Poetry Quote of the Day: Thomas Hardy

"My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own."----Thomas Hardy, as quoted in Walking on Alligators, A Book of Meditations for Writers.

Walking on Alligators is filled with quotes like this, and daily intentions such as "Today, I'll release something surprising into my writing."  It would be a great book to take along on a retreat, which I mention because Linda Urban is compiling a list of such books.  Won't that be a handy resource? Go add your own favorites.

This post is part of a month-long celebration of not-quite-daily quotes about poets, poems, and poetry. For more quotes, see the archive of the Poetry Quote of the Day. There are many more National Poetry Month celebrations across the Kidlitosphere.

Retreat Musings: Alone Time

One of the hard facts about writing is that you do it alone. You can have a fabulous critique group, an understanding family, maybe even an astute agent and/or a kind editor. None of that helps when it's just you and the blank page.

On the retreat, many of us craved alone time. Little kids, day jobs, distractions...we were leaving them behind, temporarily. We were holing up in those lovely cabins and a-write, write, writing, bay-beee!

Only, that didn't quite happen. Turns out there's only so much alone time a person can stand. And that writing, while solitary, demands engagement with the world. How to find the balance?

I did spend a lot of time alone on the retreat. I kept the shades to my cabin windows pulled. I drafted new material for my manuscript under revision, which made me happy, but dang it, that manuscript didn't say thank you or even good job, sweetie. It looked at me greedily like I was a fading light source and it was a pulsating black hole.

That's when I crept out, in search of company. I joined the afternoon critique sessions, which turned out to be the ultimate motivator. Wow! My fellow retreaters were kind listeners. They were funny. They were lyrical. They were brave. They were wild (yee haw!)

I learned so much from hearing them read their work aloud. About rhythm, and structure and voice. I dared read a piece of my novel-in-verse-in-progress. They demanded that I write more of it---the next day! (So yeah, they were more powerful than that black hole.) But I did. I wrote more, for them. And it woke me up to the simple power of what happens next? in story-telling. We write alone, but we create story to be shared.

Thanks, Cassandra and Anne Marie and Alma and De and Loree and Katy and Kristy and Linda and Kathy and Tanya!

(More photos and words from De here)

Retreat Musings: Cry if you Want To

More things I thought about on retreat:

Our stories are supposed to make you laugh and cry, scare you and thrill you, change you, distract you, challenge you, take you into the dark forest and out the other side. So how come we don't talk more about how much of an emotional roller coaster ride it is to write like that?

In the last week, I:

---finished a paragraph, and ran laps around the house, arms Rocky-like above my head

--wanted to burn the entire manuscript, page by crappy page

--woke in the night to worry over a character

--laughed at my own words

--cried at a made-up situation that I made up!


This is probably why I don't write in public.

Retreat Musings: Nuts and Bolts

I promised to share some of my thoughts from my recent writing retreat. Here's a start:


Sometimes, I think people pigeonhole writers as the flighty, imaginative sort. We're good at dreamily gazing out the window, making up things out of thin air. But I think the act of writing (and especially revision) is closer to problem-solving. Writers are the mechanics of the written word! And a great deal of what we do is by trial and error.

Last night, my son called me down to the basement to fix his guitar.

I don't play guitar, I don't know (in any detail) how a guitar works, and I absolutely don't know how to fix one. But I did it, and without Google!

Above is the part that was broken. It's where the musician plugs in the jack for the amp, and it was designed by the devil. (Or maybe that evil coffee mug designer.) The nut and the thin washer underneath had both fallen off, causing the 1/4 inch jack receptacle they support to collapse into the guitar.

Imagine us, one holding the guitar upside down, to make the metal tube slide barely out of the hole. Then the other person would try to grab it, straighten it, and hold it by a fingernail. Then the fruitless attempts to slide either the washer or the nut over the tube without knocking it back down inside. AAAAARGGGGH!

Finally, I called in the needle-nosed pliers. And yes, they could hold the tube out more firmly than a fingernail. But...they were always in the way. It's not mechanically possible to put a washer or a nut over something you're also gripping by an edge. (That didn't stop me from trying, however. Sometimes, I think the laws of nature will bend to my stubbornness.)

And then! And then!! I had the brilliant idea of slipping the washer and the bolt over the end of the pliers BEFORE I stuck the end in the hole. AND I didn't grip the tube; I inserted the pliers and kept the tube from slipping back into the guitar with pressure from the inside. Voila! The washer settled over the tube, then the nut, too. We screwed it tightly back on. I did the Happy Triumph Dance of Mechanical Genuis. (Please do not tell me if you already knew the answer five paragraphs ago. I'm still impressed with myself. )

Anyhow, it made me think of my writing retreat, and the sessions where we'd all gather and read our work. Time after time, I was impressed with my fellow word mechanics. These writers were willing to do whatever it took to make their story WORK. There were stalled manuscripts, and whole books that had to be re-built from the ground up, and loose parts, and maddening boxes of pieces that were supposed to go somewhere, but just didn't fit.

And yet, we all worked for the solutions with stubbornness of good mechanics. We shared tools with each other. (Cool! A storyboard!) We asked for test runs. (Could you try that in third person?) We didn't let each other give up on what needed fixing.

Because as Laini said: the only tool a piece of writing has to use against you is intimidation. You, on the other hand, have way more than needle-nosed pliers: You have a keen sense of smell, able to detect word crap. You have an ear for when a story engine is running smoothly and when it's not. You have a heightened vision for seeing a character's deepest desire. You can taste the right opening for your story when it rolls off your tongue. You can find your way out of the deepest plot thickets by touching your fingers to the keyboard, over and over and over.

Those tools, plus lots and lots of trial and error (and yes, some stubbornness) are the nuts and bolts of writing. Thank you, fellow retreat writers, for letting me witness the work of mechanical geniuses in action!

One Happy Camper

Hey! I feel like blogging.

It's been 14 days since my last post. (That sounds vaguely like it was overheard in a Catholic confessional, doesn't it?)

The truth is, I could have blogged over the last two weeks, but I didn't. My energy and focus were elsewhere, and that's a good thing.

So what have I been up to?

Retreating in Honesdale with a fetching array of amazing writers. (That's me, to the left, skipping with delight at my good fortune.)

I'm not going to blog about the nitty-gritty of it much (sorry) because part of the joy was simply experiencing the feeling of retreat instead of analyzing it. Enough to say that time to write + supremely funny, compassionate and talented writers + unbelievably yummy food = one happy camper.

I do plan to blog about some of the things I thought about over the week. Stay tuned.