walgreen’s. I number them.
Anyway, I shall go on. I’ll tell you more about myself and the evolution of my writing career:
I continued studying for my orals. I was a forty-eight year old grad student, and single mother of two daughters. I felt so joyful about this first sale that I couldn’t wait to get to New York. My oldest daughter was at New York University studying journalism, and dance and it was near Christmas. I was excited that not only would I meet my publisher, but I would have a white Christmas with my daughter and her boyfriend. It was all too joyful. Too perfect. It was like a beautiful bubble floating in front of me and I was afraid if I breathed it would burst. And to think the professors had said that I was too old, and that it was too late to be an author. To take up real estate or Chinese cooking lessons. Everything is possible at any age. Everyone has creativity in them. Every life is a book.
* * *
Anecdote…The Meeting-New York
I arrived in New York. The snow was like lace and the City was full of energy. I stayed with my daughter who was at NYU and her boyfriend, in their twelve-story walk up, sleeping on a thin futon. But I had sold a book and nothing else mattered. I ventured into a cold snow filled day, wearing my new marked down rubber boots and a long black cape, and arrived at my publisher’s office. He and his editor took me to a swank restaurant for lunch.
“I’m so excited.” I said, over a stiff lunch at the publisher’s wood paneled office. The publisher was formidable, huge, with a mane of white hair, like a lion, and his editor was a sleek, mean looking petite blond woman who seemed disappointed that I wasn’t “like Jackie,” meaning his author, Jackie Collins. Glamorous. I sat in their swank office making small talk about the snow while they gave each other these in-the-know looks. It was awful. I was green. After I slid down for the “iniation,” as Berney said, this stripe pole in the center of the room that went down five floors, we ventured into the snow, to dine at a fancy French restaurant. I was in a daze. This was a dream I had dreamed all of my life and I didn’t feel present. I couldn’t wait till the day was over so I could go home and remember it, and feel every inch of it.
At lunch, I picked at a few shriveled spears of asparagus wallowing in oil and lemon while several waiters hovered around our table, commenting on the weather. Then the editor, patting her small palms together as if making a world-shaking decision, announced that many of my scenes “had to go.”
“More sex.”
“I like the title, “Virgin Princess.”
“Well, that title doesn’t… reflect my themes,” I hesitantly said, trying to be polite and wanting to tell them to forget the whole thing.
“Why does he not consummate the wedding night?” persisted the publisher. “Maybe he’s gay. Yes. That’s it.”
“Or a pedophile,” said the editor, picking at a tiny shrimp.
“The point is that she never knows why he married her, that she rises beyond her obsession and on the end, she figures it out. Only it’s different from what she had thought. It doesn’t matter if he’s gay or straight, it’s the deception.”
“Or she kills him. She dreams she kills him,” said the editor. “So if you have a gun, use it. Rule number one.”
Sure, some editing is always requested, but to rewrite and cheapen my novel? I didn’t know what to do, so, again, being a blob of a person who thought I was lucky I had a chance, I went home and did exactly what she told me to do. I felt as though I were writing a paint word by number. I was following the editor’s memorandums and they were moronic. I was a mess. I was aborting my book. Selling out for a publication. So I thought. Art is the only time you have to be honest… to be true. If you’re not, just as a criminal pays, you will too. The revision took another year. And as I told you in my prologue, the book was canned because it “fell flat” and lacked a “voice.”
More to follow-
Everyone has a personal voice, it resonates from self esteem, observation, and truths, and if you give up your own point of view, truths, passions, rage, just like with anything in life, nothing will evolve and it will be tepid… flat. The key to good writing is truth. Emotions reveal story. And your title comes from your emotions. Students come to my classes and they write perfectly rule bound dramas, but there is no originality, no voice, and no passion. Why? They haven’t gone into their souls, into the landscape of their unconscious, or observed enough.
The next Aerobic will help you find your title, come up with different choices. You’ll be using your titles in a lot of the Aerobics.
WRITING AEROBIC
FINDING YOUR TITLE
Title means everything. Your title is your theme. It contains your story line, conflict, and resolution. Consider these titles: Absalom, Absalom; Madame Bovary; The Great Gatsby; The Crying Game. The Godfather-others.
Write several working titles, even the ones that just come to you. You’ll be surprised. Sometimes the story will suddenly become clearer. Pretend that your book is in a bookstore and you are looking at the title. Behind the title lays the magic kingdom of the book’s journey.
Already the title is the seed
Now you have a book that is starting. When I wrote Rise&Fall, I typed on an electric Smith Corona typewriter. I placed the pages in a box that I had painted with flowers and faces that I imagined my protagonist to have. It became a world. Every day I watched the book grow until the pages filled the box. It’s the same with a binder.
WRITING AEROBIC
DESIGN YOUR BOOK JACKET
Imagine your book cover. Now sketch what you see or find some clip art on your computer or cut out an image from a magazine. Whatever medium you use, be sure it’s how you envision your book. Make a copy of your design.
Now get out your binder. This is where your book starts, with the page you are about to lay out. Select one of your working titles, one that reflects your secret self. Where do you want the title? Where do you want the image? Do you want the title at the top, then your name, then and the art? Do you want the title below the art? Once you decide, do some cutting and pasting, literally or on the computer, then insert it as the first page in your binder, just as if it’s the actual cover page of your book’s jacket. See an example on the next page.
Your Title
by
Your Name
Have fun with this! Get creative, unexpected.
This is the cover of your book.
“What’s your story about?” asked the editor
“It’s about a woman who falls in love with a Trapeze artist.”
“I mean, what is its premise?”
“Excuse me?”
* * *
What my editor wanted was the premise, the central idea that inspired me to write my book. The premise is what drives the story, in my case, that a woman wants to find the reason her husband jilted her on her wedding night so that she can once love. That was my main idea. I was telling her what my book was “about.” Which is not the premise but the story and I was reciting a linear list of scenes. Again, Premise is the main desire that has led you to write your book. In my classes, my students when asked what the premise of their book project is they often don’t know, and will start explaining what the book is about, explaining long and lengthy scenes—“My story is about this, and then that happened, and then she…” and on and on. With that kind of pitch you will lose your audience quickly. By not having a clear, concise premise, your book structure will be all over the place. I struggled with pitching because I never had a clear idea of my Premise--Here are some pointers.
What is Premise? Again, it’s the central idea of the story. What emotion or event inspired you to write this book project? As you flesh out these questions your Premise, your central idea will clarify itself. Once you have the premise, like seeds planted in a garden, as you write your material, the premise will drive the material, which will expand and change course. But the premise will stay intact, like steel girders on a bridge. Premise is important for the structure.
Anecdote-about central ideas…When I searched for a Premise-
It was 1983. It was the AIDS holocaust. My next-door neighbor Joe had died a terrible death from AIDS and he and his partner had been evicted because they were gay. I was appalled by the homophobia and thought about my brother Robbie locked in the basement all of his life because he was gay. So I started interviewing men and women with AIDS. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, but I just knew that I wanted to record the voices that gave me their stories about discrimination, who suffered pain and who died terrible deaths. So while I was writing I was recording what was around me. Trust your instincts. Tape record people you think are interesting. I believe that art is life’s true documentation. You never know. More, later.
I didn’t understand what Premise meant until I had written and published my second novel. I told you that my anecdotes and story of my writing life would not be linear-I don’t think that way so allow me to tell you a little more about my experience with this subject of Premise. When So Long, Princess, the novel I wrote after Rise&Fall was shelved—it was published by Morrow, was hot for its fifteen minutes of fame. My literary agent set up a meeting with a film agent in Los Angeles. “She has a hot option ready to go,” he told me. He arranged for his assistant in Los Angeles to pick me up at the hotel and drive me to meet the film agent.
Anecdote…The Premise
Los Angeles was very hot, so hot that the air didn’t seem to move around and even the palm trees in rows along the hot streets looked gummy. My agent’s assistant, a smooth ex Vassar girl with snippy, judgmental eyes and a voice edged with irritation, drove us to Santa Monica. She instructed me to “listen” to the film agent and to let her do the “talking.” Big bucks, she repeated. So Long Princess, written in rebellion to The Rise and Fall of a Jewish American Princess, had excellent reviews but the distribution had been a mess and there weren’t many books in the stores. I was upset. I’d been through the mill, first Rise and Fall shelved, then two more years writing So Long Princess, with rave reviews and no books in the stores. “Stop complaining,” she said, driving faster, and weaving in and out of the heavy freeway traffic.
She’d do the work, she emphasized. I drifted. I was remembering my father, who had been a film distributor for Universal Pictures, and the special times I had with him at the Los Angeles studio where he spent years of his life. Back then I had dreamed of maybe becoming an actor and was dazzled by the dark sets, the cameras, and the young stars in costumes. Once I had a screen test. I was made up and had this wave that slid along my eyes like a kiss. I rehearsed lines. But my father encouraged me to go work and get married. It was the generation.
Anyway, we reached Santa Monica and pulled up to a brown shingle bungalow. It was cool inside. Movie posters covered the walls. A pretty receptionist offered bottled water, pouring it into a wine glass with a twist of lime. My white cotton shirt was sticking to my back and my thin, curly hair was frizzing out. My agent’s assistant looked cool in a flowery dirndl skirt and a crisp cotton off the shoulder top. “Barbra Streisand is interested,” she whispered. “Remember, let me talk.”
“Sure.”
“It’s very important that Alison likes you. She love loves loves the book, but she wants to meet you.”
Just then the door banged open and Alison introduced herself. Her quick appraising blue eyes took in my soaked blouse.
“You’re very talented, my dear,” she gushed. “Love, love, love the project.” She shook hands with my agent’s assistant and led us down a whispery gray hallway into her office. Dozens of green jade bangles slid indolently along her tanned, defined arms. She sat behind her long glass desk and glanced at me with her I don’t see you glance. Then a disappointed double blink.
“So Long Princess is a very important book,” she said. She’d already said that once. “Very important,” she repeated again. I felt like an idiot. I didn’t know what to say. Or do. And Miss “Let—Me—Do—the Talking” sat there like a lump of clay, fluffing her dirndl skirt and making gurgly sounds. The film agent’s desk was cluttered with contracts and cups and jumbo color coded Rolodex files, and telephones were ringing soft bell sounds. Finally, after talking to a client, a long rude telephone call, she jumped from her chair and shouted that we were going to be late and that Dianne didn’t like to wait. Dianne was very important she emphasized. She was Taylor Hackford’s assistant producer and Hackford’s girlfriend but she makes all the decisions.”
Did I know that he produced La Bamba, she threw out as we climbed into the car.
We arrived at this humongous Hollywood hotel, antiques in the lobby, plush carpets, cool air, and a pianist knocking out Cole Porter tunes on a huge piano.
Let me describe Dianne. Gorgeous, a size 2 boy’s body, dark hair sculpted short to her perfect head—no lumps or waves, like mine—and, of course, she appeared so cool not at all flustered by the humid day. The jacket of her pleated couture silk suit wasn’t sticking to a sweaty back and when she walked the most delicate scent of perfume drifted like mist.
At lunch, Dianne, wearing a multicolored beeper around her very thin waist, gushed about my novel between telephone calls, chattering about run throughs, pitches, and contracts. I picked on a wilted salad, and wondered what this lunch meeting was about. With a sigh, Dianne informed us that she had to “rush” as she had to pick up “Dustin” at the airport. She glanced at her gold Rolex.
“So give me a pitch,” she said, neatly buttering a teeny roll. “What is your premise?”
I sputtered that the book is about a fifty-year old woman looking for love.
“Fifty? No one wants to see a fifty-year-old schlep along life. We must make her… young,” she said with a wave of her hand.
“Young,” agreed the agent’s assistant.
Then I added that I was working on a book about AIDS and homophobia. My agent’s assistant kicked me under the table, and Dianne, looking horrified, glanced again at her watch, and there was this terrifically thick silence, the kind that means you failed.
“Let’s do lunch sometime,” she said, getting up. “I have to pick up Dustin. Ciao.” She left in a cloud of perfume.
“You fucked up,” said Alison. “When you know your story premise, call me. And you pitched that lesbian AIDS shit.”
“It’s not lesbian… it’s about people of all races and sexualities, whole—”
“I’m out of here,” said Alison. “We have no deal. “
As she left, my agent’s assistant frowned. “You poor thing. You’ve had it. Never never never pitch a project while you’re trying to sell another. She didn’t like you. It’s over.”
The option didn’t go through. Just as I had known it wouldn’t. After that, my agent lost interest. He urged me to pursue my next book. “You have a three book contract,” he said. So instead of insisting that he resubmit The Rise and Fall of a Jewish American Princess, or firing him and taking a stand, I began forcing a new novel, calling it Love, Sometimes. What was hard was that I used the same material from my life—recycled it into another story. I depended on my life and my observations for material. So what? You can do anything you want. Only this time I didn’t feel the burning passion I had felt writing Rise&Fall, and then So Long, Princess, which was about writing Rise&Fall. Love and Art was based on my current relationship with a commitment phobic mathematician from Berkeley and about Nina, a sculptor, and also a commitment phobic. I was deep in the middle of my relationship with the mathematician and though every writer has to be her own psychoanalyst, it was hard, like stepping back and writing about it instead of living it and the prose, though better, the voice and tone were flat. I was determined to please. To produce and a bestseller.
So. Anyway. Premise. Ask yourself what your idea is. Premise is different from theme, which is embedded in the idea, and it is different from conflict, which is what makes the idea expand and causes tension. Premise is the central idea of your book is. Remember, fiction and nonfiction have the same structural concerns. When you had an idea to write your novel, how to book, essays, or short stories, what was the underlying idea that made you click your fingers and say, “I have an idea. I’m going to write a book about…”?
Have confidence.
Trust the creative process. Structure is only a destination, but the creative process will pull you in different directions so go with it.
Passion.
Truth.
Believe in your self and your books will come true.
I remember myself in a poetry workshop. When I hadn’t believed in myself.
Memory of a Poetry Workshop—
A window is open and streams of cold rain soak my papers. The chairs are in a circle and my professor sits in the center. She wears thick glasses and her thin mouth is pressed in insufferable judgment. Priscilla, the class star, is reading her poem. I wipe my glasses with Kleenex, and try to be attentive. Priscilla has long, silky, blonde hair. Everything about her is perfect: her nubby woolen sweater, snug jeans, and yellow rain boots. Her blue eyes are so pale they’re almost white. Her deep ponderous voice is rising, dropping, and she pauses just the right amount of time before reading the next stanza. I don’t understand her poems, only that the stanzas are perfect and she’d been published in prestigious feminist Anthologies. I love writing poetry. Images from my dreams, and unconscious pour onto the page like drops of rain. She finishes reading “Black Moon.”
There is applause.
Phyllis nods and there is a flurry of raised hands, and a lively discussion about the sexual meaning of moon imagery.
“The moon is sexual,” she explains with a sniff.
“You can feel the… light,” exuberantly raves Kit, a thin girl with nervous gray eyes.
“So Sextonian.”
There is a reverent discussion about her “Breadth.” Then it is my turn to read my long prose poem. I had worked from the images, but I had felt passionate about it. It was about my brother’s attempted suicides. I was nervous. My voice was thin and faltering and I felt the paper shaking. I tried not to notice Priscilla, frowning and taking notes.
Cracks map graves,
My brother’s heart is encased in a tin shell,
I knock it
It is hollow, like a drum.
I finish reading. I sit down. I take several breaths, angry that I am still blushing.
And why does Priscilla frown? My rubber boots stick to a piece of gum.
Phyllis nods twice.
Her glasses are so thick her eyes are dots. Phyllis asks for comments.
“Too much egg imagery,” says Chris who wears a tomahawk. “It drowns the meaning.”
“No structure.”
“Disconnected.”
“Too Plathian.”
“Dangling prepositions” says Priscilla, smiling.
“I like the worm imagery.”
“Why are marigolds contemptuous?”
“Up close they smell bad,” I hear my self explain. “Like life—”
Why are they laughing?
“Barbara, you need to clarify the conflict. To give credibility to the imagery. “Focus. Your imagery is interesting. You’ll get there.”
I unroll my paper bag so it will be ready to blow into.
Get where? What does she mean get there? I’m here. Why don’t you see? Hear? Do you know how painful it is to feel invisible?
A bell rings and chairs scrape like scratches. I hurry past the group clustered around Priscilla, into the hallway, holding my paper bag, and rush downstairs.
Why don’t they understand that marigolds are disappointing? That the themes eggshell imagery was that my brother’s soul was taken at birth, snatched away and only an empty shell existed. That is why his suicide was necessary. I blow into my paper bag three times, and then I fold the bag and carefully place it into the slot in my purse, next to an extra pair of eyeglasses.
A bell rings.
* * *
WRITING AEROBIC
YOUR PREMISE
Write your premise. Think of the idea that inspired you to write your story or nonfiction project.
(I feel this little person curled in me, hidden and watching. She’s comforting, sometimes)
No mortal mind can plumb the depths of nature… not even the depths of the unconscious. We do know, however, that the unconscious never rests. It seems to be always at work, for even when asleep, we dream.