Writing Salon Mistress Muses

Analogies and Metaphors

I received this email from Writing Salon teacher Alison Luterman today. It came in just at the moment when I was wondering what to post on this blog. I thought, Easy way out!  and took it.


Every year, English teachers from across the country submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphors found in high  school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country.

Here are last year's winners.....

1.  Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making  and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3.  He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went  blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a  pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the  dangers of looking at a solar eclipse, without one of those boxes with a pinhole  in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine  laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it    throws up.

6. Her  vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a  six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30  years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock,  like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little  boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball  wouldn't.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty  bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly  howl. The whole scene had an eerie,surreal quality, like when you're on  vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of  7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a  sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots  when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the  star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two  freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36  p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35  mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences  that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met.  They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for  her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a  steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted  shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan  was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might  work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not  eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping  on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe  and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire  hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids  around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing  up

More Dear Natalie

"You have to earn the right to make an abstract statement. You earn this right by using the concrete bricks of detail. After much original detail, you can take a little leap, step away, and make a statement: "Ah, yes, life is good," or "Life sucks." But you can't say "Life sucks" until you have given us a picture of it: a man lying in a gutter, mosquitoes feeding at this open sores, the tongue of his right shoe hanging out, his pockets turned inside out, his eyes stunned closes, and his skin a pale yellow." — Natalie Goldberg

Push Yourself

"Push yourself beyond when you think you are done with what you have to say. Go a little further. Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that's why we decide we're done. It's getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out." — Natalie Goldberg

Dear Alice Munro

Last night after midnight, I finally managed to stay awake long enough to finish reading one short story by Alice Munro. The story was called Chance, and it was in her book of short stories called Runaway. Her story, which was character driven, pulled me along as deftly as a magnet pulls a metal filing.

What was going to happen to shy and romantically inexperienced Juliet when she went to visit the man she'd met on the train? They had spent only a few hours on the train together. He was, essentially, a stranger. It had been six months since the train encounter when she received a short letter from him, a letter that said little more than "I've thought of you often." He had sent it to the school where she taught, because he hadn't known her address and, in fact, could not even remember her last name.

Nothing boded well for Juliet. The trip seemed destined to end badly, somehow. But how? I was reminded of myself at age 21, the same as as Juliet. I had all but forgotten how it feels to be 21, to be so on the verge of. . . almost everything!

Where was Alice Munro taking Juliet? Where was she taking ME? And why?

Reading that story made me want to write again. I'd also forgotten how reading can inspire me as a writer. It doesn't even have to be a whole book. My time for reading is limited, and squeezing in a short story is about the best I can do right now. But oh, what a relief from the torture of TV. A torture I impose on myself far too often. What an idiot I am! Television has gotten so BAD. The reality shows are hideous. Moronic. They certainly don't inspire me to write.

Dear dear Alice Munro. Thank you.

My tip for today (obvious but can never be said enough to an American): Read more good literature. It will inspire you and perhaps even teach you a thing or two about how to improve your own work. Turn off the TV. Turn off the iPod. Turn off the cell phone. Turn off the radio. Turn off the computer. Pick up the book. Open the book. Read.

Walking & Writing

I have more to say (surprise!) about my last post. Much more. However, I feel like a change of pace, so..... just so you don't think I've become nothing but a boring BCO Blogger (Breast Cancer Obsessed Blogger), I'd like to add that I've been working away on the new spring session schedule of Writing Salon classes, and am rather excited about a new class we'll be offering called Walking & Writing, taught by Stephen Vincent.

Stephen just sent me a short series of some of his own writings that he did (or started) while out walking around San Francisco. The writings are coupled with photos that he also took while out walking, and the series is titled Ghost Walks. Here's a small, lovely excerpt from Ghost Walks.

More about Walking & Writing later, but right now I am inspired, partly by Stephen, to go out for my three-mile walk before the next downpour arrives. This time I'm taking my new Nanopod because, as much as I enjoy the peacefulness of walking in silence, I also sometimes get bored with that. I want to whisk myself around Bernal Hill to the sounds of music today. Maybe a little Zydeco and World Beat.

The Truth Is. . .

I'm going to take the easy way out this morning, and do a cut and paste blog entry. Below is an excerpt from a book about writing, which I typed out last night to send to my Round Robin class members. Since the Round Robin is a class that requires students to write from prompts for 10 to 12 minutes a day, every day (without planning ahead of time what they want to write), I especially wanted them to note the graph that I've put in bold.


"All of my friends, and most of my acquaintances, are writers of one sort or another, or editors or agents who deal with writers constantly. But it's remarkable how little I know of what happens to writers when they're actually alone writing.

If the way my mind works when I'm trying to write has any resemblance to the way real writers' minds work, then I pity them all. When I have time to write, the ideas aren't there — or if the ideas, then not the words. Forcing myself to put the words on paper helps not at all: insights become platitudes as phrased when writing under self-imposed duress. You see?!

If I determine once and for all to finish up a section which has been "nearly finished" for months, then the simplest transitional paragraph evokes related but irrelevant speculations and I find myself furiously scribbling thoughts that get further and further from what I was intending to do, that cover material I know I must some time write, but it's material that I'll want to have make a different point from the point I'm making with it now.

Still, one often stares so blankly for so long at the paper to no avail that to be writing anything -- and this fast! -- is to be exploited while it lasts. And perhaps there are some sentences in it that when later combined with the laborious, correctly directed writing-under-duress can be organized to say what it is that's needed.

Combining them, then, later -- determined this time to make a coherent sequence out of all these scraps and all these sets of three or four pages of hasty handwriting, some retyped some not -- I try to construct some sort of bridge between two of these passages, some transitional passage, which somehow gets me started on a related train of thought, but certainly not the one that's needed here, and off I go again, wildly and enthusiastically (but despairingly) scribbling something I hope is good and may have some use later: another disjointed passage to puzzle over.

This is a sample of that.

Can I use it to say that the necessary, planned writing is often the most pedestrian, if not actually awkward, and that what seems most useless when it is being written will often prove not only best but eventually central, because it flows as it comes -- which it wouldn't do if it were wrong with the mind, with your own real thoughts on the matter?

But that's not it, not really. Sometimes I can see not only exactly what it was I meant in such-and-such a passage, but also a use for it with a whole new slant. I can comprehend the whole. I can see beyond a few pages to where so-and-so might lead. Befuddlement passes. Super ego sneaks away in shame. Energy releases clarity. Clarity releases energy. What paralyzes a writer is the inability to see where what he is writing is going -- to see the connections between the aspects of his work. Concentration is all that's needed, really. A deadline releases nervous energy. Adrenalin flows. There's someone who wants the work, is waiting for it. Encouragement's coming, is on the way. No, again that's not it, really. It's more than that. The truth is that the only way not to feel really terrible is to work."

    from Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, by L. Rust Hills

The End

"I wanted a perfect ending. . . . Now I've learned, the hard way,
that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear
beginning, middle, and end. . . . Delicious ambiguity." — Gilda Radner

My students will be arriving in an hour. Since I still have things to do to get ready for this Round Robin class that I teach every session, I can allow myself only ten minutes for a blog post. Guess I'll have to cut to the chase and get right to the ending.

I love good endings. Every time my writing group meets, we all pretty much know what each one of us is going to say by way of critique. I don't mean that we know exactly what will be said, but we know what each person will zero in on. Martha, for example, always always always focuses on looking for the first signs of conflict, and she always always always wants the first signs to be moved up closer to the beginning of the piece. Doug always always always thinks that the original version was better than the revision. Eric always especially appreciates the poetic aspects of any piece. Mary Ann always either cries or says it's beautiful, or both. Will always fixes small punctuation errors on the hard copy, and pays a lot of attention to what you seem to be trying to SAY, so much so that he usually "gets" it better than anyone else does. Karen always (okay, not always but often) says she thinks it's brilliant. And I always say that I think it should end sooner. "Just lop off that last line," I say. Or "What if you ended it with the second-to-last paragraph?"

This is because I prefer endings that don't try to wrap everything up all nice and neat. I'd rather my endings end with a question than an answer.

Today while sitting in the dentist's chair waiting to have my teeth cleaned, I read a 3,000 word short story, "A Taste of Dust," by one of my favorite writers, Lynn Sharon Schwartz. I particularly loved her ending:

"She tried to telegraph back the kindly message he wanted: I'm sorry it turned out this way. I would help you if I could. But as the door shut behind her, her face showed envy, not sorrow. He owned all the misery his risks had earned; he was in the thicket of his mistakes, impaled, fending off an excess of feeling, even if it was remorse. His life was dense and palpitating. She was clean and dry as old bones."

It satisfied me in the way that only a story that refuses to depend upon a tidy ending can. Needless to say, such a story will almost certainly be character driven.

Doing the Work

One of the Writing Salon teachers who has been teaching a longer class told me that he wants to change the class to a one-day workshop. Why? Because, he says, "not enough people want to do the work." They come to the class all fired up because they have an idea for a book,  but many drop out of the class as soon as they begin to realize that there's a whole lot more involved in writing a book than just having an idea, even a good idea.

Sometimes when people drop out of classes it's because the teacher isn't very good. But in this case, I know the teacher is good. Very good. I've taken his class myself, so I know only too well that you get out of it exactly what you put into it.

Many students haven't yet figured out that  writing really IS a craft and, some of the time, an art. They think they know this, of course. But they don't REALLY know it. They don't REALLY understand how much time and effort it takes to learn a craft.

If you attend a class 2.5 hours a week, that's great. You'll almost certainly learn a few things during that time. But to get the full value of the class, there's more to be done on your own. You do your homework. If you don't have a homework assignment, then you set aside time to practice. Or you read other writers. Or you think about writing, you train yourself to look at the world with the eyes of a writer. You ponder your ideas. You percolate.

Taking a class is a step in the right direction. But it's just one step. The teacher can give you valuable information and tools, but you still have to buckle down and do the work yourself. No magic trick, no formula, no book, no class, no teacher is going to do the work FOR you.

After your class has ended, maybe you'll opt to take more classes, or join a writing group, or work privately with the teacher, or plug away on your own. Or some combination of the above. Whatever you choose to do in order to progress, you aren't going to be able to escape the fact that writing is work, just like any other work.

For me, the work of writing sometimes feels like play. It's great when that happens, but it doesn't always happen. Often it feels daunting, boring, difficult, downright impossible. Often I don't have time for it. Or I do have time but I don't use the time well because I'm too afraid, confused or lazy to grapple with the hard stuff, the messy stuff.

Yeah, writing can get pretty messy. Just like life. And you muddle along as best you can.

Uh-Oh

I last posted on August 1st, I see. Five days ago. Rather a long time. Uh-oh. Apparently I just lived through five days while in the process of blinking my eyes ONCE. A split second ago it was last Sunday, July 31st, and I was two miles south of Occidental on the Bohemian Highway, where I turned onto a tiny, windy dirt road and curved around and about through dirt and woods until I found the tiny house guy (see my Tiny House blog for more information, which will be there someday I hope). That was nice, meeting the tiny house guy. A nanosecond past a split second ago, it was last Monday and I was posting  a poem written by Marie Howe. After that, I did a couple loads of laundry, got the car air conditioning fixed, vacuumed the floor of the Writing Salon's Berkeley classroom and then spot- cleaned the carpets with Resolve (straight from a spray can). And I taught a writing class. And I wrote about my softy-earred cat and about the multi levels of sex and about my new neighbor who is a chicken.

Getting to know Ms. Bak Bak Baaaaaaaaaak was the peak experience of my rapido week, I suppose. She's a clucker alright. I asked my writing class students if anyone knew whether it was legal to raise a chicken in the city. A couple of students said no, and a couple said yes. Then we moved on to doing an active verb exercise that I took from a book by Natalie Goldberg. Put ten concrete nouns in one column. Example:

shoe
table
car
ice cream
computer
bra
dog
clock
nose
feather boa

Now think of an occupation. Example: chef. Now make a column listing fifteen verbs that go along with the actions of a chef. Example:

saute
chop
dice
slice
stir
whip
mix
steam
braise
bake,
broil
flambe
boil
poach,
spice

Now combine your nouns with your verbs, as in: subject/predicate. As in: The feather boa spiced up her neck. Her Miracle bra poached her nipples. Clocks broiled my dreams. Computers flambed my brains. His ice cream whipped her into a frenzy of hot fudged desire.

We had fun. Our words stirred the thick August air. Karen's glove knelt (kneeled?) down beside the table leg.

Get to Work!

"A man named Buzz Green worked with me years ago at the Boeing Company. He had once been a jazz musician and along with a man named Lu Waters had founded a jazz band well known in its day. Buzz once said of Lou McGarrity, a trombone player we both admired, 'He can play trombone with any symphony orchestra in the country but when he stands up to take a jazz solo he forgets everything he knows.' So if I seem to talk technique now and then and urge you to learn more, it is not so you will remember it when you write but so you can forget it. Once you have a certain amount of accumulated technique, you can forget it in the act of writing. Those moves that are naturally yours will stay with you and will come forth mysteriously when needed.

"Once a spectator said, after Jack Nicklaus had chipped a shot in from a sand trap, 'That's pretty lucky.' Nicklaus is supposed to have replied, 'Right. But I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get.' If you write often, perhaps every day, you will stay in shape and will be better able to receive those good poems, which are finally a matter of luck, and get them down. Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work."
                — Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town