This blog provides advice to writers on their literary work.
See the end of this post for links on these topics: How can you get the full benefit of workshops? How can you work best with your mentor? What, when, and how should you publish?
Completing a book-length project is
never easy, but it’s something that writers need to learn how to do. It takes inspiration,
desire, and hard work. Combining those at the right times is not simple. Here’s
what I do to keep myself going when I work on a project that can take me years.
While I’m working
on a book, I make myself little promises about what I’ll do to reward myself
when the book is done. One reward I think about is just announcing to someone that
the project is complete: When this book
is done, I’ll get to send an email to the editor, telling her that I’ve finished,
and I’ll say…
Another reward for
finishing that you see in your mind can also be spending more time with your
loved ones, or taking a special vacation. Sometimes I imagine doing readings of a
particular part of the book that I like, and I picture the audience’s reaction.
Another fantasy that keeps me going is to visualize the book on the shelf in a
bookstore, though not all books are marketed in stores these days.
Often I pretend
that the book will be nominated for a prize. Whether that’s realistic or true
is not the point—it’s an idea that keeps me going. I have a little awards
ceremony of the imagination where a favorite literary figure introduces the
award and then announces (drumroll, please!) that my book is the winner. That
fantasy, silly as it is, also allows me to hold myself to the highest standards
while I’m working on the project. I know I won’t have a chance for that prize
if I don’t do the best I possibly can on the book.
That’s another
challenge when working on a long project—you’ve got to keep the quality
consistent. If you feel as if the quality is lagging, take a break till you’re
ready to work at your highest level of creativity and attention.
If the book
involves an advance, I spend that money in my mind many times over. I think
about all the things I could do with the funds, from paying my taxes to going
on a shopping spree for my favorite music.
The important
thing when working on a book is to keep your nose to the grindstone, but your
eyes on the prize—which is finishing.
There
are many reasons to enter literary contests, and at least as many reasons not to.
Hundreds of literary awards exist, and many thousands of writers apply for them. Sometimes it seems as though the odds
are so much against winning (the number of entries exceeds 1,000 for many first-book
awards in the U.S.A., for instance) that it doesn’t seem worth it to enter
contests. There have also been many instances
in the United States where a prize goes to someone personally connected with the judge.
Not to mention that contests can become a distraction from the real business of
creating literature that is meaningful and reaches people. I can sympathize with
those who refrain from participating in literary contests for those reasons,
and personally, I hardly ever enter literary contests.
On the other hand, I know about fifteen
writers who have won a prize in the United States that involves publication of a book, and in no
case did the writer know the judge. Often the prizes in the U.S. include a cash
advance and/or a reading or series of readings. The Poets Out Loud Prize from
Fordham University Press, for instance, is given each year by the press to two
poets. The writers get the winning manuscripts published as books, a cash advance
of $1,000 each, and a reading in New York City in the Poets Out Loud series at
Lincoln Center. The contest entry fee amounts to $28.
A prize that involves book publications
comes with publicity and a chance to reach a larger audience—not to mention cash. All that is good for a writer, particularly a writer trying to launch a
career. It’s also a good exercise to assemble a manuscript for a contest—the
stakes are high enough that a writer has to take seriously the task of polishing
and arranging a manuscript, a good thing whether you win or lose the contest.
So what’s the downside? I think a writer
can become obsessed with trying to win awards, and spend precious time and
money researching and entering endless contests. Even worse is the emotional energy
writers expend thinking about prizes they do not win. Newer writers often waste resources entering contests at a
stage when they don’t yet have a manuscript that is really competitive. Before
you plunk down $25 for a contest entry fee, make sure that your manuscript
measures up to the work of recent winners for that prize. If you book consists of poetry
or short stories, at least a third of
the work should be published in various literary journals before you enter a book publication contest, and preferably more than half of the work should already be
published in magazines. The manuscript should be carefully copyedited for spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
What sorts of books win prizes? In the U.S., contest-winning manuscripts usually have a very consistent style, format, and
theme. Some good books fit into that category, but some definitely do not. For
books that are more eclectic and varied, it seems to me unwise to enter them in
contests. A commercial or small-press publisher might have a more open-minded
approach and be more likely to accept a manuscript of that sort.
If the contest sponsor makes public the
name or names of the judge(s) in advance of the contest deadline, I would research that before entering.
Judges, like anyone, have preferences. It’s not worth entering a contest when
the judge’s aesthetic conflicts with your own.
For a good listing online of literary
contests in the U.S., consult the website of Poets & Writers. Their listing has the advantage of being
organized as a calendar, by deadline date for contest entry. It’s also
cross-listed under the name of the contest sponsor.
One in the Other is a game invented by the Surrealist group
in Paris in 1953. The game (called l’un
dans l’autre in French) started when the poet and group leader André Breton
struck a match and decided to describe it in terms of a lion. He said something
like, “I’m a lion with a mane of fire, I’m a lion that lives in a little box
with a herd of other lions, etc.” The game evolved from that spark.
Paul Hammond describes the rules of the game in his book Constellations of Miró, Breton:
“The rules of ‘l’un dans l’autre’ are straightforward.
Let’s assume there are four players gathered in a room. Player 1 leaves the
room and mentally chooses an object (object A). Players 2, 3, and 4 debate
amongst themselves and come up with another object (object B). Player 1
reenters and is given the name of object B. Player 1 then has to improvise a
description of object A—without naming that object—but solely in terms of
object B. The game ends when one of the other players divines what object A is.”
The game is based in part on an idea of the ancient alchemists.
According to alchemy, each thing contains the seed of every other thing. Lead
can contain gold, to cite the most famous example of alchemy. But this applies
to all things—a beach blanket can be seen as a cluster bomb, a cube of cheddar
cheese can be thought of as a baseball glove, etc.
How can writers use this game for inspiration? The game can
be played by a group, such as a workshop, as a warm-up for a writing session.
But an individual writer can also assign himself or herself a game of One in
the Other, plucking two contrasting objects out of the subconscious, and then
knitting them together through metaphor. The result can sometimes be worth saving or expanding on.
The 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud
prophetically titled one of his prose poems, “Alchemy of the Verb.” In that
poem, Rimbaud says, “For a long time I’ve bragged of possessing every possible
landscape…” In the imagination, all landscapes are ours. With One in the Other,
each thing is connected to every other thing.
When the Surrealists played the game, they used the first
person to become the object that was also the other object: “I’m an hourglass,
a part of which, contained in a larger hourglass, is gradually disengaging
itself and cutting all ties. I’m opaque, reddish, and elastic. The red sand I contain is turned upside-down every second. I
function for an average of several decades.”
The two objects in the example I just mentioned
are a baby being born and an hourglass. I find the game also works if the
person who is “it” just says, “I’m thinking of an hourglass…” etc.
Here’s an example of One in the Other that I came up with,
choosing the random objects “lips” and “a manhole cover.”
I’m thinking of
lips you find in the street
I’m thinking of
lips that form a perfect circle
I’m thinking of
lips with a name molded into them
I’m thinking of
lips poured from molten steel
I’m thinking of
lips so heavy it takes a strong person to open them
I’m thinking of lips
that reveal a world beneath our world
I teach in the low-residency MFA in writing program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. One of the assignments
the students have is to write responses to books by authors they’re not
familiar with. I sometimes find that if a student does not connect immediately
with an author’s work, the student dismisses that writer offhand. “I just
couldn’t relate to this author’s preachy style.” “I found this writer’s diction
very stilted and old-fashioned. “I couldn’t see the point of this author’s
work.” By painting with such a broad brush, those students could be missing out
on an important experience for a writer.
I think we actually have vital
things to learn from writers whose work we don’t like. Why bother? Because
sometimes the authors we don’t like have exactly the quality, theme, or tone
that our work is lacking. Even if we don’t want to write like authors we find
uninteresting or distasteful, we may learn from then how to tweak our work so it
contains features that we don’t often include in our own writing. I’m not saying
we should surrender to the enemy. But I am saying that we should learn why our
enemy’s army has better boots.
Here’s an example. When I was in
grad school in a writing program, I was studying with the poet Joel
Oppenheimer. He assigned us to write a sonnet. At the time, I felt that sonnets
were just the most outdated, boring thing a person could possibly write. I
didn’t even want to read any more sonnets, except ones that were exploded, unrhymed,
free-verse versions of the form, such as Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, with its collaged, Buddhist moments.
I absolutely refused to write a
sonnet in Joel Oppenheimer’s class, and that occasioned a heart-to-heart talk from
my instructor, which was maybe what I was really after, without knowing it. I
could have learned a lot from writing a sonnet in Joel’s class, but I was too
stubborn then to realize it. At the time, I was rebelling against traditional
verse, to the point where my poems were prosy, disconnected,
and self-consciously loose. Sonnets, on the other hand, have tightness,
conflict (between the premise stated in the octave and the conclusion in the
sestet), and require careful word choice. Writing a sonnet was exactly what the
doctor ordered to correct some of the imbalances in my writing. Not that I
needed to become a formal poet, but I would have done well to develop certain
skills that were lacking in my work. By studying the poets whose writing is
opposite from ours, we can often learn to make useful adjustments to our own work. That doesn't mean we're going to prefer writing we don't like—I wouldn't wish that on anyone! But it does mean that we can learn from any writer.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke uses
language in uniquely powerful ways in his moving poem, “Autumn Day”
(“Herbsttag”). The poem appears in the first section of Rilke’s collection The Book of Pictures, published 1902.
What a
fascinating structure Rilke has created for this poem! He substitutes for the
stanza of regular length his own distinctive formula where each successive stanza acquires
one more line, as if every stanza digs to a deeper layer
of fall and the emotions connected to it.
The
first two stanzas create a sense of fulfillment. This aura is still partly
abstract in the first stanza, beautiful, but limited to disembodied shadows and
winds. In the second stanza he adds color, taste, and smell to the richness of
fall by expanding to the sensual realms of fruit, warmth, and wine.
Now
look at Rilke’s German:
Herbsttag
Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.
Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gieb ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren
Wein.
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut
sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es
lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe
schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und
her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter
treiben.
[emphases added]
Rilke highlights the feeling of
fulfillment in the first two stanzas by using the German word voll—full—in
two different forms, the adjective, voll, and the noun, Vollendung, which
means completion, finishing, ending, consummation, perfection. Not only that, Rilke
takes the wide-open vowel o from the
German word for full, and lavishes it over the first stanza: groß, Sonnenuhren, los, emphasizing the
sound by using it in rhyming words that end lines one and three. I’ve
highlighed in blue each word in the poem that contains the letter ‘o’ in the German.
The
sentences in the poem start out very short and then get increasingly long in
the first two stanzas, as the imagery become more lush and hypnotic, while the
picture of fall’s completion develops—“Now drape your shadows over sundials,”
“Command the last fruits to brim on the vine.”
Suddenly,
in stanza three, we are back to short, declarative language: “Whoever has no
house yet, will build none.” The words have the authority and stateliness of a
biblical judgment, or of a proverb. The
second line in the last stanza seems like it’s about to mirror this structure
with another matter-of-fact, symmetrical pronouncement: “Whoever is alone, will
stay alone,” but then surprisingly the sentence continues, sweeps us along until the very end of the poem, taking us into the very private world of the solitary person
whose autumn is not one of fullness but of emptiness and loneliness.
Take
another look at the German. Amazingly, Rilke
is able to write the entire last stanza without once using the vowel o, the vowel in the German word for
‘full’ that saturates the first two stanzas, where it continually evokes the
sense of fullness. There are few other poets who would use sound in such a
methodical, unique, and strange way, foreshadowing the lipogrammatic
experiments of OULIPO group members such as Georges Perec, who wrote his entire
novel A Void without the letter e.
There
is a powerful sense of nostalgia and melancholy in Rilke’s poem, but in two
different shades: in the first two stanzas we have yellow-orange sunlight and
the long shadows of fall afternoons, colors of ripe fruit and the final warm
days; in the last stanza there are the bare trees and the nocturnal scene of
the lone man, a colorless world where nothing seems anchored or still.
What
kind of person is the figure in the last stanza who wakes up late at night,
reads, and writes long letters? An artist, specifically a writer. We know Rilke
lived this kind of restless existence, moving from city to city and country to
country every few months during many periods of his life. Perhaps he is talking
about entering a stage in his life when he will banish himself from the warmth
of a family home, destined to a solitary pursuit of literature and his
correspondence with friends. This was, to some extent, the plot of Rilke’s
life, which he might have seen taking shape at the juncture when he wrote
“Autumn Day.” It’s so paradoxical that the poet has the otherworldly power to
order God to begin the change of season to the fall (“drape,” “Command,”
“push,” etc.), but he ends up alone and isolated at the end, despite that force
(or because of it?).
Rilke was
involved for several years with Lou Andreas-Salomé, a brilliant woman of
letters who had been romantically connected to the philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche when she was a young woman.
Lou Andreas-Salomé
There were thoughts Rilke confided only
to Lou, and, as a practicing therapist who herself had been analyzed by Sigmund Freud, she understood the poet Rilke better than
many. She discusses Rilke’s Duino Elegies
in her autobiography, Looking Back:
Memoirs: “…one sees clearly, and with a shudder of certainty, how greatly
Rainer longed for human experience, for the
revelation of life, which, in spite of the perfection of his achievement,
would go beyond the work of art, beyond the poet’s word. Only there could that
which was most deeply human in Rainer find a resting place, and peace.…Nothing
is more certain than that Rainer achieved the joyous affirmation of his own
despair in the celebration of the Elegies.” I find this comment about Rilke
revealing. Maybe “Autumn Day” is, like Rilke’s Duino
Elegies, both a celebration of the poet’s own despair, and his expression
of longing for human warmth. That conflict is part of why "Autumn Day" continues to
fascinate readers and to endure.
If you’ve never
tried writing a dramatic monologue, or you’d like to try again, what character
should you pick? Maybe you already know whose voice you’d like to use. In that
case, go for it!
If you don’t know,
or you’re looking for ideas, consider choosing a character you’ve always wanted
to be. I wrote a dramatic monologue the voice of the great African American
singer/dancer/entertainer Josephine Baker because I admire her tremendously. I
also love the setting of her early success—Paris in the 1920s. I wanted to know
what she might sound like talking to a friend in private about her very public
life, so I just made up their conversation, based on research.
Another reason to
choose a persona might be an individual whose life illustrates a particular
point. A good example of this is June Jordan’s “Unemployment Monologue.” The
poem is in the voice of a young Black male who might be standing on a street
corner, talking to someone from a more privileged background. The speaker is
called by different tags, from Herbie Jr. to “Ashamah Kazaam,” a name somewhere
between an Islamic given name and a superhero punch. We get a sense that this
young man is creative and smart, but going nowhere in a society that has no use
for him. He boldly challenges the person he addresses—an interesting stance
for a dramatic monologue.
Another reason for
picking a character for a dramatic monologue might be to choose someone so
different from you that it creates a challenge to put yourself in
that person’s shoes. The difference could be gender, age, class, historical
time period, race, sexual orientation, religion, politics, geographic location, physical abilities, etc. Make sure you are not falling into stereotypes about a group, and that you
are creating a character with the complexity that you hope others see in you. If
you write about someone from a group not your own, consider showing that person
not just at his or her lowest point. Without ignoring the adversity your
persona has to encounter, allow that individual at least a moment of triumph or
connection.
One other
consideration with a dramatic monologue: who is the speaker addressing? Is it a
generalized audience, or an individual the speaker knows? If it’s a specific
person, that can create more depth and/or drama. In Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son,” for instance, the fact that this speaker is a mother talking to her child makes it
much more moving. In June Jordan’s “Unemployment Monologue,” the young man
addressing a person of relative privilege sets up a dynamic tension. In a sense, even a monologue is a dialogue of sorts, since it is addressed to another or to others.
The dramatic
monologue has many advantages for a writer. The form allows for a distance
between the author and the speaker. In a dramatic monologue, the person using the "I" is by definition not the author. Why should that matter? With distance, the burden of self-disclosure is lifted. By its nature, the dramatic monologue
tends to preclude self-pity or gut-wrenching confession, no matter how intimate
the subject. Interestingly, the distance between the author and the
speaker sometimes allows for a more
personal revelation, since the writer does not have to claim the material as
autobiographical. Sometimes we are most truly ourselves when we are wearing masks. By standing in the shoes of a character different from ourselves, we are able to show the unique ability of writing to empathize with another person. Film and theater, for instance, can only show a person from outside. In a dramatic monologue, a writer has the ability to actually understand the thoughts of another human being.
The disadvantages
of the dramatic monologue include the fact that the reader is sometimes not
sure at any given moment if the content is real or fictional. The reader might not be certain whether to trust the content. so the impact may be lessened. The
authenticity of autobiography is also missing. A writer may use a persona as a
mask, and hide or lose awareness of his or her real thoughts and/or emotions.
For these reasons,
the dramatic monologue fell out of favor for many years. This change of
aesthetics began with Anna Akhmatova and the Acmeist poets in Russia in the
early twentieth century, starting with Akhmatova’s first book,
Evening, published in 1912.
Frontispiece of Akhmatova's first book, Evening
Akhmatova wrote, “I’m somewhat anti-Browning. He always spoke in
another character, for another character. I don’t let anybody else speak a word
(in my poetry, it goes without saying). I speak myself and for myself
everything that is possible and that is not.” Akhmatova says she is “anti-Browning,” because Robert Browning was the acknowledged master of the dramatic monologue in poems such as “My Last Duchess” and “Andrea del Sarto.” Akhmatova's viewpoint was echoed by
Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam, and an important
chronicler of this generation of Russian writers: “In poetry, every word is a
confession, every finished work is part of the poet’s autobiography…”
The eclipse of
the dramatic monologue continued during the decades of confessional poetry that
began in the 1950s with the writing of U.S. poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Robert
Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. Identity politics of the late 1980s and
the decades that followed also made dramatic monologues somewhat suspect, especially when
the author and the speaker of the monologue were not from the same background. If the speaker and the author were not of the same origin, many readers felt that the author was attempting to speak for or appropriate the material of another group.
In the last decade
or two, the dramatic monologue has made something of a comeback. Poets such as Cornelius Eady, Julie Sheehan, and Robert Thomas have reclaimed the form. The pendulum
has swung back, now that identity politics has made many vital points, and
confessional poetry has explored in depth a range of topics approached by authors testifying from a standpoint very close
to their own. Dramatic monologues are now making a comeback.
Remember when you write a dramatic monologue that it’s a form meant to be spoken aloud. Read your drafts out loud to make sure they sound like a character is speaking in their own, individual voice, telling their story. That voice can and should be very different from your own.
