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Lessons from the Life of Tony Hillerman

Posted on October 20, 2015 by

by Sherri Burr

Tony Hillerman, the author who exposed the Navajo way to millions of people, passed away on October 26, 2008. After moving to New Mexico in 1988, I mentioned to a University of New Mexico colleague that I was looking for a writer to speak to my class the following spring. She recommended I read The Ghostway and The Dark Wind. I became a fan and wrote Tony.

For a humble person who reveled in his Oklahoma farm boy roots, spending time with lawyers and lawyer-wannabes was not Tony’s idea of fun. But he was also a teacher at heart and always willing to share, even with not-so-modest attorney types.

After publishing three books in 2004, I was invited to join First Fridays, a group that Tony and several of his writing pals started in the 1960s to share knowledge about the publishing industry. One morning a couple of years ago, I received an email seeking someone to drive Tony, now in his 80s, to the next meeting. I immediately volunteered.

Driving Tony Hillerman was a gift. Even as he struggled with health infirmities, he quipped, “Don’t get old.” Here are a few other tips from a great writing mind:

Tip 1: Take Time to Observe the Clouds
“Look at those clouds,” Tony said as we walked to my car. “Don’t they remind you of a flock of geese?” Other times, he would notice horses in stalls or dogs wandering the roads. His books are filled with elegantly described settings. I realized that he could write so vividly about New Mexico and Arizona because he was constantly observing the environment.

Tip 2: Be Generous with Your Writing Earnings
On one occasion, we pulled up at a stop sign as a panhandler approached with a sign. Tony took out his wallet and handed the man $10. Wow, I thought, how generous. At that First Friday meeting, Tony said he had recently opened a letter and a $100 bill fell out. The woman wrote of having borrowed his books from the library all these years and realized that he was probably missing some royalties. Lesson learned: generosity is returned many fold.

Tip 3: Keep at It
Tony’s debut novel The Blessing Way received 101 rejection slips before being picked up by Harper & Row in 1980. Along the way, agents wanted him to change the location of his books from the Navajo reservation to Santa Fe and to alter Joe Leaphorn’s identity. He stuck to the truth of his stories, and you should, too. After bemoaning the dozen rejections one of my manuscripts received, I realize I have to send it out 89 more times.

Keep the faith and keep writing. Tony did and we are grateful that he lived.

Sherri Burr is the Regents’ Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico School of Law where she teaches Entertainment Law, Intellectual Property Law, and Art Law. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Princeton University, and the Yale Law School, she has authored or co-authored 20 books, including A Short and Happy Guide to Financial Well-Being (West Academic, 2014). Sherri is also a long-time member of SouthWest Writers and a regular contributor to the organization’s newsletter SouthWest Sage.

This article was originally published in the January 2009 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

Are You Ready to Write a Novel in November?

Posted on October 13, 2015 by

by Bentley Clark

Every November, in addition to working my day job, shopping for the holidays and baking pies, cookies and other autumn goodies, I write a novel.

A fool’s errand? Perhaps, but I am only one fool amongst many. In November 2014, over 325,000 writers around the globe participated in National Novel Writing Month—NaNoWriMo to initiates. Over 58,000 participants successfully completed a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Now in its 17th year, NaNoWriMo offers writers of all genres of fiction the opportunity—and excuse—to write their contribution to the canon of great world literature. Or, at least, to write what Anne Lamott affectionately calls the “sh*tty first draft.”

For a successful NaNoWriMo experience, I have found the following to be indispensable:

Internet Access
Fifty thousand words in 30 days is a daunting task, so it is important to find a community of writers who are facing the same victories and setbacks. The NaNoWriMo community is an incomparable support system. NaNoWriMo.org is a gateway to boundless encouragement, to connecting with NaNo Buddies and to exploring forums with topics ranging from “Backing up your work: How do you do it?” to “Are elephants capable of taking over the world?” Internet access can also be useful for wasting valuable writing time researching specific elements and the varied nuances of elephant coups d’etat.

Writing Time
If I manage to find 3 hours in the day to write and I average about 556 words per hour, I’m golden and will cross the finish line by 11:59:59 pm on November 30. Manageable goals are the key to NaNoWriMo success. Typically, getting 556 words on the page in an hour is nigh impossible as we writers pull our hair out for hours to find the right 556 words. Fifty thousand words is the goal of NaNoWriMo, not necessarily good fiction. In fact, travesties of good writing are encouraged: words can be misspelled, poorly chosen, grammatically incorrect or sheer nonsense, so long as they total 50,000. Many WriMos find that in November, sentence structure goes out the window, pronouns become optional and characters get three or four middle names, all in the name of word count.

Mardi Gras Beads
Writing a novel is serious work for eleven months of the year. Not in November. To stave off the tendency to take novel writing too seriously and to remind himself to enjoy the insanity, NaNoWriMo founder, Chris Baty, dons a costume Viking hat while he writes. I drape myself in cheap Mardi Gras beads. A friend of mine wears a Halloween witch’s hat. In addition to adding a bit of levity to the task at hand, costume pieces can remind well-meaning family and friends that you are committed to your goal and that they should interrupt you only when they are bringing you Nutella and banana sandwiches or when the dog has caught on fire.

Notebook
It is no secret that notebooks are an essential tool for every writer. In addition to allowing you to jot down ideas and snippets of others’ conversation—in order to pad your word count—it can be interesting to document your emotional journey through November. There are days when 1,667 words fly from your fingers as though channeled from a higher power and there are days when putting together a single sentence seems impossible. November can have tremendous emotional peaks and valleys, all worth documenting.

In order to write a novel, you must silence your Inner Editor. Even more so in November. So, I also like to use my notebook to doodle portraits of my Inner Editor. Then I doodle a giant bear clad in clown regalia mauling him beyond recognition.

Stamina, Endurance and Resolve
It may be one of the shorter months of the year, but if you plan to write a novel in November, you must prepare yourself like a marathon runner. You must steel yourself mentally for the enormity of the task. You must recognize that there will be waxes and wanes of energy and enthusiasm. And you must learn to not look back because the goal is to cross the finish line, regardless of your state upon crossing it. And, most of all, you must have fun!

(Note: If this article was a piece of fiction and was written in November, I’d be 1.4% of the way there.)

To participate, sign up at www.nanowrimo.org.

BentleyClark125 Bentley Clark drinks far too much tea, cooks far too much food, watches far too many movies, owns far too many books, loves PBS beyond reason, and enjoys sleeping more than she’d like to admit.

This article was originally published in the October 2011 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

The Genius of Alfred Hitchcock (and what writers can learn from him)

Posted on September 29, 2015 by

by Lorena Hughes

The other day an old college friend of mine invited me to the Hitchcock Film Festival in a downtown theater I thought had closed years ago. This art-deco building (circa 1927) has been presenting some of Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous films every Friday night for the last two months.

The movie we watched was Rope (1948) with James Stewart. It’s already been three weeks since I saw it and I’m still thinking about it. Funny because that same weekend I watched Gravity—an expensive display of special effects that Hitchcock could have only dreamed about—and a story that values life above all (almost the exact opposite of Hitchcock’s film). Yet, the movie that keeps popping into my head is Rope, one of Hitchcock’s lesser-known films and produced over 65 years ago. Perhaps if I explain more, you’ll understand why this film impacted me.

Rope was inspired by a famous murder trial from the 1920s. Two affluent college students decide to kill one of their classmates for the simple thrill of killing. As followers of Nietzsche’s philosophy, they believe themselves to be intellectually superior to other mortals and, therefore, above the moral laws of “ordinary” men. They think they can plan and execute the perfect crime and, to make it more thrilling, they hide the corpse inside a chest of books and invite the victim’s friends and parents to a dinner party. In very Hitchcock fashion, they set the dinner buffet on top of the chest.

James Stewart plays the clever schoolmaster who inadvertently instilled this philosophy in the two murderers. Of course, one of the guys is terrified of getting caught, but the other one seems to almost want his former teacher to discover them so he can admire their “masterpiece” crime. The success of the film is in the juxtaposition of tension (anyone could open that chest since the hinge is broken), dark humor (not only in the party set up but also in the dialogue), the motive for the murder (I’ve never heard of something more original) and the Big Question of whether or not the guys will get caught.

But this film was fascinating in both content and form. The entire story develops in real time, in one single setting, and the cuts are nearly imperceptible—one continuous scene with very subtle transitions (Hitchcock focuses on a jacket or an ornament to make his cuts seamless.) It’s no surprise that the film was adapted from a play. In addition to this novelty, we have another element that struck me as original: the camera tells its own story.

Let me explain without ruining the film for those of you who’d like to watch it. Have you noticed how in children’s picture books sometimes there is the story the text tells you, but there are minor stories that you can only see in the illustrations? (this is where a very talented illustrator can thrive). Well, Hitchcock does something similar twice. While the characters are speaking, the camera is moving around them or is focused on another object, making the conversation inconsequential and the visual action what really matters. This is something I haven’t seen in contemporary film making. When dialogue is present in a film, it always supersedes anything that may be going on in a scene.

Because I have a tendency to write complex novels with abundant characters, I always admire writers and directors who can tell simple stories. The plot here is simple: will the guys be successful at hiding their crime?

So here are some of the lessons I learned (as a writer) from this film:

1. It’s okay to write a story that develops in a short amount of time (and how challenging that is!).

2. People can have the strangest motives for committing a murder (and the more original, the better).

3. Keeping the tension in a story is key.

4. Add humor whenever you can (even if it’s dark).

5. Plot twists and complicated storylines are not always required to write a gripping tale.

6. Build a complex backstory (even if you don’t mention all the details), and the story and characters will seem more realistic and believable.

7. For your ending, keep your audience guessing until the last possible moment.

8. Suppress the desire to make your main characters a) always sympathetic and b) always safe. Let them make mistakes.

And here are some of the lessons I learned (as a human):

1. Life is extremely fragile and can end in an instant.

2. There are a lot of crazy people out there.

3. Never befriend someone who admires Nietzsche!

And just for fun (and because I like lists), some of the trivia I learned about this film:

1. James Stewart was not happy with this role.

2. Hitchcock originally wanted Cary Grant for Stewart’s role, but he declined.

3. The real-life case which inspired this film, Leopold and Loeb, was never discussed or acknowledged by Hitchcock to any of his writers or cast members.

4. The attorney who defended Leopold and Loeb, Clarence Darrow, delivered one of the most famous speeches there is against capital punishment—and saved their lives. Both got sentenced to life in prison (plus 99 years each for kidnaping).

5. According to several online reviewers and the scriptwriter himself, there is a homosexual undertone in the film between the main characters (Leopold and Loeb were allegedly a couple). This may have been the reason why the film didn’t do so well in the box office and why Stewart was not entirely happy with it.

6. This film is said to have been a reaction to WWII and Hitler’s belief in the superiority of one race (man) over another.

Are you a Hitchcock fan? Do you think there’s a contemporary director who compares with him?

LorenaHughes2 Lorena Hughes was born and raised in Ecuador. At age eighteen, she moved to the US to go to college and earned a degree in Fine Arts and Mass Communication & Journalism. She has worked in advertising, graphic design and illustration, but her biggest passion is storytelling. Her historical novel set in South America, The Black Letter, took first place in the 2011 Southwest Writers International Writing Contest (Historical Fiction category), an Honorable Mention at the 2012 Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition, and was a quarter-finalist for the 2014 Amazon Breakout Novel Award (ABNA). She is represented by Liza Fleissig of the Liza Royce Agency and is a freelance writer for What’s Up Weekly. You can find her on Twitter at twitter.com/SisterLorena.

This article was originally published on The Writing Sisterhood blog and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

The Writing Life: Adapting Your Work

Posted on September 15, 2015 by

by Sherri Burr

I was fortunate to conduct one of the last television interviews with the late Navajo artist R.C. Gorman in 2004. I asked him about his propensity to exploit his copyrights by turning a single oil painting into lithographs, posters, greeting cards, mugs, calendars and so forth. Gorman’s response was, “Why limit?”

Writers should adopt Gorman’s approach and explore the many ways that the written word can be adapted into other forms. Take for example Alice Walker’s book The Color Purple. Ms. Walker licensed the movie rights to the book in the 1980s and Stephen Spielberg produced a haunting film starring Whoopie Goldberg as Celie and featuring Oprah Winfrey as Sophia in her film debut.

Oprah acquired musical theatrical rights and co-produced The Color Purple: A New Musical, which opened on Broadway on December 1, 2005 and was nominated for several Tony awards (but lost for Best Musical to Spring Awakening). The latter was adapted from a play by Frank Wedekind. I saw both musicals in early January 2008 on a trip to New York and was amazed at the power of authors to address the significant emotional issues encountered by human beings, including adoption, abortion, suicide, and emotional abuse.

In the version of The Color Purple that I saw, the role of Celie was played by Fantasia, an American Idol winner. Thus, a Reality TV participant teamed up with television talk show host Winfrey to present a variation of a book that won both the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award.

Your work doesn’t have to win major awards to be worthy of adaptation. Section 106(2) of the U.S. Copyright Act specifies that all authors of copyrighted works have the right “to prepare derivative works based on the copyrighted work.”

Poems become songs (think of rap music as poetry spoken to a beat). Songs become films (remember Roy Orbison’s song that became the inspiration for the film Pretty Woman starring Julia Roberts). Many a New Yorker article has become a feature film. The point is to think expansively about your works. Be open to deriving other works based on your original works.

Take a page from R.C. Gorman’s legacy: don’t limit!

This article was originally published in the February 2008 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

Louis L’Amour Saved My Life

Posted on September 10, 2015 by

by Olive Balla

Just to dispel any misunderstanding up front, I never actually met Louis L’Amour. He never reached out his hand to pluck my struggling body from a rain swollen river. He never yanked me out of the path of a careering city bus. But what he did do was just as vital to my survival—he wrote fiction.

When I was twenty-one, married with three children and trying to survive a spiritual, emotional, mental, and financial train wreck, I discovered Louis L’Amour’s Sitka. That phenomenal piece of literature bore me on a magic carpet of woven words, away from the turmoil that was my life, and into flights of escape. The harsh expanse of Alaska, the tough men and often tougher women, the struggle to not only survive, but thrive against overwhelming odds, those all spoke to my depressed, lonely, fearful spirit.

After that, I haunted the local public library in search of more L’Amour titles. I grew to crave the sensation of being ferried into the past while watching from the safe distance of the present. I thrilled in the knowledge that everything would turn out okay for the men and women with whom I found myself identifying. I read everything Louis L’Amour wrote, and his words comforted me. They gave me hope.

Over the next few years I branched out into other areas of fiction. I reveled in the excitement of spy novels written by Helen MacInnes, feasted on the haunted offerings of Stephen King, and devoured the cerebral musings of Isaac Asimov.

My world changed and expanded. Eventually, the idea that I myself could change took root. At the age of twenty-nine I went to college, where I learned how to teach others to read and write.

Thirty years later, I still look forward to those quiet times when I can burrow into my pile of pillows, a cup of hot tea at my elbow and a compelling story in my hands. I still thrill at being escorted into other realms, other dimensions, other realities.

Some people believe that every person has a unique niche in this world, a slot molded in her image and into which she alone will fit. I don’t know if that’s so. But I do know that writers hold a special place in the human experience, some even to the point of sparking world change.

So, thanks to those of you who answer the call to write in whatever genre beckons. Thanks for meeting deadlines, for struggling with agents, for doing hours of research, for rewriting innumerable times and not giving up. Thanks for following the tugging of your muse. And thank you Louis L’Amour, for saving my life.

Olive Balla, author of suspense novel An Arm and a Leg, is mother of 3, grandmother to 13, great-grandmother of 4, a retired educator, and part-time professional musician. Having been everything from secretary at a used car dealership, a university student, and a high school Spanish teacher, Balla states her characters are, in part, amalgamations of people she’s met. Living with her husband Victor in the Albuquerque area, she spends her spare time in a small woodworking shop designing and building everything from breadboxes and wine racks, to a porch bench. Visit her website at omballa.com.

This article was originally published in the October 2011 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

Whack-a-Mole Writing

Posted on August 20, 2015 by

by Olive Balla

Telling stories is great fun. But writing those stories in a way that will attract readers is a whole different stratum of the art. It’s a bit like the old arcade game Whack-a-Mole. The mole pops up and invitingly taunts the player. But just as the player takes aim, the mole disappears and the player’s mallet smacks air. It’s the same with writing. Just as the writer thinks he has a lock on what the reader wants, the reader moves on.

What can a writer do to set his work apart from that of the hundreds of thousands of other wannabes striving for recognition? What strategies, what tricks make one story shine brighter than the tales of all the rest of those yearning to become well-paid, or even moderately-paid authors? The problem of capturing the attention of today’s reader is a tough one, and the blame may not rest solely with the writer’s commitment and level of skill. It may boil down, in part, to recognizing and capitalizing on the continual metamorphosis of today’s reader.

Only since about 1840 has public education as we know it been available to the children of the poor as well as to the scions of the wealthy. As a result, the skills of reading and writing have become common to not only society’s scribes, but to the hoi polloi. And that’s a tremendous thing. It enhances the quality of life no end. But it doesn’t end there.

Thanks to the explosion of technology, thousands of storytellers are investing in laptops, blogging their pithy reflections on life, Facebooking, Tweeting, and working through their choices of hundreds of social networking sites. Tens of thousands of Baby Boomers are clacking out memoirs and novels of every description and genre. Websites dedicated solely to the preparation and presentation of self-published works are blossoming like my mom’s lilacs in May. We’re witnessing a supernova in the numbers of storytellers demanding our attention. So why is it that such a statistically few of us make it to press?

The answer to that question isn’t merely a matter of the writer’s aptitude for showing rather than telling, or his ability to resist the urge to explain everything, or his deft crafting of supercharged, vibrant dialogue. Nor is it a matter of simply offering a great three-arc plot and tightly-edited, attention-grabbing first five pages (thank you, Kirt Hickman). Of course, those are important precursors to publication. But today’s writer must do more—he must appeal to two generations of children raised on television shows of the Sesame Street ilk. And he must find a path to the growing numbers of readers with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Today’s reader is more sophisticated, more world wise than her seventeenth or eighteenth century counterpart. And as a result of the growing numbers afflicted with ADD and ADHD, the same reader has a short attention span.

But beyond the increasing ADD and ADHD phenomenon, the research literature indicates the passive act of watching television actually rewires the brain, especially of those under 5 years of age. Since Sesame Street’s first showing in November of 1969, countless millions of children-now-adults have spent hours each day passively watching television. And that means there are tens of millions of folks with altered thinking processes out there trying to find something interesting to read.

A suggestion: Spend a day at Barnes & Noble scanning the bestsellers in various genres. Take a pad and pencil, and jot down your reactions to what’s hot in today’s market. Read the first two or three chapters. Open the book to the middle and read a couple of chapters there, and then read the last two. What immediately catches your attention? How many paragraphs must you read before action kicks in? Is the dialogue always grammatically correct? Is word usage up to par with your high school English teacher’s expectations, or does the author douse the pages with artistic license? How long do the sentences tend to be? Are there lots of words longer than two syllables, or few to none? How much backstory do you see in one place?

Although the answers to those questions depend entirely upon the author and his genre, paying attention to these details might help zero in on a few techniques to grab the target reader.

I’ve heard more than one published author intone the benefits of never giving up. But I’ve heard just as many admit that success is a mixture of hard work, persistence, and dumb luck. The latter is kismet, but the former two are up to the writer.

According to Andy Griffith, “Ain’t nothing easy.” Hang in there.

This article was originally published in the March 2013 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

The Writing Life: Having it All

Posted on August 18, 2015 by

by Sherri Burr

When Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All” in the July/August 2012 issues of The Atlantic, she caused quite a debate among women nationwide. Anne-Marie, a colleague from International Law circles, discussed her challenges of trying to balance being the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department in Washington, D.C., while her husband and 12- and 14-year-old sons remained in Princeton, New Jersey. Taking a government job proved so much more difficult for her work-family balance than her Princeton academic job of teaching, writing books, and giving speeches.

The work-family balance can challenge all of us, both women and men, whether we are married or single and whether we have children or not. It is of particular concern to anyone responsible for the bulk of the house chores necessary to keep families functional. What tipped Anne-Marie over the edge was when she took a job described as “typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule.” From reading Anne-Marie’s article, the challenges of balancing work and family life seem to boil down to an issue of how much control you have over your time.

Unlike government, corporate or many traditional jobs, the writing life has the advantage that writers completely schedule their own hours. Even when they are on a deadline, writers decide how and when to meet the deadline.

Lucky writers can produce full time and earn a living from it, or a sufficient living combined with other income. They have the flexibility to write in the early mornings, get kids off to school, write while the kids are gone, and do household chores. If a writer has a part-time job, he or she still has a great deal of flexibility to set their own schedule.

Writers with full-time jobs where the hours are set on someone else’s schedule face a more difficult situation. They often have to rise early in the morning or stay up late to produce their work. They have to accept that producing an article or book is going to take much longer than if they could write full time. This requires discipline to write on the fringes of the day when you may be thoroughly exhausted. This kind of commitment demands a project that the writer feels called to produce. Nothing short of a feeling of a calling, and the accompanying stick-to-itiveness, will get a project done for those writers with full-time jobs and families.

I had to face this challenge head-on when my nephew Terrance moved in with me for two years to attend middle school, at a time when I had received a contract for my first book. About a month into his stay, he looked at me over dinner one day and said, “You look like you need a vacation.” From you were the words that immediately surfaced in my head. I was completely exhausted.

Soon thereafter, I spotted an ad for two seminars by parenting guru John Rosemond. I signed up for both of them, and bought his book. After listening to Rosemond extol the virtues of 1950s parenting for several hours, I came home and announced to Nephew that he would now have chores. I made a list of everything it took to keep the house running, including cleaning the house, car, and yards. I explained to Nephew that since he now lived with me he would be responsible for half of all the chores. He protested initially, but agreed after I said I would pay him a weekly allowance.

After Nephew forgot a chore, I just deducted an appropriate amount from his allowance and did the chore myself. Once his paycheck shrunk, Nephew became more careful about his responsibilities. I also taught Nephew how to cook and made him responsible for preparing several meals a week. If I got really busy, I offered to pay Nephew more if he would do some of my chores. He gladly accepted. Nephew’s help proved invaluable, and I ended up publishing two books during his stay.

Can women have it all? Can any parent have it all? It depends on how much control you have over your work and family life. A writer with a full-time job who is also the maid, cook, nanny, and gardener for the family is in for a challenge. The more help you can get both internally (by giving all able-bodied occupants chores) or externally (by hiring help), the more likely you can produce great works.

This article was originally published in the September 2012 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

On Write What You Know

Posted on August 11, 2015 by

by Bentley Clark

$Out Of One\'s Head, Relax The Brain" courtesy of thaikrit / FreeDigitalPhotos.net$ Write what you know. This ubiquitous advice is espoused on the first day of writing workshops, classes, and seminars all across the country. Need a story idea? Write what you know.

Story not going as planned? You must not be writing what you know. Won the Edgar Award? Congratulations, you wrote what you know.

As I’ve been polishing a short story for a contest submission, I’ve been trying to figure out what this advice means and whether or not I have successfully put it to work in my own writing.

Aged and experienced writers—whilst sitting in wing-backed chairs at their club, drinking brandy and comparing leather elbow patches—must discuss this advice on a semi-regular basis.
Someone muses about writing and knowledge and they all nod sagely. They jovially pat one another on the back and exchange the secret handshake. Oh, yes. These writers know what it means to write what you know.

Yet, for many of the rest of us, the subtle—and even the overt—meaning of “write what you know” seems open to interpretation. Some opine that the advice should be taken literally: Live in New York; write about living in New York. Grew up poor; write about growing up poor. Others assert the advice is a commandment to write about your truth-with-a-capital-T: Married to an alcoholic; write about the mutually destructive nature of co-dependence. No siblings; write about loneliness and feelings of alienation. No doubt, both approaches have led to great literature.

One of my favorite authors is a lovely, well-coiffed, happily-married, mother-of-two living in Dorset, England. She also happens to write dark psychological thrillers with disturbed main characters who perpetrate garish misdeeds. So, given this paradox, how does “write what you know” come into play in her work? Surely she doesn’t actually know how to kill a person with a scold’s bridle. Not literally anyway. Not the actual mechanics of the task. And I doubt when she was in the planning stages of her book she looked to her diary to consider which of her recently successful murders to mine for her craft. But I bet she knew what it was like to loathe a gossip monger enough to want to murder her. (And what better way to accomplish it, really, than with a scold’s bridle?)

Now, while I admit I live for the vicarious experience of doing something unseemly, something taboo, I also find myself questioning the mind that created the experience for me. With stories that contain even the hint of something untoward, I assume that the writer knows whereof they write and I fear the same.

So, imagine my surprise when a character came galumphing out of the shadows of my imagination about a year ago demanding that his rather grotesque story be told. As soon as he appeared, we had something of a come-to-Jesus-meeting, he and I. I sat him down and informed him that I was not the right person to write his story—I am a nice person from a nice family who doesn’t write about the sort of deeds he had in mind. Rather self-righteously, I also informed him that I couldn’t write his story because I don’t know a single thing about who he is or why he wants to do the things he wants to do.

His solution to the problem of my ignorance was to hound me for months. I would be sitting in the car at a stoplight and he’d tell me all about the career he wanted or about the type of girl he would date. I would be shopping at Target and as I walked past the shoe department, he would pick out the pair of shoes he couldn’t live without. In short, this character of mine was working to ensure I would have no time to myself if I didn’t put his story down on paper.

So, I opened up a new document on my computer and I wrote his story—filled with the things I know: idiosyncrasy, obsession, solitude, and a singular need to capture the world as I see it. My character had already fleshed out (no pun intended) his physical appearance and the comings and goings of his everyday life. The only gap left in my knowledge was the scientific details and consequences of his deed. Easy research.

Now, I can’t say that I have the answer to the definitive meaning of “write what you know.” But I can tell you that by infusing a character with some of my truth-with-a-capital-T, I was able to create a piece that I’m quite proud of. Even at the cost of having to research pig putrefaction.

BentleyClark125 In 2011, Bentley Clark had a conversation with the character she writes about in this article. Click here to go to Anne Riley’s blog to read that exchange.

This article was originally published in the May 2012 issue of SouthWest Sage, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

Image “Out Of One\’s Head, Relax The Brain” courtesy of thaikrit / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Joy of Interviewing

Posted on July 21, 2015 by

by Sherri Burr

In my article “5 Steps to Master the Art of Interviewing” I discussed how to set up, prepare, and conduct interviews. I also urged writers to write up the results immediately and share them with the subject. For today’s article, I focus on the joy of interviewing.

To maintain a writing life for the long haul, writers need to receive pleasure from the process. The more gratification we obtain from our work, the easier it is to overcome the pain of rejection and keep writing daily, monthly, and yearly. The writers I admire the most are still putting fingertips to keyboards into their eighties.

When I interviewed legendary author Max Evans in 2012, he was still writing at 87. Evans was working on a book about director Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch and The Getaway) and interviewing folks who worked with Peckinpah to gain information for his biopic. The day we had lunch, he was trying to reach Ali McGraw to set up an interview to discuss her collaboration with Peckinpah on The Getaway. Evans’ face was filled with delight as he discussed his planned attack for interviewing McGraw.

I have felt such bliss numerous times while preparing for or actually interviewing someone. In November 2011, I flew to Los Angeles to question actor Giancarlo Esposito who is known most recently for playing Gus on Breaking Bad. As sometimes happens, several attempts to interview Esposito had fallen through. For several years, I tried to obtain him for my television show ARTS TALK that I film during the semester so that my Entertainment Law students can interact with the talent they may someday represent. I finally obtained a date from him in early November 2011, only for my students to be disappointed when he had to cancel to film an episode of the hit television series Once Upon a Time.

At the end of November 2011, Esposito and I agreed to meet at his yoga studio during a block of time after he had completed a workout and before his meeting on a forthcoming film project. We drove around searching for a Starbucks and stumbled upon a gluten-free pastry shop where we were the only two customers. One of my students, Justine Hines (who was an Esposito fan), had prepared 20 questions, several of which dealt with the role of Gus. Since this was an extremely bad character that killed people, I asked Esposito about preparing for, playing, and ending a role like Gus.

Esposito said he agreed to play Gus because he “shows the devastation of meth in the West. I let roles speak to me and draw on their organic nature. Gus was unpredictable. Gus was graceful, caring, and polite. He cared about people. He ran a business, an illegal business. He took care to choose people with integrity. That went to the success of Gus.”

The director called in Esposito to inform him that he was killing off Gus at the end of Season Four. The six writers said they were sorry to see Gus go. They told Esposito, “We love to write for you.” Esposito said that is one of the highest compliments that a writer can give an actor.

Esposito found leaving Gus to be hard. He had to take time to shake off Gus. Sometimes he would catch himself walking like Gus and speaking like Gus. Indeed, he wanted to tell Gus to leave him alone. He finally accepted that excising Gus was like a journey and that he needed to compartmentalize the character from his soul.

As I listened to Esposito discuss this character, I was enthralled to be in his presence. To be a writer conducting an interview is to be a witness to the creative processes of others. Most writers craft work in an environment populated by one. When we interview, it allows the extroverted part of our nature, however small or large it may be, to surface and interact with others.

Take time to conduct interviews. It enhances and brings joy to your work and life.

This article was originally published in the June 2012 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

On Finding a Reason to Join the Crowd

Posted on July 14, 2015 by

by Bentley Clark

$Out Of One\'s Head, Relax The Brain" courtesy of thaikrit / FreeDigitalPhotos.net$

I attended my first SouthWest Writers Saturday meeting a couple of months ago. By the time I got there, all the seats were taken, so I stood in a back corner of the room. I began meet-and-greet by circling the room, smiling at people and idling near interesting conversations. When I gathered the nerve, I made a beeline for the most densely populated part of the room with every intention of adding my perspective to some rousing debate. But by the time I made my way into the hub, my heart was racing, my palms were sweating and I felt as though my expression had gone wild eyed and maniacal. I beat a retreat to the food table, grabbed coffee and a cookie, and tucked myself back into the corner from whence I came.

Standing there terrified and praying that the crowd wouldn’t turn on me like an angry mob of rabid zombies—have I mentioned that my anxiety is both wildly irrational and excessively creative?—I wondered why I seemed to be the only writer completely paralyzed by her own introverted nature. Goodness knows, I can’t have been the only introvert in the room. And yet, if there were others, they were so graceful in maneuvering their way around that particular obstacle that no one was the wiser.

Dusting cookie crumbs from my shirt, I wondered what motivates introverted writers to behave so against the grain of their nature in situations such as this. Myself, I am hard-pressed to think of more than two things that I value enough artistically to push through the hyperventilation and flop sweat to have a discussion with complete strangers. Then I remembered a lovely encounter my husband and I had on a recent weekend in Santa Fe.

We were having a quiet breakfast at Bishop’s Lodge. The restaurant was empty, but for ourselves and a well-dressed older woman contentedly dining alone. At the end of our meal, as we rose from the table and moved to push in our seats, the woman politely motioned us over to her table. My husband and I were taken aback and a bit incredulous. She just wanted to thank us, she said, for our genteelness and consideration. She appreciated that we didn’t talk on our cell phones during the meal or make her an unwilling participant in our conversation by talking too loudly. She told us it was refreshing to have a peaceful breakfast out and to be able to hear herself think. Or, more accurately, to have a peaceful breakfast out and to be able to concentrate on editing.

As it turned out, she had been editing the galley of her novel while dining. When I asked her about the progress of her editing, she smiled courteously and mildly cursed the “find and replace” function of her editor’s word processing program. But when I asked her about her novel, she transformed from a quiet, unassuming diner to a passionate artist and enthusiastic salesperson. While she maintained her impeccable decorum in discussing her novel, her eyes lit up, her vocabulary became peppered with hyperbole and she leaned in so close to us that she nearly put her elbow in her eggs. The novel she was editing was the first in a series that married theology, spirituality and history. And while this combination isn’t my usual fare, her exuberance made me want to run out and buy the first copy to hit the bookshelves.

I clutched my Styrofoam coffee cup to my chest and willed myself to breathe deeply, and thought about the impetus for her transformation from mild-mannered Lone Diner, valuing quiet and solitude, to enthralling Intense Writer, discussing theology with strangers. Quite simply, I had asked her about a piece of work that she believed in, that she had worked on for years and that she now wanted to share with others. Discussing and promoting her book were so important to her that there was nothing else she could have done in that moment but passionately broach taboo subjects with two random fellow diners.

If this level of enthusiasm and passion for writing is at the heart of the conversation and buzz at our Saturday meetings, I am simply awestruck. Awestruck and humbled. Awestruck, humbled, and determined to find that piece of work that will propel me into the throng with wild abandon, leaving my introversion in the corner with a cookie.

BentleyClark125 Though it has virtually nothing to do with this article, Bentley Clark wonders if zombies can get rabies. Opine and give her a piece of your mind in the comments below.

This article was originally published in the April 2012 issue of SouthWest Sage, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

Image “Out Of One\’s Head, Relax The Brain” courtesy of thaikrit / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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