Giving Away the Store, Part 12: Practice

I have been coaching a woman who has just begun writing at age 39. Her prose sparkles in places, and she paints radiant pictures of her characters and settings throughout her narrative, so encouraging her continued writing is an easy task for me. Nevertheless, she has expressed concern that her story does not have direction and goes nowhere. My response? So what!

This writer's lament brings to mind how little final product any endeavor yields. Professional sprinters who run in, say, six 60-meter and six 200-meter indoor races, and ten 100-meter and ten 200-meter outdoor races per year—quite a busy schedule these days—perform only eight minutes a year despite practicing on the track, in the gym, and in the weight room seven days a week with little exception throughout that season. Artists sketch endlessly in their studio but do not present everything they do as a completed artwork. Musicians do their scales all day long for their two 75-minute concerts per week, not including those periods when they have no gigs. Any expert independent contractor who gets paid by the hour, as I do, knows about the hours of unpaid preparation time they must dedicate to their craft. In my case, as a writing consultant, everything I read and write and view contributes to my consulting expertise, institutional knowledge, and performance skills. Why should writing be any different? Writers do far more than write. They read, research, interview, attend meetings and conferences, and record. So much goes into the work, and, as the prolific author Irving A. Greenfield once told me, "There are no shortcuts. I'll take the word of a writer of nearly 400 books.

The key to working as a writer is to write every day. And don't beat up yourself if you miss a day or two. Stuff happens in our life that we cannot control. Write about those interruptions too—write about anything—just keep practicing. You'll see big dividends! 

  

Giving Away the Store, Part 11: Travel

When I suggest that developing writers travel, I do not necessarily mean they go on a costly worldwide tour or even on a flight to another country—although those experiences would be great. But I also don't mean a staycation. Staying home on vacation surely has its perks. It's an opportunity to walk in your hometown at times when work prevents you from enjoying that opportunity. But staying home can be too easy. 

The travel I'm talking about could be an overnight trip to a forest if you live in the city, or to a city if you live in a forest. It could be a weekend at the shore. Or a visit to a national park, historic site, or monument. What's important is that you look at the trip not as just another opportunity to live it up in a karaoke bar or run around an amusement park. Write about your reactions to the different environment. What distinguishes this place from home? What would you miss about home if you were to live in this new place? Are people there any different from where you live? Would you like to be there with someone who is not with you? Why? What would it be like to live there? What adjustments would you have to make? How different would your life be? The more you dig into the scene, the more you'll learn about it. Before you know it, you'll drum up characters for a new story or create a topic for an essay. 

Take a notebook with you. If you're a laptop type, that will do just as well. Dedicate specific times of day to record your reflections in solitude. Don't feel you have to write "I did this and I did that." Write about the graffiti on a building wall. Write about that stray dog that followed you halfway down a city block. Write about the drone disturbing the geese as it hovers over the lake. Write about a delivery woman who sang Beyoncé's "Formation" as she drops off a package. Write about that ever-smiling six-year-old boy in a wheelchair under an oak tree. Write about whatever you like, or not like. When you return home, read what you wrote. Some gems may be lying in the middle of a paragraph or at the end of a sentence. By the time you make this activity a habit, you'll be connecting ideas from your last trip to previous ones. Now you're brewing.   

Giving Away the Store, Part 10: Experiment

Experiment! I'm working on a sestina right now. A sestina is a 39-line, 7-stanza poem with six 6-line stanzas and one final 3-line stanza. Invented nine centuries ago in France by Arnaut Daniel, the sestina uses the six words ending each line of the first stanza to repeat in alternate positions in the following line endings of the next five stanzas, and the last 3-line stanza contains two each of those words per line, one at the middle and one at the end. 

The sestina is the type of poem that might put off readers as too repetitious and irk writers as too complex and restricting. But poets should practice as many forms as possible in deference to their predecessors and in honor of the craft. I have written one before, 47 years ago, which appeared on the National Council of Teachers of English website in 2014. Notice the repetition:

 On Living Near The Bronx Zoo: An Urban Sestina

This block where we live in the heart and the soul of The Bronx
You’d say is the last place you’d find any culture or art.
Eleven miles down the IRT tracks, the world
So lavishly watches the latest Shakespeare-in-the-Park,
A Mozart festival opening in Carnegie Hall,
Or a Jackson Pollock at the Whitney Museum. The streets

In what they call The City ain’t our streets,
Ain’t our city. We who live here in The Bronx
Don’t say New York’s where we’re from. Our screaming halls
Are us. Our neighborhood, yeah, is all about art,
From paisons playing softball on the asphalt park
To amigas taking the stoop as if it’s their world,

None too far from that fabled zoo, its monkey world
Screeching in sorrow but not as pained as the street,
Where hitters stalk hookers as darkness takes the park
And dropouts pipe ashcans in mailboxes. Our Bronx,
With blaring boom boxes making a nuisance of art,
Lives and dies like echoes through those empty halls.

And heading west you’ll find another Hall,
This one of Fame. It shows folks of another world,
Their busts marred with graffiti and bubble gum, this art
The boys be doing when they’re wilding the street
As off-duty cops drink pitchers in Chuck’s Bar. The Bronx
Belongs to these boys, they own the streets, the park,

The halls, and everything else but the animal park,
Where mandrills ape each other in the monkey hall,
The elder dragging his nipples through the dirt of The Bronx,
Face blue and red, conjuring still another world
Thousands of miles away without the streets
Covering the dankness, the rot. This human art

Of entombing earth so we could live; the art
Of growing trees from all the world in one park
To remind us the world is bigger than our fabled streets—
The mountains, the deserts, the oceans—as if our halls
Were not enough, as if the natural world
All boiled down to what you wouldn’t call The Bronx,

But it does: the ultimate art, the footsteps and echoes down the hall,
The breaking of benches in the park, the nickel-and-dime world
We call our community’s streets—that’s what we call The Bronx.

Another rarely used form is the pantoum, originating from Malay. The pantoum usually contains four 4-line stanzas with repetitive alternating lines in specific positions. Here is one I wrote 46 years ago,  as soon as I learned of the form. It appeared Motherbird in 2001. Again, notice the repetition.

Back at the Ranch: A Pantoum

One birch bends, the other splits in two.
Upon both trees one cardinal nests;
A tabby scales both trunks in rue
And claws the roots and never rests.

Upon both trees the cardinal nests
Far from the tabby’s reach;
He claws the roots and never rests
And blanches the bark of each.

Far from the tabby’s reach
The cardinal flits from branch to branch
And blanches the bark of each,
Disturbing all the ranch.

The cardinal flits from branch to branch.
The tabby scales both trunks in rue,
Disturbing all the ranch.
One birch bends, the other splits in two.

The point is that writers need to practice, and practice appears in many forms. Research them. And keep experimenting.

Giving Away the Store, Part 9: Go Back

Go back can mean a lot of things for a writer. It can mean go back to your last draft and try to improve it. It can mean go back with a family member or friend to an episode you experienced in common to get their take on those moments. It can mean go back to a restaurant or museum or sports center to compare experiences then with now. In this post, I note three other go-backs that I do periodically. They usually inspire some creativity.

1. Go back to your roots. For me, going back to my roots means two places: the Bronx, New York, where I grew up, and Mgarr, Malta, where my parents grew up. When I go to the Bronx, the James Monroe Housing Projects in particular, I could swear I see my ten-year-old self racing friends around the apartment buildings, playing in the softball field, and hanging on the bench with my childhood friends. When in Mgarr, as I'll be next month for the eleventh time in my life, I see the police station where my father served as a police officer. I see the fields where my mother, as the eldest of 11 children, fetched water from the well for my grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Stories are behind my every step in these places.

2. Go back to something you've read. I am fortunate to have read books like John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea to my grandson Delano. These are fiction pieces I read in high school or college, and as I read them a half century later to my grandson between his eighth and tenth years, I not only connected with him—always a good thing—but I got new perspectives as a senior and from Delano, 10 years younger than I was when I read them. There's a story somewhere there, right?  

3. Go back to something you've written. I can go back 52 years in my journals, and I often do. I am the same person I was back then, but I am not too. My attitudes and inclinations, even my politics, have changed. I am less hopeful than I was then, but also less anxious. I was angrier then, and I am more tolerant now. Some people who know me may read this and disagree, but what matters to a writer is his own mindset. Regardless of how I feel or felt, I can tap into a reservoir of ideas from those notebooks. And I do.

Giving Away the Store, Part 8: Review Your Entertainment

An easy way to keep writing is to compose reaction pieces of any movie, play, concert, ballet, or art exhibit you might attend, or any book or article you might read. Even a song you hear on the radio, or your music player will do. Forget about the rules of what should appear in a reaction piece. This isn't school. You can compare what you just read to another story, including a personal one. You can explain what a song you just heard means to you. You can note how a painting reminds you of someone you love. There are no rules. This activity is for you, as a means of kickstarting the writing process or  recording an experience. Nobody's business but yours.  

You can find any point of entry into such writing. The more personal, the better. Say you heard a new version of a song this morning that struck you in some way. For instance, I remember the first time I heard Ray Charles sing "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!" by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Before that moment in the early 1980s, when I was preparing a family meal, I thought of that tune as little more than a decent Broadway show opener. But when Ray's voice burst through the radio in his singular way, soaring high and descending fast like an eagle after its prey, my breath was taken away. I just had to stop cooking and write down some notes about how Ray Charles can recreate the most ordinary tunes into soulful celebrations of life. I've heard his rendition hundreds of times since as a pick-me-upper. 

More than once I experienced watching a play I had already read that astonished me because of its staging and acting. I can think of Colleen Dewhurst performing as Josie Hogan in Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1974, her husband George C. Scott playing Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman the next year, and F. Murray Abraham as Krapp in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape just a week ago—a full half-century later. Their performances were so special that I was sure they added lines to the original script. But upon reviewing the scripts once I got home, I realized I was wrong. That's the power of a great performance. The actors make you hear the lines for the first time.

I could write similar stories about musicians. The first time I heard Billie Holiday sing her forlorn rendition of "Love for Sale," or Stephane Grappelli bend notes on his violin for "Nuages," or Michel Camilo's piano thundering through "On Fire." I could name many more musicians. Or artworks, like when I first saw Chuck Close's "Phil," a 6-by-9-foot black-and-white acrylic on canvas portrait of Philip Glass. Or when I first stepped into the Museum of Modern Art room dedicated to Claude Monet's giant water lily paintings. Or my impression of monumental books like Call It Sleep by Henry Roth, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.

Writing summary reviews is also a good way of compensating for any guilt you might feel over watching too many sitcoms. Write about everything you watch. You'll find a gem in your notes just waiting for you to expand into a poem, story, play, or essay. Just do it. 

Giving Away the Store, Part 7: Speak to a Decedent

I don't think I have ever cried at a loved one's funeral, and I have been to many. But recently I have cried with laughter when remembering some clownish antic of my father-in-law, Peter Kostares, dead 30 years. Not long ago, I have laughed like a madman as I walked down Broadway in New York City over some irreverent remark by my father, Francis Xavier, gone 28 years from this earth. I have cried over the loss of my mother Lucy's unconditional support, who passed away 26 years ago. I cry thinking that I could not communicate with my paternal grandmother, Carmela, now gone 54 years, because we spoke different languages before translation technology bridged such a boundary. 

I cry a lot, almost always when I am alone, and far from finding myself in the depths of despair, I become overwhelmed with joy, glowing with gratitude for being alive with such remarkable forebears to guide my walk through life. I continue to speak to these decedents, as well as grandfathers Philip and Carmelo, grandmother Elizabeth, uncles Emmanuel, Reno, and Fotios, aunts Katherine, Theresa, Salvina, Josephine, Rita, Katherine, and Maryanne, cousin Mario, friends Danielle, Tony, Tom, Victor, Deborah, Lucille, Ann, and Nancie, former employers Ida, Harry, and Mickey, and many more people whose names would run a dozen more pages.

If you are a writer struggling with something to write about, rely on your decedents. They are a source of rich material. They will never let you down. Talk to them. Ask them questions. Listen to their responses. They are wiser than we will ever be in this lifetime.

 

Giving Away the Store, Part 6: Do Something New

My college journalism professor assigned the class to interview someone we did not know and report about it. During this time, the early seventies, New York City's streets were teeming with homeless people much like today. I decided to interview a homeless person. 

In those days, I was living in the James Monroe Housing Projects in the Bronx. That neighborhood, a euphemism if there ever was one for the projects, was a drug haven, so I had seen plenty of gang members, dealers, junkies, pimps, and prostitutes. But homeless people were scarce in the projects. Riding the graffiti-covered, unwashed, fetid subway cars from the Bronx, where I lived with my immigrant parents and siblings, to Manhattan, where I studied and worked, was an adventure, frequently a scary and dangerous one, replete with vagrants, panhandlers, gangbangers, and muggers. During nighttime rides home, I would act crazy, pacing back and forth on the train platform and talking to myself loudly enough to be heard in the hopes of keeping everyone at a distance. Those were strange times for an 18-year-old man. The specter of being drafted into the Army to serve in a battlefield 9,000 miles away to kill strangers or die myself lay heavily on my mind, but sometimes I wanted to get away so badly that I thought about enlisting in America's war machine.

I don't recall why I chose to interview a homeless person. I'm sure I wouldn't have without the prompt from my journalism professor. I did pay close attention to homeless people whenever I emerged from the number 6 train at Twenty-third Street and Park Avenue South. Whether they were sleeping on the sidewalk against a storefront, pulling down their zipper or lifting their dress to pee in plain sight, screaming at invisible demons, or dragging their possessions in a shopping cart with a missing wheel in the midst of rush hour traffic, I was always shaken by their circumstances and feeling privileged to be in my own humble, relatively fortunate, situation.

With an hour to kill after classes before heading to work, I walked to Madison Square Park, two blocks away from Baruch College, where I was a student. The park is far more attractive today than it was in 1972. The benches were occupied by the nameless, the crazed, the hopeless, the wasted, the forgotten. Most businesspeople would walk a long detour around the park, which stretches from Twenty-third to Twenty-sixth Streets between Madson and Fifth Avenues, rather than make a beeline to their offices by walking through the park. Not I. I was young enough, curious enough, foolish enough, romantic enough to walk out of my way to enter the park whenever I could. I wanted to observe, to bear witness, to the most miserable humans on Manhattan Island amid some of the wealthiest real estate on Earth. The contrast got to me. I wanted to write about it.

I'll leave this post here for now. It's not important how many times I was unsuccessful in getting a coherent, cooperative interviewee before I met a forty-year-old Korean War veteran named Sal. It doesn't matter to the point of this story where Sal was from, what he did before his residence became Madison Square Park, or how he descended into such a desperate situation. I have long forgotten the angle of my writing assignment or the grade I received. But I do know that the assignment I chose changed me. Everything we do changes us. That's what writers do. Experience. Report. Change. Repeat.