There is a well-intentioned person who gets in the way of my ideas bursting onto the page. This person is eager to please, wants to make sure I use the right term every time, and is convinced that a semi-poetic line can become the best version of itself if I just stop and tinker with it a while. That person is, of course, me.
To get this zealous fellow to stop and let me write, I took a wonderful card from Meg Pokrass’s endless Rolodex of tips and tricks. Two, actually. One was her suggestion to write with a black screen. It’s simple, really. Here’s Meg Pokrass: “Go to ‘brightness’ in Settings and turn it all the way down so that you can’t see/edit what you are working on.” This is VERY uncomfortable at first. The first time I tried writing with a black screen, I dimmed down, tapped up, dimmed down, tapped up, just to check if writing was actually getting done in the cosmic darkness before me. And then, well, you just let go. If I had done any bungee jumping in my life, I would say that this feels like bungee jumping. Exactly like it, in fact.
The second card from the Rolodex is to use prompt words. This is trademark Meg Pokrass. You can create your own list or use a random prompt word generator online. I jot them down on a Post-it note next to the keyboard. Prompt words are good in general, but with black-screen writing they’re a great tool to gain momentum. And black-screen writing is all about momentum. I’ve gotten flight velocity a few times, and when the brightness settings go up, there are, impossibly, a thousand words emerging from the darkness.
Cleaning up the mess is fun at that point. Of course there are typos! Of course quotation marks are all over the place! Of course a name is misspelled every time! I mean, it was a black screen. Not a dash of judgment goes into the batter. And that’s my writing tip. Get momentum with prompt words, and do some high diving into a black screen.
Federico Escobar grew up in Cali, Colombia, and has lived in New Orleans, Jerusalem, Oxford, and Puerto Rico. He has published short stories and poems, as well as academic articles and translations, in both Spanish and English. His literary work has been published or is forthcoming in Cabinet of Heed, The Phare, Bending Genres, Passengers Journal, Typishly, Tulane Review, HermanoCerdo, Revista Eñe, Sad Girl Diaries, and Stone’s Throw Magazine. He currently works in education.
In her story“The Back Nine” (Issue 45), Kim Magowan shows us a character with a growing list of personal losses, trying to come to terms with the lost connections that still haunt her.
Andrea: Where did this story begin for you? With the main character of Marianne, or a general situation, or the story’s thematic preoccupations? Thanks for sharing your early ideas as you crafted the narrative.
Kim: This story has a basis in fact. Several high school classmates of mine have died in the past decade, and “Sad News” is, indeed, the subject heading of these emails that go round announcing their deaths. Another classmate of mine died just a couple of months ago, after I’d already written this story. I guess I’m getting to an age where these deaths will start seeming more normal and commonplace, but right now, I experience each one as shocking. (A mortal being in denial of my mortality!). For a couple of days after one of these “Sad News” announcements, the email thread keeps growing, and I find myself obsessively tracking everyone’s comments. It’s a way I can both pay respect and make sense of these losses. One of my classmates mentioned something about being on “the back nine” of our lives, and though I’m not a golfer, that phrase burrowed into my brain. The next morning I started this story.
Andrea: The POV is third-person, but the distance varies, sometimes close to Marianne’s inner experience, and at others, seemingly further away than close-third. Could you give us a sense of how you modulated the POV, or used it to suggest the protagonist’s comfort level with her emotions?
Kim: As I reread the story, I see what you mean. Those junctures where we’re more removed from Marianne’s mind are mostly when she’s reading other people’s memories of Chip. Her most distinctive moment of contact with him is a kind of anti-contact, when he’s facing her but looking through her, so she can’t entirely access how classmates closer to Chip see him. Memories that to her are a little repugnant—she calls them “violent”—are warm ones to her classmates. At the end of the story, she’s removed again, unable to account for why she still displays an unflattering photo of herself and her ex-husband. But my hope is that the reader will have thoughts about what that photo means to her, what it is “proof” of, even if Marianne “doesn’t have the capacity to name” it. I see Marianne as a limited character, carefully guarding her emotions and her insights, because truly feeling them, and truly seeing people, is frightening. It’s always scary, to be proximate to loss.
Andrea: At first the title felt like a mismatch, with its golf terminology as we’re meeting a former football player. Yet within a few paragraphs, it became clear that a larger metaphor was at play (!) regarding sports idioms and “the game of life,” as well as gender differences in approaching that “game.” Please tell us about the title, and the possibilities it opened up for you with “The Back Nine.”
Kim: I mentioned this already, but the title was the seed of the story, the kernel of truth from which the story sprung. My writer friend Mike read an early draft, and he didn’t like the title: he thought it was a cliché. Though I’m often willing to bail on titles (I suck at titles), I clung to this one, partly because the phrase had dug into my brain, and partly for the reasons you describe above. In high school, sports matter; sports are how a lot of friendships are formed, and they convey social status. Almost forty years later, I still remember who the varsity captains of my high school’s teams were: football, track, soccer, field hockey, ice hockey, tennis, crew, and lacrosse. Playing sports is one of the early ways we start coping with losses; being a “good sport” is about a graceful approach to loss. So those things were all in my head regarding the title: that in high school, sports have an outsized role in one’s life and lexicon. I understood Mike’s point about how “the back nine” as a cliché, but that made the analogy more interesting to me—the idea that life is a game that, ultimately, we all must lose. (Heavy thought! Well, this story is all about the painful confrontation with mortality, something few of us cheerfully face).
Andrea: What were some challenges you experienced while writing or revising the story? How did you address them?
Kim: I wrote this story quickly. It was one of those bursting-to-get-out stories. I’ve been thinking a lot about aging and dying lately; I see preoccupations with mortality in much of my fiction and nonfiction from the last year. I’m definitely one of those writers who processes thoughts by alchemizing them into stories. All this is to say—the challenge of writing this story was that writing it made me sad. It made me think about things I don’t like thinking about. The craft problem I had with the story was how to end a story about endings, in the close-third perspective of a character who tries to avoid pressing her bruises. I thought a lot about those items on the table; I saw the ending in an almost cinematic way, as a film shot, a tableau. I thought about what Marianne literally displayed, and what those items displayed about Marianne.
Andrea: What are you working on now?
Kim: Two big things, which feels very daunting! But fortunately, I have a partner for one of them. Michelle Ross and I have a collection of co-authored stories coming out early next year from EastOver Press. Our book is called Don’t Take This the Wrong Way (that title is in part a nod to the way we wrote these stories, emailing paragraphs back and forth). Writing those stories together has been so fun and joyful. I highly recommend collaborative writing! We just finished final edits, and we have a lot of book promotion tasks ahead. Promotion generally feels like a grind, but it will be much more pleasant getting to do them with Michelle, and we’re in great hands at EastOver Press. Also, I have another short story collection of my own, my third collection, that I think is just about done. I still need to puzzle some things out about the manuscript—identify weak links, tweak the sequence, figure out the right story to open with and the right title, but I’m close. I’m within spitting distance.
Kim Magowan is the author of the short story collection Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, co-authored with Michelle Ross, forthcoming from EastOver Press; the short story collection How Far I’ve Come (2022), published by Gold Wake Press; the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books; and the short story collection Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her fiction has been published in Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf‘s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com
Andrea Caswell runs Cleaver’s Short Story Clinic, offering detailed feedback on fiction up to 5500 words. Whether you’re wondering how to improve a story, getting ready to submit one to a lit mag, or preparing an MFA application portfolio, editorial feedback will be personalized to help you reach your fiction goals. Writers may also schedule a conference with Andrea as a one-on-one workshop to discuss their work further.
A Writing Tip by Clifford Thompson DUALITY IN THE PERSONAL ESSAY
Duality is the soul of the personal essay.
I sometimes tell students that while the province of speeches and op-ed articles is certainty, the domain of the personal essay is uncertainty. The personal essay represents an attempt, raised to the level of art, to make some sense of life and navigate some of its complexities. The word “complexities” suggests that there is more than one way of looking at a subject, that uncertainty is possible, and this is where duality comes in. To read many of the best works in the genre is to follow along as the writer argues with themselves. The writer of the personal essay does not start out knowing the answer and may not know by the end, either—but if we are reading the work of a master, we are at least given a new way of viewing the question. This duality, then, helps bring about the ultimate achievement of the personal essay, which is when a reader says, “I had never thought of it that way.”
I also tell students that while life is made up of innumerable details that do not necessarily relate to one another, those details, once on the page, take on an interrelationship—and it is the job of the essayist to manage that interrelationship. Here is where duality comes in once more. For each object, fact, or event mentioned in a personal essay, we must understand both what it is and what it means. Duality plays a part, too, in what writers find to be the most vexing part of an essay: the ending. The trick is to say goodbye without closing the door—to leave and yet leave us with something to consider. This makes for a similar duality: the words, and where they lead.
Creative Nonfiction Contest Judge Clifford Thompson’s books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues (2019), which Time magazine called one of the “most anticipated” books of the season, and the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men (2022), which he wrote and illustrated. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Best American Essays, The Times Literary Supplement, Commonweal, and The Threepenny Review, among other places, and his essay “La Bohème” was selected for the 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Thompson teaches creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. A painter, he is a member of Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City. Thompson was born and raised in Washington, DC, attended Oberlin College, and lives with his wife in Brooklyn, where they raised their two kids.
A Conversation with Cleaver Senior Nonfiction Editor Sydney Tammarine DUALITY IN NONFICTION
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
What does duality in creative nonfiction mean to you? Do you have any favorite essays or memoirs that explore duality?
When I think about duality, I think about the tension that is inherent in all life, and therefore, in all good literature. I often tell my students that one definition of essay is a verb that means to try: the essay is an attempt to understand—to reconcile—those parts of life that feel most contradictory.
One of my favorite short essays about duality—one I got to read with students in a recent visit to Davis & Elkins College—is Anika Fajardo’s “What Didn’t Happen.” Fajardo examines the life she didn’t live—the self she didn’t become—because her family left Colombia to live in the United States. The essay asks those most universal questions: Who am I? What makes me who I am? As she describes this other self, the imagined self, her present life lives like a ghost on the page: defined and measured in comparison to—which is to say, always in tension with—the imagined self in Colombia, the self she carries with her in the United States.
To me, there’s not an essay that doesn’t explore duality in some way. Almost by definition, the essay explores dualities of narrative and philosophy, language and limitation, memory and imagination, self and society: who we are and who we want to be.
I can’t wait to see what our readers come up with.
Sydney Tammarine‘s work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and other journals. Her essay “Blue Hour” was selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2021. She is the translator of two collections of poetry by Christian Formoso: The Most Beautiful Cemetery in Chile / El cementerio más hermoso de Chile and Pavilion of the Names / Pabellón de los nombres (Cuadernos de Casa Bermeja in Argentina and MAGO Editores in Chile). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University and is Associate Professor of English at New Mexico Military Institute. You can find her at www.sydneytammarine.com.
At an Oxford, Mississippi, courthouse last summer, I sat in on the trial for the most recent person to try to assassinate my father, a circuit court judge. Things went poorly for the defendant. The prosecutor played the recording of a call he had made to his cousin while he was awaiting trial. During the call, he asked his cousin to Google information about the accusations against him—the guy might as well have asked his cousin to visit some website called I’mGuilty.com.
But that’s not what I found most interesting about the call. Whenever the tape went silent, presumably while the defendant’s cousin searched the internet, a strange tap-tap-tapping could be heard, like the sound when a stand-up comic, bombing on stage, hits the microphone: Is this thing on?
After playing the phone call, the Assistant DA prefaced her examination of a detention officer by asking about that sound, and the officer explained that because the phone system is computerized, it automatically drops the call if there are more than twenty seconds of sustained silence. “Inmates figured out that tapping the mouthpiece fools the system.”
The circuit board of my writer’s brain surged with electricity. Ah, the dramatic potential! By the time the direct and cross-examinations wrapped up, I had invented and field-tested, examined and re-examined, appraised, cataloged, and filed away dozens of ways I could use the tapping in a work of fiction. Not only could it provide support to the narrative—as a red herring for some layperson listening to the tape, as a smoke screen for relaying secret messages from jail—but it could also help with the secondary elements of atmosphere, suspense, and rhythm. The tap-tap-tapping could break up otherwise blocky chunks of dialogue. For readers, it could subconsciously mirror a character’s pounding heart. And I’m sure there are more uses for the metronomic tapping that I haven’t yet thought of.
Although I ended up not using it for my work-in-progress—a literary Southern Gothic crime novel set in the 80s, years before computerization reached jailhouse phone systems—the tapping has remained in my head, a reminder not of the missed opportunity but of so much potential. I can almost hear the tapping when aspiring crime writers ask for advice. Visit your local courthouse, I tell them. Most criminal trials are open to the public, and hearing schedules can typically be found online. Watch. Listen. You never know what you’ll pick up.
Snowden Wright is the author of American Pop and Play Pretty Blues. He has written for The Atlantic, Salon, Esquire, and the New York Daily News, among other publications. A former Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellow at the Carson McCullers Center, Wright lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi. His third novel, The Queen City Detective Agency, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in August 2024.
As I write (or rewrite) a piece of fiction, I ask myself a few questions: Why does the story start when it does? What does my chosen point of view add or subtract from the piece? What is the problem, and how is it a symptom of the deeper conflict? I’ve recently started asking myself: What will readers want for my characters? What will they fear for them?
When it comes to crafting a character, the heart of their journey lies in the emotional investment of the reader. A character should transcend being a mere plot device; they should be someone the reader cheers for, frets over, and ultimately cares deeply about. Readers should yearn for something for the character—be it conquering a mythical dragon, finding true love, or battling their inner demons. This yearning fosters a connection and stokes the reader’s curiosity, drawing them further into the character’s world and amplifying the impact of their triumphs.
Equally significant is the reader’s capacity to fear or worry about something for the character. This could be a looming danger, a character flaw that might lead to their downfall, or the uncertainty of their future. It could be something fantastical—like the dragons I mentioned—or something as human as heartbreak. This fear or worry not only injects suspense and complexity into the narrative, keeping the reader on the edge of their seat, but also sustains their interest in the character’s journey. We often find ourselves in these struggles; sometimes, they’re more relatable than success.
When these two elements are skillfully woven together, the character becomes fully realized, multidimensional, and utterly compelling. The reader becomes emotionally invested, experiencing the character’s triumphs and setbacks as if they were their own. In essence, writing a character is about evoking empathy and engagement. By making the reader have hopes and fear for a character, the writer brings them off the page and into real life. Those are the characters that stay with us long after we finish reading.
Jess Silfa is an Afro-Latine writer from the South Bronx. They graduated with an MFA from Vanderbilt University and are currently an Albert C. Yates Fellow in the Ph.D. program at the University of Cincinnati. Jess is President of the Disabled and D/deaf Writers Caucus and has been published or has work forthcoming in ANMLY, beestung, Transition Magazine, and others.
Andrea Caswell: “Stay on the Line” begins in media res, in a hospital during a medical emergency. What made you decide to start there? With short stories, it can be hard to know where to jump in sometimes.
Richie Zaborowske: I love short stories. I love how every word counts and is working toward a common goal. I love how, in a matter of minutes, I can have a complete literary experience. With this in mind, when I’m constructing a story, I’m always considering if what I’m writing is necessary to the piece as a whole. Does it move the plot forward? Is it interesting? Is it needed? The opening here isn’t necessarily needed in the sense of the plot or character development, but I thought it helped establish the voice and tone of the piece, and created a vivid scene that readers could immediately latch on to.
Andrea: The story is narrated in the second person, which feels like just the right choice. Did you try other forms of narration before selecting second person?
Richie: My main concern when writing “Stay on the Line” was that readers have sympathy for the character, which I thought might be tricky. Here is someone experiencing one of the greatest moments of their life (the birth of a child), while also feeling an incredible sense of loneliness. With our second child, the delivery was similar to the one in the story (not as dramatic, but we had some scares). My goal in this story was to convey some of the emotions I was feeling: the fear and joy, but also the solitude. I had a related experience when I was home with both of my children during Covid. I felt incredibly fortunate and wanted to cherish my time with them, but I was also counting the minutes until the UPS driver showed up so I could have a chat with an adult.
To create this sympathy, writing in second person, though I don’t use that form often, came naturally. I think that’s what I started with, and it didn’t feel overly “writerly,” so I just went with it.
Andrea: You’ve combined high and low moments here: the birth of a child and receiving spam calls. I thought I knew what to expect with each situation, but I was wrong, which is what I think good fiction should do: awaken us from our auto-pilot responses so we can experience the human condition anew. How did you develop the trajectory for this story? Did it hold some surprises for you as well?
Richie: I tend to write a lot of stories where a character is out searching for something: out in the city, or a cornfield, or in this case, a hospital. I like movement and staying in the scene and letting the plot propel things forward, creating a linear experience for the reader. So even though I had an idea for the beginning of the story, when the character left the hospital room I had no idea where they were going. All of it was a surprise for me. And those are the types of stories I like writing best, because it’s almost as if I’m living the story while I’m writing: I’m walking past the window with the snow, I’m discovering the birthday cake in the cooler. All I have to do is take detailed notes of what’s happening and before I know it, the story is finished.
Andrea: What are some challenges you experience while writing? How do you address them?
Richie: My biggest challenge, by far, is patience. I have none. It took me a long time to realize that only with time (sometimes months, sometimes years) do my pieces improve. I have to let my pieces rest between sessions. If I keep coming back to edit a piece day after day, I notice that I end up rewriting the first paragraph over and over, or making only incremental changes, like switching around sentence structure or swapping words. Instead of making improvements, I’m simply writing.
If I can put a piece away for a few months, then approach it with fresh eyes, not only do I catch more mistakes, but I’m also able to make bigger changes: cut whole swaths that don’t belong, add where it’s flagging, develop the characters more. I’m not organized enough to have a system, but I find that it helps me to have several pieces going at once. Right now I’m writing a few short stories, some poetry, and nonfiction. This way I’m always rotating pieces, always approaching my work with fresh eyes.
Richie Zaborowske is a dad, librarian, and author from the Midwest. He puts a contemporary twist on traditional library offerings; his monthly Short Story Night packs the local brewery and features trivia, comedy, and author interviews. His writing appears in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Brevity, The Los Angeles Review, HAD, X-R-A-Y Lit, Identity Theory, Jet Fuel Review, and others.
Andrea Caswell runs Cleaver’s Short Story Clinic, offering detailed feedback on fiction up to 5500 words. Whether you’re wondering how to improve a story, getting ready to submit one to a lit mag, or preparing an MFA application portfolio, editorial feedback will be personalized to help you reach your fiction goals. Writers may also schedule a conference with Andrea as a one-on-one workshop to discuss their work further.
The idea that psychoanalysis and the art of writing have significant common ground is not revolutionary. What is explored, what can be learned, what challenges must be faced—in writing as in psychotherapy, the answer can be found in the complex emotional fabric of a human life. For that reason, we can easily apply the techniques used in one of these fields to aid our struggles in the other.
Free association was a therapeutic tool developed by Freud which consisted of the patient verbalizing unrelated, seemingly unimportant thoughts as they come to mind. Freud’s theories and techniques are now mostly debunked, which is fine for us because we aren’t using free association to heal our inner child, but as a tool for generative writing. What makes this tool so helpful for writing is that it disabuses us of pretense when attempting to write from an uninspired headspace. Writing when we aren’t feeling inventive leads to work that is ostentatious and inauthentic. When instead we use free association to capture a series of random thoughts without the intention of sounding particularly literary, we are shown throughlines which would not have appeared to us by forcing output. These throughlines are revelatory: they show what’s really been on our mind, what ideas are captivating us, what concepts are ripe for investigation. I use this technique when I’m struggling to write poetry, but it can be useful for any type of writing. Like a campfire game in which the last letter of one player’s word must begin the next, you can compose a complete work by threading together disparate thoughts brought about by free association. Once you have created this jumble of disconnected thoughts and ideas, you have a bank of ideas and phrases to draw from.
Here is my process. First, I sit down outside and begin to pay attention to my surroundings. The outside part is optional, but I always feel most calm in nature. Becoming observant helps me get the first thought on paper—the first word in the campfire game, so to speak. Once the first phrase is written down, I sit peacefully and allow thoughts to come to me. Each thought that comes, I write down on the page. When I tried this the other day, I spent about twenty minutes on writing. If no thoughts come, I wait until they do. I do not judge or analyze the thoughts that came—there is no time to! I write thoughts down quickly, before the next one appears in my mind. Below is what came of my twenty minutes of free association.
I think it’s an owl droning on between the songbirds I’ve finished my drink and crushed the can I’m too aware of my breasts today I like this straw mat I’m sitting on My pants are loose and comfortable Twenty minutes feels like enough I see someone’s ear through the window—or is that a pair of glasses? I’m a bit cold now—I freeze up though I know I should be moving This feels like getting to the beach too late Why’d I bring my phone out here? A phone is so silly when you’re beneath the evening sun I ought to do this more, and play my guitar Why do I have that thing anyway? It’s good not to wash my hair so much I hate to shave my body hair but the guys at work are republicans I hope I’m cool when I’m old, and that I can pick stuff up, and that my kids want to be around me I’m not sure what that sound is in the leaves behind me—that’s not where owls hang out I have a sense we’ve beat culture now, beat like hit or the other one People have kidneys that aren’t working and I have this straw mat on the grass (it’s fake grass, but hey, I have two working kidneys) I fucking hate styrofoam and saying the word “die” in songs I was a runner twice before. Now i go to physical therapy and I watch Ellen (not sure her name) learn to stand up and sit down—she used to be a pro at that, like I am This crushed can of lime soda is very green, but nothing beats that aloe plant in the sunlight I like when old people talk about sex. Those ones write good poetry I read Camus and I maybe shouldn’t have—I ought to hope more, confront the absurd less I can’t believe so many lives transpired in rooms (I’ve been reading Emily Dickinson) I must look silly shivering—it’s 63 degrees out Turns out twenty minutes wasn’t enough
I leave the brain dump in my notebook for a few days. When I have a chance, I come back to it, and attempt to make some poetry out of this disjointed jumble. I read it over a few times, and notice any themes that appear repeatedly. I make a mental note of these. Then, on a new page, I copy any phrases that fit the theme. I don’t bother to name it—just feeling it is enough. If I had to guess, there was something in my last attempt about nature, animals, bodies, aging, and sex:
I think it’s an owl droning on between the songbirds I’m too aware of my breasts today I’m a bit cold now—I freeze up though I know I should be moving I hope I’m cool when I’m old, and that I can pick stuff up, and that my kids want to be around me I’m not sure what that sound is in the leaves behind me I was a runner twice before. Now i go to physical therapy and I watch Ellen (not sure her name) learn to stand up and sit down—she used to be a pro at that, like I am I like when old people talk about sex. Those ones write good poetry
Once I have these on the page, I begin to compose. Now, instead of free associating, I begin weaving. These pieces can be strung together—I have felt the throughline. Now, it is a matter of finding the poetic twine and tying the phrases to each other in a way that makes sense. I allow myself to deviate from what I initially wrote down when and if it felt natural—certainly, I change tenses and parts of speech at will. Having a bit of a scaffold like this is a lot less overwhelming than a blank page. This most recent time, it took me only a few minutes to compose the first draft. Then, with a few edits, I came to this:
There is an owl droning on between the songbirds, and sitting beneath I am too aware of my body today. I am too awake to all it has been And to whom—the many whoms… I try to freeze it into not knowing—to disappear its hum in the hooting branches The leaves rustle, and I know, reluctantly I ought to move this buzzing body. A few times over, I stand up and sit down I let the fleshly hum harmonize, amplify Into that owl’s rhythmic calling: Stand up, hoot, sit down, hoot… I wonder about owls getting old And if when their necks begin to ache They wish they’d turned their heads more often, or made more love In that droning youth.
Whether what I’ve composed here has great implications for revealing the intimate secrets of my psyche, I will leave to my therapist to decide. But for the purposes of composing a poem when inspiration eluded me, this tool has served me very well.
Cleaver newsletter editor Layla Murphy is an Iranian-American writer—when she’s not being a refugee resettlement case manager, a restaurant host, or a Spanish tutor, that is. While a student at the University of Pennsylvania, she co-founded Quake Magazine, a publication dedicated to exploring sex and sexuality through art. Read her essays and poetry on a personal blog: aslongastherearepoppies.wordpress.com. Got a Writing Tip for our newsletter and feature? Email her at [email protected]. View her bio page here.
During my years as a working writer I’ve had opportunities to participate in public readings and open mic nights, including a “slam” in which I placed second while a student at the MFA Program at Queens University at Charlotte. With such events, a common element is the time limit. Often I’ve had only two or three minutes to make an impression, which has led me to a game I call Beat The Clock, a revision strategy that helps pare one’s prose to its vital core. While it works with flash and microfiction, it’s most effective with longer stories or passages from a novel.
First, select the passage needing revision. Time yourself reading it aloud. A two thousand-word story takes me approximately eleven minutes to read. After that initial timed reading, I’ll pretend I have a coveted slot at the famed 92nd Street Y in New York, but with a time limit of ten minutes, not a second more or I’ll be yanked from the stage and booed ferociously by the restless crowd. With such a strict time limit, I’ll push every word and sentence through a three-question interrogation. Does it advance the story? Develop character? Does the language possess an aesthetic beauty? Each question is wielded like a guillotine ready to drop. The results? Invariably I find things I should have caught previously: repetitions, unnecessary dialogue, seven-word descriptions better replaced by Flaubert’s famous le mot juste. When I read and time the revised version, I know that it’s better, and I celebrate getting it under the required ten minutes.
But, wait! In my head Colson Whitehead arrives unexpectedly wanting to read on the same night, and who am I to keep such an award-winning heavyweight from the stage? Luckily the organizers decide that if everyone reading gives up only thirty seconds, Whitehead will have all the time he needs. Once again, I play Beat the Clock, cutting another thrity seconds (in general, around 100 words) from what I thought was a polished piece. Sure enough, those thirty seconds of cuts improve the story, and when I read it aloud a third time, it holds together as if those missing ninety seconds had never been written.
There are many ways one can approach revision, but Beat the Clock works best for me, as reading aloud with a specific time limit focuses the mind and turns the eyes and ears into gatekeepers weeding out all but the very best.
Chuck Augello is the author of the novels A Better Heart and The Revolving Heart, a Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2020 selection. His most recent is Talking Vonnegut: Centennial Interviews and Essays (McFarland), an exploration of the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut. His work has appeared in One Story, Necessary Fiction, Smokelong Quarterly, and other fine journals. He’s part of the fiction team at Identity Theory and a contributing editor for Cease, Cows.
Recently, I set aside a story I’d been working on for over a year. I did so reluctantly after revising the opening section to build to certain plot points I selected from earlier drafts. The more I revised, the more dissatisfied I became. It was like watching dominoes lined up between two walls topple over one by one. Despite knowing that something prevented the story moving forward in an interesting way, I continued to revise. I have goals, I told myself. Six stories into the collection I want to publish someday, I anticipated completing the seventh story I was revising and starting on the eighth, my momentum steady until the project was complete. Writing takes work, I reminded myself, which entails not quitting when it becomes difficult but pushing through whatever obstacle lies in the way. But sometimes will power isn’t enough. Sometimes a story requires less of us, not more, in order to be told. That story does not await fully formed in another realm in a Platonic sense but rather, necessitates that I become the right person to tell it. So I set it aside, acknowledging that I may never be that person. If and when that time comes, I occupy the space between what is and what will be fashioning myself through the stories I tell further into existence.
Moriah Hampton received her PhD in Modernist Literature from SUNY-Buffalo. Her fiction, poetry, and photography have appeared in Entropy, Rune Literary Collection, Hamilton Stone Review, The Sonder Review, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in the Writing and Critical Inquiry Program at SUNY-Albany.
Andrea: “The Detriment of Doubt” (Issue 44) is such a clever and creative piece. How did the idea for a 911-type call that’s not exactly a 911 call originate?
Hannah: I developed the concept for this story first. I knew I wanted to write a piece that questioned the nature of truth, and I knew that in order to do that, I’d need a scenario with lots of built-in assumptions about truthfulness. My fiancé and I were throwing around ideas, and one of his suggestions was a 911 call. Since 911 dispatchers are required to take callers at their word, I immediately knew it was the plot-grounding form I’d been looking for.
Andrea: You’ve written this story using only dialogue. Was that an original constraint or parameter, perhaps related to a prompt or exercise? If not, at what point did you decide to write it as a dialogue-only text?
Hannah: The story wasn’t in response to a prompt, but it did develop from the concept I mentioned above. I intended it to be all dialogue before I even started writing, because I figured that was the best way to literalize the idea of fictional unreliability. Nobody expects narrative prose to lie (and many readers feel a bit cheated when it does), but everyone knows people can lie, so putting narrative prose into someone’s voice allowed me to concretize narrative unreliability without tricking readers. I really wanted readers to contemplate the fact that every story is being told by someone, even if we don’t know who that “someone” is.
Andrea: “The Detriment of Doubt” includes multiple characters, and ultimately a nesting-box narrative structure, in which we discover a story within a story within a story. Tell us about that structure, and the challenges you encountered as a result.
Hannah: I’ve always been fascinated by metafiction, aka stories within stories. Metafiction is perhaps the main art form that allows creators to move throughout levels of narrative awareness and engineer parallels. That’s probably why writing metafiction is so exhilarating to me—it makes me feel like God. In a story whose whole premise is that things that present themselves as honest are often not, metafiction felt especially appropriate. I wanted the revelation that the purported “main story” was not even “real” to raise questions about the respective “realness” of the other stories too.
The main challenge I faced, which stemmed from the combination of metafiction and all-dialogue, was managing transitions between layers of storytelling. In traditional metafiction, one can simply break the fourth wall and inform readers of a transition, but the all-dialogue structure presented setbacks. I eventually decided on a scene-break, even though the new layer wasn’t technically a new scene.
Another challenge pertained to the ambiguity of who was speaking at any given time. Two-person back-and-forth dialogue is easy enough to manage, but once you add more characters to the mix, it becomes difficult to know who’s talking. I made a somewhat unnatural decision in the story’s latter section to partially deal with this (now that you’re looking for it, you’ll likely notice it while reading), while also leaning into it by giving most characters gender-neutral names. Due to the story’s themes, the decision to keep a bit of ambiguity ended up being the best choice.
Andrea: I’m so intrigued by the title. This phrase doesn’t appear anywhere in the story, but the experience of doubt is ever-present for the reader. Was this always the story’s title, or did it have other “working titles” before you decided on this one?
Hannah: I tend not to come up with titles until after I finish writing stories, and this one was no exception. However, certain titles come more easily than others. “The Detriment of the Doubt” came to me because as I was writing and editing, I kept thinking about the idiom “the benefit of the doubt,” and how readers who give these characters the benefit of the doubt will have their expectations subverted. From there, I decided to invert the idiom, and asked myself what the opposite of “benefit” might be. That question led me to this title.
Hannah Smart (who has previously published under the name Ambrose D. Smart) is a fiction writer and literary/pop culture critic. Her short stories have been published in or are forthcoming in West Branch, The Harvard Advocate, Puerto del Sol, The Rupture, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others, and her essays have appeared in The Boston Globe, Potomac Review, and The Sunlight Press. She is the founder and editor in chief of experimental journal The Militant Grammarian, a three-time presenter at the International David Foster Wallace Conference, and a writing studies professor at the University of Southern Mississippi. Visit her website.
Andrea Caswell runs Cleaver’s Short Story Clinic, offering detailed feedback on fiction up to 5500 words. Whether you’re wondering how to improve a story, getting ready to submit one to a lit mag, or preparing an MFA application portfolio, editorial feedback will be personalized to help you reach your fiction goals. Writers may also schedule a conference with Andrea as a one-on-one workshop to discuss their work further.
A Writing Tip by Shoshauna Shy The Almost-But-Not-Quite Poem
Three weeks of wrangling words into position—and still when you cap your pen or click Save, there’s a crumpled shirt tag chafing at your neck. Something isn’t right. Why does your poem feel unfinished no matter how many times you smooth things into place?
You read it out loud. The language has a stilted quality. Or the images don’t segue seamlessly from one to the next. Like pulling on a sweater when there’s a thread or two coming loose, and the sleeve catches halfway up your arm. Consider this: You may actually have chosen the perfect verbs and nouns—but it’s their sequence that’s the problem!
One trick I use often is to simply swap the order of lines in a sentence. It’s a very small tweak, but the change in perspective can do wonders against that stilted feeling we, as poets, know well. For example, see what happens when I switch these two lines around:
I stare down January at 12 below At the top of the sledding hill
Kind of choppy, wouldn’t you say? So I switched them:
At the top of the sledding hill
I stare down January at 12 below
There. More slope in the melody. Sometimes the switch works with two clauses in a compound sentence. I began with:
Threadbare bedsheets, chapped winters
… which made my jaw hurt. So then I tried:
Chapped winters, threadbare bedsheets.
By having “Chapped winters” first, that set the season. When “threadbare bedsheets” followed, it made me feel even colder. Voilá!
Like online games where a reshuffle of letters allows you to see a new word, shuffling the sequence can sometimes make your poem snap! into place.
Shoshauna Shy is a Midwestern poet and flash fiction author, and the founder of Woodrow Hall Editions, the Woodrow Hall Jumpstart and Top Shelf awards, and the Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf program. Currently, Shoshauna works as an editor for Flash Fiction Magazine’s sister publication, 101 Words, and as a copy editor for Cleaver Magazine. Her poems have been published in The Seattle Review, Cimarron Review, The Briar Cliff Review, Rattle, Poetry Northwest and by over 200 other journals and presses. One of her poems was selected for the Poetry 180 Library of Congress program launched by Billy Collins.
Recently I wrote about The Most Dangerous Writing App, an efficient but hair-raising way to generate fresh ideas for your writing. If you haven’t tried it, give it a spin. You might catch something you can use; at very least you’ll get a three-cups-of-coffee adrenaline spurt.
Yesterday, a student of mine told me she has a friend who drafts all his writing in The Most Dangerous app. Imagine that! For most of us, however, such a heart-pounding practice isn’t sustainable for more than a few minutes at a time. To write deeply, to compose, one needs to be composed. Maybe, like me, you compose on a keyboard, fingers flying to keep up with your thoughts. Maybe as you type you’re struggling against the urge to look away, to Google that last reference, to answer that ding (typing this, just now, I floated away for five minutes into Instagram.) You know what I mean.
This week, I challenge you to connect your head and your hand. Shut the laptop, turn off your phone, find a pen, and write. Savor the sensation of your skin against the paper, of the small muscles in your fingers working. Take your time forming the letters. Instead of crossing out and crumpling, stay in the moment. Your time here is safe. Your notebook isn’t going to slam itself shut and delete your work if you pause to daydream or reconsider. Fill the page. One page, maybe, or a second, or third if you like, but don’t stop until you reach the end of the current page. Do it every day this week, and maybe next week, and the week after. Make a practice of setting aside these few daily moments.
What will you catch in a page or three? An idea, a draft, a memory? Most valuably, perhaps, your breath. Neuroscientists have long known that handwriting on paper activates more areas of the brain and promotes better memory and deeper thinking than typing. It’s true for note-taking and it’s true for drafting paragraphs and poems. Writing by hand pulls on thoughts buried deep and calm. Let this practice inform and augment the rest of your writing.
Karen Rile is chief editor of Cleaver, which she co-founded in 2013 with Lauren Rile Smith. She is the author of Winter Music, a novel set in Philadelphia, and numerous works of fiction and creative nonfiction. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania. Follow her on Instagram @whatkindofdog.
Andrea: Congratulations on “The Love,” (Issue 44) which feels like a perfect short story. It’s got it all: deep love, disenchantment, humor, food, family secrets, and a profound moment of truth, encapsulated within 1500 words. What’s your “recipe” for creating a powerful short story?
Monique: Thank you so much! It was an honor to have “The Love” published in Cleaver Magazine. This is a great question, and in theory feels like an easy one to answer. However, it truly isn’t. My best answer is: Know at least one thing for certain, whether it’s setting, a theme, or in this case, word count.
For this piece, the primary goal was for the story to be a maximum of 1500 words, with very little room for compromise. I had spent the past two years in my MFA program at Drexel University working on a short story collection. Each of those stories was between 5000 and 7500 words, and I wanted to compose some shorter bodies of work.
The second most important ingredient in this piece was the POV. Because I had such a small space to work within, it was imperative to create an intimate connection with my protagonist immediately, and to maintain that bond throughout. First person POV allowed me the capacity to bear my protagonist’s soul in such a tenderhearted way that even if the reader couldn’t absolve her, they could deeply empathize with her. It also limited how much the narrator could intervene.
Andrea: Where did this story begin for you? With these two characters, or a general situation, or the setting so ripe for a difficult conversation? Thanks for sharing those early tentative ideas, for a story that feels so fully realized that we can hardly imagine it any other way.
Monique: The bare skeleton of this story began with a timed prompt several years back. We were to write about someone with a secret. I’m not great working with prompts. As a matter of fact, I had completed only about two meager paragraphs, then put it away.
This past June, I attended a writing retreat in Collioure, a beautiful vacation town in southern France. Every morning about 7:30, I had coffee at a restaurant on the beach. All seating faced the Mediterranean Sea, so even if you were with someone, you naturally gazed upon the water instead of at each other.
I sat toward the back, which was still relatively close to the beach. However, it allowed me to take in not only the vibrant colors of the structures, the plush green of the mountains, the varying shades of blue of the clear water, but also the people. One morning, a couple up in age passed by and sat a few rows in front of me. They moved slowly and deliberately, not in a way that suggested age was defying them, but more in a manner of just being. The French have such a laissez-faire way about them. I watched them get settled in, place an order, and then just rest in the peace of the atmosphere.
Now, I’d never met them, nor had I talked to them. For all that I know, they could have been widowed and found love together later. They could have been just friends. But I imagined them as a couple who had lived and loved through decades of life together, and I wondered what they survived to get to this day when they could sit restfully on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, watching the ebb and flow of the water in the beautiful seaside village of Collioure.
Then I remembered the prompt about the secret. After the workshop, I went back to the same spot and the story flowed.
Andrea: What challenges did you encounter in writing this piece? How did you address them?
Monique: The biggest challenge was keeping the story confined to 1500 words, while fleshing out the characters in a full manner. Longer pieces give the writer opportunities to explore the characters in a deeper capacity. To address those issues, I revealed the secret to the reader, but not to Robin. The idea was to use the secret to push the story forward. I also chose the first person POV to develop intimacy between the reader and the protagonist, and I depended on dialogue to do a great deal of the heavy lifting, such as fleshing out the characters.
Andrea: The title of the story works at every level: as part of the setting, as the electric current running through the narrative, and as a thematic compass rose leading us to the ending. Any tips on coming up with terrific titles?
Monique: This is truly an instance where the title hid in plain sight. The initial title of the story was Barren. It’s such a heavy word that lies on the heart. However, outside of being unable to physically conceive, the mother’s life was extremely fruitful. Even meeting at The Love restaurant was in commemoration of it being Cliff’s favorite one, and the relationship between Robin and her mother is so full and compassionate. In the overall arc of the story, Barren didn’t fit, which I realized somewhere around the second draft. I changed it to ‘unknown’ and let it rest.While reading the final draft before submission out loud, when I read the name of the restaurant, The Love,I literally froze. This story is about love in one of its most complicated forms. The moment I heard the words “The Love,” they felt perfect. My suggestions for choosing good titles are: (1) don’t force the title; (2) expect to change it, even if you don’t; (3) be open to the title finding itself within the story; and (4) read your work out loud—you never know what you’ll hear or how you will hear it.
Monique Danielle is a Philadelphia native with an MFA from Drexel University and an MA in English from Arcadia University. She co-chairs the Drexel MFA Alumni Association, and when she’s not writing about the most common thing ever—the complexities of humans—she’s attempting to bake a cake that actually rises.
Andrea Caswell runs Cleaver’s Short Story Clinic, offering detailed feedback on fiction up to 5500 words. Whether you’re wondering how to improve a story, getting ready to submit one to a lit mag, or preparing an MFA application portfolio, editorial feedback will be personalized to help you reach your fiction goals. Writers may also schedule a conference with Andrea as a one-on-one workshop to discuss their work further.
Here’s the truth: Your first instinct is your best. Write the draft the way it comes to you.
Maybe your story comes out naturally in first person. And you nail it, fluently: the voice, the character, the plot. Brava!
Here’s the rub: You show your draft to trusted readers and—what the heck?—they don’t get it. This narrator is too unlikeable to care about, they complain. They confuse the narrator’s motivations with the story’s intent. They miss your carefully laid irony.
Should you fire your writers’ workshop and look for a new set of literary peers? Hold on. Your story isn’t quite telling itself.
Here’s the tip: When something feels off about your first-person narrative, try reworking it in a close third-person voice. This is a minor adjustment that produces big results. Third person breathes a puff of air, a little narrative distance, into your story while preserving the first-person flavor and voiciness.
There was nothing wrong with your initial impulse. It just needed a little tweak. Try it!
Karen Rile is chief editor of Cleaver, which she co-founded in 2013 with Lauren Rile Smith. She is the author of Winter Music, a novel set in Philadelphia, and numerous works of fiction and creative nonfiction. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania. Follow her on Instagram @whatkindofdog.
Where did this prompt come from? I’ve used it in my Penn classes for more than twenty years. I’ve personalized and fancied it, but I don’t think the original idea was mine. This week I paged through my personal library of books on writing and teaching and scoured the internet, but I cannot find the author. If you recognize it, drop me a line!
Solving for X creates a detailed and seemingly capricious to-do list that, like all great prompts, frees you from the prison of the empty page. Not quite as daunting as a sestina, but hard enough to keep you interested. The best Solving for X stories make the prompt seem to disappear entirely. The reader becomes so absorbed in your quirky story they don’t notice the successive initial words.
Make it fun, or make it serious. Use it alone, or with your peer writing group, or assign it to your own students.
Solving for X
Write a short story with the following conditions:
1. Your story is exactly 26 sentences long.
2. Each sentences begins with a word which starts with a letter of the alphabet in order. For example: All the excuses had been used. By the time the school doctor saw me he’d heard everything. Coughing, I began to tell him about the lie which I’d hoped would save us all….
3. Your story must include one sentence fragment…
4. …and one sentence should be exactly 100 words long and grammatically sound.
Karen Rile is the author of Winter Music (Little, Brown), a novel set in Philadelphia, and numerous works of fiction and creative nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in literary journals such as The Southern Review, American Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Other Voices, Superstition Review, Tishman Review, and has been shortlisted among The Best American Short Stories. Karen has published articles and essays in The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and others. She is the founding and chief editor of Cleaver and Cleaver Workshops. Karen lives in Philadelphia and teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA from Bennington College, a certificate in satire from The Second City, and is a kick-ass certified LYT Method movement instructor. She is also the parent of four adult daughters with more interesting careers than her own: an aerialist, a glass artist, a violist, and a playwright. Follow her on Instagram @whatkindofdog.
In her flash CNF piece “Transported” (Issue 44), Sue Mell takes readers on a joy ride through a coming-of-age friendship. Mell shares insights about writing the story with senior fiction editor Andrea Caswell.
Andrea: In “Transported,” you’ve packed just about all we need to know into three short paragraphs. It feels like magic! Did this piece begin as something longer, or did you plan to write with great compression from the outset?
Sue: What a great compliment—thanks so much! I’d tried using this material as the basis for a short story as well as telling it in a longer or personal essay form. None of which succeeded. So yes—in different versions I attempted over the years—you could say this piece began as something longer. But with this version, originally intended for Instagram (more about that below), I was always going for great compression.
Andrea: If this piece began with a prompt, do you mind sharing what the prompt was?
Sue: For a while, in my search to find a meaningful way to share my work—and my life—on social media, I was experimenting with a series of Instagram posts and reels that included a snippet of fiction or nonfiction. This was right around the time the Long Island Railroad extended its service to Grand Central Station, and I posted something about having once worked at the Zaro’s in the main terminal, and how those vaulted corridors are haunted by other ghosts of my former selves. I was also part of a small group of writers offering support by commenting on each other’s posts, and that one seemed to hit home, with people asking for more Grand Central stories. “Transported” came about as a direct response to that request.
Andrea: What advice do you have for someone wondering if an experience is “too small” to write about?
Sue: This is a question I ask myself all the time. It’s certainly a frequent refrain of the critical voice in my head. But my advice would be that if an experience nags at you—if it holds a particular significance or maybe just a feeling you’re compelled to express—then it’s worth at least getting down on the page.
Andrea: How does writing flash fit in with the rest of your creative work? I know you’ve published a novel and have a short story collection forthcoming in 2024. Is flash a regular part of your practice? If so, what do you enjoy about it?
Sue: I started out as a short story writer and have written and published a novel. (Whether I ever write another remains to be seen!) And I’m very excited about my forthcoming collection—which I completed, linking new stories with previously published ones, back in the summer of 2022. But since then, flash—and micro, really—have become the primary forms of my writing practice. Partially, this is due to the fractured focus of being a caregiver, trying to build platform, and promote a book. And partially it’s because, in some ways, flash may be the form I’m most suited to. All the things I struggle with in those longer forms fall away, leaving me with the pleasure of finding the most precise and artful way to portray—and convey the feeling of—a certain moment in time.
Sue Mell’s story collection, A New Day, is forthcoming from She Writes Press in September 2024. Other work has appeared in Narrative, Hippocampus Magazine, and Jellyfish Review. She lives in Queens, NY, where she cares for her mom and a gray tuxedo cat named Poppy. For more, visit her Substack, So Much Stuff, where she writes about how the things we collect—and can’t let go of—express who we are. https://suemell.substack.com/
Andrea Caswell runs Cleaver’s Short Story Clinic, offering detailed feedback on fiction up to 5500 words. Whether you’re wondering how to improve a story, getting ready to submit one to a lit mag, or preparing an MFA application portfolio, editorial feedback will be personalized to help you reach your fiction goals. Writers may also schedule a conference with Andrea as a one-on-one workshop to discuss their work further.
A Writing Prompt by Layla Murphy Hate Christmas, You’re Allowed
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Bah humbug—this again! Christmas is right around the corner, and whether you celebrate it or not, you’ve surely got some holiday sensory-overload by now. I thought we should turn things topsy-turvy by taking a page from David Byrne’s Christmas playlist, which showcases such hits as “Christmas Will Break Your Heart” by LCD Soundsystem and “Another Lonely Christmas” by Prince. So, put down that eggnog and join us in some healthy holiday crankiness as we channel our humbug into our writing… Ready? Let’s get scroogey!
For a anti-Christmassy writing exercise, ditch the jolly merriment and instead, write a short first-person narrative explaining why you (whoever your “you” is) hate Christmas. One rule: don’t investigate the usual unhappy holiday themes like loneliness or family tensions. Stick to the absurd and come up with a totally new reason someone would be a killjoy over the holidays—a fear of Santa? Red-green color blindness? A peppermint allergy? Or, maybe an elaborate criminal scheme that meets its end precisely at the hour of 12 midnight on December 25th, shattering the personal life of your narrator and permanently associating the holiday with ruin? Just a thought. I’ll be writing mine in a diary format, which you might find works for your Grinch too. Give your curmudgeon a name, a quick backstory, and a contempt for Christmas, and you’ll be on your not-so-merry way.
It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it will get your fingers moving and your imagination working. Merry Christmas, and happy writing!
Cleaver newsletter editor Layla Murphy is an Iranian-American writer—when she’s not being a refugee resettlement case manager, a restaurant host, or a Spanish tutor, that is. While a student at the University of Pennsylvania, she co-founded Quake Magazine, a publication dedicated to exploring sex and sexuality through art. She has also written for 34th Street Magazine and The Daily Pennsylvanian. Read her essays and poetry on a personal blog: aslongastherearepoppies.com. Got a Writing Tip for our newsletter and feature? Email her at [email protected].
A Writing Tip by Jen Mathy Booster Clubs Don’t Just Sit in The Stands
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
A successful writer today has a whole new set of responsibilities. Yes, your primary role is that of artist and writer. First, create. Then, with the understanding that agents seldom find new clients in their slush piles and that publishers primarily support A-list authors and authors who receive large advances, it’s important for an emerging writer to take on the role of marketer as well.
There are many elements and ways to promote yourself and your work, just as there are many ways to approach the writing process. And, unless you can afford to produce and place a viral-worthy Super Bowl commercial, there’s never only one element of successful promotion.
One easy and effective way to promote your work is to form a Booster Club or, rather, a Booster Network. We all know other emerging writers we like and admire. Perhaps we met them in workshops or writing groups, or by working together on a journal. Maybe we met them in college, via social media, at a conference, or in line getting coffee. By adding these writers to your Booster Network, all of your careers will benefit.
First, especially on social media platforms, it’s important to self-promote only 10-20 percent of the time. Your followers become easily bored or dismissive if every post is, essentially: “Look at me!” By using your social media, your blog, your newsletters to also mention recent publications by someone in your network, you become more engaging to your followers and you establish yourself as part of the writing community. Second, when your friend does the same, you are exposed to a new audience, a new set of eyes. You may connect with more writers – who you add to your Booster Network – exposing your work to an even wider audience.
Reading this Cleaver writing tip is your signal to reach out to those other writers and say: “You know, I’ve always liked your work, and you’ve said some kind things about mine. Why don’t we make a pact to promote and share each other’s work?” Send them a link to this page, if it’s easier!
There’s an “ick” factor to self-promotion, I get it. But doing scary or uncomfortable things always seems easier with a friend, doesn’t it?
Jen Mathy is a marketing communications consultant in social media, PR, and advertising. She was VP of advertising and brand management for Morgan Stanley, brand manager for Discover Card, and in university relations for Northwestern University. She has an MFA in Writing from Bennington College and manages social media for the program. She has written stories for The Chicago Tribune and WGN-TV, among others, and wrote the poetry and prose for “An Expat Journey in Singapore,” a book of photography about the island nation.
The best way to improve your writing is to cultivate a consistent practice. There are many ways to approach your practice, and you might change up your techniques frequently in order to keep your work feeling fresh and interesting. The most important mindset is to be both kind and firm with yourself.
This week, your job is to do The Most Dangerous Writing App every day for at least 5 minutes. Feel free to edit the timer to a longer session, up to 60 minutes (if you dare!) You can use one of the generated prompts or just start writing. And keep writing. If you pause for too long, not only will you lose momentum, your text will turn red, then blurry, and then it will disappear. The key is to keep going. You don’t have to write quickly, but you must press forward, or all will be lost.
Start a new document on the first day, paste in your results. Add each subsequent day’s results to the original doc, and at the end of the week you will have at least seven new freewrites. As far as the literary merit of your attempts: they will probably be terrible, and that is completely fine!
Ready, set, go!
Karen Rile is the author of Winter Music (Little, Brown), a novel set in Philadelphia, and numerous works of fiction and creative nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in literary journals such as The Southern Review, American Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Other Voices, Superstition Review, Tishman Review, and has been shortlisted among The Best American Short Stories. Karen has published articles and essays in The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and others. She is the founding and chief editor of Cleaver and Cleaver Workshops. Karen lives in Philadelphia and teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA from Bennington College, a certificate in satire from The Second City, and is a kick-ass certified LYT Method movement instructor. She is also the parent of four adult daughters with more interesting careers than her own: an aerialist, a glass artist, a violist, and a playwright. Follow her on Instagram @whatkindofdog.
A Writing Tip by Layla Murphy WRITE LIKE YOU’RE DYING
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
I never knew what a death doula was until I listened to an episode of NPR’s Life Kit the other day focused on relationship repair. It seemed odd at first that a podcast episode on relationship repair—presumably with other, living, people—would include a segment on death. But the relationship to be repaired by these end-of-life caregivers is our relationship with death itself.
Death is scary. It’s taboo. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s painful. And, I think engaging meaningfully with death would make us all better writers. In arguing that we ought to confront death earlier, more frequently, and more head-on, my take is very similar to that of the death doula who appeared as a guest on this episode of NPR. Her name is Alua Arthur, and she quickly convinced me that the key to a sensually and emotionally full life is a true understanding of what it means to die, and of what becomes important when we know that our life is coming to its end. Arthur’s clients wanted to just taste their favorite souffle, or feel the sun on their face, not, say, go to Machu Picchu. Learning about their lived experiences in dying, and hearing all the beautiful things they felt like doing at the end, seemed very much like a list of the best things to write about.
So my tip is to complete an exercise in perspective-taking to get in touch with the content of a truly full, sensuous life—and then write about that. Think, what exactly would you want to do with your time if you had very little time left? Based on what Arthur shared of her own clients, I have a few thoughts. Perhaps you would want to rewatch your favorite movie. Or listen to all your favorite music. Likely, you’d have a list of foods you would want to taste—maybe after a lifetime of dieting. And I mean really taste them. You’d want to let the dark chocolate melt away on your tongue, and to relish it sensually, and completely. You would want a massage, maybe: The feeling of another’s fingers on your shoulders one last time, or the sensation of a lover stroking their thumb across your hand. You would want to smell a fresh fire, and to smell Christmas. You would want to hear your grandparents tell you they love you. You would want to tell them you love them. In fact, there are so many people you’d want to express your love to—and you would want to do it with abandon. With locked eyes, or faces touching each other, feeling each other’s love. You would want to go swimming in the middle of the night, in the cold, and feel the air get knocked out of your lungs, and the blood rush through you to warm you up in the water. You would want a pint of your favorite beer. You would want a soft blanket around you and you’d want to take a delicious nap. If you doubt that this is what becomes important at the end of life, I encourage you to listen to Alua Arthur speak from experience and expertise.
All that feeling, all that sensation, all that emotion, is what I think we often try to get at with other writing prompts and exercises. We want to share detailed experiences with other people, our readers, so we try going for walks and writing down what we see. We try writing down all we can write about, say, oranges. We try to write by hand, or in the dark without looking. But what are we writing about? What is the good, really good writing, really talking about? In my view, great writing gets at all the things that would feel important to us as we’re dying. Writing about real love, real perception and reaction. How good it feels to get your hands in the soil under a temperate sun, and the smell of rain that just ended, or that’s anxious to begin. The perspective-taking exercise forces us to get really descriptive, which is a hallmark of compelling poetry and prose. What is it about the cherry that is so gratifying? What is the experience of eating it really like? Can you tell me that? Are you able to articulate the sensuousness? Can you make me think about dying, and can you make me love the way I feel when I take that perspective? Can you make me love, truly love, the experience of it, through your writing? Tell me about the peach fuzz on my face touching the peach fuzz on the face of my mother as I kiss her goodnight. Tell me about the juice falling down around my chin when I bite a perfect, cold, crisp, red apple. Tell me about the woozy way I feel when I’ve been sitting out in the sun for too long, next to a gentle ocean and the murmur of other beach-goers just like me. Tell me about how much I love them, and how. That will make for good writing.
My tip, then, is to write like you are dying. I hope it helps you to write well. But more than that, I hope it helps you to live more expansively, more self-indulgently. And to share that life, that full life, with everyone around you—your readers, of course, included.
Cleaver newsletter editor Layla Murphy is an Iranian-American writer—when she’s not being a refugee resettlement case manager, a restaurant host, or a Spanish tutor, that is. While a student at the University of Pennsylvania, she co-founded Quake Magazine, a publication dedicated to exploring sex and sexuality through art. She has also written for 34th Street Magazine and The Daily Pennsylvanian. Read her essays and poetry on a personal blog: aslongastherearepoppies.com. Got a Writing Tip for our newsletter and feature? Email her at [email protected]. View her bio page here.
A Writing Tip by Michelle Bitting FINDING GOLD IN LOST TREASURE
“There is something to be said for a boundary, there is something to be said for unbinding.” ~ Diane Seuss
I remind myself and my students to write with abandon, to let language, image, and thought run wild and amok across the page. Forget about lineation, breaks, logic, punctuation, precision, or even “truth” (small ’t’) really, when launching into a new piece of writing. Prompts are great as guide posts, and I wholly embrace them for inciting the unexpected, stoking intuition, and allowing invention to surface. Prompts steer the imaginal waves in ways that encourage risk for the swimmer-scribe, while providing buoy markers, a.k.a. constraints. But what about those times the generative engine stalls, is thwarted, is “timing-challenged”? Or there’s simply a desire to revisit a shelved piece of writing that held promise but was abandoned? While Diane Seuss’s quote applies to perception and psycho-emotional dynamics inherent in writing itself—chaos and order, wildness and structure—be it metrical, syntactical, or a myriad other possible ordering principles—we might also consider boundary and unbinding in terms of basic crafting and making, meaning physical strips of paper, glue, tape, and words on a page we can play around with. Jericho Brown has described his poem-making practice to include cutting up past poems into single lines that he mixes in a bag, scatters, and pushes around a table or floor. Like sand or food, like minerals or rocks or gems, like bones or tea leaves or sounds tossed and watched as they carom, collide, ping, and spark off each other, igniting fresh ideas through chance, opening windows to poesis. New ledges propped in the tenuous house of poetic cards, a place for leaping into sweet creative abyss. One additional component of such unorthodox ceremony is the excavation of old poems considered flat or “meh” that the writer dropped, though never, in her heart, entirely abandoned. Harvesting parts and reforming new work from individual cut-up lines or clumps of words, a la Jericho Brown’s practice, can be surprisingly fruitful, and requires surrender to the chaos of unbinding while the writer considers fresh approaches to reconstruction. Might something vital be resurrected from the autopsied mess of typed and scribbled parts spread out across a kitchen space? Very possibly! And like both Seuss and Brown, lyric attention often presents opportunities for employing a formal form like the ghazal, pantoum, sonnet, or, as I did with a poem recently published in Cleaver, a villanelle. Brilliant Jericho Brown actually invented a marvelous new form called the Duplex through his disciplined play. Primo Diane Seuss won the Pulitzer for her superb book of provocative contemporary sonnets. Check out both for endless transformative inspiration. Unbinding lines from old poems, submitting to the limbo of questioning and play, but fearing not the unknown and eventually sought-after craft constraints can lead you, Writer, down undiscovered paths to the conjured new poem, the resurrected beast hidden, until now, in the magic heart of poetry.
Michelle Bitting is the author of five poetry collections: Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize. Michelle Bitting is a lecturer in poetry and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University and in film studies at the University of Arizona Global.
Write one breathless paragraph using the first person point of view in response to this digital collage. Include all five of your senses and the word “beguile” in your micro-fiction.
Anne Anthony’s stories and poems feature flawed characters with superhuman traits. She’s been published in Longleaf Review, West Trestle, Litro Online, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other literary journals. Her short story collection, A Blue Moon & Other Murmurs of the Heart, was published in 2019. She’s a senior editor and art director at Does It Have Pockets.
I was driving to work a few weeks ago, listening closely to a news report about the survivalist Eric Frein, who had just murdered a Pennsylvania State Trooper and managed to evade capture by hiding out in the dense forests of the Pocono Mountains. Although hundreds of people were engaged in a desperate and dramatic search for the killer, he had thus far evaded capture.
I listened closely to the report. I grew up in Philadelphia and the Poconos almost rivaled the Jersey shore for vacation fun—summer camp, ski trips, hiking, camping, and later, gambling casinos. When I was older, I became more and more fascinated by the old mining towns and patches, the abandoned anthracite coal breakers, the eternally burning mine and town of Centralia, the gold-domed churches of immigrants from Russia, Ukraine, Slovakia.
As tragic as the killing was, it still sounded like something out of the 19th century—as though a character—Ivan from The Brothers Karamazov—had moved to the region, taken up with a magistrate or mine-owners wife. Here among his fellow Slavs, he could continue his profligate ways, until he broke. And went crazy.
I was imagining all this, thinking about writing a sequel to Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, as the report continued. Of course, Frein was not Russian, was part of the survivalist-militia fringe, and most likely a neo-Nazi, eager to foment violent revolution and anarchy. And then I heard this statement from a police spokesman providing an update: They had no idea where Frein was hiding out, but deep in a secluded forest, they came across the following:
“Serbian cigarettes and soiled diapers.”
Immediately, I pulled off the road—into the Tim Horton’s parking lot and repeated the phrase over and over. This is what I heard:
SER-bian CIGarettes / and SOILEDDIA-pers.
A line consisting of two accents, a caesura (pause), and then two more accents, and three out of the four accents alliterative. A perfect example of Anglo-Saxon Alliterative verse:
Wrath was wakeful, watching in hatred;
hot-hearted Beowulf was bent upon battle.
There’s more though. There’s the sharp contrast between the exotic brand of cigarettes cohabiting in the same line with poopy pampers. There’s the oddness of the “America-first” Frein choosing something from the Balkans—with all those associations: Dostoevsky’s championing of Pan Slavism, the role of a Serbian anarchist in starting World War I, the more recent atrocities committed by the Bosnian Serbs…..the magnificent poems of Charles Simic. In short, I was hearing poetry, if only a single line.
Today, almost seven weeks later, Frein was finally captured. (As though emerging from the Bardo Thodol.) Various media reports reveled in what their own writers felt was poetic—that Frein was shackled with the handcuffs of the murdered state trooper. The press, the American public, scriptwriters seem to love that sort of comeuppance, as though it’s an act of retributive justice.
Perhaps they’re right, but I think that a headline from the day before his capture struck me as pure poetry:
Falling leaves in the Pocono Mountains
could expose U.S. public enemy number one.
If the headline is broken into two lines, the first conveys a fairly typical sentiment that could appear in a multitude of poems. For example, William Butler Yeats’ “The Wild Swans at Coole”:
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry
Yet, as simple as the first line of the headline seems, it is more complex rhythmically than the strict iambic pentameter of the opening two lines of the Yeats poem. In the headline, we get a nice mix of iambs and trochees:
FALling / LEAVES in / the PO– / coNO / MOUNTains
And then, just when you expect the poem to continue, a la Yeats, we encounter something completely unexpected. The word “expose,” with its links to “poser,” and “exposé,” presents the first detour which leads directly to the long bureaucratic and sensationalist jargon of the wanted poster or even hip hop’s Public Enemy. From there, had the copy editor really cut loose, I could imagine the execution-style murder of one of Yeats’ wild swans…or even the assassination or assault of Keats’ drunk, drugged, and drowsy autumn maid.
When writing poetry, then, I would urge poets to think in terms of headline writing. Although newspaper copy editors might not be fully aware of their own editorial processes, I’m sure that at some level they have internalized these lessons—even if those lessons have been watered down or simplified for the sake of their readers. Yet, I suspect that foremost in their mind (and their mind’s ear) is the quest to be poetic and the search for the best language to capture our attentions and shake us out of our complacencies.
Leonard Kress has published poetry, translations, non-fiction, and fiction in Missouri Review, Tupelo, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. Among his collections are The Orpheus Complex,Walk Like Bo Diddley, Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems and his new verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. Craniotomy Sestinas appeared in 2021. Leonard Kress has received multiple grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. Leonard Kress currently teaches at Temple University. Visit his website here.
A Writing Tip from Matt Broomfield WRITE WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Revoke the tired shibboleth, and write what you don’t know. But first, come to know it, as though it were your own. Live as you read and read as you live: avidly, with catholic interest, above all vicariously. Delve into profoundly conservative Regency biography in the same frenzied spirit with which you breathe tear-gas at Belgrade Pride.
As a poet you perhaps find yourself standing awkwardly round the corner of your own life. No matter. Force yourself to do more than peer in through the window. Break in, fall in, fall in love, fall in war, be both internationalist and dilettante. Even if haunted by the fear of failing truly to live, you can run with the pack of the living, for a while. (Some part of you will always stay skulking round the corner, of course. This inner sanctum, too, must be preserved.)
The poet, no less than her cousin revolutionary, must be as organic as she is able. As Frantz Fanon conjures us in Wretched of the Earth, she must ‘collaborate on the physical plane.’ Linger on the picket-line, in the rave, at the bizarre tryst and the uncomfortable reunion, even and especially when you had much rather skulk home to your notebook. Write, instead, in your phone notes as the bailiffs hammer on the door below: sleep twined round the toilet-bowl, and awake gasping at 4AM to scribble yourself a note which seems, in that moment, to hold the key to all dreams.
The alchemy of turning any hardship into poetry should in itself justify that hardship. This process is no more certain than true alchemy, no more likely to belch up gold. But the hard-won understanding that life and suffering always hold the mysterious potential to become their opposite—permanent, lapidary beauty—constitutes, in itself, the true transfiguration of the poet’s life.
Matt Broomfield is a British poet, essayist, and journalist. He has recently been published by the Tahoma Literary Review, Stand, Agenda, Glass, the North, and the Best New British and Irish Poets 2021, and won the 2022 Lucent Dreaming Prize. His debut collection, brave little sternums: poems from Rojava (Fly on the Wall, 2022) is based on the three years he spent living and working in Syrian Kurdistan in solidarity with the women-led, direct-democratic revolution there.
A Writing Tip from Mark Danowsky DABBLE IN EKPHRASIS
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Ekphrasis provides an opportunity for artforms to engage with each other. As a poet, this often means engaging with visual art.
Ekphrastic writing is an excuse to look at other artforms as an outsider. You don’t need to feel competitive. After all, you’re a poet and they are a visual artist. They are experts in their field just as you are in yours.
Keep in mind, you have no requirement to like/appreciate a famous artwork simply because it is said to be “genius” or created by a “master”. The artwork has already been created. It’s a finished product. You’re the one creating something new. You’re in charge here.
When viewing a piece of artwork, react as you wish. There are no stakes at this stage. See what you see. Feel what you feel. Consider taking notes.
Your personal taste is what you bring to the table. Like what you like, dislike what you dislike. Avoid the temptation to go wholeheartedly negative. That is, writing a poem about all the ways you dislike a piece of art is a little like writing a bad review. If you hated the work, then why are we even having a conversation? There are, of course, always exceptions that prove the rule.
While experiencing, engaging with the artwork you are writing about in real time, enjoy the interplay. What is the work making you feel? What emotions arise as you gaze at the work? What associative thoughts and memories come to mind? Does the work make you feel positive or uplifted? Are there certain aspects of the work that are a turn off? What draws you in? What pushes you away?
As you continue to reflect on the artwork, start to consider readership. What can you share that illuminates something that will be a meaningful takeaway for readers? What insight or epiphany has dawned on you as you engage with the artwork?
A tricky aspect of ekphrastic writing is discovering what can be shared with readers that provides them with value. Otherwise, the writing becomes too personal and navel-gazey. You want to make the personal universal.
A goal, too, is to make the poem valuable without the reader being required to view the artwork alongside your poem. Ideally, your poem should stand alone.
At the end of the day, ekphrastic writing is wonderful practice even if what you come up with is later determined not to be something for public consumption. Not everything we write as poets is going to be for an audience. It’s good to remember that practice, putting hours into work that will never be shared publicly, is something we should feel good about. Practice is an accomplishment.
Mark Danowsky is Poetry Craft Essays Editor for Cleaver Magazine and Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry. He is the author of Meatless (Plan B Press), Violet Flame (tiny wren lit), JAWN (Moonstone Press), and As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press). His poetry collection Take Care is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press in 2025. Visit Mark Danowsky’s website here.
You planted the mums the week before the early September heatwave. Even though you watered every morning, there are many withered blooms. Without thinking, you pull the dead buds from the stems, leaving a little pile at the base of the tall black pot.
This process is called deadheading, and it has nothing to do with music.
Deadheading encourages the plant to continue to bloom by removing the old growth just as writing involves removing or revising passages that are not working. The writer “deadheads” weak writing, pruning away sentences, paragraphs or whole sections. This editing process helps the stronger ideas blossom by clearing distractions and letting the writer focus energy on the most fruitful parts of the text.
The writer, like the gardener, learns over time how to be discerning in her cuts, making choices that allow her creation to flourish. While it can be emotionally difficult for the writer to discard words, she must understand that it’s just part of the process. Writing involves both creation and revision. Deletion is a tool. Careful removal of faded blooms and flabby text makes room for continued growth and beauty.
Eileen Toomey’s works have appeared in Oyster River Pages, The Rumpus, The Tishman Review, Fish Food Magazine, The Eastern Iowa Review, and the Museum of Americana. She lives in Red Bank, New Jersey with her husband, Michael. Eileen is currently writing a memoir about growing up in Canaryville on the south side of Chicago where her mother taught her how to appreciate the little things in order to endure life’s biggest hurdles.
A CRAFT CHAT WITH CECILE CALLAN, author of “Home Away From Home”
A CRAFT CHAT WITH CECILE CALLAN, author of “Home Away From Home”
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
In her short story “Home Away From Home” (Issue 43), Cecile Callan takes readers into a smoky bar in the city, where richly-drawn characters are thrown together and forced to face themselves. Callan shares insights about writing the story with senior fiction editor Andrea Caswell.
Andrea Caswell: Tell us about the story’s title. Is there really a cocktail called “Home Away From Home,” or is it an original recipe of yours?
Cecile Callan: The title came to me because, it seems to me, the relief we seek at a bar is partly an impulse to make stress and worry fall away as we sip a drink. It takes only a moment for our shoulders to drop as we begin to feel just a bit more relaxed than when we walked in, not unlike kicking off our shoes when we first arrive home. This title fit well as the name of her drink and of the story. If there isn’t a cocktail called “Home Away From Home,” there should be!
Andrea: It can be inspiring to hear the “origin story” of a short story. Where did this one begin for you? Was it in response to a prompt, or had you been working with these characters for some time, or…? Thanks for sharing insights about the path this story took.
Cecile: It started as a journal entry, after an experience I had in New York. My husband and I were in the city to see a show and stayed at the Hotel Edison. They have a cozy wood-paneled cocktail bar, The Rum House, that’s been there forever, with live music, star-struck tourists, and often casts from Broadway shows who come in after curtain to unwind before they go home. My husband had gone upstairs to bed while I decided a nightcap was in order and went to the bar by myself. A businessman did mosey up beside me and was perhaps checking out my availability when I mentioned how my husband and I loved the place. Immediately his behavior changed and I was of no more interest to him.
I found details of this encounter—the loud sensuous music, the crowded room, the bubbly group of beautiful young women—in my journal several years after it happened. I started thinking about it from the POV of the main character in the novel I’m working on, a middle-aged woman recently left by her husband who is only beginning to come to terms with the long-buried, unresolved emotional tangles that have kept her stuck. I was interested in how a newly-single woman might feel bombarded, not only by the sensual world but by her own unexplored, less-than-pretty truths.
Andrea: So you’re telling me there’s hope for several decades’ worth of detailed journal entries finding their way into my fiction?
Cecile: Yes.
Andrea: Oh good, I needed to hear that! In all seriousness, you use physicality so well throughout the story. You’ve placed these characters in a confined space and set their bodies in motion—every move they make feels charged. Can you share with us how movement guided their actions here?
Cecile: When you confine anything, like in this bar where the space is tight and packed, you take away the ease of one thing and compensate with something else. In this case, the characters are physically pushed together, and that small space defines the parameters within which they must interact. If she’d ignored him, it would have been uncomfortable, so she ‘gave’ him what she felt he was looking for, effectively entering into a sort of dance. When he later uses that same space to wall her out, it makes her go inside of herself and get even smaller. All the while the cocktail bar, the musicians, the tourists, and the performers keep rolling on in their bigger space beyond the one happening between these two at the bar.
Andrea: “Home Away From Home” concludes with a question. Actually, with two of them. Sometimes it’s hard to know how or where to end a story. How did you decide this one needed to conclude at that moment, and in that way?
Cecile: When she turns inward after the male character unceremoniously walls her out, I felt she would only be able to self-flagellate then, because even though she actually gets what she wants—to be left alone—he does it with such brute clarity that it leaves her questioning her own worth. That questioning is what I believe brought her to the bar in the first place, so ending the story that way felt right because it had come full circle.
Join Cecile and other Issue 43 contributors at the Contributors’ Reading on Sunday, October 22.
Cecile Callan’s poetry and fiction appear in Quartz Literary, The Fish Anthology, and Louisiana Literature. The award-winning L.A. production of her controversial play about abortion, Angels Twice Descending, is in development as an indie feature. In a former life, she was an alien with four nostrils, a dumb bank robber, and a sexy geologist among other professions, including the oldest. Insomniacs know her from reruns. Cecile Callan holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in the Hudson Valley where she is at work on a novel.
A Writing Tip from Angelina Sciolla GETTING INTO CHARACTER
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Often when you encounter a creative writer, you may be meeting a small business owner, a teacher, physician, or a parent doing any number of these things. As they orient themselves to shifting responsibilities and modes of written communication throughout the day, writers are essentially role-playing their way to creative expression.
It can be difficult to navigate these stratified scenarios because they require different skills from your writer’s toolbox and even different philosophical approaches. It’s not just about being mindful of styles, rules, or practices, because we know the boundaries around different forms of writing can be porous. It’s about understanding who you are and who you need to be in each of these situations. You might have the same name by the time you dispense with building pie charts and transition to writing poetry, but you don’t always feel like quite the same person.
So how do you play the different parts of your writer’s life? How do you get into character for the task at hand, be it a board meeting synopsis or flash fiction?
First, acknowledge that the shift must take place. Take the breath, make the space in your brain. Change coffee mugs, tee shirts, or do whatever you need to signify leaving one world for another. Don’t believe that your skills and versatility will automatically adjust to your changing scenario. Your flexible mind has muscle memory, which can pull you towards practices and patterns unfit for the world you are about to inhabit and, inevitably, worlds collide. It is typically others who will point out the damage. I’ve spent 20 years in advertising, a world of glib and slick writing, so when I endeavored to go to graduate school, I foolishly Peggy Olson’d my way through a passage about 2nd-century Christianity in my first research paper. My professor gently shamed me back to more academic, empirical prose. And when I dared to use more allusory poetic language in a brand strategy deck, my peers bullied me back into the lingua franca of marketing. (I didn’t agree with them, but copywriters never win arguments). Two different worlds require two different versions of me.
Second, don’t be afraid to differentiate and compartmentalize your worlds. See them for what they are and then see yourself as a kind of repertory actor who gets cast in all the good parts. You can take command in every scenario as long as you “prepare”, as actors say. Think about the world you are going to inhabit, what it wants from you, and what you want from it. I often resort to the palate cleansing properties of a walk, a podcast, or, interestingly, a turn at cleaning the house, before I shift to the role of creative writer. I find it necessary to transition to the “other” me – the one who isn’t writing for a client or a grade. Finally, take pride in your ability to inhabit these different spaces. Consider it a superpower that informs the very reason you write. Because it does. It not only shows a flexible skill set but an emotional intelligence that helps you understand others and yourself. That’s how great characters are formed. There’s no question the role playing is challenging, but it can also help you appreciate and—most importantly—protect the unique world you build for yourself to strengthen your writing and nourish your creative exploration.
Angelina Sciolla is a writer who has been moonlighting as an advertising creative director for the last 20 years. She has contributed to a wide range of publications, including Publishers Weekly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, SOMA, Where Magazine, Philadelphia Style Magazine, American Heritage, and many others. Her creative nonfiction has been published in The Bucks County Writer and her one-act plays have been performed at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Angelina Sciolla is currently completing an MA in Religious Studies at Regis University and serves as a submissions editor for Cleaver.
A Writing Tip from Isabel Legarda WRITE LIKE AN ANESTHESIOLOGIST
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Write like an anesthesiologist.
By this I definitely do not mean intentionally (or unintentionally) put someone to sleep, but rather, approach your writing project as a living, breathing being you put active energy into protecting through dangerous territory.
“Dangerous territory” for writers includes:
daily challenges like time scarcity, procrastination, distraction, and interruption;
occupational hazards like exhaustion, multi-tasking, the need for research, and neglect of other important tasks or life relationships;
faults to work against, such as pride, complacency, lack of self-awareness, rigidity, scrupulosity, and resistance to constructive feedback;
emotional setbacks like anxiety, feeling stuck, artistic jealousy, excessive self criticism, the need for external validation, loss of motivation or tenacity, and probably our worst enemy, self-doubt.
A few suggestions from my day job might be of help:
Engage in singular focus. Anesthesiologists protect patients by putting intense focus on a single individual at a time. For a writer this might look like knowing a character in a story really well, writing to a single, important, imaginary reader (as one of my earliest mentors, the late Larry Woiwode, suggested) rather than to an “audience” or “market,” and devoting protected time to a given project to the exclusion of other projects.
Prepare for the unexpected. The night before each work day anesthesiologists habitually imagine the what-ifs for every surgery and come up with a Plan A, B, and C for coping with each. As a writer, perhaps you are a plotter and have a detailed, thirty-page outline for your novel in progress. But what if your main characters, because of the traits they have (and that you know intimately), veer into uncharted territory? Bring your toolkit of strong verbs, engaging dialogue, and vivid imagery and follow the energy of the scene. Or, perhaps you’re a pantser with no idea where to go next. Imagine three different contingencies for your characters, ask some what-if questions about them, and come up with a Plan A, B, & C for each possibility.
Optimize brain waves. Anesthesiologists in many places now have the technology to monitor patients’ brain waves, not just their vital signs. Brain waves may matter for creativity, with high levels of alpha waves in the right temporal area possibly associated with the mind forming unusual associations. Ever wonder why you get your best ideas in the shower, while driving, on a long flight, when you’re just about to fall asleep, or when it’s raining out? The mental relaxation promoted by these environments, soundscapes, or physiologic states might be optimizing brain states conducive to creativity. Try meditation or brown noise to encourage “The Muse.”
Finally, keep moving. Anesthesiologists are constantly moving toward “emergence”: the moment an unconscious patient awakens and reconnects with the world. They’re under pressure to make sure surgeries proceed efficiently and can’t get hung up on setbacks, even painful ones. A bad draft, a hurtful rejection, or a piece that has to be put away for a while even after multiple revisions might feel like failure in the moment, but it’s all part of working the clay: work done for the artistic process, valid and valuable whether it “goes well” or not.
Isabel Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to the United States. She attended New York Medical College and is currently a practicing physician in Boston. Isabel Legarda’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in America, Ruminate, The New York Quarterly, Matter Monthly, Qu, West Trestle Review, and others.
A Writing Tip from Micah Muldowney PACHELBEL’S CONUNDRUM
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Before I was a writer, I was a musician. I’d only just begun when they let me in on their dirty little secret:
Most songs are just three chords.
Some are just two. Even the harmonically ambitious ones are usually just Pachelbel’s Canon, reskinned. It’s a proverb, to the point that Ed Sheeran famously used it to get a copyright lawsuit thrown out.
Many aspiring musicians find this empowering—after all, with just a handful of fingerings, you too can play half of what’s on the radio. I, however, found it irritating. After all, what’s the point of being good at something that any idiot can do? I complained about it to my teacher, and she laughed at me.
“You are worrying about the wrong thing,” she told me, “Chords are just building blocks. They’re a consensus. It’s what’s happening on the surface that matters. How the song moves and breathes.”
She was right, of course, and in time I’ve found the same holds true for writing. While we’re often sold so hard on the virtues of originality that we’ll waste away huge chunks of our writing time trying to come up with a concept so radically original it’ll make people’s eyes bleed, the truth is, all the good stories have been told, at least on a conceptual level. In fact, if no one’s thought to tell it, it probably isn’t compelling.
Most successful writers don’t even bother. They focus on writing good prose. Case in point, one of the greatest critical successes this year was a scene-by-scene retelling of David Copperfield. Why? Because Barbara Kingsolver knows it’s the texture that counts—how the story moves and breathes on a surface level. What matters is what is happening here, where you are right now.
As writers, that’s where we really need to invest more of our time: on the surface of our prose.
How does the sentence move?
Does the pacing work?
Is the language working to create feeling, and to convey my message in a nuanced way?
Once I have a general shape, I find it helps to spend time getting a feel for the surface of my writing, where things like line and beat and style come in. Sometimes, I’ll read a sentence aloud as nonsense syllables so I can hear and feel where it catches. Then maybe I’ll play with a new rhythm, or insert a pause, or maybe try something else entirely. Because in the end, it’s what’s happening now, as you read, that makes the difference between a throwaway and a memorable piece.
Give Pachebel’s canon a listen. Then, listen to Oasis’ classic song “Don’t Look Back in Anger”. Sound a little similar? Still like them both? Yes, I thought so.
Micah Muldowney is the author of the collection Q-Drive and Other Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2022). His short fiction and poetry have been featured or are forthcoming in The New England Review, Descant, West Trade Review, and many others. He currently lives in the greater Philadelphia area, where he is working on a novel.
A Writing tip from Leonard Kress Poetry as Meditation
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
For several years I have been working on a series of sestinas that embody certain important aspects of Buddhist mindfulness meditation. Each sestina—and I have written nearly 100 so far—is a timed and focused meditation, contingent upon time, place, and physical, mental and emotional states.
Duration, for example, translates to space—the 36 lines in each individual poem is the amount of time it takes to wander through those lines, just as a meditator might practice sitting or walking meditation for a specific time period. The lines of the poem, as they proceed, play out and represent the active workings of a restless mind (what Buddhists sometimes refer to as “monkey-mind”). These mental wanderings, however, must, at the end of the line, return to the poem’s focus—the repeated end word which is part of the sestina’s form. This refocusing is the poem’s version of returning concentration to the breath. And, as in meditation, the poem invariably struggles free and proceeds in its own distracted and digressive way—until the next repeated end-word. Thus, the process repeats throughout the six stanzas.
The varying end-words inherent in the sestina form keep the meditation fresh and alive and foreground the emphasis on process. There is no ruling consciousness in charge, no one fully manning the controls; there are only people, creatures, events, places, and sounds entering the field of the poem. Each poem embodies a way of working through both psychic and physical materials—memory, experience, pain, suffering, grief, joy, gratitude, enchantment…
I suggest you, too, begin to treat your poetry as meditation. For a given time, allow yourself the wanderings. Begin your writing with the intention of allowing it to progress chaotically, and with the knowledge that it will—meanderings in tow—return to a focus. In this way, your listless mind will have a chance at making a creative mirror of itself in verse.
Leonard Kress has published poetry, translations, non-fiction, and fiction in the Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and others. Among his collections are The Orpheus Complex, Walk Like Bo Diddley, Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems, and his new verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. Craniotomy Sestinas appeared in 2021. He has received multiple grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. Kress currently lives in Blackwood, NJ, and teaches at Temple University.
A Writing tip from Moriah Hampton Hair Splinters: Listen Before You Write
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Writing is about relationships—relationships we cultivate with ourselves, and our readers, subjects, and communities. To have good relationships, it’s important to listen. A conversation I had with my friend Gabby recently reminded me of the importance of listening for creative development.
“My boyfriend had to dig out one of my hair splinters,” Gabby said, looking at me in the mirror above her workstation at the salon.
“A wood splinter?” I asked, sure I’d misheard her.
“No, a hair splinter.”
Gabby went on to explain what hair splinters are and how stylists deal with them.
“Hair is sharp when it’s cut,” she said, “so it pierces the skin just like a wood splinter and gets stuck.”
I sat in the salon chair, entranced. Gabby had just shared an insider detail about her profession with me, one I never observed or imagined during prior visits.
On other occasions, I had observed the way Gabby moved cutting my hair—the way she held segments between two fingers while snipping off the ends or measured segments by pulling them straight on either side of my face. I had also imaged her life at home based on photos of loved ones hanging at her station. But through conversation, Gabby had offered an insider detail that gave me a different view of her world. Observation and imagination revealed only so much; listening revealed even more and altered my expectations of a hair stylist’s life.
Our conversation about hair splinters reminded Gabby of a story.
“Hair splinters can be nasty,” she paused, trying to recollect something she read or heard. I couldn’t tell which. “A man went to his wife one day and asked her help with a hair splinter,” she continued. “She got out the tweezers, pinched the strand, and began pulling and pulling and pulling…the hair kept coming, didn’t stop.”
“Who wrote this story?” I asked, convinced she must have read it.
“I heard it,” she said, “from someone. I forget who told me, but it’s true.”
Gabby’s lore about the hair splinter led to a story born from my interest in weird subject matter. Listening gave me backstage access to this bizarre detail, one that is now charting its own course through my imagination. This experience suggests the importance of listening to creative development. It also reminds us that creativity is not the province of a select few, but our birthright—and that, when shared, invigorates the creativity of others.
Bonus: In the mood for more hair horror? Check out Janet Burroway’s flash piece, “The Tale of Molly Grim” in Cleaver Issue 40!
Moriah Hampton received her PhD in Modernist Literature from SUNY-Buffalo. Her fiction, poetry, and photography have appeared in Entropy, Rune Literary Collection, Hamilton Stone Review, The Sonder Review, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in the Writing and Critical Inquiry Program at SUNY-Albany. Visit her bio page here.
A Writing Tip from Andrea Marcusa DON’T FEAR THE WACKY STUFF
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Do you ever have wacky ideas or thoughts that you scribble down, but then decide they’re too awful to keep? If so, I have a suggestion for you. Put them in a file and label it something funny, like “Wacky Pantry.” Then, come back to them a few months or years later.
Often, the thoughts or ideas that we feel compelled to write down are the ones that feel wrong, not “us,” embarrassing, or poorly written. We might think that no one would want to read them, except maybe someone who’s been waiting in a doctor’s office for hours with nothing to do.
But I’m here to tell you that’s not true. I’ve banished many dashed-off pieces, scenes, or rants to a file, thinking they were plain, sad, pathetic, icky, or trite. But then, years later, when I’m going through my files (which always feel a bit like a foreign country), I come across them and ask myself, “Why did I think this was so bad?”
Usually, it’s because I’ve uncovered something difficult, painful, and shameful—those feelings that we all possess that we’d rather not acknowledge. But with distance, these feelings may feel less urgent and painful. And the editor in me may see something alive and promising.
Often, I dust off these old ideas and find a way to work with them. Not always, but I never discard them. Perhaps they need more time to bake.
So next time you have a crazy idea or thought that you’re tempted to dismiss, don’t. Put it in a file—visit your Wacky Pantry. Then, come back to it later and see if it’s still as awful as you thought it was. It may even be the start of something great.
Andrea Marcusa’s work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Citron Review, Cherry Tree, Heavy Feather Review, and others. She’s received recognition in a range of competitions, including Smokelong Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Raleigh Review, and Southampton Review. Her flash piece “The Tummy Bridge” was awarded Honorable Mention in the Cleaver 2022 Flash Contest. She studies with Philip Schultz at The Writers Studio. For more information, visit: andreamarcusa.com or see her on Twitter @d_marcusa
Andrea Caswell Speaks with Brendan Stephens TITLES, FIRST SENTENCES, AND HOW “HELL’S MOUNTAIN” CHANGED
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
In the story “Hell’s Mountain” by Brendan Stephens (Issue 42), readers are invited into the Underworld with a narrator who must scale a looming mountain to discover what awaits at the summit. Senior fiction editor Andrea Caswell asked the writer and Cleaver contributor to share his insights on titles and first sentences, and to describe how “Hell’s Mountain” changed during revision.
Andrea Caswell: Could you tell us “the story” of that first sentence? Long ago, after I died, I found myself alone in a vast wasteland with nothing on the horizon except a single imposing mountain gray with distance. Did the rest of the story take shape from there, or did the opening sentence change quite a bit as you wrote further into the story?
Brendan Stephens: I know writers who begin with a single sentence and discover the story image by image, but that doesn’t work for me. I generally have a bulleted list of upcoming scenes I’m working towards, so before I wrote anything with “Hell’s Mountain,” I had the story in broad strokes. I was reading the story “Hellion” by Alissa Nutting—which is incredible, by the way—and it made me think of other stories that take place in Hell: The Inferno, Stanley Elkin’s The Living End, CS Lewis’s The Great Divorce, even The Good Place sitcom. That got me thinking about how many of these works center around “bad people” who are irredeemably selfish, greedy, or violent. But if Hell exists as Christians believe, it’s almost entirely populated with ordinary, even good, people who just didn’t believe.
I also wanted to explore character growth in the afterlife. The assumption that after you’ve died you’re now eternally locked in as the person you were when alive is kind of strange to me. I look back on things I did just a few years ago, and it seems incomprehensible. In eternity, I feel like people would say, “Back when I was 100,000 years old, I was just a dumb kid.” So from this idea of ordinary people in hell who grow and change, I started to get the outline of a video game streamer trying to accomplish a seemingly impossible task. Having all of that in mind, by the time I sat down to write the first sentence in particular, I kind of knew where I was going and didn’t have to change it substantially.
Andrea: How did you land on the title “Hell’s Mountain,” which is both on-the-dot and figurative?
Brendan: Confession—I’ve never felt extremely confident in my titles. Even the titles I’ve had that really resonate, I often have a sneaking suspicion that perhaps there’s a better title buried somewhere in the text or maybe an allusion that just hasn’t occurred to me yet. But I can say that my intention with “Hell’s Mountain” was to be as up-front as possible about the setting of the story. Between this and the “Long ago, after I died…” first line, I wanted readers to be oriented immediately. The sooner the better because that would let me delve more quickly into characters, relationships, and comedy. So that was my primary concern, but I felt like including the mountain in the title rather than just “Hell Story” or something because it puts a bit more emphasis on that central goal the characters strive towards.
Andrea: So much of our writing amounts to rewriting. Can you share a problem with “Hell’s Mountain” that you had to solve in revision? How did you work it out and “fix” it?
Brendan: As much as I knew the central premise of the story, the early drafts, as expected, were full of unnecessary details. There was significantly more that ended up being cut: unnecessary world-building, tertiary characters who didn’t impact the plot, and more than one philosophical speech on damnation and justice. Thankfully, a friend of mine basically said, “The best part is this friendship between a video game streamer and a berserker pagan king, so why not make that the whole story?” That ended up becoming my north star in revision, leading to lots of cuts and new scenes. It was a classic example of needing to emphasize character over plot and world-building. I find it funny how it’s possible to write 30 pages that follow Freytag’s Pyramid and have a whole character arc without even fully knowing what your story is truly about until someone else comes along and tells you.
Brendan Stephens is a writer hailing from western Maryland. His work has appeared in Pinch, Epoch, SmokeLong Quarterly, the Southeast Review, and elsewhere. His awards include multiple Inprint Donald Barthelme awards, an Into the Void Fiction Prize, and a Sequestrum Emerging Writer Award. Brendan earned his PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. Currently, he serves as a submissions editor for SmokeLong Quarterly.
Andrea Caswell runs Cleaver’s Short Story Clinic, offering detailed feedback on fiction up to 5500 words. Whether you’re wondering how to improve a story, getting ready to submit one to a lit mag, or preparing an MFA application portfolio, editorial feedback will be personalized to help you reach your fiction goals. Writers may also schedule a conference with Andrea as a one-on-one workshop to discuss their work further.
A Writing Tip from Jessica Klimesh WRITE LESS, READ MORE
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
As writers, we’re often told that we should be writing every day (or, at least, regularly), that we shouldn’t just wait for the muse to strike.
But writing doesn’t have to mean just writing. Tasks related to writing also count as writing: editing, revising, submitting, thinking, and—an important one—reading.
So, if you find yourself staring at a blank screen (or notebook page), no ideas coming to you, pick up a book or go to your favorite lit journal, and read.
But don’t just read. Read with intent. Read as a writer.
Read something different than you usually write or read. If you’re a fiction writer, read poetry. If you’re a flash writer, read some long-form memoir. Expose yourself to new authors and new ways of writing (e.g., hybrid work). Then, practice writing in this different form or genre.
Look for interesting or curious phrases in what you’re reading, and write them down. Use them as prompts for new stories/essays/poems. What image comes to you from a phrase or sentence you’ve written down? Write a story around this image or idea.
Creating a writing habit doesn’t mean tying yourself to a chair for hours at a time. If you have a hectic schedule, you may find that you can only write for ten minutes at a time. Similarly, you don’t need to read for hours upon hours. Sometimes reading for just ten or fifteen minutes can be enough to spark your creativity and break through a block.
In short, venturing outside of your comfort zone—both reading and writing-wise—can have a number of benefits, not the least of which is boosting your creativity. And if you ever read something and think, “I wish I had written that,” go ahead and write it—with your own voice, your own spin on it. You might surprise yourself!
Jessica Klimesh is a US-based writer and technical editor whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brink, Variety Pack, Ghost Parachute, Bending Genres, FlashFlood Journal, Cleaver, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Cedar Crest College and an MA in English from Bowling Green State University. She is currently working on a novella-in-flash.
A Writing Prompt from Janet Burroway DISASTER STRIKES
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
There has been a disaster and you must leave your home. You may choose one object to take with you, and only one. What will you take?
You arrive at a border, where the guard tells you that you may not take your object across.
But if you discard the object here, you may pass and she will give you something to take to the other side. What is it?
What will you do?
Sit with this scenario for five minutes, then start writing, at any point in the action.
Janet Burroway is the author of nine novels including The Buzzards,Raw Silk, Opening Nights, and Cutting Stone (all Notable Books of The New York Times Book Review). Her Writing Fiction is now in its tenth edition, and Imaginative Writing is soon to be published in its fifth edition. She is the author of the memoir Losing Tim and the winner of the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the Florida Humanities Council. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Florida State University. Her flash fiction story,“The Tale of Molly Grimm”was Second Prize winner of Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.
Most of the work of writing is rewriting. No one wants to hear this! We thrive on that rush of creativity and sense of possibility inherent in a first draft. After our initial inspiration and abandon on the page, revision can feel like a fall back down to earth. I have to revise this? What a mess! The good news is, revision is some of the most “creative” writing you will ever do. Here are some tips for enjoying the process.
[Be kind] Before you change a single word: approach your work with kindness and curiosity. Give yourself credit for drafting that short story or taking that generative class using prompts. Recognize your effort in keeping a notebook close so you can scribble scraps of sentences whenever they come to you. What you’ve managed to put on the page is the result of your desire and dedication to write. This half-baked mess before you is cause for celebration!
[Be curious] In revision, ask yourself the relevant questions. Instead of wondering, “Is this any good?” you can ask, “What am I curious about here?” As writers, it’s not our job to decide if something we’ve written is “good” (there are plenty of critics and gatekeepers for that). And “Is this good?” tends to shut down creativity by discouraging some of the risk-taking inherent in writing. Don’t fall for this trap! As you begin to revise, look for those parts of a poem or essay or story that ignite your curiosity and make you want to explore further.
[Be clear] Another question you can ask is, “Did I say what I wanted to say?” This question not only frees you from the “Is it good?” trap, but can also lead you closer to the heart of the matter. If you’re not sure what you wanted to say, that’s also good information to have. Keep writing to find out!
Andrea Caswell runs Cleaver’s Short Story Clinic, offering detailed feedback on fiction up to 5500 words. Whether you’re wondering how to improve a story, getting ready to submit one to a lit mag, or preparing an MFA application portfolio, editorial feedback will be personalized to help you reach your fiction goals. Writers may also schedule a conference with Andrea as a one-on-one workshop to discuss their work further.
I know. I know. So grotesquely obvious. Except for the essential sequitur: Be inspired by what?
The metronome flick of your puppy’s tail?
The mellifluous hum of the antique AC?
The letter m, lowercase, written, for the first time, by a child?
The problem is, the possible sources of inspiration can be measured by infinitudes, and to write we need some curb or cramp, a boundary or horizon, a wall against which to toss our nouns or a pocket into which to tuck our thoughts.
We need a place to start; we need some traction. Here’s the first page of Autoportrait, by the author Jesse Ball:
I read Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait and found I admire its approach to biography. It is an approach that does not raise one fact above another, but lets the facts stand together in a fruitless clump, like a life. He wrote it in his thirty-ninth year. In my thirty-ninth year, this book follows his.
And there it is—the place where Ball’s book starts, the borderlines the author gives himself. He will write in a way that does not create a hierarchy of facts. He will pursue a “fruitless clump.”
Go to your shelves. Pull down a favorite book. Study its first lines. Write down the constraints that the author suggests and then make them your own. Maybe you’ll end up writing toward color (Bluets). Maybe you’ll pursue the chemistry of tears (The Crying Book). Maybe you’ll write to reach someone (On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous). Maybe you’ll start to think very hard about “how much we pad our lives with … stuff.” (Index Cards).
Let another writer’s structure or obsession shelter your thoughts. Then exhale and free yourself to take a good long look around.
Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of three-dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher, co-founder of Juncture Workshops (now running the Story of You lecture series), and a book artist. Her new books are Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays and We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class. More at bethkephartbooks.com and etsy.com/shop/BINDbyBIND.
Revision is an important but often-dreaded stage of the writing process. Having to revise can feel like facing a harsh reality after the freedom of free-writes, and of first drafts bursting with inspiration. But if you flip the lens and adjust your POV, you can see revision as an opportunity to engage with your work more deeply and creatively, as you practice critical writing and editing skills.
Here are my five favorite suggestions for a more positive revision process:
Start from the beginning, but don’t get stuck there. It can be tempting to overwork a beginning while neglecting the rest of a piece.
Related to #1: Allow yourself to work in a nonlinear fashion. Sometimes moving on and coming back to a section will help you refine the focus and content of a piece.
Give yourself the benefit of time. Your patience will pay off! Early drafts look different after they’ve had a chance to cool in a drawer.
Create a document where you keep favorite sentences/sections that don’t make the final cut. Your darlings can live happily ever after in their own special file.
Try not to become too critical of drafts that are under construction. Instead, recognize them as a necessary part the writing process, full of potential and possibility. Leaning into revision will reward you with a deeper appreciation for and faith in your work.
Andrea Caswell runs Cleaver’s Short Story Clinic, offering detailed feedback on fiction up to 5500 words. Whether you’re wondering how to improve a story, getting ready to submit one to a lit mag, or preparing an MFA application portfolio, editorial feedback will be personalized to help you reach your fiction goals. Writers may also schedule a conference with Andrea as a one-on-one workshop to discuss their work further.
Andrea Caswell runs Cleaver’s Short Story Clinic, offering detailed feedback on fiction up to 5500 words. Whether you’re wondering how to improve a story, getting ready to submit one to a lit mag, or preparing an MFA application portfolio, editorial feedback will be personalized to help you reach your fiction goals. Writers may also schedule a conference with Andrea as a one-on-one workshop to discuss their work further.
Tricia Park TIPS TO UNSTUCK YOUR WRITING Second in a 5-part series
Sometimes, the hardest part is getting started. We get overwhelmed by self-doubt and too many (or too few) ideas as we sit, staring at the blank page.
Often, we just need a prompt to fire up our writing engines. Here’s a free prompt for you to try out today:
Timeline of your life.
● Set a timer for 10 minutes.
● Draw a horizontal line across a page. This is the timeline of your life.
● Mark off the first year at the farthest left and the current moment on the farthest right. For ten minutes, mark off all the events you can think of on the line. Eg: My first loose tooth, my first kiss, my prom, my wedding day, the day my dog died, etc. etc. etc. No life event is too small or too large. The choice is yours.
● When the ten minutes is up, look at your timeline and circle the event that calls out to you. Don’t overthink it, just pick one.
● Set your timer for another 10 minutes.
● Write down everything you can think of about that life event. When the ten minutes is up, you can keep writing OR circle another event and write for another ten minutes.
● Repeat as many times as you like.
These exercises work for two reasons: urgency and ordinariness.
Our (relentless) ten-minute timer creates urgency to focus our attention, giving us a finite amount of time in which to complete the exercise. The tension of not quite enough time puts a fire under our butts to write with intention while also giving us an out…since we only have to write for ten minutes.
And by drawing inspiration from ordinary things–using our senses, our favorite books, eavesdropping on conversation (or radio), everyday objects, and phrases–we relieve ourselves of the burden of starting. We don’t have to make things up if we just follow the things we find around us.
Build on this exercise by…
● Seeing if you can come up with your own exercises, too, considering the principles of urgency and ordinariness.
● Making your time limit shorter or a little longer.
● Writing in a different space each day and notice what ordinary, but novel things are around you.
Sometimes, even when I know what I need to do or have to do, it can still be hard to get started or follow through. That’s when I’ve found a little accountability can go a long way.
Tricia Park TIPS TO UNSTUCK YOUR WRITING First in a 5-part series
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Sometimes, the hardest part is getting started. We get overwhelmed by self-doubt and too many (or too few) ideas as we sit, staring at the blank page.
What if I told you that you could write more quickly, with more fun and ease?
Writing is hard because we have a lofty idea of what writing is. We imagine people–fancy people–with degrees and credentials and quills and thick notebooks into which they spill their flawless thoughts from their flawless brains, sitting in flawless libraries filled top to bottom with other flawless books by other flawless authors.
Yeah, no. That’s not how it works.
The best writing begins with mess.
The messier and wilder you are, the better. The best thing we can do is throw ourselves in, as quickly possible, and write a lot of mess, as fast as we can.
Okay, yeah, but how?
If you’re ready to make the leap, here’s one way to get started:
Drop the needle, aka Your Bookshelf is Your Friend.
When I was a violin student at Juilliard, we took listening exams where the professor would drop the needle on a random record and we’d have to guess what the piece was and who composed it. A nerve-wracking exercise, but I’ve transformed it here, into a fun writing exercise for you.
● Go to your bookshelf and pick a book you love.
● Open to a random page, close your eyes, and drop your finger (the needle) onto the page.
● Open your eyes and wherever it lands, that’s the prompt. Example (if you don’t like yours, you can use mine): In Durga Chew-Bose’s TOO MUCH AND NOT THE MOOD, I dropped the needle on this phrase: “Funny thing about adulthood,…”
● Set a timer for 10 minutes and write.
● When the timer rings, shampoo, rinse, and repeat this exercise. (My next one is: “a top hat and monocle.” You can steal this one, too.
This exercise works because of two things: urgency and ordinariness.
Our (relentless) ten-minute timer creates urgency to focus our attention, giving us a finite amount of time to complete the exercise. The tension of not-quite-enough time puts a fire under our butts to write with intention while also giving us an out…since we only have to write for ten minutes.
And by drawing inspiration from ordinary things–using our senses, our favorite books, eavesdropping on conversation (or radio), everyday objects and phrases–we relieve ourselves of the burden of starting. We don’t have to make things up if we just follow the things we find around us.
Tricia Park is a concert violinist, writer, and educator. Since making her concert debut at age thirteen, Tricia has performed on five continents and received the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. She is the host and producer of an original podcast called, “Is it Recess Yet? Confessions of a Former Child Prodigy.” Tricia Park has served on faculty at the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa, and has worked for Graywolf Press. She is the co-lead of the Chicago chapter of Women Who Submit, an organization that seeks to empower women and non-binary writers. She is a Juilliard graduate and received her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2021, Tricia was awarded a Fulbright Grant to Seoul, Korea, where she worked on a literary and musical project. Her writing has appeared in Cleaver Magazine and F Newsmagazine. She was also a finalist for contests in C&R Press and The Rumpus. Tricia has served on faculty at the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa and has worked for Graywolf Press. She is the co-lead of the Chicago chapter of Women Who Submit, an organization that seeks to empower women and non-binary writers. Currently, Tricia is Associate Director of Cleaver Magazine Workshops where she is also a Creative Non Fiction editor and faculty instructor, teaches for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and maintains a private studio of violin students and writing clients.