A Moment Leads to an Essay: A Journey in Five Parts

1.

My daughter and I share a plate of fried ripe plantains, a sweet taste that immediately reminds me of my childhood.

“Mommy, are there bananas in plantains?” she asks.

I pause. Bananas in plantains. “A plantain is a plantain,” I say. “It’s not a banana.”

“But are there bananas in plantains?” she asks again. And I think of what she knows. The similarity in taste, the specks of black seeds. This is where the pondering begins. I ruminate about her understanding of this food that matters so much to her Jamaican-American mama. “A plantain doesn’t have any banana in it,” I tell her.

2.

The memories spill forth with a ferocious speed. Plantains. Bananas. The evening so many years ago when my babysitter peeled a plantain, thinking it was a banana, and gave it to me. Me seated on the red stool in my childhood kitchen while my mother fried plantains. A day when I lived in Cape Town and my friend gave me a plantain picked from her friend’s tree. One by one, I turn these images into fully formed scenes. As I write, I find myself wondering: “Why do I care so much about plantains?” and “When my daughter doesn’t know the difference between a plantain and a banana, what does that say about me?”

3.

What is the difference between a plantain and banana? I type those words and wait for my phone to tell me. I discover that plantains and bananas share a common ancient ancestor that boasted much larger seeds. And memories continue to pour into me. My father singing, “Come, mister tally man, tally me banana,” and my sister and me yelling back, “Daylight come and me wan’ go home.” Family. Generations. There’s something here, I think. I keep taking notes, I keep following where the memories lead. I’m still not there, though. This I know. Patience, I tell myself because patience can be what separates a glimmer of connection from a fully-realized piece. Patience is sometimes just what an essayist needs.

4.

At a writing retreat, a prompt instructs me to write words directed at another human being. For reasons only my unconscious understands, I choose to write words to my sister. “I’ve heard it said that one day you and I will be all we have left.” I write about a future day when my sister and I no longer having living parents. I write about a time when it will be just the two of us alive who experienced the memories from the early years of our lives. The free write ambles into the territory of preparation of Jamaican food and what my sister might teach me.

It’s now months since my daughter first asked me if there are bananas in plantains. It is here, though, as I sketch out this imagined scene of my sister and me, that the worlds of memory and moments, research and scenes collide in the most unexpected way. These meanderings, these questions about plantains and my daughter, this was never about what I’m teaching her. This was always about my sister, always about me. A plantain is not a banana I discovered during my research, but they are close. My sister is not me, but we share much in common. Two black American daughters of Jamaican immigrants with different stories about the formation of our identities.

5.

The pondering began with a single question from my child. The writing found life with a long-awaited connection between two sisters and plantains and research about banana trees. In the act of understanding the connections, I began to see what mattered to this story and what might fade away. Yes to a scene of my long-ago babysitter mistaking a plantain for a banana. Yes to a memory of my mother pushing my sister and me in a grocery cart in search of plantains. No to my father singing Dayo. And no—the big surprising no—to the moment my daughter asked if bananas are in plantains. That moment began the search for story, but it wasn’t part of what the story ultimately wanted to be.


Patrice Gopo is the author of All the Colors We Will See, an essay collection about race, immigration, and belonging. You can hear a recent podcast interview with her here. She will teach “Crafting the Personal Essay: The Art of Sharing our Lives and Loves” at Charlotte Lit in January.

On writing a novel: You don’t have to know everything to begin

Kim Wright teaches “So You Want to Write a Novel: How to Get Started and Keep Going” at Charlotte Lit on Thursday December 13 from 6 to 9 pm. Register


Writers use a lot of analogies for the sense of disorientation and fear that comes with starting a book. E.L Doctorow famously said “Writing is like driving a car at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” My friend and fellow novelist Kim Boykin less famously (but quite consistently) claims that her stories are dictated to her by her characters. Their voices, she says, come to her out of the ether and page by page, each plot twist is a mystery, right up to the point that the characters finally explain how their story ends.

Either way, the point is this. You don’t have to know everything to begin.

You don’t have to know much at all.

I think of each story as a room and that there are many doors into that room—many ways to enter and oriented yourself.  Some writers won’t write the first word before they figure out the plot. Others, like Kim, connect to the voice of their characters and some of the more high-minded among us are motivated by theme, choosing to write the books they think the world needs to read, based on the topical issues that most inspire their authors. For me, the door frequently opens in the form of an image. Which can be scary since image, by its very nature, gives you both everything and nothing. The whole sense of the story world reveals itself in one fell swoop but you don’t have a clue what any of it means.

A good example of this is my Last Ride to Graceland, which in many ways has been my most successful book. I was lying in bed on a rainy Sunday morning perusing the Charlotte Observer and I noticed an article on how they were restoring the car Elvis Presley drove on the last day of his life. It had been wrapped in plastic in Graceland for nearly forty years, shoved in a corner of a massive garage, just waiting to reveal its secrets. An intriguing enough notion on its own, but suddenly an image flashed into my mind—not of a 1977 Stutz Blackhawk spending decades being ignored in a garage in Graceland but of that same big black muscle car zooming down a road in rural Alabama. “Fairhope,” I thought, although I didn’t know why, but I did know that a woman was driving the car, a woman who had been born shortly after Elvis died. And I didn’t know precisely how her age fit in, although it was certainly a clue to the mystery of the book but there was trash in the car, trash left over from 1977 and the last time the car had been driven, and that seemed essential too and for some ungodly reason I looked over and saw she had a coon hound on the passenger seat beside her.

And so the book began. No matter how a writer begins or which door they choose to enter into the world of the story, it often feels a bit mysterious when they start. Uncertain and dimly lit, like the nighttime fog EL Doctorow described. But the point is that you must trust in the story’s willingness to unfold itself over time and your own ability to wait, with patience and loyalty to the process, before you even begin to see the big picture.

In that sense, the writer is the story’s first reader—the first to feel its pleasure and mystery and pain and power. You don’t have to know everything. You don’t have to know much of anything. You just have to open the first page and begin.


Kim Wright is the author of Love in Mid Air, The Unexpected Waltz, The Canterbury Sisters, and her latest novel, Last Ride to Graceland, which was the 2017 recipient of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. For the past three years she has been a developmental editor through The Story Doctor, helping writers with issues of story arcs, structure, and pacing. At Charlotte Lit, Kim teaches classes and serves as a coach in the Authors Lab program.

Folksy, Whip-Smart, and Self-Aware: Maurice Manning’s “The Common Man”

4X4CLT poet for December, Maurice Manning, joins us for two events. First, celebrate the release of this edition of the poetry and art posters on Friday November 30 from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at Resident Culture Brewing. Manning’s master class, Writing By Ear,  will be held at Charlotte Lit on Saturday, December 1 from 10 am to 1 pm and is currently sold out. Email us at admin@charlottelit.org to be added to the waiting list.


In Kentucky, the muse might be an older boy who says, “Take ye a slash / o’ this — hit’ll make yore sticker peck out— “; or the muse might be the moonshine the boy hands over. Either way, Maurice Manning’s The Common Man begins with a hint of the illicit and a shot of whiskey. Such an initiation forecasts the diction, desire, and occasional delinquency that course through Manning’s fourth collection, which amasses to an oral history of the landscape and community that the poet has consistently and creatively plumbed. Manning’s earlier collections each coalesce around a specific figure: an imagined adolescent (Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions); Daniel Boone (A Companion for Owls); a breathless shepherd (Bucolics).

The eponymous speaker in The Common Man is part listener, whose poems are determined by others’ stories, and part bookish poet, whose titles — “The Old Clodhopper’s Aubade,” “A Panegyric Against the Consolation of Grief” — derive more from a library than a neighbor’s porch. Manning invokes poetic tradition to collide it with the poetry he finds in a place that’s home to pawpaw trees, philosophizing farmers, and even a talking horse. The resulting poems are a conscious mix of high and low. But more than Manning’s previous collections, this book is hellbent on narrative. Folksy, whip-smart, and self-aware, the speaker asks, “You reckon I could ever run out / of stories in my heart to tell?” The poems often unfold with the pacing and plainer syntax of prose, their lines predictably broken. Their turns occur in their turning on the reader, with metaphysically gesturing questions such as: “Were you / raised up with a beast beside you?” Or: “[M]aybe you’re thinking why / is this man so bent on darkness?” The speaker perforates the poems’ intense localness by implicating the reader in the community his poems shape, reminding her, “Part of me / resides out there, and part of you / is out there too. Let’s hope we’ve got / that much in common, a fair amount / if you think about it very long.”

The poems take on the burden of many sadnesses that transcend place: the sadness that comes from relying on a remote God, the sadness that comes from mourning an irretrievable past, the sadness that comes from longing for the love of a good woman. Though Manning dedicates this book to the memory of his grandmothers, the women in these poems are elusive, appearing only in the form of fantasy, comic relief, or some amalgam of the two. This reader wonders what stories they might tell, were they given more chances to speak.


December 2018 4X4CLT poet Maurice Manning is the author of six collections of poetry.  His first book, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, was selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.  His fourth book, The Common Man, was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. A former Guggenheim fellow, Manning teaches at Transylvania University and for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives with his family on a small farm in Kentucky.  His next book, Railsplitter, will be published in 2019.


September 2018 4X4CLT poet Cecily Parks is author of the poetry collections Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia, 2008) and O’Nights (Alice James, 2015). She also edited the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 2016). Her poems appear in The New Republic, The New Yorker, Tin House, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, she teaches in the MFA Program at Texas State University.

This review originally appeared July 15, 2010 in Orion Magazine. We’ve reprinted here with their permission. Visit their website at orionmagazine.org.

Morri Creech’s Blue Rooms

The Arts at Queens proudly presents The English Department Reading Series and poet Morri Creech, Tuesday, November 13, 7 pm, Ketner Auditorium, Sykes Building, Queens University of Charlotte.


Nov 13, poet Morri Creech reads from his just-released fourth collection, Blue Rooms. The book is eagerly anticipated; his previous, The Sleep of Reason, was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. You may have seen his poem “The Choice” painted as a Wall Poem at Brevard & 9th Streets, or may have attended one of his classes at Charlotte Lit. Morri is my colleague and friend at Queens University.

The poems of Blue Rooms explore the perceiving mind and the possibilities and limitations of language. Words themselves are the question, what they can and cannot contain, and what this means at a personal level, given the emotional weight of “what slips the net of language.” The book includes ekphrastic poems, which reflect on works of art. They do so with such a depth of voice that, although knowledge of art references reveals satisfyingly complex layers, such knowledge is not required.

In the opening sequence, “Self Portrait as Magritte,” the books’ thematic concerns unfold brilliantly through the figure of this painter, a surrealist known for finding the strange in the every day and for mislabeling objects. As these poems reference art, the art provides a means to comment on language. The reverberations between the two media, poetry and painting, echo the work of Magritte. The self-portrait structure of this series is particularly engaging. Identity is rendered elusive. The self cannot recognize itself, is tangible and yet not present, seeable and yet unknowable. Others cannot be known; “The kissing lovers’ shrouded heads / Lean together in ignorance.”

The second poem in this group references Magritte’s “The Mysteries of the Horizon,” an oil painting with three men in bowler hats beneath three slivers of moon: “These three men share my look and dress./ I cannot say which one is me./ Three ways I face the emptiness,/ The central man, the mystery.” The poems feel inevitable in their form, yet there is also a haunting use of the sentence, creating perhaps a sort of identity question within the kept form itself: how, within these metered, end-rhymed lines, do the poems create such stillness? The space generated by this unhurried music holds revelations that raise more questions: “The self is still our best disguise.”

Throughout the book, the exploration continues, through pastoral paintings and the works of Cézanne. The imagery rendered through language begins to take on a different feel in this context. The apple, the camshaft bolt, the skull: each are explored as parts of a still life blurring into narrative and back again to still life. Certain poems suggest a kinship to the philosophical poetry of Wallace Stevens. There are discoveries to make in the diction, which starts to feel as characteristic as the brushstrokes of Cézanne (natter” and “daub” and “smutch”), creating a particular voice within the disruptive concerns about identity.

There is an increasing urgency, and the tone becomes more burdened. Leonardo da Vinci is featured as the dissector of the corpse. Poems explore violence. The journey of the book leads to “a trick of perception.” In the “Self-Portrait After Goya” sequence, near the book’s end, Goya paints “my nightmare,” and “I cannot speak, strapped to my fever chair.” Language has ultimately led to the cost of the questions, “the circling birds / Of sheer unreason,” the suffering and the sleeplessness, and the terrible images Goya depicts while “trapped in his head.” The final poem on a Japanese folding screen, which follows this sequence, brings relief.


Morri Creech was born in Moncks Corner, SC, and was educated at Winthrop University and McNeese State University. He is the author of four collections of poetry, including his latest, Blue Rooms (The Waywiser Press), and The Sleep of Reason, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is the Writer in Residence at Queens University of Charlotte, where he teaches courses in both the undergraduate creative writing program and in the low residency MFA program.


Julie Funderburk is author of the poetry collection The Door That Always Opens (LSU Press). She is the recipient of fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and the Sewanee Writers Conference. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Queens University of Charlotte.

Questions to Ask Yourself When You Write Memoir

In 2006, to relieve his back pain, my husband had an epidural, a procedure so routine it’s given to women in childbirth. The minute the needle pushed into his spine, he was paralyzed from the waist down. People kept asking me if I was going to write about this. “Never!” I declared. I’d lived through it; I certainly did not want to live through it again. But then, in 2008, I was held up at gunpoint at the dry cleaner. Here’s what’s odd: That gun did not scare me. It made me sad. I cried for days

I found myself telling the story of the holdup over and over. I wanted everyone to know. At a dinner party, I made my friends join me in a re-enactment. “Okay, John, you be the owner of the dry cleaner. And you, Bobbie, be the robber. Just jump out, Bobbie. Like this. And hold the gun lower. Point it at my stomach. Both of you come closer.” I made it funny so we could all laugh – my fellow actors and our audience.

And then I went home from the dinner and cried.

I wrote an essay about the holdup. But it started growing. Suddenly, I was writing a memoir about my marriage – how our roles had switched, our identities shifted. Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap was taking shape.

When I asked myself the following questions, I began to understand the connection between what had happened to my husband and the holdup:

What did I think then? What else? What do I think now? What else?

Here’s where those questions led me:

Because someone threatened me with a gun, I could finally cry – really cry – over what had happened to my husband. It was as though I were confronting his accident for the first time. How everything can be fine one minute. And then, nothing is. That thin line. How a brushfire can erupt on a perfectly sunny, clear-skied day. How your life can be taken right out of your hands.

How, when you write memoir, you encounter new possibilities for understanding your life. How memoir truly is the narrative of revelation.


Judy Goldman is the author of six books: two memoirs, Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap (which will be published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday on February 12, 2019) and Losing My Sister; two novels, Early Leaving and The Slow Way Back; and two books of poetry, Wanting To Know the End and Holding Back Winter. Losing My Sister was a finalist for both Southeast Booksellers Alliance’s Memoir of the Year and ForeWord Review’s Memoir of the Year. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Crazyhorse, and Real Simple magazine; her book reviews in The Washington Post and The Charlotte Observer; and her commentaries on public radio in Chapel Hill and Charlotte.


Judy’s class, “Crafting a Memoir: How to Weave Personal Experience into a Compelling Story” which begins on Thursday November 8 from 6 pm to 9 pm, has one seat remaining as of this writing. Please go here to register.

 

 

Tech Toolkit for Writers

This post is an electronic version of my presentation at the NC Writers’ Network Fall Conference in Charlotte, November 2018. It includes links for many of the apps and concepts discussed.


PROLOGUE: BEFORE WRITING

The Backstory

Before we sit down and write—on a device or on paper—there are many other things that happen, and which technology can help with, such as collecting random ideas, thinking out a problem, planning your writing, and outlining.

Note-taking

The problems this solves: How to keep from losing ideas; how to organize lots of ideas; how to gather all ideas in one place (or keep all ideas in all places)

  • Notes (Mac, iOS, iCloud): Simple, free, auto sync to all Apple devices
  • Microsoft OneNote (multi-platform): multi-level organization, free, auto sync
  • Evernote (multi-platform): complex, free (sync 2 devices and other limits) or $8/mo
  • Google Keep (online and mobile): relatively simple, sticky note-like; free, sync
  • Simplenote [by creators of WordPress] (multi-platform): free, syncs
  • Phone apps: too many to list
  • Audio notes: phone apps (iOS: Voice Memos; Evernote; Google Keep)

Tip: Select one (or two) apps of any type and use only those

Mind Mapping / Concept Mapping

The problems this solves: How to generate ideas; how to find connections between concepts; how to build characters; how to brainstorm in a structured way

Tip: Use one of these only if it’s better for you than working on paper

Planning

The problems this solves: all the problems with not planning; and how to impose structure on an unruly first draft.

  • Outline tools in Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, etc.
  • Snowflake Pro [by Randy Ingermanson] (Mac or Windows, $50 when purchasing the companion book, How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method)
  • Story Planner for Writers [by Liternauts] (Mac $15, iOS $5)
  • Story Planner [by Joanne Bartley, 21 planner types] (web-based | free – $40/year)
  • Aeon Timeline: visual timeline creator (Mac and Windows, $50; iOS, $20)

WRITING

The Backstory

Here’s an immutable truth: The words will not write themselves. Considering how hard that job can be, our tech should not make it any harder. This section considers the hardware and software decisions that can make your writing life far easier.

Hardware

The problems this solves: the eternal Mac or Windows question; the cloud question; the form factor question; the “can’t this thing just work” issue.

    • Laptop (Mac OSX or Microsoft Windows OS; local apps/data storage, cloud options)
    • Chromebook (Chrome OS; all cloud-based apps and storage)
    • Tablet (Apple iPad, Microsoft Surface, Samsung Galaxy Tab, etc.) or phone; apps are local, storage is cloud-based)

Tips

  • Laptops: pay extra for a solid-state hard drive (lighter, quieter, faster)
  • Test the keyboard; consider an external bluetooth keyboard for tablets and phones
  • If you use more than one device, synchronization is key

Writing Software

The problems this solves: Microsoft Word (and Apple Pages, and Google Docs) is not designed for writers, or for long documents, or for documents divided into chapters and parts, etc.; how to have my writing on all my devices and keep it in sync; how to find a writing environment you love; how to keep copies of the work before I edited it

  • Local
    • Word Processors
    • Writing Apps
      • Scrivener: made for writers by a writer (Mac or Windows, $45; iOS available)
      • Storyist: Scrivener-like (Mac, $59; iOS $15)
      • Ulysses: text only, distraction free, multi-markup formatting only (Mac and iOS, $5/month or $40/year cross-platform)
      • iA Writer: text only, distraction free, multi-markup formatting only ($20 Windows, $30 Mac, $5 iOS, free on Android)
      • Screenplays and stage plays: Final Draft (Mac or Windows, $250; iOS available)

Tip: Most apps have free trials so you can play before you have to pay

  • Cloud
  • Phone / Tablet Apps
    • Microsoft Word (multi-platform, free for most devices, req. Office 365 for iPad Pro)
    • Apple Pages (iOS, free)
    • Scrivener (iOS, $20; companion to desktop version)
    • Final Draft (Screenplays and stage plays; iOS, $10)
    • Many, many others

Tip: Synchronization matters

Writing Without Typing

The problems this solves: can’t get the words down fast enough; carpal tunnel pain.

  • Dictation Options
    • Dragon (Windows, $150; Mac version discontinued, available from online sellers—look for version 5; mobile versions available)
    • Apple Dictation (built into Mac and iOS)
    • Windows Dictation
    • Google Docs Dictation
  • Transcription Options
    • Rev: $1/minute (human)
    • Trint: $15/hour (machine)
    • Otter: 600 minutes/month free (machine)
    • Scribie: $0.10/minute (machine), $0.60-$2.40/minute (human) based on turn time
    • GoTranscript: $0.72/minute (human)
    • TranscribeMe: $0.10/minute (machine), $0.79/minute (human)
    • Sonix: $6/hour or $15/month

Focus

The problems this solves: shiny objects (metaphorically speaking); the barrage of incoming texts and emails; attention deficits of various shades.

  • Remove distractions
    • Freedom: app and website blocker (Windows, Mac, iOS; $7/month, $30/year)
    • Focus Mode (Word) and Composition Mode (Scrivener)
  • Timers
  • Motivation & Mindfulness
    • Tracking word counts in writing apps
      • Word: Tools > Word Count
      • Pages: View > Show Word Count
      • Scrivener: always visible in status bar
    • Meditation Apps (Headspace, Calm, Buddhify, Insight Timer, etc.)

Organizing

The problems this solves: where’s all my stuff?

  • Long Works (multi-chapter: novels, memoirs, etc.)
    • Option 1: All chapters in one document
    • Option 2: Each chapter in its own document
    • Option 3: Use app that is a container (e.g., Scrivener)

Tip: Also see the section below on version control

EDITING

The Backstory

Spell check is not all there is. There are other sophisticated tools available and useful— though not a substitute for human editing and not foolproof. We also have to consider the question of where to keep the prior versions of the work as you edit.

Checkers: Spelling, Grammar, Proofreading

The problems this solves: find the easy stuff that your eye overlooks.

  • Built-in
    • Spell check
    • Grammar check
    • Thesaurus
  • Grammerly: grammar (online, app integrations; free & premium versions, $11-30/mo.)
  • Hemingway: grammar (online, free; Mac and Windows apps, $20)

Helpers: Style, Grammar

The problems this solves: how to uncover your mistakes and quirks, including the ones you didn’t know to look for.

  • ProWriting Aid: style and grammar (multi-platform, app integrations; free and premium versions, $50/year)
  • AutoCrit: style (online, $10-80/month)
  • Master Writer: word choice ($10/month)

KEEPING YOUR WORK SAFE

The Backstory

We don’t want to lose our work. Period. For your writing or any of your device’s contents, you need a multi-tiered system to make sure that your current data is safe no matter what, and that you can go backward into prior versions of your work if needed.

Here’s some terminology you need.

  • Storage is where your data is saved, day-to-day. Primary storage (the original data) is usually—but not always—the hard drive on your computer. Some apps, such as Google Docs, and some devices, such as Chromebooks, use cloud storage (a server somewhere out on the internet) for all files created using them.
  • Backup is making a copy of what’s in storage. There are essentially two kinds of backups: selective backups (some files but not all, such as the file you just finished editing, or only your writing files), or complete backups (that is, your entire computer system). You can make a local backup (that is, in the same place as the primary storage), such as when Word saves a backup copy on your hard drive when you exit, or an external backup (that is, to another device). The external backup can be a physical device such as a USB flash drive (for selective backups) or an external desktop hard drive (for selective or complete backups), or it can be a cloud backup (that is, uploaded to an internet backup service, such as Backblaze). Backup is similar to, but not the same as…
  • Sync is a service (such as Dropbox) that copies your files from one device to others via the internet (or “cloud”) and keeps them all the same, so that changes to one are reflected in another. All syncs are technically backups, since you’re making copies of files, but they often don’t keep legacy copies—older versions of the files, like a backup does.

Backups

The problem this solves: losing your work in a systems crash or loss.

  • Automatic Selective Backups: If your application supports it, enable automatic saving and automatic backup copies
  • Use an External Drive
    • USB Flash Drive: least good option; manual, critical files only, small capacity, easy to forget to do
    • Desktop Drive: best local option, can backup entire systems, easy to hide and remove from the house when needed. Software needed for automatic backups (Mac: Time Machine; Windows: requires third-party, such as Duplicati or CrashPlan). If primary device is a laptop, will have to remember to connect the drive at certain intervals.
  • Cloud Backup: best option; automatic, set it and forget it
    • Backblaze: $5/month unlimited
    • Carbonite: starts at $6/month

Sync Across Computers and Platforms

The problem this solves: having the same work on multiple devices.

Tip: Create a multi-tiered system, including at least one cloud option

Version Control

The problems this solves: what happens to the prior versions as you edit? What if I want to go back? What if I want just some of what I wrote back?

  • Option 1: Overwrite and don’t worry about old versions.
  • Option 2: Make a copy of the work before beginning edits (e.g., using Save As or backup software
  • Option 3: Print hard copies at intervals
  • Option 4: Use software that makes backups for you
    • Automatic in Google Docs (document level)
    • Automatic (customizable) in Scrivener (document level)
    • Manual in Scrivener (Snapshots)

Tips:

  • Set up automatic backup systems available in the software
  • Create a copy before major rewrites or revisions

OTHER THINGS WE COULD TALK ABOUT…

Sharing (working with others, separately)

  • Methods for sharing: Email, flash drives, Dropbox, cloud document sharing
  • Editing/Incorporating Edits with Track Changes

Collaborating (working simultaneously)

  • Cloud platforms that allow multiple editors at once

Formatting Submissions

  • Scrivener to Word
  • Scrivener or Word to Final Draft
  • Any format to email
  • Any format to PDF

Submissions & Queries

Self-publishing Tools

  • The process: From x to y (sometimes via z)
  • For example:

Online Sharing

EPILOGUE: YOUR TASK LIST

1. Select your writing software

    • Scrivener strongly recommended. Try before you buy, and save 20% with the code CHARLOTTELIT.

2. Try out some new apps

    • Grammar & Style apps
    • Focus apps (save 40% on Freedom yearly or forever plans with the code CHARLIT)

3. Clean up your old versions and create a sensible storage system

4. Set up a multi-level backup system

The Secret to Being Precocious: Mary Shelly & “Frankenstein”

For two centuries now, Frankenstein has been an easy book to hate, and Mary Shelley has been an easy target for envy.

When Frankenstein was published anonymously in January 1818, readers were scandalized by Victor ransacking graves and daring to play God. Even after Mary Shelley was revealed as the author, some reviewers still maintained that only her mad husband Percy could have written it. For all that, it has never been out of print and has spawned hundreds of stage and screen adaptations.

With its overwrought and silly dialogue, absurd plot devices, and mixture of mayhem and moralizing, how did it become an enduring cultural force? How could a teenaged girl have created what she herself called this “hideous progeny?” Before queasy readers or jealous writers grab pitchforks and torches, let’s give Mary Shelley her due.

True, she had the good fortune to be the child of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, two of the brightest intellectuals of the age, growing up in a home visited by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who recited “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” for her), Charles and Mary Lamb, John Keats, scientists such as Humphry Davy, and—among many other notables—even Aaron Burr (for whom she and her sisters danced). Her intimate circle consisted of Percy Shelley, Byron, and Dr. John Polidori. It was Byron who prompted the group to hold the most famous ghost story contest in history at the villa Diodati outside Geneva. Since that contest sparked both Frankenstein and Polidori’s novel The Vampyre, it engendered two of our most enduring horror movie icons.

Yet Mary deserves sympathy almost as much as her abandoned creature does. When she began the novel, she had lost her famous mother at birth, been disowned by her father for running off with Percy Shelley, and lost her own newborn daughter. She ran away from a wicked stepmother and a household of five children born from two different fathers and four different mothers. Though much more suffering would plague her life, here was certainly more than enough pain to foster artistic expression.

Still, Mary Shelley was driven by a fierce intellectual curiosity and a relentless ambition to live up to the example of her parents, particularly her mother. As a teenager, she was reading widely and deeply: Milton, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Burke, Goethe, Voltaire, de Staël, French and Italian drama, Ovid, Virgil. Much like the creature in her novel, who soaks up Paradise Lost and speaks like Milton’s characters, she absorbed the skills of her craft, not just reading, but translating and studying and journaling diligently. She served her apprenticeship, but she broke new ground as well. She took advice from her famous companions, but she did not let them squelch her unique voice.

She produced an intricately structured novel, with multiple narrative voices and stories within stories. Though its dialogue may sound stilted to our modern ears, the voices are passionate and compelling. With the audacity of youth, Mary Shelley challenges the old Miltonic world-view, advocates for social justice, and issues a clear warning about the dangers of unfettered human curiosity.

If you want to be precocious—at any age—read widely and deeply, engage with people and ideas, channel your ambition into work, imitate and rebel in equal measure, be both diligent and daring.

Kathryn Schwille on Kevin McIlvoy’s novel “At the Gate of All Wonder”

Samantha Peabody is a bioacoustician, an oddball recluse living in the Pisgah National Forest who runs a year-long “Sonic Adventure Program,” taking children into the woods for one week a month to teach them to hear what others ignore. She’s at the center of Kevin McIlvoy’s original new novel, At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo Press), a journal-like recollection of her year with a pair of particularly sturdy, intuitive children.

A trip into the forest with Samantha Peabody is no ordinary adventure. This one is a bread-crumb trail to the heart’s strange workings, cast against Pisgah’s sounds and the limits of ear and soul.

“In the thickets near us, finches split and spat and spewed cedar berries…we began to hear the in-whispering of tree boluses, the inverted echoing cups of stones having the smallest hiding spaces beneath them, the resonant silences in empty bird and wasps nests. After hearing the rhythm of the earth’s soft-palate sounds, we could hear the timbre of its hard-palate sounds: the empty shells and keels and the tight-fisted fleshless ribs of dead creatures no bigger than seeds and pods.”

The forest hums with music, evoked by McIlvoy’s lyrical word play and sentences that swell and bump against each other with energy and surprise. Beneath the soundscape, revenge, estrangement, betrayal and devotion crawl through the novel in a tip-of-the-iceberg treatment that yields a disturbing story. The children’s mother is the divorce lawyer Peabody hired after her husband’s affair: “Carla murdered his spirit exactly as I had asked.” When they divorced, Peabody kept his precious books, “a punch to the Adam’s apple.” Husband Robert did not stand a chance.

As a teacher, Peabody is lovable but cranky, with high expectations for the children, aged six and eight. “If one of you can tell me what the buzzing noise is I will not eat your portions of our crackers later today.” Nothing is easy. The children camp in the cold, they must not read. The Sonic Adventure includes an excursion through February fog to The Place of Nothing There.

Evoking myth, ghosts and the enchanted woods of fairy tales, At the Gate of All Wonder is, like all of McIlvoy’s work, a marvel of language. “The spring foliage around and above our campsite muted certain distant sounds and encapsulated us as if we were silky chestnuts. The senses fuse when one is held in the rose-velvet lining that is contained in the prickly bur of a very cold March. The sound and soundlessness inside our tent was isolating, it was pungent, tightening our scalps, reissuing cidery and sour tastes in our mouths.”

At the Gate of All Wonder is a layered tale that bears examination, and reward is in the re-reading. What a sharp-eyed reader finds in this book today may not be what she finds tomorrow. There is inspiration in these pages. A reader might want to keep it by her side and see what shows up.


Join us at Charlotte Lit on Wednesday, November 7 from 7 to 8:30 pm for “I Went Out to the Hazel Wood”— A Reading & Conversation about Place, with Kevin McIlvoy and Kathryn Schwille. This free event features two writers whose recent books are set in forests. They come together to talk about place as a generative force for storytellers. The Pisgah National Forest became the engine for McIlvoy’s remarkable At the Gate of Wonder. Much of Schwille’s evocative What Luck, This Life is set in the East Texas woods. Join them for a discussion of how location can become what Eudora Welty called the “ground conductor” of emotion, belief and a story’s charge. Free, but space is limited, so please register here so we can save you a place.

Learn, Connect, Enjoy: Making the Most of the NCWN Fall Conference

The fall conference of the North Carolina Writers’ Network returns to Charlotte this year—November 2-4 at Hilton Charlotte University—so we have tips for those who are attending (or still thinking about it). There are deadlines in here, so read on down.

BEFORE YOU GO

Select Workshops in Advance. One sure way to know if you’ll receive a good value for your money and time is to review all five workshop time slots (three on Saturday and two on Sunday) and make your selections in advance.

Bonus tip: choose a backup workshop for each time slot, too. Sometimes you realize once a session is underway that it’s not for you. It’s OK to slip out and try another one.

Carefully Consider the Extras. This conference has extra options that might fit you. Manuscript Mart and Critique Service are 30-minute feedback sessions on 20 pages of your manuscript—the former with a literary agent or publisher, the latter with an accomplished writer. Master Classes are all day on Saturday, taking the place of the three workshop slots. The cost is just $30 extra—although it’s a small gamble, because that’s the reading fee, non-refundable if you’re not placed in one.

Bonus tip: Deadlines for all these are this Friday, October 19.

Save Money. The conference is a great bargain if you register by October 26 (you’ll save almost $200). If you’re not a NCWN member, join! Membership plus the member rate for the conference is less than the nonmember rate.

Bonus tip: If you don’t need a hotel room, you save even more. NCWN’s fall conference rotates here only every four or five years, so this is your best chance for awhile.

AT THE CONFERENCE

Meet New People. The classes are generally excellent, yet meeting writers from across the Carolinas might be the best part. Try sitting with new people at meals, and saying hello to people at break times. Here’s a sure-fire way to break the ice, even if you’re an introvert: ask “where do you live?” and “what kind of writing do you do?”

Bonus tip: Take names. If you meet someone you’d like to be in touch with again, jot down their name and something about them. If you carry a business (or writer) card, offer to exchange cards.

Stretch Yourself. When selecting workshops, consider taking some that are out of your normal wheelhouse. If you’re a fiction writer, consider a session in poetry, for example.

Bonus tip: This is especially easy to do when the time slot doesn’t have something in your genre or form that really excites you.

Thank the Presenters. After a session, or when you see them later at the conference, say a few words to the presenters. Most work very hard getting ready, and it’s nice to feel appreciated, and you might make a lasting connection—most of the presenters are local (and most also teach at Charlotte Lit). Not sure what to say? Try one piece of specific praise (“I found the part about x especially valuable”).

Bonus tip: Most presenters will have books for sale at the conference bookstore, and they’d be happy to sign for you.

AFTER YOU GET HOME

Follow Up with People. Did you collect names and email addresses? Reach out and say hello. Did you meet an agent or editor who expressed interest in your work? Send what you said you’d send.

Bonus tip: No email address? Send a connection request through Facebook or LinkedIn.

Review Your Notes. Most conference materials never again see the light of day, which is a shame: there’s likely a lot of great stuff in there. Did you come up with a story idea, or write a great piece of dialogue, or jot down a book you want to read? Now’s the best time to review and act.

Bonus tip: Do this within the first week, while your memory is fresh and motivation high.

Keep the Motivation Going. You’ll likely leave the conference fired up. While it’s hard to sustain that level of enthusiasm all year, use it as a springboard for your current or next project.

Bonus tip: Decide on your next conference or class and sign up right away. Might we suggest charlottelit.org/classes?

That’s it! We hope to see you there. And please stop by the Charlotte Lit table and say hello.


Learn more and register for the NC Writers’ Network Fall Conference. Hurry! Early bird rates are open until October 26.


Paul Reali is a co-founder of Charlotte Lit, and the author of Creativity Rising and other books on creative problem solving. He will present “Technology Toolkit: Software and Tech Stuff for Writers” at the NC Writers’ Network Conference. 

How to be a Well-Versed Citizen (Poetry World Edition)

Charlotte writers have an extraordinary opportunity for engagement at the North Carolina Writers Network Fall Conference on November 2-4. Classes are offered in a variety of genres, including Lisa Zerkle’s class, “How to be a Well-Versed Citizen of the Poetry World.” Registration is open now.


There’s someone new in town, just arrived with the poems she wrote in a state of thrilled, urgent uncertainty. She knows she doesn’t know enough about writing but still wants more of that electric, creative state. Also new around these parts is that older guy who’s been writing on the side for years, dashing off a poem here and there and saving them for later. It’s later now, he has some time, time he wants to invest in this writing thing he’s thought so long about.

Look around. You’ll see these people, so many of them, newly arrived on the shores of poetry. They’ve thrown open the metal hatches of the getaway pods they used to escape the non-writing world they’ve left behind. They’re clambering out, duct-taped valises full of rough drafts in hand, taking their first steps into this new place. I’m here! they say. What’s next?

I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to be an engaged citizen of the literary world. If this land has served us as a respite—a place with welcoming plazas and warm hearths, challenging teachers and encouraging colleagues—if we want this land to continue to thrive both for us and for the next wave of new arrivals, what’s required?

The archetype of the solitary writer, toiling alone in a garret ensconced in a haze of cigarette smoke and angst, has never been wholly accurate. Of course as writers we know the joy and sorrow of approaching the page. Stacking up lines, tearing them down, rearranging their constituent parts. What we do before and after that, however, is equally essential, I argue, and necessary to keep our literary world thriving.

Toni Morrison’s well-known encouragement reminds us that, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” By extension, if we want a vibrant, expansive literary world, we must build it. First—of course—we write, we revise. But not just that. Our writing should include book reviews, author appreciations, essays on craft which constitute another necessary facet of our writing. If we’re to articulate these reflections in a cogent way, we’re also reading broadly. Bill Griffin, a fine poet and an excellent literary citizen, recently took two notably different books along on a trip. The first, a short story collection by an author who is, he says, “bizarre, eclectic, impossible to categorize.” The second, by a poet who is “grounded and true; when I read his poems I am always amazed that something that seems so simple can be so deep.” This diversity of reading material results in “conflicting bits, the novel and the orderly, the stable and the radioactive, bouncing around in my head. What’s going to happen? Poems grow out of that stuff,” he says.

So, writing, reading, and then? I know Bill from my time serving on the board of the North Carolina Poetry Society. After I became serious about poetry, NCPS named one of the poems I’d really toiled over as a finalist for an award. I hadn’t won, but even that minor recognition validated my efforts. When, a few years later, I was asked to help out on the board, I agreed as a way of paying it forward. When I needed advice on literary citizenship, friends from my writing tribe—like Bill—came through.

Our lives are busy and not everyone can make time for a board position. But all writers can do something, say, attend a reading or an open mic, sign up for a workshop, get the word out about an upcoming book release or lit event. Someday, when your own book is fresh from the press, you’ll want a strong community there to write rave reviews, invite you to readings, send you notes of appreciation for your writing.

Don’t you want that? Introverts, this also means you. Get out there and engage with your people. Now’s the time to build that community, just as when you took your first steps into the writing world, someone was there to welcome you. Someone who offered to read one the poems sliding out from that duct-taped valise, someone who said, “This way. We’re all here together.”


Lisa Zerkle is the Curator of Charlotte Lit’s 4X4CLT Poetry and Art poster series.