Booya-kah-ha: The Wit and Wisdom of Cyndy Drew Etler

A couple of months ago, a tweet about this YA memoir, Straightling, caught my attention. Following the link to the author's website, I signed up for her email list and got access to an excerpt. Her fresh, lively voice captivated me immediately. I emailed the author, Cyndy Drew Etler, and asked if I could review her book for M.L.T.S. Magazine.

A little while later, I got an email asking for opinions of two stock photos. And so began a beautiful friendship.

We email almost constantly. We talk about self-publishing, our favorite books and movies, and writing. Cyndy's been reading THEY KEPT THEIR SECRETS, the book I'm working on, and critiquing it. For a criticism junkie like me, her imparting her intelligence and talent is a blessed gift.

Today, she sent me this email:

Here's a sentence that illustrates one of the points I want you to pick up. I know you have the talent to do this, just maybe it hasn't occurred to you concisely. 

When you describe things, as much as you are able, and as much as is reasonable, you want to use the perfect descriptor--and quite often, that descriptor is going to be the most effective if it's unexpected. Check this sentence out. 

He sat on the lumpy green couch tapping his feet in time with a guitar he scratched at with sullen incompetence. 

Lumpy, green, couch: standard fare. Nothing unusual, but at the same time, no overkill, either. It's lumpy and it's green. It's not also velour, scratched-up, old, and heavy.  Right? So for the part of the image that is not the pivotal part--that is not the part he most wants you to take notice of--he gives two normal words to describe it. Just enough to let you know it's shitty. 

Tapping his feet in time: that's just what the character is doing. Nothing fancy, just a statement of fact. This, too, is not the focus of the sentence. 

a guitar he scratched at with sullen incompetence.  NOW we're talkin.  THIS is the gem in the crown. The incompetence, the animal-like fumbling. Therein lies our characterization, so therein lies our fancy wording. You dig? 

And instead of telling us "he couldn't really play, so he was fumbling at the guitar," he let us divine that, by showing ("scratched at") not telling. He did tell about incompetence, but the "sullen" gives us the layers about him. He's pouty. He's not only incompetent, he's pissed about it.  

See what I'm saying here?  I want you to go through all your stuff and highlight the lines where you are telling, not showing.  

Then with a colored pen, underline the portion of those sentences which is the gem, the really important info you want us to get.  

Finally, for those underlined parts, I want you to go into like a state of meditation about it. Hard to explain this part, but you have to let your mind loose of its moorings, and see or feel or hear what that thing/scene/action/look/mood is most "like." A wedding dress, dark like Louisiana Bayou. A stadium cheer of a smile. See how they're totally not related, but the layers say soooo much?

This woman is quickly becoming a dear friend. Hopefully her advice will help you sharpen your own writing!

Climb Every Mountain

Bad writing. It piles up. You write and you write and you just add to the pile. It's shit, it's shit. You torture yourself. For what reason? It's terrible, it's shit. You're convinced. Utterly convinced.

Then suddenly. It sucks less. Just marginal improvements at first. And while the pile of writing builds, you come to find that eventually, you've reached its peak. Your peak. The stuff you're writing is actually decent. No wait, it's good. It's better. It's f*cking great!

Today I climbed a mountain again -- I looked through all of my electronic files. I skimmed dozens of pages of fiction, some of it passable, some of it maybe even good. A lot of it was bad. Really bad. Like, how-could-I-ever-have-thought-this-was-good bad.

But there, amidst the bad, and the okay, there were gems.

And then, later, I was paging through my last Writer's Notebook (#7) and found the following quote I'd copied from the January/February 2011 issue of Poets & Writers magazine:

"No writer worth her salt needs to be reminded that underneath nearly every successful piece of writing there is a veritable mountain of 'failure' upon which it stands. The writer--oh, how well she knows. After all, by what other means has her poem, story, essay, or chapter arrived on the page than by fits and starts, addition and subtraction, revision and rewriting?...The act of creating something meaningful is rarely easy. Rather than get discouraged, consider each derelict passage--the mishanded metaphor, the broken logic--as another step further along in that hard slog toward a good, solid piece of writing."

Those words were written by Editor Kevin Larimer, and they really struck a chord, then and now.

The Boy Who Could Do Anything

This handsome devil is my boyfriend. Jealous?
(Photo: Rosella Eleanor LaFevre)

I have a favor to ask of you, my lovelies.

My darling, Christopher Doctor, is at work on his own novel. It's called THE BOY WHO COULD DO ANYTHING. He started it a while ago and he's finally back at it. The thing is, he's kind of an instant gratification addict and really wants to know what others think of it.

Would you please take some time out of your day to read the following excerpt, the prologue to TBWCDA, and tell us what you think?

Read the excerpt after the break.

Fairy Tales and Real Life

As a writer, I've long mined my personal experiences -- and exploited those of some of my closest friends and family -- for stories. But through a compost process, I take my own experiences and those of others I know and combine them, filling in the holes as I go with my own imagination.

One thing I've never really given myself credit for is living a life interesting enough to write about without expansion and exaggeration. Maybe that's why I've been fascinated by memoirs lately. Some of my favorite memoirs include Anna Fields' Confessions of a Rebel Debutante and Cyndy Drew Etler's Straightling. Now I'm reading My Week with Marilyn, the memoir by Colin Clark, the young man who got his first job in the film industry, working as third assistant director on The Prince and the Showgirl.

I'm only a few pages in and already I'm delighted by Clark's literary style and, surely, intrigued by the experiences that provided Michelle Williams the opportunity to step inside Marily Monroe's skin. Here, I'll share with you the first paragraph of the memoir, which immediately struck me.

"All my life I have kept diaries, but this is not one of them. This is a fairy story, an interlude, an episode outside time and space which nevertheless was real. And why not? I believe in magic. My life and most people's lives are a series of little miracles -- strange coincidences which spring from uncontrollable impulses and give rise to incomprehensible dreams. We spend a lot of time pretending that we are normal, but underneath the surface each one of us knows that he or she is unique."

While reading, I often highlight or note with a pen those passages which strike me as profound and relevant to real, everyday life. This passage is now between blue ink brackets to be referred to again and again.

Have you read any memoirs? Which are your favorites?

(Above photo property of the Weinstein Group. I'm just borrowing it.)

Getting Back into the Swing (Plus an Excerpt)

Last week, I started writing again. Spurred on by all the great reading I've been doing and my coversations with Cyndy Drew Etler, a writer who is self-publishing her memoir, Straightling, I knew it was time I got back to my old self. I've always defined myself as a fiction writer but after the fall 2010 semester, I really hadn't written much. I needed to get back to that person.

So I've been working on this novel I'd gotten the idea for a while ago. And it's slow-going but I really think what I've got so far is beautiful.

I decided that I'll share an excerpt from it with you. Read the excerpt after the break.

Beth Kephart on Writing Slowly

About a year ago, when I was working for two.one.five magazine, I got the chance to interview Beth Kephart, author of several books. She is a true poet and an inspiration. I just read this on her blog and had to share:

"There are great pleasures in writing a book at a quiet pace, in writing toward the not easily known. You steep until the material owns you. You steep, you read, you keep consulting those maps, you watch those films, you listen to those people speaking their foreign tongues until they don't sound so foreign after all. And then one day you wake up, and you own it. One day it's not about what you are studying, but what you know. It takes time." 

A Love Poem

I'm a little obsessed with Marilyn Monroe after seeing My Week with Marilyn. Here's a piece from a poem she wrote about her third husband, Arthur Miller. Hope your 2012 is filled with love and happiness!