Marion Dane Bauer's Blog, page 36

Lighten Up and Play

“For me, finishing a novel requires a kind of dogged persistence. It’s a long process requiring a suite of hard-won skills. But when I approach a book with a sort of grit-your-teeth determination, I can crush all the life out of it. My best writing comes when I lighten up and approach it in a spirit of play. For me, writing a novel is a delicate balancing act of craft, persistence, passion, and joy.”

What wise words from Susan Fletcher, author of Falcon in the Glass and many other fine novels....

Transformation through Writing

In response to my blog, two weeks ago, Steve said: I’ve often thought that both acting and writing are ways to temporarily try on personalities and circumstances that our more reserved selves couldn’t really maintain in real life.

Here’s a question: do you think you’ve ever been changed or transformed by the process of getting into the mind and heart of character?

It was a question I didn’t find easy to respond to, so I turned it over to my readers.

Sarah Lamstein said this: When I wrote my nove...

More Feelings and Fiction

Last week I asked if any of my readers shared my experience of using fiction writing to express feelings their early training had taught them not to acknowledge. Here are some of the responses I received:

Dorothy Pensky said, “Interestingly for me, trying (and so far kind of failing) to be a writer has made me able to see my feelings in real time in the world. I’m not sure I’m in control of them on the page, yet. Trying to be a writer has completely changed the person I was trained to be–Scott...

When Feelings Aren’t Nice

I grew up in a family where strong feelings of any kind were not allowed. They were, in fact, distinctly not nice.

The message was never spoken, but I absorbed it with my mother’s milk. Tears were a disgrace. Exuberance was, at the very least, undignified. Affection was to be contained, doled out only in acceptably small portions. To descend into anger was to lose the argument, whatever the argument might be. To simply like something or someone without having a clear, logical reason for that l...

Second Time Around . . . the Novel in Verse

The first time I wrote a novel in verse, Little Dog, Lost, I felt as though I had just stepped onto the moon. After forty years of writing and publishing, I was doing something entirely new . . . for me. In fact, I was doing something I had disapproved of in times past. “Poetry novels,” I had been known to expound, with my nose pointed rather high, “are too often neither. They aren’t poetry and they don’t work as novels.”

It goes without saying that the world hasn’t been waiting for my approva...

To Teach or Not to Teach

I couldn’t begin to count the number of letters I’ve received from young readers that say something like, “When I read On My Honor I learned always to tell the truth.” Each time I’m tempted to write back and say, “Really?”

Teachers love to ask their students to identify the “theme” of a story, and there’s nothing wrong with that concept. It asks the reader to look beneath the story action for meaning. And every story, whether it intends to or not, has meaning. The meaning can, quite simply, be...

Finding Our Souls in a Story

Wendell Berry photo © Jim Fothergill

I seldom reread. There is so much out there waiting that I have little inclination to carve out the time to read even the best books a second time. Sometimes, though, I find my soul in a story, and then I am compelled to return.

Wendell Berry is one who draws me back. The moral universe in which his characters live, the farming culture they inhabit speaks to me profoundly. Interestingly enough, the depth of my response comes not from my own history but from...

The Gift of Truth

My mother lied to me when I was a child.

Now, I don’t want to be hard on her. After all, I grew up at a time when lying to children was routine. Any topic that embarrassed adults was deemed inappropriate for kids—sex, bodily functions, adult foibles of all kinds, finances, birth, death . . . sex.

My mother, however, was probably better at lying than most. She not only lied with her silence on all those terrible topics. When asked a direct question she lied to my face.

An example: Not a word was...

Writing as Translation

E.B. White

“Remember that writing is translation,” E.B. White said, “and the opus to be translated is yourself.”

An article in my local newspaper recently cited a study which gave proof that we get pleasure from talking about ourselves. No surprise there. Surely that’s a phenomenon we’re all aware of. But what was interesting about the study is that psychologists actually monitored people’s brain waves during conversations and watched the pleasure centers light up when they were being self-reve...

Talent, What is It?

The remark came through my agent with a rejection of a picture-book manuscript. The editor turned the manuscript down—I’ve forgotten why now, perhaps because she had something on her list on the same topic—but added, “Your writer is talented.”

My response? A burst of surprised laughter. Talented? Isn’t that something you say about young people, those folks of high energy and raw hope? How long has it been since anyone has used that word about me? I bring to my work some facility for language,...