Monthly Archives: March 2011

A Walk Around Green Lake

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"A Week of Walks Around Green Lake" by Jane LaFazio

Many years ago my friend Dian wrote a story titled “Around Green Lake,” about a woman who was contemplating suicide. The character walked around Seattle’s Green Lake thinking about her life and her desperate situation. Around and around the lake she went, thinking and thinking. The story got longer and longer as the character remembered more episodes from her life. In revise after revise, around and around the lake she went, until finally the story got to be a metaphor among our writing group for the whole rewriting process.

“I’m going around Green Lake again,” we’d say at our meetings, meaning, I’m still working on that same story. We’d bring page after reworked page to the group, every rewrite becoming more tortured as we each went around our own Green Lakes. Seasons changed, rains came, leaves fell. The occasional snowfall or ice storm, but each of us inexperienced writers continued slogging the well-worn path of our stories, revision after revision, in our futile attempts to make them “perfect.”

Ultimately some of these stories did die – euthanasia we said, rather than suicide. We figured it was more humane to kill them gently and with love, than to continue in our attempts to keep them alive with false metaphors, contrived plots, stilted characterizations. And, remarkably, some of those stories did survive, did get better. A few even saw publication, or at least a submission or two.

Looking back, these long, repeated trips around Green Lake weren’t wasted; they were important journeys in our writing and in our lives.

We learned to be patient with ourselves and with our writing, to occasionally stop and look up from the path and notice how the light fell through the trees. We learned to look at our work both close up—word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence—and from great distances. We learned to ask questions and to accept honest, thoughtful critique. We learned not to give up too soon, but to know when to stop, too, and to put a story away for awhile—weeks, months, and in some cases, years, until we could look at it with fresh eyes. This is how we learn to be writers. By writing. And by rewriting.

Dian Greenwood and friend

I don’t know what ever happened to Dian’s story about Green Lake. Serendipitously at an art exhibit one year, I came upon a lovely mixed media piece by artist Jane LaFazio titled, “A Week’s Walk Around Green Lake,” and purchased a print for Dian. It hangs in her writing room. (You can see more of Jane’s work at her website, PlainJaneStudio.) As for me, I have boxes and boxes of early stories and their revisions stacked in my garage, many drafts of a novel take up more space, as do the boxes of notebooks jammed with story-starts and character sketches and nubs of ideas. Who knows if any of them will see the revision pencil again. Maybe they’ll wind up in the recycling bin the next time I move. Or sent out in a flaming boat upon the waters of Seattle’s Green Lake.

Why Good Writers are Good Readers

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When my granddaughter was five years old, she discovered the magic key that transforms individual letters into words. After she’d read her first sentence aloud, she said, “I’ve been waiting all my life to do this.”

Drusilla Campbell and friend at the San Diego County Library Book Festival

I know exactly how she felt. When I was a young girl, my mother joined a Children’s Classics Book Club for me and my sisters. How excited I was to receive the books in the mail each month—The Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, Black Beauty, Little Women, One Thousand and One Nights, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and so many more. Books that transported me to worlds beyond anything I had ever imagined. Books that inspired me to write stories, too.

Most writers begin as readers and most of us stay that way. For good reason. Nobody and nothing is a better teacher for our writing than books. Every time we pick up a good book to read, we have an opportunity to study with a master.

Examples: at one point in a novel I was writing, I needed to create a scene with a family reunited after a near-tragic event. I had no idea how to begin. Then I remembered a particular scene in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler. After rereading it and rereading it again, I was back with pen in hand, not exactly confident, but at least words were finding their way to the page. Another difficult piece that had me half-afraid and half-stuck involved an abortion. I turned to Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays—honest, clean, devastating. How to slow down and take time for a particular event? The description of a first kiss in Lit by Mary Karr. She wrote about it gorgeously for a page and a half. I have grappled with descriptions, scenes, characters, and transitions by the dozens until finally, I remember or discover a writer whose work illustrates perfectly what I haven’t been able to arm-wrestle my way into. Thank you, thank you, forever thank you.

My notebooks are filled with descriptions, sentences, phrases and images that I adore. I tear pages out of the New Yorker and make copies of passages from books and journals and stuff them into a fat, messy file labeled “keepers.” When I’m absolutely knocked out by a particular piece of work—chapter, scene, sentence, I deconstruct it to see what the writer did and how he or she did it. Once, my friend Dian, concerned about the first page of her novel, took as a homework assignment to read the first pages of fifty novels she admired. Maybe you’re one of those writers who copy, word for word, a paragraph or a page or a complete scene of a book so you can get inside the language and rhythm of the author. Or you’re in a book club like San Diego Writers, Ink Writer’s Read Book Club whose members read and discuss books from a writer’s point of view.

Wednesday, March 2 is Read Across America Day and I’ll be reading to a classroom of students at Montgomery Middle School in San Diego. The book I’ve chosen to read from is Storky, How I Lost My Nickname and Won the Girl, by my friend Debra Garfinkle. I hope you’ll find a child to read to, not only on this special day, but every day. I hope you’ll read something for yourself, too. It will make you a better writer.