Use Your Whole Personality in Your Writing

When I was a young writer, I went to hear a favorite poet read his work at a well-known reading venue in New York City. I was such a fan of that writer—I’d read all of his books, even his juvenilia published in tiny editions by small presses when he was just getting started. I looked on this poet as a terribly serious and important writer, and since then his reputation has continued to grow over a long and distinguished career.

The Donnell Library in New York City was at one time a major venue for poetry

What surprised me most about that poet’s reading that day was not the poems themselves, but the patter the poet spoke in introducing each poem. Invariably, the author introduced a poem with a humorous anecdote, terribly funny, and then read a deadly serious poem afterwards. Before hearing that poet in person, I had no clue he had a great sense of humor, a quality that absolutely won over that large audience.

What was so odd to me was that the poet never included his sense of humor in his writing. Not once. And yet that trait, as much the poems themselves, captivated the audience that day.

 

I promised myself when I heard that reading that I was going to try to include in my writing my full personality, including parts of it that might not be solemn, or that I might not think an audience would like. All of us are complicated beings, and unless we bring those complications to our writing, we’re going to miss opportunities to engage our readers in ways we could not predict.

 

Yes, literature is a serious art with a serious purpose, but it also requires breathing room for humor, for whimsy, for digressions that might not seem immediately part of the intent of a piece of writing. So use your whole personality in your writing. If you tend to be serious but you have a sense of humor, include that lighter side. If you always go for the punch line in your writing, allow more pathos to seep in. If your most widely used voice is sincere, use your sarcasm for a change. If you’re always satirical, let your empathy into your writing.

 

Using your whole personality involves not just character traits, but your interests as well. If you happen to enjoy cooking seafood dinners, or watching soccer on TV, or walking around cemeteries, those sides of you are gold for writers. They are areas you care about that can help get your readers deeply involved because they really matter to you. Not only that, you’re an expert about them, or you at least know more on the topic than most people. That doesn’t mean you should spend your entire literary career writing about your collection of Madagascar stamps, but it does mean you can include a poem about your favorite Madagascar stamp, or you can write a mystery that hinges on a Madagascar stamp.

So, don’t think that only part of your personality qualifies as literary. Every patch of your soul should be part of your literary quilt.

Zack’s memoir about his father, the writer Lee Rogow: Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Other posts of interest:

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

Writing Fiction about Real Historical Characters: Interview with Wesley Brown

This post features an interview with fiction writer Wesley Brown about his latest book, a dynamic novella about the jazz musician Miles Davis. See the end of this blog for Wesley’s full bio.

Author Wesley Brown. Photo by Brian Cornelius

Question: Your new book, Blue in Green, takes place during one day in the life of Miles Davis and his wife, the dancer Frances Taylor. How did you pick that particular time frame for the setting?

Wesley Brown: I wanted to focus on the assault on Miles Davis by police in front of the New York nightclub Birdland on the evening of August 25, 1959. Limiting the action within that time frame was indicative of the compression of Miles’s approach to playing.

 

Q. The period of the novella, the late 1950s, was a sort of high point for jazz and popular culture in the USA, with such music greats as Miles, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Billie Holiday, and Lena Horne, who all make cameo appearances in your book; and dancers like Katherine Dunham, Fred Astaire, and Cyd Charisse, who also figure in Blue in Green. What about that period attracted you as a setting for the book?

 

WB: The late 1950s were a transitional moment in jazz. Miles had taken the modal expression within jazz as far as he could take and was about to move on to his next musical challenge. And this period ushered in the emergence of figures like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

Q. When you have a work of fiction with a very tight timeframe, like this one, what types of moments lend themselves to adding some backstory? For example, there are some fascinating stories in your book about the life of Miles’ wife, Frances Taylor, who was a renowned dancer in her own right. How did you decide where to insert material that takes place earlier in time?

WB: Since the novella focuses on memory, I was interested in the events triggered by Miles’ beating, which were related to his beginnings and the pivotal experiences in his evolution as a musician. It is much the same for Frances. The difference is that she looks back on the trajectory of her artistry as a dancer that she gave up to be with Miles.

 

Q. What were the challenges of writing fiction about actual historical personages whose life stories are known to many readers?

 

WB: The challenges were not to focus on the facts of their careers that were well known or could be found in books, but to try and get in touch with their emotional lives which I could only discover through imagining them.

Q. One of my favorite passages occurs when we are inside the thoughts of Miles Davis while his band is playing the song, “If I Were a Bell.” How did you go about imagining what Miles Davis might have been experiencing while he was in the middle of playing a number?

 

WB: Of course, I couldn’t know what Miles was actually experiencing by playing, “If I Were a Bell.” So, I attempted to use the lyrics of the song as a way to imagine how he might experience them. 

Frances Taylor and Miles Davis

Q. The novella also deals with the complex relationship between Miles Davis and his wife, Frances Taylor. How did you approach that material, given that it shows a side of Miles that is sometimes extremely negative?

WB: I knew about Miles’s violence against Frances from interviews and books. But again, I tried to get underneath what they didn’t reveal by imagining the effects of his emotional and physical abuse had on both of them.

 

Q. There’s a curious section in the book where Miles Davis sees the film Some Like It Hot, and he reflects on gender, thinking that Tony Curtis in drag is a sexier woman than Marilyn Monroe in the film (some of us might beg to differ about that!). Is that section meant to tell us something about Miles, or was that Wesley Brown riffing?

 

WB: As the character of Miles says in that section, Monroe was a male fantasy of hyper, female sexuality that she enabled. I was riffing on that. But Miles was attracted to the androgyny of figures like Curtis and Elvis.  One need only look at his gravitation toward Prince.

Wesley Brown’s previously published novels are Darktown Strutters, Tragic Magic, and Push Comes to Shove. He also wrote the plays, Boogie Woogie and Booker T, and Life During Wartime. Brown coedited the multicultural anthologies Visions of America and Imagining America and edited The Teachers & Writers Guide to Frederick Douglass. With Thulani Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, and Amiri Baraka, Wesley Brown co-wrote the screenplay for W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

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

Writing Tips from Italy: Guest blog by Giulio Mozzi and Laura Pugno

A friend gave me a copy of a wonderful manual for writers by the Italian authors Giulio Mozzi and Laura Pugno. Their book is full of great ideas and prompts.
 

Link to: Oracular Manual for Poets

Though the book is particularly for poets, I’ve translated three sections that I think are of interest to all writers. Grazie, Giulio and Laura for giving me permission to reprint these!

Co-author Laura Pugno

Co-author Giulio Mozzi

Do words have souls?

A poet considers every word and every thing as if it were alive. They might actually be alive. What do they want to say?  

 

A good poet is an animist who looks at things as if they were saturated with life, death, stories, and words. And in the same vein, a poet looks at every word they hear, read, say, or write as if it were a living being. Not only that: a good poet is a matchmaker who brings together words and things based on their affinities and preferences. To sum it up: a good poet is like that clever servant who pretends to do the bidding of things and words, but who in reality is the one in charge, the one who masters them, and bends them to meet a particular need in a piece of writing.

 

Who lives in your poems?

 

The “us,” that unknown. How many homes can you make in it that you’ve never even thought about? Collective poetry, choral poetry. There’s a whole world out there: the others.

 

With your own voice, unique and private, you, as a poet, are the founder of a community. But how is it possible that poetry, which is such a lyrical and solitary form of expression, can create a community? Well, each of us is a person who belongs to humanity, so in each of us there’s something shared or held in common with others, maybe with a few others, maybe with many, or maybe even with everyone else. When you speak as a poet, with that shared something, you’re speaking the ”us.” Even when you use the “I.” Even when it seems you’re speaking completely impersonally. As the philosopher Rocco Ronchi once said, “Communication…is not a form of transmission. At its root, communication means to create a common ground, to fasten together a community, even if it is a minority, and to give that community identity and recognizable traits. Communication is the creation of a sense of community.” Poetry does not communicate by transmission, it fosters commonality, founds a community. To quote the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska: “[Jean-Paul] Sartre said one of the most horrific things ever uttered: ‘Hell is other people.’ («L’enfer, c’est les autres.») What does that even mean, that hell is other people? In fact, I would say that other people are the true paradise. Doesn’t ‘other people’ include loved ones, neighbors—not just anybody? And I’m not only referring to lovers here, but also to relations, friends, the care of a neighbor, etc. Where would we be without others? Who would we be? Nothing. A hell.”

 

Rearrange the poetry books on your shelves.

 

Discover the books you forgot you had.

 

When you’re a new employee in a bookstore, the first day on the job you’re taught that you have to dust the books. Every day, when there aren’t many customers in the shop, you run a cloth over one, two, or three shelves and give them a good swipe. Romano Montroni, the founder of Italy’s Feltrinelli Bookstore chain, explained why, in his book Selling Souls: The Bookseller’s Profession. Montroni said that this is useful for memorizing each book, the author, the title, and a couple of sentences from the back cover. Similarly, if you have a few shelves of poetry books at home (and I certainly hope you do!), take the time every once in a while (maybe once a month?) to rearrange your books. You might reorganize them by author, or maybe chronologically, or by the colors of their spines, or by their size, or by when you bought them, or according to which ones you like the most or the least. This will help you (you’ll see, it works!) to find forgotten books, to resume interrupted readings, to read again passages you  haven’t looked at for ages, to discover that, just as you have changed over time, so have your books.

 

From Oracolo manuale per poete e poeti, @2020 by Giulio Mozzi and Laura Pugno, published by Sonzogno di Marsiglio Editori. Reprinted by permission of the authors. Translation from the Italian © 2022 by Zack Rogow.

Zack’s memoir about his father, the writer Lee Rogow: Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Other posts of interest:

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

Alison Luterman Guest Blog: How Long Does It Take to Finish a Work of Writing?

This is a guest post from poet, essayist, and playwright Alison Luterman. 

I was walking with a novelist friend in the woods the other day and she was telling me about how she’d had to tear apart the structure of her draft (which I’d read and loved), change the point-of-view of several characters, eliminate some extraneous material, and was now, basically, rewriting a very different book. I asked how she was feeling about it all.

  “Oh, you know,” she shrugged. “At first I was pissed at my mentor for telling me my structure wasn’t working, and then when I accepted that she was right I was sad that I’d wasted so much time polishing that early draft, when I should not have been polishing it at all, I should have been restructuring it. Then I was overwhelmed with how much work I’d have to do to make this new draft work, and feeling doubtful if I could even pull it off. But now I’m into it, and one of the main characters is emerging as more twisted and interesting than he ever was before, and I’m enjoying getting to know him. This new book is going to have a very different tone than the draft you read. It’s going to be much darker. Actually, I'm loving working on it."

  I did know. My dear friend Leslie Absher just published her remarkable memoir Spy Daughter Queer Girl, a book she worked on for more than sixteen years. The layers of living and feeling and research and growth really show in the story. Sure, she didn’t think it would take that long when she embarked on this project, but she stayed with it and she stayed with herself and her own changes and the work shows the benefit of that patience and care and earned wisdom.

Alison Luterman

I’ve got students and writing clients who are concerned about this. They ask, How long does it take to get a book out? The answer, infuriating as it is, is “It takes as long as it takes.” Each of my books of poems has taken years longer than I thought it “should.” I always fondly imagine things are ready long before they are. I’ve sent out so many manuscripts to contests only to realize, five minutes after paying the thirty dollar entry fee and hitting Send, that it was really just a lump of raw dough rather than a fully baked loaf.

  On the other hand, sometimes lightning strikes and a poem comes out whole. The writer Ruth Stone contended that her poems came to her whole, like tornados on the horizon. She would sense one coming and run as fast as she could back to her house, in order to grab a pen and scribble it down. If she didn’t outrun the poem it would blow right past her.

  And Bob Dylan sometimes wrote three songs a day at the height of his powers. There was apparently a conversation between him and Leonard Cohen about writing. Cohen confessed it had taken him seven years and zillions of drafts to write “Hallelujah.” “How long did it take you to write ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’?” Cohen asked Dylan. “Ten minutes,” Dylan replied. So, there you have it!

Alison Luterman’s books include the poetry collections In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran Press), Desire Zoo (Tia Chucha Press), The Largest Possible Life (Cleveland State University Press), See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions); and a collection of essays, Feral City (SheBooks). Luterman's plays include Saying Kaddish with My Sister, Hot Water, Glitter and Spew, Oasis, Touched; and the musicals The Chain (with composer Loren Linnard), The Shyest Witch (with composer Richard Jennings), and the song cycle We Are Not Afraid of the Dark (with composer Sheela Ramesh).

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

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

Dealing with Rejection as a Writer

One thing you don’t always hear when you’re starting out as a writer is that your work is going to get rejected most of the time you send it out. I’ve seen a variety of statistics, but it seems that in general, literary journals accept between 1% and 2% of their submissions. A magazine such as The New Yorker accepts an even lower percentage: .14%. That means they reject 99.86% of the work sent to them. 

In fact, if the work I submit to literary magazines, publishers, and theaters is accepted even one tenth of the time, I feel as if I’m doing terrific. The reality is, there are many, many talented writers, and a much smaller number of outlets to publish in.  

 

On top of all that, rejection is never easy to take. We work hard on our literary creations, and we pour our hearts into them. For that reason, rejection often feels as if our very souls are being turned back from the gates of Heaven and banished to literary hell.

 

So, how to deal with rejection? Well, one lesson I try to take away from a negative response is that my work can always improve. After a rejection, I imagine I’m the editor who reviewed my work, and then … poof, I accept it!

 

No, actually, I imagine I’m the editor, and I attempt to see my writing more objectively. I think how I can make that submission better before I send it out again. I try to consider each rejection as an opportunity to rethink and to polish my writing. That doesn’t mean ripping up what I sent and throwing it out. It means I strive to raise my work closer to my aspirations for my highest potential as a writer.

 

Another takeaway from getting your work turned down is that not all rejections are completely negative. In some cases, an editor takes the time to say that they liked your work and they hope you’ll submit your writing to them again. Do not take that as a polite version of a flat “No.” That means an editor really did appreciate your work. Make sure your submissions log has a place to note rejections of that sort, and periodically go back to those notations and send more work to that outlet, maybe six months or a year later. In your new cover letter, thank the editor for encouraging you to resubmit, as a way to remind them that they liked your earlier submission. Do not resubmit the same work, however—that would be ignoring what the editor told you in the first place.

 

One of the reasons you send out your work is that you’re hoping to reach out beyond your solitary labors as a writer. As the poet André Breton once said, “Writing is the loneliest road that leads everywhere.”

André Breton: 
“Writing is the loneliest road that leads everywhere.”

While rejection may not be the kind of connection you were hoping for when you submitted your work, it still means you were brave enough to risk sending your work out into the world. That’s a victory. Someone also saw your writing, and weighed it in their mind and heart. That’s also a connection. Consider viewing your attempt as an achievement, rather than as a negative.

 

If a particular work of yours keeps getting rejected, try sending it to a different kind of magazine. Over a two year period, I sent out a poem I thought was very publishable to 50 magazines in the United States. It got rejected at all of them. You read that right: 50 rejections! The 51st journal I sent that poem to, with an editor based outside North America, emailed me to say, “Congratulations! We loved your poem and would like to publish it in our next issue.” Sometimes it makes sense to mix it up a little.

There are also many different kinds of acceptance for a literary work. Getting published in a magazine or anthology is just one of them. If you present a poem or story or nonfiction piece at a live reading, and an audience member comes up to you afterwards and says they were moved by your words, that is also an acceptance. In many ways, it’s as meaningful as having your work in print.

 

But given that rejection is the most likely outcome of a submission to a publication, make sure you really celebrate when your work is accepted. Savor that moment. Don’t boast, but don’t be too modest, either. When the publication is posted online or arrives in the mail, share that with your friends and on social media.

 

It’s rarely easy to get your work printed online or on paper. But publication is, after all, one of the great thrills of being a writer. Yes, rejection is not the fun part of a writer’s life, but it helps us to improve our work, and it reminds us to keep faith with our literary calling, even when that is painful.  

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

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