Craft and Inspiration – First Installment

Dispatches from Poets & Writers Live San Francisco, January 2017, Part 1

Ah, the writing conference. Communing over coffee and tea with writers I’ll never see or speak to again, soaring to the words of a keynote speaker who rises above the craft to spark our creative souls, gravitating between surprise and monotony during the “practical” discussions as I hear things I’ve never heard before and things I’ve heard a million times, struggling to conjure just the right opening gambit for the editor, publisher, or agent in the expo or breakout, battling through petrified emotions to give myself that one fleeting chance to at least introduce my story. And by the end, I’m typically exhausted both physically and emotionally, and I look around me to see that others are, too, moving to seats with no neighbors, sitting quietly, question-raised hands retracted for the duration.

Yes, these are difficult and inspiring things, these writing conferences, but since I’m not the type to kill myself with booze and isolation until I’m discovered by some visionary journal reader, I am consigned to go, for the benefit of my stories, to give them that one extra chance to wiggle themselves into print somewhere.

The weekend of January 14th and 15th, I engaged in this dance between cynicism and wonder at Poets & Writers Live in San Francisco. The theme of the weekend was Inspiration, and I have to admit that, despite my own skepticism and the chilling cold of this unusual San Francisco winter, the rustic and historic environs of the Art Institute, where the conference was held, provided a backdrop to some truly inspiring talks, as well as some new, useful, and usable practical advice. As I sometimes do on this blog, I’ll share some of those with my fellow writers in a short series blog posts, of which this is the first.

Juan Felipe Herrera – Keynote

He’s the Poet Laureate of the United States, but I frankly knew nothing about Herrera, or his early days in San Francisco among the Beat poets of his youth, or his passion and joy for his fellow California poets and artists, culture warriors of the 60s, or his vision. His vision spoke of big poems, poems on billboards, poems in Times Square, poems up the side of skyscrapers like the Transamerica building. He read from work that had not yet been stamped—that is, workshopped, revised, and beaten into submission—and he encouraged all of us to do the same. I’m not a poet, but I took those words to heart and sat in Calzone’s in North Beach and wrote a poem that very evening. The poems Herrera read issued and answered a challenge to incorporate the joy of life and humanity in among the tragedy and sadness of our existence, to combine the two and even find the connections between them. And he issued that challenge to us, and I would be surprised if the poets in attendance aren’t turning out some very interesting work even as I type this.

Benjamin Percy – Set Pieces | The Art of Suspense

A simple rule I live by: If Benjamin Percy is on the roster, I’m there. Percy is the writer, in my experience, who goes straight to the practical—technique, method, edict—while at the same time inspiring and entertaining. He’s a searing presence with haunting blue eyes and a voice that is positively otherworldly, but beyond that, he’s just a super fricking smart guy. In this breakout, the indelible image Percy has talked and written about for years—Charles Baxter’s widowed image, the nugget in the screenwriter’s phrase “moments make movies”—is relabeled the set piece. It’s that compressed moment, a moment from real life or a movie or a play or anywhere, that keeps coming back into your mind year after year. A moment like this is precious, Percy growls, because that place in your mind that it has carved out for itself can be the source of great writing, like the resonant scene in Percy’s story “Refresh, Refresh,” a father commanding his young son to follow him, picking up a shotgun and leading the son out into the woods, a raven-like skree echoing off the trees as they make their way to the clearing where a young deer is trapped, terminally injured, begging to live, where the father hands the boy the gun and commands him to shoot the poor creature, shoot it dead, end its misery.

This set piece in the story, this critical moment, comes from Percy’s own life, and it became the resonant scene in a story that became the title of a collection. In any story, you’ll want one of these; in a novel, at least four. (Like I said, technique, method, edict.) These are the crescendos in the story, the places where you’ll slow down—just a minute of story present might cover 2 or 3 pages—where you’ll amplify the language, where you’ll hold the reader spellbound. So search your life, and search your memory, and find the caverns of your mind that have been occupied by these set pieces, these moments, these images. They’re pure gold.

Back in the main theatre, Percy lectured on The Art of Suspense, and oh man, if you’re not scared yet, you should be. Because if Percy reads your story, and there’s a scene in there with two dudes sitting in a bar, or on a park bench, engaging in some expository dialog that’s supposed to reveal the story, Percy might just sick a lycan on you (because you know he has some of those locked up in his basement). Instead of assuming readers are stupid and need to be spoon-fed, welcome them into your enterprise by triangulating the dialog—that is, couching a spare amount of it in a goal-driven action—and revel in the experience of creation, as a writer, by revealing not only the story, but the character as well, and do it all with vivid imagery and fewer spoken words.

Now that’s suspense. You know what else is? Offstage mythology. Think of “He who shall not be named.” Before a reader ever encounters a character—a sinister antagonist or a game-changing rescuer—introduce the myth of that character in advance through the recoiling or reaction or reminiscence of others. Make readers wonder and anticipate and fret, and then spring the ghost on them just when they’re expecting it the least.

In the next dispatch from Poets & Writers Live, we’ll tell you what literary agents say about how to pitch your book to them, and in a brief, final installment, we’ll share the insights and inspirations of Bay Area author, songwriter, publisher, and activist Ishmael Reed.