Creating layers… through the window of the Miller-Claytor House, the oldest surviving house in Lynchburg, built ca. 1790.
I never thought I’d enjoy being forced to write the truth. Fiction is my first love, and even within that genre, I especially love exploring the blurred edge between the real and the mythic. But I’ve been working for a museum and as part of that work, writing and telling true stories about people that lived, places that exist, events that unfolded. Even though there are limitations that come with sticking to the truth, I’m finding history writing to be a powerful way to communicate some of the themes I care about.
I’ve written here about the creative potential of form—how limits can push or propel a writer into a greater set of ideas, a more rigorous or intense result that full freedom might not have prompted. Writing to share history is something like writing within a form. There are parameters and a set of facts that cannot be embroidered or mislaid. But within those boundaries, and using some of the same skills I employ in my creative projects, I find so much potential.
Every story, true or not, is more effective if it achieves an arc: a provocative beginning, an intense middle, and a satisfying or stunning end. Interpreting history seems to be about finding the perfect arrangement of truths to achieve this shape. Without a shape holding them together, facts can be difficult to hold onto. In this process of arrangement, my perspective is essential. Every interpretation conveyed through a different storyteller is unique. Even while tethered to the truth, as I frame anecdotes, layer details, find connections, and create subtle shifts in focus, I make a story my own.
Finally, working with true stories is satisfying because I see it making a tangible difference. At the museum, we are committed to finding narratives that have been forgotten or written over, stories of the marginalized that, until lately, have remained untold. I’m seeing these stories reach an audience in real time as I give guided walking tours, or put together themed exhibits.
As much as I’ve enjoyed this experience, I’m not abandoning my first love. In fact, I’m longing to dive back into my own invented worlds now more than ever. While sharing history, I’m allowed to provoke but not predict. I can make connections between people or objects or places in the past, but I can’t leap forward and apply those connections to the precarious future.
To warn, to predict, to leap intuitively to what might come next—this is the purview of the poet, the inventor of worlds. There will always be a need to look at and learn from the past, but there is also the need for a different kind of storyteller, too, a need for those writers on the frontier, looking forward, bringing powerful truths back from what they foresee.
Noelle Beverly writes poetry and prose, interprets local history at the Lynchburg Museum, and is a member of the BACCA Literary group. Photo by author.
I can spot about six different half-finished crochet projects from my desk. It took me nearly ten years to complete my bachelor’s degree because I kept changing majors—and schools. And, for the past many years, I’ve been wrestling with a memoir.
Recently, I’ve been considering shelving that writing project.
Is it time to unravel that “sweater” or just set down the hooks for awhile? Image by Olliss via Unsplash
There are several reasons I’m contemplating letting that project go. Much of the story deals with trauma, and it’s tricky to sit in that energy while trying to also enjoy and balance the demands of my current life. Also, one of the primary reasons I was writing was to try to understand why a family tragedy occurred, and in the process of regular old living, it became clearer to me. And, in the past few years, I found an alternate way of creating resources that might be of service to people who’ve experienced sibling loss, which was one of my initial motivators to complete this memoir. Last but not least, I’ve been writing about this topic for decades. I’m curious to see what else might bubble up on the page.
But what about completion? What about the countless hours I spent writing and revising? What about stick-to-itiveness?
One thing I love about crocheting is that the stakes are low. If I mess up partway through a project, or get bored with it, it doesn’t really matter if I rip the stitches out or start a new project. As a recovering perfectionist, there aren’t very many places in my life where I let myself off the hook (pun intended) so easily, but crochet is one of them. The meditative state I enter when my hands are busy making something with the yarn and hook is a worthy pursuit, regardless of whether it results in a blanket.
Writing is an art, but I choose to not see it only as a commodity. Writing has been a survival tool for me. It’s how I attempt to make order from the chaos. It’s often how I learn what I’m feeling. Writing helps me frame and understand parts of my life that otherwise seem disparate.
Besides, one of the best parts of writing, to me, is the magic that happens when we show up to the page and we tap into something outside of our own minds.
From that perspective, all those hours I spent on that memoir weren’t wasted.
In the time I spent on my memoir, I grieved. I remembered. I made sense of. I tinkered.
I’ve also been doing a whole lot of living in between. I’ve been raising two kids and nurturing an almost 20-year marriage. I was able to be present and helpful through my dad’s illness and death. We have a dog and a mortgage, and I exercise on the regular. From this little list, perhaps I’m not actually a quitter.
Completion isn’t the same as commitment.
Maybe writing doesn’t need to be that different from crochet—it’s not the end of the world when I have to rip out stitches or trash the sweater project because it ends up looking more like an oven mitt. Maybe there’s freedom there. Curiosity. Openness.
But. There’s still one thread of the memoir that I can’t quite let go of. It’s about the amazing women who shepherded me through losing my brother, and how they basically taught me how to connect, get through the tough stuff and live a rich life. I’d like to find a way to tell it, though I’m not yet sure what that might look like. I’m looking forward to giving the story some space, letting go of the vision I had of it in my head, and seeing what might take shape.
Lynn Shattuck grew up in a Southeast Alaskan rainforest and is now a Maine-based writer. She’s a columnist at Elephant Journal, where she writes about grief, parenting and wellness. Her essays have been featured in Human Parts,Al Jazeera, P.S. I Love You, The Fix, Vice, Fabric, and Mind Body Green.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day’s Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.
This may seem dangerously weird of me to say, but I could almost direct that entire poem to my relationship with books. (The ‘after death’ part might be overdoing it, and I’m not really into lost saints.)
Books are among the loves of my life. When I was little, they were a super-significant source of entertainment and escape. We were late to acquire a TV, and even once we had one, its use was seriously rationed, its location itself – in the former coal storage room – discouraging. My sibs were a lot older, and had their own lives. The street we lived on had more babies and infants than kids around my age. So I took advantage of the public library, just a few blocks away, along with the contents of the many shelves in our house, and occasional gifts from my grandmothers and parents. I could hole up under a lightbulb and read the hours away. I’d hide under the covers with a book and a flashlight after bedtime. The stories I was reading and the information I was gathering enlivened my waking and dreaming hours, every day. I read voraciously, unquestioningly, thirstily, with little thought to the authors or their circumstances, much less how their books came to be published and distributed. Those levels of awareness developed over time.
Once the classroom teachers expected us to regurgitate book reports on a regular basis, my unthinking enjoyment had to change. Now I had to introduce new analytical processes, alongside my love of character and setting and narrative. My fifth-grade teacher memorably demanded ‘the gist’ of each book’s story, requiring more of an overview than I had thought necessary. I adjusted – and savored even more the books that I read strictly for pleasure. The magic of words on a page, transporting me to someone else’s imagined or reported world, in another time, place, and culture – that was the best thing ever. I didn’t need to remember all the details for later reference. What mattered most was the immersion: dissociation at its best. I was uncritically indulging in showers and rivers and oceans of words.
High school brought longer-form papers, based on multiple books, and the dreaded outlines. (I’m a pantser to this day.) Footnotes. Index cards. Through it all, I sustained a love of reading, sighing with relief each time the heavy lifting of term-paper generation had ended and I could return to the uncritical inhalation of books.
Life sped up with college. Thereafter, my love affair with books alternated with other kinds of love affairs – plus work and assorted adult responsibilities.
Fast forward to my life now. Working less, with fewer responsibilities and the love life of an immune-compromised old person during a pandemic, books and I are hot and heavy once more. I binge without shame.
And when I write my own sentences, I breathe a prayer of gratitude to all the writers of all the books. Couldn’t do this without you. Mwahhh!
— A M Carley writes fiction and nonfiction, and is a founding member of BACCA. Through Anne Carley Creative she provides creative coaching and full-service editing to writers and other creative people. Decks of her 52 FLOAT Cards for Writers are available on Amazon. Anne’s writer handbook, FLOAT • Becoming Unstuck for Writers, is available for purchase from central Virginia booksellers, at Bookshop.org, and on Amazon. She’s querying her first novel, and writing her second.
2023 was my year to explore nonfiction. I didn’t follow any particular map to my exploration – I just read whatever struck my fancy. Since I’ve been working on a nonfiction book about the discovery of an earthquake fault under a nuclear power plant, I was curious to see how other authors tackled scientific, historical, and emotional subjects. Some of the authors were objective and presented only the facts. By not injecting their opinions, they let readers draw their own conclusions. Others included their opinions and even their morality into their prose, swaying readers to see the author’s point of view. Some authors wrote about their methodology of research while others left those details to the footnotes. Here are some of the nonfiction books I enjoyed and a few thoughts about their stories and how they were presented. I highly recommend all of them:
Ron Chernow’s biography, Alexander Hamilton, should be required reading for all Americans, especially for those who saw Hamilton: An American Musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda. I saw the musical on the Disney Channel and found it enlightening, albeit a tad one-sided. While George Washington is praised for his insight and leadership, Jefferson and Madison are slightly shortchanged. After reading Chernow’s in-depth examination, the wonder isn’t that Alexander Hamilton was shot by Aaron Burr, but rather that he ever existed at all. To rise from the lowest of births to the right-hand man of George Washington while still in his twenties is a rags-to-riches story beyond anything Hans Christian Andersen could dream up. Chernow injects little of himself into this biography, letting the book sway readers and form their own opinions about Alexander Hamilton.
The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell: It’s difficult to be objective about the bombing of civilians, and Gladwell doesn’t try to shield readers from the horrors. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell takes a close look at the small band of geniuses and moralists who challenged the Allied military strategy of mass bombing in World War II. Labeled the “Bomber Mafia,” they invented and proposed precision bombing techniques to save civilian lives. Sadly, their ideas were too farfetched (too ahead of their time) to be used in the 1940s. The deadliest night of World War II wasn’t the atomic bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki; it was the mass aerial bombing of Tokyo. Had the Bomber Mafia proposals been used, many lives in Tokyo might have been saved. Malcolm Gladwell is always a lively and relatable author who brings you right into his research and opinions. He doesn’t hold back on his feelings. He definitely gives his take on the 20th century tragedy of mass bombing.
The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery: This beautiful and spellbinding book should come with a warning to anyone who enjoys eating octopus because after reading Sy Montgomery’s “biography” of some of her octopus friends, you’ll never be able to eat these brilliant invertebrates again. For me, after reading The Soul of an Octopus, eating octopus or even squid feels akin to cannibalism. They have personalities, dreams, and hopes. They remember friends and can even warn their human companion of impending illness just by touch. Montgomery is the lifeblood of the narrative as she describes what it’s like to be touched and befriended by an octopus. She is an advocate for environmentalism and especially for marine life. There’s no objectivity here, and the results are perfect.
The Wager by David Grann is another book that should come with a warning. About halfway into the nonfiction, there is a visceral description of the disease scurvy. I promptly put oranges on my shopping list and took an extra Vitamin C. The story of the shipwreck of the British warship Wager not only tells of the bravery and foolishness of world exploration during the age of sails and wooden ships, but it also goes into how the shipwreck affected the British Royal Navy. Grann’s previous nonfiction is arguably my favorite book, Killers of the Flower Moon, which I read several years ago. As with Killers of the Flower Moon, Grann added a chapter or two about how he came upon the story of The Wager and about his research.
Avast yet matey!
Before ye sail any further let me warn ye!
There Be SPOILERS ahead!
Skip ahead if ye haven’t read Killers of the Flower Moon
Image courtesy of Pixabay
With overly high hopes, I went to see the movie version of Killers of the Flower Moon directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro. Every reader knows the excitement of watching their favorite book on screen. I looked forward to watching the members of the Osage community reckon with the murder of their members and the heartbreaking betrayal when they discover the culprits were married to Osage daughters. I know movies seldom live up to expectations, and unfortunately, the movie version of my favorite book was particularly disappointing. In the book, the narrative centered on the distraught Osage women, but the movie chose to focus on the male killers. In doing so, my beloved book was turned into a sick love story. Even more frustrating was that the audience immediately learns the identity of the killers, so the mystery that propelled the book was lost.
End of the spoilers
Ye can come back aboard
As if the universe wanted to give me a reversal of my disappointment in with Killers of the Flower Moon, my favorite movie in 2023 prompted me to read the book it was based on. I went to see the movie Oppenheimer (twice) before reading American Prometheus, The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. The book is the perfect companion to the movie Oppenheimer directed by Christopher Noland and staring Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey, Jr. The book fleshes out some details without veering away from the basic theme of the movie. Oppenheimer was a moral genius. Any other time in history his genius might have been used to create safe renewable energy but in the era of Hitler, it was used for destruction. He was both the hero and villain of his own story, and the details in the book only enrich the time, place, and people. The authors keep their voices low as they tell the story of Dr. Oppenheimer, allowing the reader to decide how history should regard him.
The biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer as well as my own research into the nearby North Anna Nuclear Power Plant directed me to my next nonfiction: Chernobyl, The History of A Nuclear Catastrophe, by Serhii Plokhy. The author dives deep into the cultural as well as the engineering failures that created the Chernobyl disaster. Chernobyl wasn’t a widget factory in which if a line employee noticed something amiss and just shrugged it off there was no harm done. With an industrial site as complex and dangerous as a nuclear power plant, transparency and communication are essential, but neither existed at the Chernobyl power plant near Kiev, Ukraine. In the inflexible hierarchy created by the Soviet Union, no one dared point out a mistake for fear that drawing attention would land him in prison or worse. “Keep your head down” was the motto of the Soviet Union in April 1986. Say nothing. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred in 1986, shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union. The disaster had a direct impact on faith in the government and accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s understandable mistrust of Moscow.
The newspapers in 2023 were full of articles about the war in Ukraine. The Chernobyl book brought home why Ukraine has felt betrayed by Moscow in the waning years of the Soviet Union but I wanted to learn more about the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. What better place to start than with the man who ruled the Soviet Union for half of its existence?
My journey into Soviet history began with Stalin, Volume One, Paradoxes of Power, 1878 – 1928, by Stephen Kotkin. What a fascinating enigma. A dark-haired Georgian born in obscurity, Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (he’d change his name to Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin) had to agree to study for the priesthood (Russian Orthodox) to receive any advanced education at all. He was a soft-spoken, relatively small man with a pockmarked face who walked with a limp. The brutality of the Tsar seemed to leave all Russians callous to the suffering of others and eager to make their lives minutely better. Lenin arrived on the doorstep of World War One and gave Russians a glimpse of life without the Tsar. His stirring speeches gave Russians a taste of delicious idealism. Lenin read Karl Marx the way Thomas Jefferson read John Locke – as true believers. Lenin’s death sent the nascent Soviet Union into the famous power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky. So famous, in fact, that it was satirized in the George Orwell classic Animal Farm with brutish Napoleon representing Stalin and thoughtful Snowball representing Trotsky. But Orwell fails to capture the political acumen of Stalin. He failed to capture Stalin’s initial openness and his devotion to Lenin and fellow communists. He failed to capture Stalin, the adroit politician who remembered names and birthdays and gathered loyal followers.
It took a full month for me to read the first volume of Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin biography but my interest in Soviet history wasn’t satiated. I was delighted when I learned that Kotkin had written a sequel. Like all my favorite nonfiction authors. Kotkin balanced the human story with historical detail.
Stalin, Volume 2, Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, also by Stephen Kotkin is the Stalin era that most of the world knows: the purges, the paranoia, and the mass graves. In his detailed biography, Kotkin gives the reader insight into Stalin’s rise to dictator and the chilling impact of his decisions on Russia and the world. Only Adolf Hitler could take the world’s eyes off the horrors of Stalin. While Hitler aimed his death camps at specific groups, Stalin was an equal opportunity murderer. Men and women from the highest levels of the Communist Party all the way down to the starving beggars of Ukraine and Georgia would fall into his mass graves. His insistence on the destruction of the peasant economy and replacing it with collectivization pitted neighbors against neighbors as poor peasants saw opportunities to take the wealth of slightly less poverty-stricken peasants. The standard byproduct of dictatorship is paranoia, and Stalin’s paranoia created the Great Terror that murdered millions and purged the Soviet Union of its most educated and experienced. The Great Terror came about largely because of Stalin’s cold and ruthless contempt for everything in Russia that existed before he ascended to power. The youth left alive were easier to mold into Stalin’s image.
Stephen Kotkin hasn’t completed Stalin Volume 3 but I look forward to its publication. He offers a complete and complex biography of Stalin and of the times he lived. Volume 2 devotes considerable time to the rise of Hitler and Stalin’s finagling to split Poland and stay out of World War Two. As I wait for Volume 3, I can’t help but compare the Russian Revolution to the American Revolution. What if Stalin hadn’t become a dictator? What might have the Soviet Union become? America flirted with monarchy when George Washington was elected President, with the army at his command. Washington could have easily become King of the United States. He didn’t. He resisted what so many others couldn’t – the siren call of power. Instead, Washington was the first to usher in the peaceful transfer of power in the United States. Stalin had to die for there to be a transfer of power in the Soviet Union and by then the precedent of cruel dictatorship was set. Considering what could have been in the Soviet Union is almost as heartbreaking as learning about what was.
I checked out one of the many Great Courses audiobooks from the local library, this one entitled From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History, presented by Professor Kenneth J. Hammond of New Mexico State University. Dr. Hammond’s lecture briefly touched on pre-history of China, including Peking Man (Homo erectus pekinensis) but the majority of the lectures were devoted to the eons of dynasties. The final lectures illuminated the western and Japanese mistreatment of China and the subsequent rise of Mao. Between Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, it’s amazing humanity survived.
Anyone who had read Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton should also read Thomas Jefferson, The Art of Power by Jon Meacham. Jefferson and Hamilton were two sides of the same coin. Both were completely devoted to the creation and defense of the United States, although their ideas on governing were vastly different. Both men devoured books, but while Hamilton was a famously flashy orator, Jefferson was a shy speaker. Jefferson saw Hamilton as dangerously enamored of the British system and public debt, while Hamilton saw Jefferson as an advocate of states’ rights at the expense of the federal government. Neither turned out to be true. Hamilton would never betray America to the British, and Jefferson expanded the national boundaries more than any other president in American history. Compared to Hamilton, Jefferson was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but his life wasn’t without heartache. On her deathbed, his young wife asked him never to remarry, and he never did. Other than his wife, his most famous and perhaps his constant love interest was his wife’s enslaved half-sister, Sally Hemings. And by all accounts (including those of John and Abigail Adams), Hemings was both brilliant and beautiful. According to Mr. Meacham, when Jefferson went to Paris as the US Ambassador of France, he brought Hemings’ older brother James with him as his personal chef. A few years later, sixteen-year-old Hemings accompanied Jefferson’s daughter to Paris. Hemings lived with Jefferson in Paris for several years, and under French law, both Sally and her brother James could have petitioned for their freedom. Why didn’t they? That begs the question: what would they have done had they stayed in France? Their mother and siblings were in Virginia. They had no one to turn to in France, nowhere to live. Moreover, the French Revolution was beginning. The guillotines were chopping, and death filled the streets. Hemings took this opportunity to negotiate a deal with Jefferson. She would return with him to the United States if he promised to free her children when they turned 21.
There was more to Thomas Jefferson than his complicated relationship with Sally Hemings just as there was more to Alexander Hamilton than his tragic duel with Aaron Burr. I encourage everyone to take the time to read about both of these remarkable men.
I came away from my year of nonfiction with a new depth of knowledge and a renewed admiration for the authors who tackled these riveting subjects. I discovered there are many ways authors communicate their intentions as they write. In The Soul of an Octopus, Sy Montgomery’s journey of discovery let readers come close to this magician of the sea. The strong opinions held by Ukrainian Serhil Plokhy, the author of Chernobyl, The History of A Nuclear Catastrophe, ring loud and clear even though he is barely mentioned in the book. In the biographies of the famous and infamous – Hamilton, Jefferson, Oppenheimer, and Stalin – most readers already have strong opinions about these men before opening the books. 1
Ultimately, whether the authors include themselves in the narrative seems to depend on the subject matter. Unfamiliar subjects need more guidance from the author to provide the reader with a full understanding and satisfying reading experience.
Image of woman at table created by Carolyn O’Neal using Dall E
Inner workings of 1850s-era clock at Old Court House, Lynchburg, Virginia.
Two tools have rescued me over and over this year: a timer and a notebook. Sometimes the simplest, most humble tools are also the most powerful.
Like just about everyone else, I’m taking inventory. 2023 is winding down; 2024 is about to start ticking away. Whether or not you subscribe to human constructs like calendars and clock time, late December is as good a time as any to assess and track what happened.
When I look back over the last year, especially with regard to my writing practice, I realize that the real challenge has been time. Balancing all the facets of my life—relationships, work, rest, exercise, and creative projects—has been much more difficult over the last 12 to 18 months. I’ve met most of my deadlines (eventually). I’ve created successful content for work, written important chapters for the end of my novel, and I even tried a few new things, like writing in a new genre. But there have also been flops and failures. Ideas that never got off the ground. Lackluster paragraphs and plot lines. Instances of neglect, when I didn’t live up to my promises. These are the moments that return to mind most often—especially in the wee hours.
I know that moving forward, however slowly, is the best recovery. Keep going and hone in on what’s working. It didn’t surprise me at all when I realized that the best creative tools I used this year also helped me to make good use of my time.
What can you do in an hour?
The first tool is very straightforward: set a timer and write for an hour. I learned this strategy from Jerry Seinfeld in his interview with Tim Ferriss. It sounds too simple—even inadequate. Creative work is made through dramatic power moves, right? Eureka moments and feverish all-nighters. Not necessarily. I was shocked to realize how many paragraphs and pages accumulated in just one hour of writing. If I could manage one hour of writing for three days in a row, or five, meeting a deadline suddenly became easy. Ideally, this hour would consist of sixty consecutive, uninterrupted minutes, but my life doesn’t work that way right now. So, if internal or external forces interrupted my work, I simply stopped the timer and then resumed as soon as I could.
I think that the time constraint is one reason this works. It introduces a sense of urgency, an energy, that can be very powerful. If I have all the time in the world (by some miracle), I will take all the time in the world, meandering through the writing process. Knowing I have only one hour helps me focus and get more done quickly.
I also used the timed-hour tool to set limits for certain projects: favors and side jobs, last-minute requests to rescue someone else from their procrastination-induced emergencies. I could easily lose oceans of time in situations like this. But if I limited this kind of work to an hour, I found that I met an obligation adequately enough without sacrificing too much of my own time.
A safe place for now…
The other powerful tool I used this year is an old friend: morning pages (from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way). Cameron’s prescription is to start every day with three, handwritten pages, scribbled as quickly as possible. This practice is meant to flush out useless mind detritus and limber up language skills before the real writing begins. The writing that results from this has no expectations attached to it—it doesn’t need to be polished or brilliant. An added advantage: the notebook is always ready to receive (no warming up or turning on required), and it travels easily.
I’ve used the morning pages strategy for years and found it to be very effective—and versatile. It’s not just a trash pile for me, although I use it to still circular thoughts and sequester worries or guilt-inducing feelings. These notebooks have also become a sanctuary for wild exploration, brain storms, idea generation. Sometimes, I ask a question and keep writing until the answer inevitably comes. I record dreams in them and track changes in my mood, my health, my relationships. For my writing projects, I can use morning pages to work out narrative arcs, flesh out characters, identify themes and record bits of dialog that I’ll incorporate into chapters later. So, the morning pages notebook is a safe place to get a few things down quickly. A place where ideas can live—for now—until I find the time to polish and position them to the best advantage.
Finally, morning pages are a place where, without interruption or correction, I can fully express a thought, following it to full completion. How often do we have the chance to speak without being diverted, distracted, or otherwise cut off? How many good ideas, great lines, or amazing new projects have perished in that moment of interruption? Maybe we all need to create a safe space for those thoughts to grow and develop.
Are you looking back over 2023 and making plans for 2024? Have you tried something new in your creative practice that worked? Do you have strategies or tools that never let you down? In the final moments of this year and in the first moments of the next, I hope that we all find good tools and make time for our creative work. Cheers, and Happy New Year!
Noelle Beverly writes poetry and prose, supports local writers in the surrounding community, and is a member of the BACCA Literary group. Photo by the author.
Writers tend to be a quirky bunch. You may have heard the quote attributed to Dorothy Parker that many writers relate to: “I hate writing. But I love having written.”
I’ve been in a creative slump for a while. I’ve paused work on the memoir that I’ve been wrestling with for years. I’m puttering around on another project that, while easier, I feel less driven about. And I’m querying the project about which I recently wrote about crafting a book proposal. I wouldn’t quite call it writer’s block—it’s more like writer’s blah.
A few weeks ago, I met with a new friend for coffee. She’s a writer, too, as is considering getting an MFA. As we talked about everything from the publishing industry to our favorite memoirs, I heard these words come out of my mouth:
“I miss the feeling of just sitting down and not knowing what’s going to come out on the page. That feeling of curiosity. Play.”
I’m struggling to remember the last time I experienced that. It was probably several months ago, when on a whim, I delved into a piece of fiction. I approached it with an unfamiliar gentleness. The stakes were low; it was an experiment.
That spirit of inquisitiveness, of play? It’s the best. When I stop ruminating about agents and publishing routes and social media, and I just become a channel, a divining rod, an adventurer.
The best part of writing are the moments when I don’t feel like I’m in charge.
When my son was a toddler, one afternoon I brought a bucket of ice cubes outside for him to play with. The warmth of his hands and the summer air alchemized the ice. The cubes shrank, transforming into drips of water. My son’s eyes went wide and bright, amazed at the wizardry that was occurring. He wasn’t worried about whether he could turn the water back into ice or if anyone besides me would witness the magic he’d just created. He was an explorer, a chemist, a student.
It’s similar to the way I feel when I read something that takes my breath away. An unexpected metaphor or a passage that’s so transcendent that I can’t quite put my finger on why I love it—it simply lights something up in me in a place beyond words. It’s similar to moments when we catch a glimpse of how small our human lives are when measured against the vast history of the universe, or the unexpected delight we might conjure during a casual exchange with someone in the grocery store. The pleasure of making a new friend.
I guess I’m talking about awe. Tapping into the mystery. So many of us feel starved for wonder these days; modern life offers a billion ways to distract us, our to-do lists are never-ending and bad news bombards us around the clock.
Next time I sit down to write, I’m going to think about my son, captivated by those ice cubes. What might happen when my fingers hit the keyboard, if I show up with an open mind and a curious heart?
—BACCA guest writer Lynn Shattuck grew up in a Southeast Alaskan rainforest and is now a Maine-based writer. She’s a columnist at Elephant Journal, where she writes about grief, parenting and wellness. Her essays have been featured in Human Parts, Al Jazeera, P.S. I Love You,The Fix, Vice, Fabric and Mind Body Green.
Last time I blogged here, I described the process of querying my first novel. Now, a few months later, I have news. Has an agent requested the full manuscript? Even better, did the agent love the ms and make me an offer of representation? Even better, was the agent a good fit for me and my work? Even better, did we contract to work together? Even better, did the agent find a publisher who wanted my manuscript? Do we have a publishing contract and a launch date?
Nope. None of those happened. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
But querying has gotten a little bit easier for me.
Why? Two reasons.
Practice, Practice, Practice
Just like doing laundry or playing cards or building flat-pack furniture, our skills and facility improve over time when we keep repeating the process. The first queries I sent out were overwhelmingly difficult for me. Everything about them was hard.
Getting a decent draft of the query letter, for starters, was a long-term project. I have since revised and rewritten it countless times, but just getting it to minimally presentable status took a ton of work. Describing / selling your full-length novel with 150 words? Finding comp titles recently published in the same genre? And, by the way, what is the genre? Literary fiction? Don’t you need an MFA to be eligible to write lit fic? Book club fiction? I worry that I’m not plotty enough for that. Upmarket fiction? Maybe that’s the sweet spot. Then there’s the sentence or two of author bio – where you say enough, not too much, about yourself to sound confident, not meek, and also not arrogant. Also competent and collegial, not supplicating. Also respectful, not sycophantic.
Then there’s the ongoing search for the agents who might entertain receiving your query. On their schedule. Using their preferred document formats. In the genres they declare themselves interested in. Erf. It’s enough to make a person not want to query their novel.
Point is, these skills do get easier with practice. Querying still takes longer than I think it will. I can’t just expect to set aside ten minutes and knock one out (although that’s been possible once or twice). Many of the agents I’m approaching use the online QueryManager portal. In addition to supplying places to paste in (and then reformat) or upload the requisite number of pages or chapters, the bio, comps, sometimes synopsis, and other chunks of text, QueryManager allows its agents to ask questions.
So far, I am finding that no two agents’ QM forms are alike. One agent wanted a profile of the readers I think will be drawn to my book. Another wanted to know how many copies my self-published book sold in its first year. Another wanted my Twitter handle. Another – well, you get the idea. Some of those questions can take a while to answer, and you never know until you’re already mid-query what the surprise questions are going to be, or how challenging they’ll be to answer. I have learned to allow an hour, and never to query when the clock is ticking away before an upcoming appointment.
The Nice Rejection
The second reason why querying has become a little easier is that one of the agents didn’t just ghost-reject me or send a standard no-thanks message. She actually wrote to me, and said that, while my novel wasn’t the right book for her, she’d like to take a look at my next project when it’s ready.
I knew this agent’s response was different, and yet I was acutely aware of my neophyte status in the whole world of querying. Uncertain what to make of it, and cautious about celebrating something I wasn’t sure I understood, I quoted it to a friend who’s farther along in the querying / agenting / publishing journey. I asked her, “On the spectrum of rejections, that’s somewhere in the middle, I think, yes? It definitely feels better than the ghost rejections 12 weeks post-query.”
My friend sent back congratulations, saying, “This is a really good rejection! It means that even though she’s not interested in this book, she likes your writing, and if you had an idea that spoke to her, she’d likely sign you. Print this one out and use it as inspiration.”
Getting that reinforcement from a friend and colleague helped me frame the nice rejection in a way that feels validating. The agent thinks my writing is legit!
The queries I’ve sent out since receiving that nice rejection have felt lighter, easier, more straightforward.
Funny how that works: I gained confidence from being rejected. Who knew?
— A M Carley writes fiction and nonfiction, and is a founding member of BACCA. Through Anne Carley Creative she provides creative coaching and full-service editing to writers and other creative people. Decks of her 52 FLOAT Cards for Writers are available fromAmazon. Anne’s writer handbook, FLOAT • Becoming Unstuck for Writers, is available for purchase from central Virginia booksellers, at Bookshop.org, and on Amazon. She’s querying her first novel, and writing her second.
The Library of Virginia in Richmond celebrates two-hundred years of service this year. The on-line access to databases and eBooks offered by the library has been invaluable to my research. Newspaper articles provide facts and opinions from multiple points of view, the foundation of my narrative nonfiction.
Library of Virginia screenshot by Carolyn O’Neal
If newspaper articles do the heavy lifting for my research about the discovery of the earthquake fault under the North Anna Nuclear Power Plant, the heart of this story comes from talking to the people who were there: interviewing people by phone or in person who knew the participants or saw the geology. I’ve had opportunities to speak to professional geologists who visited the North Anna. I’ve spoken friends of Dr. Funkhouser and to Mr. Moss’s daughter. But arguably the most insightful interview I’ve ever conducted came about because two wonderful people shared stories about Doc Funkhouser with their daughter. They told her about the brilliant and colorful geology professor they knew in the early 1970s.
A few months ago, I received a message from a young woman who told me her parents knew both Dr. Funkhouser and the man convicted of murdering him. I immediately scheduled a lunch meeting with the young woman and her parents. The meeting was a windfall for my research. Both parents were well informed on the issues surrounding nuclear energy and had fabulously detailed memories of Doc and his murderer. Here’s the kicker. These wonderful people might never have seen my blog posts about North Anna or Dr. Funkhouser without their daughter. And their daughter wouldn’t have realized the significance of what she’d stumbled upon had they not told her stories of their youth.
Tell your stories! Share your history! Facts and opinion only go far in bringing the past to life. We need to hear it from the people who were there!
Carolyn O’Neal and her great niece, sharing stories.
If I really want to make forward progress, I might have to move to the side. I don’t mean step aside, as in bow out or leave. I’m referring to a strategic lateral, or sideways, shift. Sometimes, I find I can change the limitations of my world with a strong leap—out of one way of thinking and into another.
You know those scenes in a movie where the protagonist is desperately trying to run away from some huge thing barreling behind him? A boulder, a train, a troll? Do you also find yourself yelling at that protagonist? Just jump to the side, for the love of all things good and holy, jump to the side!! Or is that just me? If dude would just think (while he’s running for his life) and make a quick leap to one side or the other, the huge thing would barrel on in its track. Big things don’t pivot easily or quickly—but we can!
For years now, I’ve thought of the lateral shift as one of the most powerful tools that any person can acquire and develop. It is the quickest and most joyful way to something fresh, original, unexpected. We have other terms for this. The epiphany. The eureka moment.
Sometimes these moments happen so quickly that we think it’s an accident, or a twist of fate, or divine intervention that brought us there. But our minds, I believe, love to leap. If we let them. I think kids do this naturally and all the time. They play with big ideas, allow them to collide together. They see endless potential in every facet of the world they encounter. They transform the everyday (cardboard box, abandoned shack, pretty rock) into powerful possibility (a ship, a mansion, a jewel). They do this for the sake of joy and play.
As we grow up, maybe we abandon this practice because we think we have to stay in our lanes, follow the prescribed track to the big prize. Pay our dues and all that. I don’t think we really forget, however, how important it is make the lateral leap. How often are we asked to “think out of the box” to come up with a solution? Yep, the lateral shift is so old that there are cliched phrases built around it and it’s so powerful and valued that we hear those phrases all the time.
Three ways of looking at a wine cage. Photo by author.
What does a lateral shift look like in practical terms? Never one thing—that’s the beauty of it. A lateral shift idea is often simple, but always fresh. Like opening a door that wasn’t there before. It might be finding an alternate use for an every day object. Finding a different route to the same old destination. Or using space in an innovative way. Or making use of a pocket of time that seemed empty or wasted before.
In a great narrative, the lateral leap is a twist so good that you never could have seen it coming the first time around. A regular twist might be that, out of all the suspects, the murderer is the most innocent-looking one. A really good twist (with some lateral work going on behind it) is that all the suspects collaborated to commit a crime—no one is innocent.
I think of it as an elegant swerve. A simple solution that no one thought of before because they were only thinking in one direction, with all of their prejudices and preconceived ideas left unchallenged.
I’ve been pursuing lateral thinking ever since I discovered the “two minute mystery,” a misnomer since solving one might take an afternoon unless you have at least one smart friend working on it with you.
A woman walks into a bar and asks for a glass of water. The bartender pulls out a gun.The woman says “thank you,” and leaves.What happened?
If you know, you know. The answer is the easiest thing. It’s just…getting there. It requires a leap to the side. (I don’t believe in offering spoilers or giving answers away, but if you want to work on this mystery with me, leave a comment below.) The solution to these puzzles often comes after you’ve been chipping away at it with yes or no questions for some time. But not as part of a logical progression forward (necessarily). It’s usually a little sideways leap that gets you there. A moment when you confront certain assumptions that you’ve been harboring—and decide to let them go so you can step into broader possibilities.
I’m honing my lateral thinking skills right now for the sake of my current protagonist—Vi, a brilliant 9 ½ -year-old, who lives in a house that is like a giant puzzle box. In some ways this story has been easy to write. I can hear the characters talking to each other, so dialog almost writes itself. Other scenes, where I have to get Vi into a part of the house that she’s never discovered before, are much more challenging. To help her find a secret corridor or hidden panel, I really have to labor. I have to think about architecture (not my field) and physics (also not). Then, I’m sweating…until I remember that maybe I could just leap.
Noelle Beverly writes poetry and prose, supports local writers in the surrounding community, and is a member of the BACCA Literary group.
I’d been aware of the enigmatic document for years. But whenever I’d start to research how to write an actual book proposal, I got overwhelmed.
Besides, I was writing a memoir. While some agents and publishers liked a book proposal, I’d heard that most preferred the memoir itself. Why spend my time writing an overwhelming, difficult document like a book proposal that no one might read, when I’m already wrestling with a vexing memoir?
For years, like the proverbial person opening a closet door to peek at the disorganized stash within, I’d slam the book proposal door shut, vowing to deal with it later.
But recently, I decided to pursue an anthology project that I’ve been contemplating for decades. While it’s hard to get a straight answer about whether memoirists need a book proposal, for the book I had in mind—a nonfiction anthology—I definitely needed one.
As a writer, I love the magic of words. The feeling of transcendence when a piece of writing hits me on a soul level. Gleaming imagery and alliteration and striking metaphors.
I’m less keen on the salesy stuff.
My colleague and friend, Lisa Cooper Ellison, describes a book proposal as a business document that builds a case for the salability of your book. I was fortunate enough to take a class Lisa recently offered on writing a book proposal. Being among a group of other writers who were tackling this document was incredibly helpful.
Still, the process, at times, felt much like wading into a closet full of junk. Book proposals usually consist of several different sections, including an overview, a description of the target audience who’d buy the proposed book, a marketing plan, comparable titles, and sample chapters. When I started the class, I was particularly confused about the blurry borders between the target audience and the marketing plan. I also knew I’d made some mistakes as a writer— namely, I’d been inconsistent in building my author platform. Writing the proposal meant taking that out of the closet, staring at it, and deciding how to proceed.
With time, baby steps and Lisa’s fantastic teaching, I began to get a clearer understanding of the different sections of the proposal and which information needed to be included in each.
What I didn’t expect was for writing this beast of a book proposal to supercharge my enthusiasm about the project. I’d figured it would be a dull but necessary slog. But as I wrote and revised the document, blending my personal experience with statistics and research, and reviewed the sample chapters I’d compiled from contributing authors, that’s exactly what happened.
By the time I was ready to send the latest version of the proposal to my co-editor, I’d experienced a significant shift. The proposal became cohesive and convincing. It has an arc, and it clearly demonstrates that there’s an audience for this book. I even found a little room, in this starch-collared business document, for a little creativity, when I realized I could include social media screenshots that demonstrated high engagement on the anthology’s topic.
Writing a book proposal isn’t fun or easy, but I’ve grown to appreciate the value of the process. It wasn’t that different than creative writing—there were days when it all felt like a big mess that would never make sense, and there were other days when the words flowed, and I could see smidges of progress.
But perhaps more importantly, the process of writing a book proposal demands that we clarify what the book is about, why the world needs it now, who will buy it, and how we’ll reach that audience. It requires spending time with each item in the proverbial disaster closet and deciding what’s junk and what’s worth holding onto. And better yet, what’s worth fighting for.
—BACCA writer Lynn Shattuck grew up in a Southeast Alaskan rainforest and is now a Maine-based writer. She’s a columnist at Elephant Journal, where she writes about grief, parenting and wellness. Her essays have been featured in Human Parts, Al Jazeera, P.S. I Love You,The Fix, Vice, Fabric and Mind Body Green.
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