In which we decide it's time to move our favorite writing chair to gain some fresh perspective

Margaret writes at home. Each morning at five she rises, lets the dogs out, puts on the kettle, boots up her laptop, and settles onto her quiet porch where she taps out lovely, quiet stories of single women, their dogs, and the porches where they sip tea.

Sam writes in night cafes. Scrawling long-hand, he records the frantic rattle of the twenty/thirty something life that throngs around him. Sam's work has sirens in it--flirtations, drugs, disaster--but no quiet. Nowhere for his reader's mind to rest.

Certainly, writing doesn't always reflect the spot where it's produced. Just as certainly, writers--creatures of great habit--often have, in addition to a favorite pen, a favorite place to write. Like Baby Bear's chair, the spot we've carved from a world of chaos can nurture our writing Just Right.

But once habit takes the short leap to superstition ("I can only write _____." In the bathtub? At my corner table at Starbucks? In the library? At the zoo? The museum? The sidewalk in front of Macy's?), we've given our creative power away.

To break the spell, try a little Mr. Mix-It-Up!

• If you're a writer that needs absolute ear-plugged silence to get a word on the page, take a trip to a local music hotspot and write while guitars and synthesizers fuss and wail.
• If you keep "far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,"* take yourself to a local mall one Saturday night, then, pen in hand, capture what most of America's really like!
• If you're an out-and-about hip sort of writer, find yourself a forest or lake. Get your own heartbeat on paper. Write about the quiet in green ink.

It's a Big Ol' World out there. Take your laptop on a field trip. Grab some of that Big Ol' energy for your writing. Who knows, you might find a new favorite place.

What do you think?
Where's the last place you would ever want to write? Where's the place you'd love to write but have never been?

* From Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." Click the quote to access the text of the entire poem.

In which we stamp our foot and say, "we don't want to write about it, and you can't make us!"

Detour ahead
Politics
Injured animals
Physical frailty
Breasts
Sexuality
Depression
My brother's affair
Condominiums
My inadequacies
Global warming
The Holocaust
The truth about my childhood
Ways in which my father was right . . .

Fine whine
This is just the beginning of a long list of topics I don't want to write about. It's not that I can't write about them. It's just that I'd prefer not to. So I don't.

Natalie Goldberg, long-time advocate of writing dangerously, would frown on my avoidance. She believes there're diamonds in the caves I shy from. That's why, in Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life, Natalie says, "go for the jugular":

"If something scary comes up, go for it. . . . Otherwise, you’ll spend all your time writing around whatever makes you nervous. . . . Hemingway said, ‘Write hard and clear about what hurts.’ Don’t avoid it. It has all the energy. . ."

Yoga sutures
This sounds suspiciously like my yoga teacher, who, when you've held a deep lunge for what feels like hours and you swear you smell smoke wafting from your burning thighs, says, "Notice the discomfort. Life is uncomfortable sometimes. Yoga is life."

Oy!

This week, Porkchop's had a moment or two when life has been just a bit too much like yoga. With no convenient "Warning: Bridge Out" sign to tell us to swerve, we plowed right into some areas of life we've happily detoured for years.

I'm not sure which comes first, the chicken or the egg, the living or the writing, but it seems to me, with all the barnyard poop I've faced this week, writing a fine little personal essay titled "Things My Father Did Right" would be a piece of Devil's Food cake.

What do you think?
What don't you want to write about? Make us a list?

In which we riffle the pages of the family photo album

Snapshots
Sharp-sided, white-framed, snapshots lay flat, static on the page. More vulnerable than in any real-life moment, those frozen in the photos smile wide for the camera. They have no way of knowing, while posing for their Kodak moment, what will happen next.

Kodachrome
But we know what happens next: Sometimes painful, always unexpected, what happens next leads us farther down the path of what will become of us.

A page from her book
One of Pat Schneider's favorite writing exercises begins with the trigger of family snapshots:

"Call up from your memory a snapshot or photograph of someone who is important to you. It may be a picture in your album, or just a mental 'snapshot.' When you have the picture, begin writing with these words: 'In this one you are . . . '* You are writing [directly] to the person in the photograph."

Like a lion behind bars, when they're caged safely inside their photos, we can sneak up on even the most formidable foes from our past--sometimes seeing in them an early sheen of innocence we know the years will tarnish. Facing the long-ago emulsion, we are allowed our own insights into the person we see etched there.

Raymond Carver's lovely poem "Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year" is a wonderful, delicate example of this approach. It starts,

"October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen
I study my father's embarrassed young man's face.
Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string
of spiny yellow perch, in the other
a bottle of Carlsbad beer. . . "

Read this poem in its entirety by clicking the link at the title.

What do you think?
When you flip through your memory's photo album, what Kodak moments appear? Care to show us one or two?

*Schneider credits poet B.H. Fairchild for the opening phrase--"In this one you are . . ."--from the exercise cited above.

In which we take a hike--and invite you to come along

Long walk, short pier
Ten minutes ago, I marched out my front door, leaving cats and vague blog ramblings behind. As I clumped around the first block of my intended walk, my brain screeched to-do lists at me, but by the second block, my mind had quieted. By block four, arms swaying, legs swinging, I knew exactly what to write about.

Like walking, writing has its own heartbeat. Poetry, of course, is deeply rhythmic. Poet Edward Hirsch, speaking about the connection between walking and poetry, describes himself as

". . . a walker who inevitably ends up sitting with an open book and a pad of paper." He says, "I associate [writing poetry] with walking. Poetry is written from the body as well as the mind, and the rhythm and pace of a walk can get you going and keep you grounded."

Let your fingers do the walking
Poets and prose writers alike find easy access to their best notions when walking. Jammed ideas unknot, fresh associations link; it's as simple as a summer breeze when they're strolling.

In her generous, encouraging book If You Want to Write, writing teacher Brenda Ueland speaks definitively about walking as a pathway to a creative state of mind:

"For me, a long five or six mile walk helps. And one must go alone and every day. . . . when I walk in a carefree way . . . I am living in the present. And it is only then that the creative power flourishes."

If we, like Ueland and Hirsch, take our writing selves for a walk, Chip Scanlon assures us "You won't be alone. Walking lets you follow in the steps of literary giants," citing Henry David Thoreau's famous walks around Walden Pond and Dickens's "long nightly treks through Victorian London."

Putting one foot in front of the other, there's no telling how far we could go with such writers as our examples.

What do you think?
How does walking--or gardening, ballroom dancing, yoga, tai chi--inspire your creative life?

In which we let your travel writing take us on a trip

Going, going, gone
Both Lynnie-Lou and Joey Beat took a bite out of the Big Apple a couple of weeks ago. And Susan and Helena just did Amsterdam and Paris. If Bruce doesn't answer his land-line, it's 'cause he's in London--like, every other minute! Tonight, Julie Compton's in St. Louis promoting Tell No Lies, and even Bbbeebs gets out of Baked Bean Town heading south to West Palm.

Wish you were here
But not us. Someone has to stay home and make sure the bacon doesn't burn! So we depend on the kindness of . . . well . . . our friends to learn all about foreign (and not-so-foreign) climes. Lucky for us, all our friends are writers--who might publish their travel adventures in the Orlando Sentinel's "Being There" feature. Then we get to read stories about where they've been.

Gone fishin'
Julie wrote a piece in Tuesday morning workshop that the "Being There" folks snapped right up. Here's (the abbreviated) how:

"I wrote about a float trip I took on the Glen Canyon river," Julie says. "I thought about where I might submit it. I checked the word count--just over 450 words. I checked the submission guidelines for the Orlando Sentinel's "Being There" feature--300-400 words.

An hour later, I'd cut the piece down to 399 words. I drafted a cover letter, and with the click of a key stroke, submitted the piece. Next day I received a response that the Sentinel wanted to publish my piece. I was thrilled! This was the fastest I'd ever received an acceptance--it's usually the rejections that come so swiftly!"

Wish you were "Being There," too
Click here for the "Being There" guidelines. Send 'em a little sum'p'n sum'p'n. 50 bucks will buy you a whole lotta bacon.

What do you think?
Will you share your best story-from-the-road with your tied-to-the-frying-pan pal?

In which we let our writing voices run wild and free

Horses
As a kid equestrienne, I learned that some horses are reluctant. Unless convinced otherwise, the disinclined horse's canter will fade to a bumpy trot, devolve into a sluggish walk, then creak to a complete halt--well before you've gotten where you want to go.

Wildfire
Another horse snatches the bit in his teeth and flies, his rider hanging on for a ride that might take her far from where she expected to go. This horse needs a strong hand and a bit of refinement, but enthusiasm spurs him on.

Horse sense
A writing voice can be eager or reluctant, too. While the eager voice pricks up its ears and trots smartly towards new ground, the reluctant voice--worn by life, or so bound by convention that it can't escape its narrow, sandspur-strewn paddock--plods a tired circle of sentiment, passivity, and cliche.

Free-writing, Morning Pages, timed writing exercises, all these help shove the reluctant nag out of its stall and into the wide fields of self-expression. And they'll give it the practice it needs to regain muscle tone, sass, and energy, to boot.

The winner by a nose
Crack open any book. By paragraph one you know if the voice will carry you somewhere fresh and new. Be that writer, the writer whose voice captures a reader from the very first page--and drags her headlong on an unforgettable ride!

What do you think?
Will you let this wild-mind exercise take you for a run-away gallop? If so, set a timer for ten minutes. Now write a single, ten-minute-long sentence that includes the words "caramel" and "noon." Let this sentence tug you wherever it wants to go for the full ten minutes. (Semi-colons, colons, connective conjunctions allowed, but NO PERIODS. Remember, the challenge is to make one continuous sentence!)

In which we learn it's not how many syllables you have, it's what you do with them that counts

Hi, u cutie!
Haiku, that most diminutive of poetic forms, wraps itself tight enough to fit onto the tiny candy message heart a second-grader gives his Valentine.

Brick house
Built of just seventeen syllables, these Japanese-style poems celebrate the commonplace, the natural, the plain-Jane everyday with a subtle shift of perception that gives the mortal moment a luminous immortality:

"You rice-field maidens!
The only things not muddy
Are the songs you sing."
--Raizan

The Cider House Rules
Aside from syllable count, and the conventional three-line, 5-7-5 metric pattern (neither of which is an absolute imperative when writing haiku in English), the "rules of the road" for haiku are more philosophical than structural:

Haiku for People says,
1) Be brief. The tighter the better.
2) Focus on a single moment. Present tense preferred.
3) Evoke a season. Snow can indicate winter, but the seasonal reference need not be obvious to create the quality desired.
4) A "cutting" slices each haiku in two, allowing an imaginative distance, a creative tension, to pull between the sections.

All of which makes Lynnie-Lou say,

"Haiku,
the ghost of a riddle
in a slip of poem."

Freestylin'
Big moon quarter rising,
black sky oily with white.
White cat slinking,
rimmed with black of night.
(Oy! 20 syllables--and confusing! But it's a start. At least I've got the basic images.)

Big moon quarter rising
black sky oiled with its white--
White cat slinking,
rimmed with night.
(19 syllables--is this one clearer? It seems tighter than the loss of just one syllable should make it.)

Half moon rising
oils black sky white.
White cat slinking
rimmed dark with night.
(16 syllables--but not worth it to lose the "big quarter.")

Big moon quarter, rising,
oils black sky white.
White cat slinking,
rimmed with night.
(17! Is it a coincidence that I like this one best? But, strictly speaking, this is not a haiku. Still, I learned a lot about brevity--if not wit--in the writing of it.)

What do you think?
Say it loud! Say it proud! What can you report in just seventeen syllables?