Category / Writing

by Michael

A Question I Want You To Answer

I realize asking a question to people who read my blog can be presumptuous.  I realize that I could be setting myself up for massive laughs.  That I might have to monitor the comments a bit quicker.  That I might look at that squiggly line on my wordpress dashboard and see no movement all day.  But I’ll take the risk to pose a question. 

When I started blogging, a trusted friend (I won’t tell you it was David Swanson) told me to write “what you’re interested in, what you’d like to think about, what you’re passionate about.”  I took that good advice.  For now, David Swanson gets credit for it.  Soon, he may not.  So, I’ve been writing my interests, and I’ll consistently prepare posts that fall within the basic categories of faith, writing, and relationships. 

I’m not dry or blocked.  Things come up that I want to write about.  Still, I’m one of those communicators who appreciates dialogue.  I come from a tradition where the audience talks back.  Where the people listening participate in what’s being said.

So I have a question for you.  Since you’ve read a post or two.  Hopefully. 

What would you like me to post about?  If you were to think about topics under this three-part umbrella, what would you like me to think about?  Are there specific ways you think I can strengthen my blog, which for me connects with doing one good thing I enjoy (i.e., writing), particularly as it relates to these areas–faith, writing, and relationships? 

This is a question I want you to answer.  So leave me a comment.  Now.  Or think about it, come back and leave one.  And I’ll thank you now for your gracious replies.  And I’ll say this, too: if you see something that you think I should read or have, leave a comment about it or post the link.

by Michael

Discussing Work in Progress

When you seek publication, one of the first steps to finding a publisher is convincing an agent to represent you.  In order to do that, you have to pitch your work to the agents.  They choose you from your pitch which comes in a one-page letter called a query or from your sample pages which usually includes a synopsis and up to 50 pages of the completed manuscript.  Jessica Faust has a great dictionary of publishing terms, if you’re interested, by the way.

Whether we’re talking about a query or a full proposal with pages, I pitch projects too soon.  I’m not the most patient person.  I blame it on the fact that I was born premature.  I blame it on whatever movie my mother was watching when I announced my early coming.

But I decided recently to restrict myself from submissions for a while.  It’s an exercise in building patience, in reading the work-in-progress better, in critiquing myself harder, and in gathering useful information to enhance my voice.  I’ve made some version of this decision several times since I started writing fiction a few years ago, making the early switch from nonfiction about all things spiritual.  But I tend to release the unrealistic goal of waiting, and I submit submit submit. 

I don’t have an agent currently.  I used to, when I was pitching a particular nonfiction manuscript that we “just couldn’t sell” at the time.  But right now, I’m agentless.  So, even though I don’t have an agent, I have a manuscript, well two of them.  But we’re talking about one of them.  One I was told to get professionally edited–by an agent who read the full (the abbreviated way of saying the full manuscript). 

Somewhere between ending one year with its records and papers and making room for the new tenant who pays no rent, I filed the rejection letter along with its advice.  I had already started working on another project when I got that feedback.  Since then, I’ve finished that historical–which I’m told I can’t expect to break into publishing with since it’s historical–and started work on something else.  Writing, for me, is non-linear as you can tell. 

I’m at the point now where I am decided to have the work edited.  It’s been read by a few members of my team.  I’ve read and revised it six times since the first draft.  I started by being in love with the story.  I’ve gone the route of hating it, cutting it, changing it, breaking it and returning to the love I once had.  And it’s time to send it off to some professional person who will give me feedback, who will check my plot, characterization, and execution, who will tell me that I am, in fact, out of my mind for thinking I could write good fiction for publication or that I am on the right path and how to strengthen the work.

I’m told that many published authors have editors review and critique their work.  Since I didn’t study writing in college, I’m looking forward to this level of feedback.  I’m choosing that editor carefully over the next weeks.

So, I wanted to share a few scattered ramblings about editing this WIP.  Things that have occurred to me as I prepare to send it to someone else.

1) Giving my work away hasn’t gotten easier.  I’ve had helpful readers give me great feedback.  Each time I’ve sent my file, it’s been difficult.  The patience I’ve exercised in the waiting period from “send” to “receive” has been nothing less than divine because it took God and all God’s angels to keep me from pestering my readers with daily reminders to read and email me.  Patience comes slowly when I’m waiting for a response.  But so does my ability to send something I’ve written.  It feels a bit like taking an unflattering picture of myself–and most of them from one angle or another are unflattering–and sending it to my the guy whose girl left him for me in second grade and asking for a compliment on the photo.  Second-graders don’t forgive. Continue reading →

by Michael

My Pleasing Path to Publication…

So I’m not pleased.  I’m not published.  But I’m patient.  Extremely patient. 

In my dreams. 

I’m a writer.  I’m unpublished.  Well, mostly unpublished.  I’ve been calling myself a writer for a few years.  I say that because I write.  I write words.  Even though most people don’t see them.  That’s a problem for me, being a writer whose words go unread.  So this post is a small installment in writerly vulnerability. 

I want you to know that there is a path to publication that I’m on.  It’s a rugged road.  I want you to recognize it and travel it with me. 

Don’t worry.  I’m too private to bemoan forever in public.  But I’d like to write about my pursuit of publication.  When I write about publishing, storytelling and submissions, you’ll get a glimpse–only a glimpse–of my real, tragic up-n-down existence as someone who feels he’s supposed to publish novels.  Not self-publish or publish-on-demand.  But publish, where publish means be contracted by a publisher to complete a manuscript, probably due to the unfailing efforts of a respected agent and a handful of helpful readers and editors and sales teams and marketing professionals along the way.

Related to that, I started a new work in progress (i.e., WIP) the other week.  When I start these–so far there are two full ones, one waiting for resolution, and several sitting or fledgling in pieces and stages on my laptop–I have a general way of writing.  My way makes it difficult to talk about a story when it’s in progress.  My psychological issues make it difficult to talk about them when they’re finished.  So, you can imagine that talking about stories is difficult.  There won’t be much of that on the blog.  But I will periodically attempt to entertain you with ramblings about my process. 

Today I wanted you to know that I started writing a story some days ago.  I got comfortable writing historical fiction, but this WIP is not in that genre.  It’s contemporary fiction.  I feel out-of-my-element, but I’m working on it anyway.  And I’m working hard. 

When I’m done, I’ll sit with it for a while.  I don’t know how long a while is.  But after sitting with it, I’ll reread it, revising bits and pieces as I read.  Then I’ll have one or two people from Team Michael read it.  And I’ll read it while they do, again, revising through that reading.  At the same time I’ll likely work on a query, that one-page letter written to literary gatekeepers called agents, holding my breath and praying short prayers that that letter will be  the one that gets me representation by someone who will “love” my pitch, want to read my story, and eventually love it too.

I am many days from that.  If I write 500 words a day, my current quota, I’m more than six months from a manuscript.  It’ll take me a week to read through it that first time, two weeks to get up the nerve to send it to someone on the Team, and another month before I hear back from them.  The process already sounds long, doesn’t it?  I may shorten it.  I may write 1,000 words a day for a while, but that’s too optimistic with a new kid over there, a wife who should and needs to be loved, a church to add leadership to–you get the picture. 

So, I’m setting my expectations low.  I just sat down this evening and in twenty minutes wrote 1,000 words.  It was a good evening for writing.  I have those from time to time.  It was nothing like last Thursday when it took me forever to revise what had been written the day before and leave that session adding only 75 or so words to the page.  All that to say, it may be a while, this path.  Stick with me.  Be careful about asking questions, though.  It’s a strange mix of emotions that comes when I get the well-intentioned, “So how’s the writing coming?”  One of these days I’ll give you my personal list of safe questions to ask an unpublished writer.  Remind me though.

by Michael

Why You Shouldn’t Work From Home

I tried to work from home on a Tuesday one week after my wife returned to work from maternity.  I set myself up to work on a sermon, to connect regarding a building project, to reply to multiple emails, and to have a conference call.  I was only to be home until early afternoon.  One of the grandmothers was to come. 

It was my personal disaster.  I got little finished.  I felt frustrated by unmet expectations and a growing ignorance for what life would really be like with a newborn.

By the time maternal grandmother knocked on the door, I really only accomplished the call and replying to emails–all between screaming sessions provided by my strong-lunged son.  I left home, rushed in head to get to the office or to the LBP or to any other place where I could do non-domestic things.  I was at work for the next six hours, partly getting things done and partly regaining something left in the open-mouthed screams of my kid.

Equilibrium.  I learned about that word in seminary.  Every person, every family, every couple develops an equilibrium and tries to stick at it.  Equilibrium has to do with being consistent despite change.  We maintain ourselves and our relationships even though things change around us and in us.  We maintain equilibrium, the result of something inside us.

Balance is the vehicle that maintains equilibrium.  If you are centered, you got there through balance.  If you’re off, well, you get it.

Upon first thought, I’d say that balance is a dance I’m good at.  But I often confuse balance with the ability to do multiple things at once.  That’s not balance.  Balance sits in the background, or it rests underneath our busy legs and hands.  Balance is at the center, sticking around with its cousin equilibrium.  Balance is the unmoving anchor inside us.  It enables you to keep your wits.  Being balanced keeps your emotions from overtaking you or your intellect from ushering your heart out of the house. 

I think one of the essential tools to using balance to maintain equilibrium is concentration.  The ability to keep paying attention to the same thing.  The skill of giving yourself to something despite the other somethings around you.  When you can concentrate or focus on something, you can acheive equilibrium.  Balance is easier.  But the opposite is true when you can’t concentrate.  You grasp at things you can’t catch.  You feel split.  You see things as disconnected rather than connected. 

This is why I can’t work from home.  And if you can’t maintain focus, if you can’t concentrate while being at home, you shouldn’t work from home either.  You should work where you can thrive.  You should work in a space where what you need for the work you do is present.  If you need silence, working on a busy city street corner leads to unproductivity.  If you require people, don’t go to the unpopulated trees of the Dan Ryan woods.  If you need visual stimuli, why go to a dark room?  If you need less activity on the eyes, why toil in an art gallery?

Questions for you: Describe your work space, what is it like?  What keeps you balanced?

by Michael

Storytelling

I read this article and every since I’ve been considering the ways connection, social networking, and isolation impinge upon the writer’s life.  And the theologian’s.  How do these things enable us to communicate?  How do they restrict us from doing so?

Latonya Mason Summers, author of Good to Me, told me a few years ago when I was struggling with my first manuscript, to focus on the story.  I told her that I couldn’t finish my novel.  She said, “Don’t write a novel.  Tell a story.  Focus on telling the story.”  Those words have changed my approach to writing.  In many ways Latonya’s advice has shaped my work in ministry as well since I’m telling a story when I preach or teach.

What does this have to do with mystery?

Mystery is something that is not discernible by human power alone.  It is what must be revealed, illuminated, shown.  Mystery must be given as a gift.  It must be revealed or given by someone else, in this case, by God.  We see it once the covers have been pulled and hear it once a story has been told.

Mystery comes from some place else, not from within.  It is the story we were first told which lodged down deep and far inside us, the story that connected with us, that made sense to us in the heart.  Writers write about those stories, and communicators tell them too. 

We don’t know how those stories will look from start to finish, which is why telling the story is important.  Not writing an article or penning a book or finishing a novel.  Telling a story.  So, I’m working to lose my fixation with novel writing.  William Zinsser said that it’s a fixation that “causes writers a lot of trouble, deflecting them from all the earlier decisions that have to be made to determine its shape and voice and content.”  When we connect with people, we have the chance to add a line or a paragraph or another sentence to the plot developing in them.  Aside from the end result, we have the chance to say something that pushes them or confronts them.  We get to use words which arrest or free, confine or liberate. 

How you ever been told a story–one of faith, a funny tale, a dark tragedy–that showed you something you had never seen?

by Michael

Faith and Fiction

This quote comes from Secrets in the Dark.  Buechner is into how he’d go about answering someone who wants to hear about his faith.

I would have to talk about the occasional sense I have that life is not just a series of events causing other events as haphazardly as a break shot in pool causes the billiard balls to careen off in all directions but that life has a plot the way a novel has a plot, that events are somehow or other leading somewhere.  Whatever your faith may be or my faith may be, it seems to me inseparable from the story of what has happened to us, and that is why I believe that no literary form is better adapted to the subject than the form of fiction.

Faith and fiction both journey forward in time and space and draw their life from the journey, are in fact the journey.  Faith and fiction both involve the concrete, the earthen, the particular more than they do the abstract and cerebral.  In both, the people you meet along the way, the things that happen, the places–the airport bar, the room where you have your last supper with a friend–count for more than ideas do.  Fiction can hold opposites together simultaneously like love and hate, laughter and tears, despair and hope, and so of course does faith, which by its very nature both sees and does not see and whose most characteristic utterance, perhaps, is “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief” (Mark 9:24, KJV).  Faith and fiction both start once upon a time and are continually changing and growing in mood, intensity, and direction.  When faith stops changing and growing, it dies on its feet.  So does fiction.  And they have more in common than that.

by Michael

Beauty

Writing opens up a person to things inside.  Faith opens a person to things deep down. 

Since people gravitate to different genres and different writing styles, it’s fair to say that we read various things for various reasons.  But everything we read–and if you’re a writer, everything you write–should contain something that provokes what’s inside and eventually that something, after all the dirt and grime and sticky liquid of lifelessness, is beauty.  I don’t think we look for beauty enough.  Perhaps I don’t.  In fact I know I don’t.

I see a lot ugly in Chicago, especially lately.  Kids die at the hands of kids.  Police corrupt police.  Managers mislead employees.  Unemployment increases in one community, like the Black community, more than it does in most others.  Ugly.

There is no life in reading or watching something that contains no beauty.  That said, I can’t get away from the news most days.  Whether online, in my car, or on that box in my house, I sit and listen, and I wonder why I feel so ugly when it’s over.  Most of it doesn’t grasp for what is lovely or true or captivating in a deep sense.

But here’s the thing, it’s difficult to write about hard things beautifully.  Is beauty a fair adjective to describe life when it’s hard and gritty and painfully unattractive?  Probably not.

But honest descriptions about hard life are beautiful because they are real.  Authentic.  Reachable in a human way. 

When we can envision something, craft it in our imaginations, we have touched the breathtaking.  Unfabricated stories and statements are the best words to share because they are cleaner even if they are harsher.  In my mind they are more beautiful.  They are closer to truth.  They push us to hope and work and live.  Even inside ugliness or underneath it.

When was the last time you witnessed something beautiful?  What was it?  Tell me about it.

by Michael

Little Black Pearl

Little Black Pearl Art & Design Center

I walk here on Mondays, sometimes on Wednesday mornings or Friday afternoons.  I’m greeted by a staff of folks whose names I know.  If it’s been a while since I’ve been here, I look around the room and take in the new art.

Exposed brick lines one wall of the gallery and I sit next to a long series of floor-to-ceiling windows.  I’m here to write or to work on a sermon.  I’m here to imagine.  I’m here to drink a soy chai latte or a pot of mint or green tea.

In the afternoons, the children from the neighborhood schools come to the LBP after-school program.  They come, not to write and work on sermons, but to create, to paint, to hear about business creation, and learn what it takes to be an entrepreneur. 

The staff interacts with them respectfully.  The students get checked if they come close to disrespecting someone.  They always nod and say hello.  A few of them call me sir.  I call them sister and brother.

One of my favorite people, Eugene Peterson, wrote that “The arts reflect where we live.  We live in a narrative, we live in story.”

I’m glad to live near and with and close to Little Black Pearl.  These good people are major characters in my story, if you will.  I’m glad they do the work they do, host the space they host, and teach the children in this neighborhood.  I’m glad it feels like a small family in the place.  I’m glad they remind me, on so many levels, how to look for little black pearls.  When I go home after stopping by, I remember the feeling, the holy reminder, that the children whose faces are baked like mine are, in fact, small black gems.  They are priceless and valuable and great.

by Michael

Margaret Atwood & Stories

“It is morning, and time to get up; and today I must go on with the story.  Or the story must go on with me, carrying me inside it along the track I must travel, straight to the end, weeping like a train and deaf and single-eyed and locked tight shut; although I hurl myself against the walls of it and scream and cry, and beg to God himself to let me out.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids and all aboard powerless to stop it.  It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all.  When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”

From Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, 298.

by Michael

Why I Write

For six years I’ve written regularly for two magazines who publish education materials for churches.  At the time I started, I didn’t consider myself a writer.  Since then, I’ve gladly accepted that I am a writer. 

You can find a host of definitions for writers.  Writers write.  Writers publish.  Writers create space.  Writers tell stories.  And on it goes.  Rather than define what I mean by claiming this part of my vocational life, I want to list the reasons why I write.  I’ll expand on each indvidual point later.

I write:

1) To tell a story

2) To learn someting interesting

3) To entertain by creating a world for the reader

4) To inform the reader about something old

5) To express something beautiful about humanity

6) To creatively image or imagine God through literary means

7) To please God who loves words

I have a long life of writing in me.  I’m not just starting but I’m no where near where I’d like my publishing career to go.

I realize that some of this blog’s readers are also writers.  Others do all kinds of other things.  No matter if you’re a writer, you are a reader. 

Think about the last novel you finished.  Or the one you stopped reading before it ended.  For those non-fiction readers, consider your last book.  Tell me, why did you read what those writers wrote?  What about the written word or the author’s work kept you reading?  Or give us the name of a book worth reading.

by Michael

Something New

A few years ago my wife forced me to take her to see Something New.  It’s a movie she loved.  In fact, she loved it so much that she actually purchased tickets to see it three or four times when it was in the theatres years ago and went, even without telling me about her addiction to the film.  Do you know how much it costs to go to the show?  It’s not been cheap to see a movie since I watched Beauty and the Beast at Evergreen Plaza Theatres.  And Evergreen Plaza hasn’t had a movie theatre for almost twenty years.

Nonetheless, Dawn saw this picture, took me to see it, and eventually confessed how much she liked this film.  I wasn’t suspicious until she bought the DVD and placed in on our shelf at home.  I wasn’t worried until the third time I caught her watching the DVD after she had seen it in the theatre and seen it at home twice.  So I asked her about her fascination.  I didn’t use the word fascination.  I probably didn’t mention anything about an addiction.  I’m sure I was casual.  I was even.  I was smooth, cool. 

I’m not going to review the film.  Dawn does that.  She hasn’t written a review of Something New–I don’t think I could take it–but that’s her area, not mine.  Rather than a review, I want to reflect on my distant experience while watching her enjoy that film.  She enjoyed the narrative arc, though she wouldn’t use those words. 

The movie repositioned the old but vibrant love story that’s been told a million times after language first got started: A woman meets a man and they fall in love.  More specifically, a successful attractive woman meets a man who’s set to turn her backyard into a beautiful garden retreat.  He does a good job and before he’s done, he’s found a developing relationship with this young lady. 

The characters captured my wife because they were believable.  They were different but they succeeded in suspending any disbelief my wife had.  Apparently these characters were so good at this that Dawn could watch and watch and watch.

This blog is new.  It is something new.  Perhaps it’s not as engaging as the screenplay and movie my wife found so much fondness for, but I hope it’ll engage you as you read and comment and return for the same. 

Tell me.  What have you seen–movie, art, literature, or the like–that you keep returning to.  What is it and what about it calls you back?

by Michael

Lauching this blog

I crossed a lot of streets growing up in Chicago.  Most were simple enough.  You waited for the light.  Or for the cars to pass.  If you were daring, you’d run out regardless of cars or screaming parents or timid friends and hope for the best. 

I took pride in judging time and speed and driver skill and weaving through cars whose passengers feared for me because I was blessed with short legs.  And then there were the dreaded intersections.  The streets with cars coming from more directions than I could count or with lights that looked like they directed one path when they really instructed another.

There was the intersection near 103rd & Halsted where I faithfully frequented Harold’s to purchase a regular half chicken with mild sauce.  Halsted was always crowded.  There was the one at 87th, near the Dan Ryan, next to my godmother’s house, a short walk from the Burger King where my brother and me used to eat Whoppers because Auntie Pat didn’t make me eat little cheeseburgers. 

I was a short child and I cared little for big streets.  I especially hated the huge intersections where cars would come from winding, nutty directions, all with stoplights functioning in response to some unseen wizard who clearly hated small children who crossed streets to get from one place to another.  

79th & Stony Island.  103rd & Vincennes.  127th & Western.  Over the years, I’ve added the ones at Belmont, Elston, & California, the ones all along Milwaukee, including that nasty one down by Irving Park.  On foot or in my car, I still dread those intersections.

An intersection is a place where paths cut across other paths.  It’s a place that meets some place else.  Hopefully each place or path takes direction from something like a stoplight to prevent a collision or an injury to an unsuspecting pedestrian–or, if you frequent downtown Chicago, a pedestrian who simply cares less. 

Life pushes us into intersections. We have roles to fulfill and expectations to meet. We keep friends at work separated from those in school, and we carefully choose who gets to come near family on one hand and who, on the other, we tell secrets to. 

My intersections have to do with being my wife’s husband, a son to my mother, a brother and friend and pastor.  They are the streets inside my head which I walk softly as I seek publication for this or that novel, as I write short pieces for a friend’s magazine, or as I wrestle with words only I will see. 

What have you identified as an intersection in your life?  Hopefully this blog can be one of those places where we engage the paths which cut and cross and, by grace, get us some where.