If You're Writing, Let's Talk: A Road Map Past Writers' Blocks from Page One to The End

Follow-up

Preface

Once a week, a small group of aspiring writers climbs the hill to this canyon house. They sit around the dining room table, read their work out loud, and pray to God they don’t embarrass themselves. They come for guidance, inspiration, the courage to stick with it, and because their writing gets better.

Reading this book, you’ll observe six students on their journey through a ten-week writing workshop: You’ll meet Chuck, the actor/gold-miner, who keeps getting inspired, then defeated, by everything he writes; Mimi, the natural-born writer struggling to gain self-confidence; Tash, the former photographer working to turn his past into fiction; Kate, the anguished grandmother at forty-three whose life keeps getting in the way; Nicole, the paralegal with more talent than time; and Paul, the retired detective who refuses to write about his years on the force.

Week after week, you’ll hear tortured preambles (I hate what I’m writing), unfair comparisons (Everyone else is better than me), and eternal questions (How do I end this thing?). What you’ll discover, as problems get resolved, is that each solution to a workshop problem can help guide you past your own writers blocks.

As writers, the problems we encounter are pretty universal.

So are the solutions.

Joel Saltzman

Los Angeles

Where’s the Conflict?

You really think this is going to work, he asks, writing a book about the workshop?"

Paul, I have been asking myself that question all day. ‘Will our workshops be as interesting on paper as they are in real life?’

I mean, these things get pretty exciting, he says. "But then if you try to capture that in writing..."

All I can do, I tell him, is take a shot and hope for the best.

And if it doesn’t work?

I’ll shoot myself.

THE RISK OF FAILURE PART OF THE FUN OF WHAT I DO.

Paul Simon

I ask him about the cops I saw today staked outside a supermarket, guns drawn and rifles raised. What were they doing, waiting for a shoplifter?

Armed robbery maybe.

A retired detective, Paul says armed robbery as naturally as you or I would say Coca-Cola. He tells me about guns, his mistrust of people (based on experience), how his body at age fifty-three is now feeling the wear from twenty years of active duty, including, he adds, some crazy-assed stunts like betting to sec who could drive their police car farthest from Los Angeles and still get back before the end of their shift. The winners, he tells me, reached Las Vegas, had their picture taken with a local sheriff as proof, then chased back to town at 140 miles an hour, sirens wailing. Still, when he hears that Chuck, another member of our group, is in Cannes working for a producer and hoping to be cast in his upcoming film, he says, unabashedly, I want his life.

Everyone is convinced their life is horing, that’s why they have nothing to write ahout. If only they were leading someone else’s life—then there’d he plenty to write ahout.

Kate calls with the opposite problem, too much going on: looking for work, her runaway teenage daughter leaving her to care for her baby, finalizing her own divorce, and paying the lawyer if there’s anything left. She’ll make it next week, she gives me her word.

I CAN ONLY WRITE WITH A LOT OF PEACH—A VERY QUIET DAILY LIFE, WITH VERY FEW THINGS AND A VERY FEW CLOSE FRIENDS.

Peter Hoeg

All I can do is wish her luck, tell her I know she doesn’t want to hear it but at least she’ll have plenty to write about. You’re right, she says, I don’t want to hear it.

Now Tash calls from his car phone, I’m getting off the freeway. Be there in ten. Can you tell them some story, kind of stall for a while? Oh, and do you need anything?

I need you to be here ten minutes ago.

I don’t know where to get that.

Just get here.

And Mimi calls. She just left work, she’ll be twenty minutes late but she’ll be here.

A year ago, when Mimi was frustrated with her writing and thinking about quitting, I passed her a note that read: Mimi, you are a born storyteller. Don’t give up. A bit of hokum, maybe, but it seems to have worked.

Interviewer:

IS THERE ANY ONE OF YOUR PLAYS THAT YOU ARE DISSATISFIED WITH?

Arthur Miller:

ALL OF THEM.

Nicole, our newest member, shows up with homemade brownies. I wonder, though, is this a peace offering or a kind of bribe? Be gentle with me, I just brought you brownies.

Finally, tonight’s group (Paul, Nicole, Tash, and Mimi) settles around the dining room table and I lead off with my favorite workshop question: Who’s the smartest person here? By now, our veteran members know this is my way of saying, The longer you wait to read, like the longer you wait to write, the more your anxiety grows. The smart ones, I remind them, always read first.

Nicole Volunteers to Read

She tells us she’s been working on a novel, making our group (or so I imagine) feel diminished, ill at ease. Mostly, they’ve been working on short stories, the occasional essay, struggling with the basics. Nicole, we can sec, is light years ahead. We know this simply because she has so blithely announced, I’m writing a novel.

Still, she assures us, this is how she began—writing short stories at work while disguised as a paralegal.

Tonight, she says, she’ll read us the opening to her novel in progress. She reads:

I’m the grandmother, Mary. The isolation and loneliness of the previous century are over. People have realized their interdependence and thrive with the knowledge that what affects one affects them all.

Today was the holiday that marked the celebration of the affiliation of us with each other. Fellowship Day. Trucks of food and entertainment spilled into the community. The theme this year is Another Decade of Peace and Goodwill Toward All. Where competition once fostered aggression, cooperation fosters growth and nurturing. I have never been happier.

The grandmother might be happy, but four more pages of nothing but peace and goodwill to all has made us quite miserable.

Where’s the conflict? I want to know. What does the grandmother want and what’s getting in her way?

For now, explains Nicole, I’m just setting the stage. The conflict comes later.

"Later? How about immediately? The longer you wait to give readers a problem, the greater your risk of losing their interest—which is why a lot of smart writers start with conflict.

Look at Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find.’ I dig out an old anthology from a nearby bookshelf and turn to the first page of this famous short story, announcing I’ll read it out loud until there’s conflict. I read the first sentence and stop:

The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.

How’s that for a grandmother with conflict?

What about a novel? asksTash. Can’t you take your time?

Not if you’re obeying the first rule of storytelling.

No parking in a handicapped zone?

No starting your story without some conflict.

Returning to the bookshelf, I spot Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. It begins:

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

But that’s such a short book, he objects. What about a really big novel?

Back to the bookshelf, returning with John Irving’s The World According to Garp. Six hundred and nine dense paperback pages that begin:

Garps mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater.

You’re right, says Nicole. I need to go back and make sure there’s a problem.

Do you really believe that? I ask. Or are you just saying that to make me happy?

I’m saying that so you’ll leave me alone and go to the next person.

Novels. Short stories. Even nonfiction. If you want to hold the reader’s interest, make sure there’s conflict—some kind of problem that gets in the way.

Tash Fails to Tell the Truth

Before he reads, Tash wants us to know that what we’re going to hear is very rough, only the germ of an idea.

Disclaimer in place, he reads us the start of his latest effort, about a photographer (our narrator) who meets the perfect woman at an art gallery opening. But he also meets a solid conflict:

My swan glides past mc, over to three bulls in suits and ties, and a filly, fully filled out. I approach focusing my camera on them. Right away the bulls seem annoyed. But before they can turn away I manage to get off a shot, I think with them all in it.

Hey! one of die bulls shouts, surprised.

I look up from behind my camera, pleased with myself, though the extra-large bull doesn’t seem so appreciative. His hand on my elbow, he leads me away.

All right, kid, you got the shot. This is my card, you give me a call and I’ll buy the film from you.

I don’t sell film. I sell prints. You can order any size you like. Five by seven. Eight by ten.

Kid, in this case maybe you’ll make an exception.

That’s it so far, says Tash. I ran out of ink.

"And some logic. If this ‘bull’ wants the film, I explain, do you really think he’s going to wait until the photographer calls him to ‘maybe’ get what he wants? No. He’s going to get that film tonight—the sooner the better. The moment you have him say ‘give me a call,’ it stops ringing true."

I LEARNED A LONG TIME AGO IF THERE'S ANYTHING IN A BOOK THAT SOUNDS A FALSE NOTE THE READER WILL DISBELIEVE ALL OF THE BOOK.

Evan Hunter aka: Ed MeBain

I knew it. I knew it was wrong the second I wrote it.

And the reader knows it the second he reads it.

Trust your instincts, don’t sell yourself short. If ten percent of you thinks it’s wrong, it’s wrong.

So you think I should stick with it or move to something else?

A pointed stare from the writing guru.

Okay, I’ll stick with it.

Paul Finds His Conflict

Paul’s lopped three pages from last week’s ten-page first draft—a story about a teenage boy who joins his buddies in planting a bomb in their high school. Meanwhile, he says, I’m trying to understand more about how this kid is conflicted.

As Paul reads us this pared-down draft, I feel how close he is to discovering his character’s central conflict. Then it hits me—a line where his hero wonders if being called a coward was worse than committing a stupid stunt and getting caught.

That’s your conflict, I tell him. That’s what your story is about.

That line, he howls, has been there since my first draft!

I DON'T CHOOSE A THEME FOR A NOVEL, THE STORY CHOOSES ME.

Isabel Allende

All you had to do was go back and find it.

Going through your pages, see if you can spot a line or phrase that brings it all home—a point in your writing that seems to say: This is the conflict, this is what its all about.

"One more thing: Your ten-page story that’s now running seven? Let s get rid of another two pages."

Still some fat?

Plenty.

Mimi Finds Her Story

For weeks, Mimi has been bringing us new drafts of The Funeral, a story that starts:

The funeral was at 11:30 in the morning at the Good Shepherd Church and nobody knew where Daddy was. We had run away from him the night before. It was one of those typical nights when he had gotten drunk and was trying to strangle me. Thank God Shine was there to pull him off of me; he might ve killed me. I hated him that