The Power of YES: Why Community Matters in Your Writing Life, guest blog by Joan Gelfand

Do you know the story of how John Lennon fell in love with Yoko Ono?

While visiting an art gallery—Lennon himself was a sketch artist as well as a Beatle—he spotted Ono on a ladder installing her one-woman art show: a huge sculpture of the word YES.

Joan Gelfand, guest blogger, poet, writing coach

There is a children’s book called Richard Scarry’s Please and Thank You. The book is an object lesson in teaching children the consequences of their actions with the help of a cast of lovable characters—Lowly Worm, Pig Will, and Pig Won’t.

Pig Will does what’s asked of him. Lo and behold, guess what? Pig Will gets the goodies. He gets to participate, have fun, and be an all-around happy guy.

Pig Won’t, of course, always finds a reason to say no. You guessed it. Pig Won’t doesn’t get the goodies.

Simple as this sounds, Pig Will has power.

When people see that you help out, not only because you want to build your reputation, but because you are a team player, you are also cheerfully having a “Pig Will moment.” You are “paying it forward.”

Not all of our Yeses or positive actions are immediately followed by fabulous outcomes. But haven’t you found that taking positive action—on balance—has benefited you?

The Big, Scary “Yes”

In 2004, I quit my corporate job to write a novel, had a setback, and was just starting to establish myself as a poet. Like many writers, I was busy! I still had a daughter at home, I was running a small business, and my writing projects had projects.

When a writer friend told me about the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA), I was thrilled to meet colleagues and friends who were in the same boat! Soon after joining WNBA, members received an email. The current president was stepping down and, if someone didn’t take the reins, the chapter would fold. Wow. Okay. I was new to the group, but with the support of another member, we said “Yes,” and took on the presidency. Boy, did I get an education! I learned how to plan events, communicate to a group, and get things going. Together, we doubled our membership! Somehow, I found time in my busy life to help WNBA.

Two years later, I was asked to be the incoming national president’s vice president. Now, that was a serious ask! It meant two years as VP, two years as president, and two years as Immediate past president. I was loathe to take on a six-year commitment. I wanted to get back to my novel. My husband strongly advised that I take the position.

Since that time, I’ve had five more books published, four of which were directly related to my leadership role in WNBA. The other one certainly took into account that I had a national platform.

The point here is not about happy endings, it’s about why community matters in your writing life. 

Community

Doesn’t it seem to happen that just when you are feeling stretched thin, crunched for time, and really not in the mood that opportunities to say YES! present themselves?

What I want to say is that it isn’t always so obvious when the right time is to say “Yes.” Building your platform is not exactly like party planning.

Sometimes you need to say “Yes” exactly when you would be inclined to say NO!

Sometimes you make that extra effort to build your platform at exactly the time when you want to pull in your oars, hibernate, isolate and…. WRITE!

But winning writers, remember, are a breed apart. Winning writers who follow the “4 C’s” are  firing on all burners; building community, working on craft, maintaining commitment, and moving forward with confidence.

A note on teams: Remember that you don’t have to go it alone. When I took on the presidency of WNBA, I had mentors. Past presidents, executive board members, and chapter members were all sources of great inspiration and encouragement for me. “Yes!” 

Joan Gelfand’s new book, You Can Be a Winning Writer: The 4 C’s of Successful Authors: Craft, Commitment, Community and Confidence, published by Mango Press July, 2018 is on Amazon’s #1 Hot New Releases. The author of three poetry collections and an award winning book of short fiction, Joan is the recipient of numerous writing awards, commendations, nominations, and honors. Joan can be found writing and coaching writers at EcoSystms co-working space in SF. http://joangelfand.com 

Other recent posts about writing topics: How to Get PublishedGetting the Most from Your Writing WorkshopHow Not to Become a Literary DropoutPutting Together a Book ManuscriptWorking with a Writing MentorHow to Deliver Your MessageDoes the Muse Have a Cell Phone?Why Write Poetry? Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The VillanellePraise and LamentHow to Be an American WriterWriters and CollaborationTypes of Closure in Poetry

Movies about Writers—For the Oscars

On first thought it seems that movies about writers are a contradiction in terms. Writing is an introspective art that relies on intangible thoughts and feelings. The process of writing mainly involves sitting still for long periods of time. Movies, on the other hand, are all about action and motion. Films look at human behavior entirely from the outside, with the exception of a voiceover narration.

Jessica Brown Findlay in This Beautiful Fantastic

But in fact there have been quite a number of terrific films where the character of a writer plays an important part. I asked friends on Facebook to nominate movies they like about writers, and to my shock, twenty titles appeared within a day, an incredible variety from film noir to fantasy to contemporary realism. Thank you so much to for all the suggestions—I’m sorry I couldn’t include all of them in this blog. Here are the nominees for best films about writers:

The accomplished translator of Persian literature and opera libretto author Niloufar Talebi suggested a movie I’d never heard of, much less seen, This Beautiful Fantastic. When I watched it, I was entranced by the excellent performances of Jessica Brown Findlay, Tom Wilkinson, Andrew Scott, and Jeremy Irvine. It’s a fairy tale about a very OCD writer in the U.K. who is forced out of her interior world into a reality that can be harsh but is ultimately blessed. Niloufar also picked The Lives of Others, about writers in East Germany during the Cold War era, a deeply felt and brilliant movie.

Russian translator and publisher Jim Kates nominated Julia, which must be Jane Fonda’s best movie, and maybe Vanessa Redgrave’s as well. A story of Lillian Hellman’s childhood friend who ends up in the resistance against fascism right before World War II, Julia is taken from Hellman’s own writing in her wonderful memoir, Pentimento.

Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman in Julia

Documentary filmmaker Andrea Simon, the painter Jessica Dunne, and poet George Higgins all picked a movie I greatly admire, Bright Star, about the romance of poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, an elegant and intelligent period flick.

The writers Ernestine Hayes and Lisa Stice both selected Stranger Than Fiction, a moving comedy where Emma Thompson plays a frazzled novelist who begins to tamper with reality when she steps into her own literary world. Great cast, fun plot!

Poet and naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield nominated I Am Not Your Negro, a fascinating documentary that matches images to James Baldwin’s final, unpublished manuscript, a provocative mediation on race, the U.S.A., and the soul of a country.

Poet Vivian Faith Prescott picked The Business of Fancydancing, Sherman Alexie’s powerful film about identity, love, and the literary profession.

Historian Miranda Sachs voted for Shakespeare in Love, a captivating story based on the bard’s writing and bits of fact that the screenwriter extrapolated to create a fine plot with wonderful acting.

Creative nonfiction writer David Stevenson told me about Genius, a strong film on the unlikely subject of a literary editor, Maxwell Perkins. The movie depicts the relationship between Perkins, who edited such authors as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway at Scribner’s, and the novelist Thomas Wolfe. Excellent performances by Colin Firth, Jude Law, and Nicole Kidman.

I have a weakness for film noir, so I have to mention In A Lonely Place, a Nicholas Ray flick starring Humphrey Bogart as a Hollywood writer who has 24 hours to solve a murder and exonerate himself.

Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place

I also love Judy Davis’s intelligent and emotional portrayal of George Sand in Impromptu and her performance in My Brilliant Career, based on the novel by the Australian writer Miles Franklin.

And a recent addition: Their Finest, a 2016 sleeper about screenwriters working on propaganda films in the UK during World War II.  Bill Nighy has a wonderful supporting role as a washed-up actor recruited for a hokey picture, and Helen McCrory is marvelous as his Polish agent. Stay with this movie—it starts out corny but that’s just the set-up for a strong ending.

Speaking of Helen McCrory, she has a great cameo as the novelist Ann Radcliffe in Becoming Jane, a film about Jane Austen's early years. As overloaded as I feel by the Jane Austen craze, this film is a delight to watch, with a wonderful cast of Anne Hathaway, Maggie Smith, Ian Richardson, and Julie Walters.

Here’s another: Mistress America, starring the multitalented Greta Gerwig, who collaborated on the screenplay with director Noah Baumbach. The film follows an awkward and lovable college student trying to gain acceptance as a fledgling writer at Barnard College. The stepsister-to-be of the young writer, Gerwig plays a goofy and hilarious character who isn’t much good at anything but is all the more charismatic because of that.

More still: in 2018, the movie Mary Shelley took the life of the author of Frankenstein and turned it into a compelling story of a brilliant young woman succeeding in the man’s world of the English romantic writers. Terrific cast, excellent screenplay, fine direction by Saudi Arabia’s first woman filmmaker, Haifaa Al-Mansour.

The 2019 film Little Women, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, is also a terrific story about a struggling young woman writer, based on the book by Louisa May Alcott.

My Dog Stupid (Mon Chien Stupide) is a recent French movie based on a short story by U.S. author John Fante. Great performances by screenplay writer Yvan Attal and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who are also a couple in real life. 

Mothering Sunday is an unlikely title for a movie about an orphaned young maid whose path leads her to become a writer. It’s a worthwhile film, with a great supporting performance by Colin Firth as a man too preoccupied with his own family’s troubles to notice much else, but with good instincts. 

The list goes on!

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

George Orwell’s Response to “Alternative Facts”

On January 22, 2017, two days after the inauguration of Donald Trump, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway used the phrase “alternative facts” as a way of describing lies. She was referring to the White House press secretary’s providing false estimates for the crowd that attended the inauguration.

This idea of “alternative facts” is actually not unique to the Trump administration. Although that term is new, the dictatorships that dominated Europe in the mid-twentieth century, the Nazi regime of Adolph Hitler and the Soviet government of Josef Stalin, were no strangers to “alternative facts.” Those two authoritarian states regularly issued pronouncements and provided information that they knew were not true.

One of the greatest literary champions of truth in the face of these threats was George Orwell, who died all too soon at age 46 in 1950. 

George Orwell

Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, spent the final years of his life revealing in those two novels how dictatorships contort the truth to achieve their ends. In his book England Your England, composed largely after the end of World War II and the fall of Hitler, Orwell analyzed the effects of how Nazism and Russian communism constantly used “alternative facts” to promote their ends:

“Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the war. [World War II] The calamities that were constantly being reported—battles, massacres, famines, revolutions—tended to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One had no way of verifying the facts, one was not even fully certain they had happened, and one was always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources….Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth…that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or for failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied.” (p. 54)

This analysis describes all-too accurately the state of truth in the current era of “alternative facts.” The Trump administration in Washington baldly denies even the most obvious facts—the existence of global warming and climate change, the size of a crowd on the Mall in DC, the effects of a bill that deprives millions of people of their health insurance, the absence of widespread voter fraud in the United States, etc.. It’s frightening that the other examples of governments that use these tactics are two of the worst dictatorships in history.

What does Orwell recommend that writers do in response to governments denying obvious truths? He advocates political action, but interestingly, he cautions that opposition to regimes that embrace falsehoods can also lead to fanaticism and dogmatic ideas if we embrace activism without reflection:

“To suggest that a creative writer, in a time of conflict, must split his life into two compartments, may seem defeatist or frivolous: yet in practice I do not see what else he can do. To lock yourself up in the ivory tower is impossible and undesirable. To yield subjectively, not merely to a party machine, but even to a group ideology, is to destroy yourself as a writer. We feel this dilemma to be a painful one, because we see the need of engaging in politics while also seeing what a dirty, degrading business it is. And most of us still have a lingering belief that  every choice, is between good and evil, and that if a thing is necessary it is also right. We should, I think, get rid of this belief, which belongs to the nursery. In politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is the less, and there are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic. War, for example, may be necessary, but it is certainly not right or sane. Even a general election is not exactly a pleasant or edifying spectacle. If you have to take part in such things—and I think you do have to, unless you are armoured by old age or stupidity or hypocrisy—then you also have to keep part of yourself inviolate.” (p. 25)

In other words, writers have to curb the temptation to oppose fanatics with an equally fanatical ideology. We must act, and not be paralyzed by ethical dilemmas. But we must never let go of our critical and moral judgments, even if we have to bracket them in order to undo a terrible evil.

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Zack’s memoir about his writer dad, Hugging My Father’s Ghost
Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

The Importance of Persistence for a Writer

Sometimes a writer becomes so popular, so suddenly, that you wonder how it happened. In the late 1980s, the fiction writer Ann Beattie was on fire. All her stories were appearing in The New Yorker. A novel was in the works, there were rumors of a movie contract.

Ann Beattie

I was a fan of Ann Beattie’s—I still am. Her short story “La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans” in Secrets and Surprises is among my favorites. But I have to admit that I was furiously jealous of Ann Beattie. She’s only five years older than I am, and she was the most popular young writer in the United States at the time she first came to prominence in the late 1970s.

In 1978 I went to hear Ann Beattie read at the Sheridan Square Bookstore in New York. The room was packed—I had to sit on the floor because there were no more chairs. Ann Beattie gave a terrific reading, but a part of me was holding back from really appreciating it, because I couldn’t stop envying her.

After the reading there was a Q&A, and someone blurted out the question we all had in mind: “How did you first get published in The New Yorker?” I probably wasn’t the only person in the audience who was thinking She probably slept with an editor or had a friend who edited stories there.

Ann Beattie took a deep breath. Maybe she had heard this question many times before and she was controlling her temper. If she was, she was doing a good job. “Well, the first nineteen stories I sent to The New Yorker, they rejected. I went back and worked on my writing. The twentieth story, they accepted.”

All right, I thought, if that’s how Ann Beattie got published in The New Yorker, more power to her. 

How many of us have that persistence? Not just to keep sending our work out when most of the responses are rejections, but to keep refining and correcting our drafts. Sometimes, it takes the kind of persistence involved in sending your work twenty times to the same magazine, improving it each time.
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Zack’s memoir about his writer dad, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry