Writing with the Masters: Louisa May Alcott

Like Jack London, some of Louisa May Alcott’s (1832-1888) fiction was autobiographical, with Little Women being the most notable. Although most writers don’t sell their first novel, the rest of this experience from that book is familiar.

     Little notice was taken of her stories, but they found a market; and, encouraged by this fact, she resolved to make a bold stroke for fame and fortune. Having copied her novel for the fourth time, read it to all her confidential friends, and submitted it with fear and trembling to three publishers, she at last disposed of it, on condition that she would cut it down one-third, and omit all the parts which she particularly admired.

* * *

     So, with Spartan firmness, the young authoress laid her firstborn on her table, and chopped it up as ruthlessly as any ogre. In the hope of pleasing every one, she took every one’s advice; and, like the old man and his donkey in the fable, suited nobody.

     Her father liked the metaphysical streak which had unconsciously got into it, so that was allowed to remain, though she had her doubts about it. Her mother thought that there was a trifle too much description; out, therefore, it nearly all came, and with it many necessary links in the story. Meg admired the tragedy; so Jo piled up the agony to suit her, while Amy objected to the fun, and, with the best intentions in life, Jo quenched the sprightly scenes which relieved the somber character of the story. Then, to complete the ruin, she cut it down one-third, and confidingly sent the poor little romance, like a picked robin, out into the big, busy world, to try its fate.

     Well, it was printed, and she got three hundred dollars for it; likewise plenty of praise and blame, both so much greater than she expected, that she was thrown into a state of bewilderment, from which it took some time to recover.

     * * *

     Her family and friends administered comfort and commendation liberally; yet it was a hard time for sensitive, high-spirited Jo, who meant so well, and had apparently done so ill. But it did her good, for those whose opinion had real value, gave her the criticism which is an author’s best education; and when the first soreness was over, she could laugh at her poor little book, yet believe in it still, and feel herself the wiser and stronger for the buffeting she had received.

     “Not being a genius, like Keats, it won’t kill me,” she said stoutly; “and I’ve got the joke on my side, after all; for the parts that were taken straight out of real life, are denounced as impossible and absurd, and the scenes that I made up out of my own silly head, are pronounced ‘charmingly natural, tender, and true.’ So I’ll comfort myself with that; and, when I’m ready, I’ll up again and take another.”

And so will we.

__________

The quote is from “Literary Lessons” in Part II of Little Women.

Both the picture and Little Women are in the public domain because of their age.

Writing with the Masters: Jack London

Jack London (1876-1916) received six hundred rejection slips before he sold his first story.*  In his semi-autobiographical novel, Martin Eden, he describes his feelings about the submission process.

He began to doubt that editors were real men. They seemed cogs in a machine. That was what it was, a machine. He poured his soul into stories, articles, and poems, and entrusted them to the machine. He folded them just so, put the proper stamps inside the long envelope along with the manuscript, sealed the envelope, put more stamps outside, and dropped it into the mail-box. It traveled across the continent, and after a certain lapse of time the postman returned him the manuscript in another long envelope, on the outside of which were the stamps he had enclosed. There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps. It was like the slot machines, wherein one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had delivered to him a stick of chewing gum or a tablet of chocolate. It depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he got chocolate or gum. And so with the editorial machine. One slot brought checks and the other brought rejection slips. So far he had found only the latter slot.

     It was the rejection slips that completed the horrible machine-likeness of the process. These slips were printed in stereotyped forms and he had received hundreds of them—as many as a dozen or more on each of his earlier manuscripts. If he had received one line, one personal line, along with one rejection of all his rejections, he would have been cheered. But not one editor had given that proof of existence. And he could conclude only that there were no warm human men at the other end, only mere cogs, well oiled and running beautifully in the machine.

But London didn’t give up, and he eventually found the check-dispensing slot. So if you are discouraged by rejection slips, take heart from his experience.

__________

* The source for this statistic is Jack Canfield in Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life, pg. 153.

__________

The quote is from Chapter 14 of Martin Eden.

Both the picture and Martin Eden are in the public domain because of their age.

Writing with the Masters: Mark Twain

Have you been struggling with a memoir and finding that you can’t get it quite right? Mark Twain (1835-1910) tried to write his autobiography a number of times before he was finally satisfied enough to declare it finished.* Here is his explanation of why he was having so much trouble.

     Within the last eight or ten years I have made several attempts to do the autobiography in one way or another with a pen, but the result was not satisfactory, it was too literary. With the pen in one’s hand, narrative is a difficult art; narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands, its course changed by every boulder it comes across and by every grass-clad gravelly spur that projects into its path; its surface broken but its course not stayed by rocks and gravel on the bottom in the shoal places; a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but goes, and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe three-quarters of a mile around and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path it traversed an hour before; but always going, and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important so that the trip is made.

     With a pen in the hand the narrative stream is a canal; it moves slowly, smoothly, decorously, sleepily, it has no blemish except that it is all blemish. It is too literary, too prim, too nice; the gait and style and movement are not suited to narrative. That canal stream is always reflecting; it is its nature, it can’t help it. Its slick shiny surface is interested in everything it passes along the banks, cows, foliage, flowers, everything. And so it wastes a lot of time in reflections.

Eventually Twain decided to dictate his autobiography to a secretary. Even so, his early dictations (including this passage), still didn’t please him.

So if you are having trouble writing your memoirs or autobiography, you are not alone.

__________

* Mark Twain left instructions not to publish his autobiography in its entirety until 100 years after his death, presumably because he was remarkably candid about people he disliked (as well as about those he liked).

__________

The photograph was taken by A.F. Bradley around 1907, three years before Samuel Clemens’ death.

The quote is from page 224 of Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1, edited by Harriet Elinor Smith and published by the University of California Press in 2010. He wrote this in Florence, Italy, on January 31, 1904.

Both the photograph and the quote are in the public domain because of their age.

Travel and Experience: Write Something Interesting

by

Julie Demoff-Larson

 

World traveler? Jump in your car and head down the highway for a spell visitor? Walk the streets of your hometown voyeur? However you approach travel, there are certain elements that make travel writing interesting. Yup, this blog post is about travel writing. I have loved travel writing ever since I was a young girl. The National Geographic setting on the wicker clothes hamper in my Grandma’s bathroom caught my attention early on. I loved the photography and the stories about all things foreign to me. As I look back and continue to read as an adult, one thing jumps out at me. In travel writing, the element of discovery is prevalent. However, it is not the landscape or the visuals that capture the reader, but the moments of realization, human connection, and life changing events that make the piece compelling.

We don’t have to limit travel writing to far-off lands or even to the seasoned pros. Many literary journals are looking to publish writing about interesting places, cultures, and happenings. And writers don’t have to travel far to find research for a great travel story, because ideas do come from life experience after all.  What fun, quirky, historical, or weird stuff is going on right where you live? What goes on in your environment that doesn’t happen anywhere else? Think about these things as you begin to write about the local flavor.

Be sure to stick to specific moments and you will see a greater impact in your storytelling. Don’t leave out the background setting details, because it is important to transport your reader to an unfamiliar place. However, you don’t want it to be the focus of your piece, just a supporting role. I was reminded of this when I read the piece “Where You Go” by Lee Olsen, which was published in the first issue of Blotterature, as he takes the reader on a drive through a foreign country in a cab. It is the observations, conversations, and interactions with people that make his work special. 

And read a variety of pieces in publications that specialize in travel writing. Of course read National Geographic, but a few others to consider are Trainless Magazine and Nowhere Magazine. Both offer a wide variety of story themes and beautiful visuals. Study the writers and their use of technique to help improve your work. Good luck and happy travels.



Life is the Journey

by

Sarah White

 

The only things I know about travel writing are things I read in a book.  Pretty apropos, really. 

 

To me, that statement sums up exactly what travel writing should do—take a reader to a place and let that reader have the experience of that place whether he or she ever goes there or not. Setting becomes the main character in a narrative that revolves around the five senses, the context of history, and how that place affected the writer.

I have stared the Sphinx in the face and sweated inside the queen’s chamber of the Great Pyramid, but what I know that most people don’t is that across the street from the pyramids is a Pizza Hut, and when you push open the curtains, you have the most magnificent view.  I know what it feels like to stand inside Westminster Abbey.   I have tasted Sedona, AZ in the middle of a thunderstorm, and I knew what it must feel like to stare up from an ocean floor—no matter how fossilized and arid.  I touched the Thames and felt the whipping winds howl in my ears at Stonehenge.

Yet, have I ever been to Rome?  Shivered in Moscow?  Sipped miso soup in Japan?

Even before the Internet, travel writing connected readers to the world. People took journeys to “exotic” lands and published their adventures, leaving readers spellbound and amazed by the diversity of world around us. 

If you are interested in travel writing, you might check out the following blogs:

 

www.ridetowrite.com

www.everywhereist.com (Recommended to me by a noted local poet, Bethany Lee.)

www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-hodson/top-travel-blogs-discover_b_817283.html

 

Get out and explore your corner of the globe.  Travel writing doesn’t have to be about places miles and miles away. Sometimes, the best story is just around the corner.  Are there local festivals that more people should know about?  What makes your “hometown” special and unique?

A staycation can give you just as many stories as a vacation across many states or many oceans.

In the end, the thing to remember is what I tell my students every semester: It’s not what you write about; it’s how you write about it.

Take us outside of ourselves and away from ourselves for the span of a few minutes.

Let us “hit the road” and escape.  Let us refresh and renew our own perspectives and take a mentally journey we won’t soon forget.

 

 

 

 

 



Booking Your Travel

by

Kathryn Page Camp

 

www.kathrynpagecamp.com

 

It’s one thing to write a travel article, but what about a book?

 

Maybe you want to publish a memoir about your travels, a novel built around a road trip, or a history that brings a particular locale to life. Or maybe you dream of writing a travel guide so riveting that it’s read from cover to cover because readers can’t put it down.

 

Those are great goals, but here’s the question. How do you learn to write a travel book that makes the reader keep reading?

 

Study the masters.

 

For me, James Michener falls into this category. I read Alaska before taking an Alaskan cruise in 2008 (see the picture above) and Hawaii before vacationing there the following year. Michener uses story to bring the reader into the history and terrain of his locale. In this passage from Alaska, a pilot has just located his runaway sister and her boyfriend, who are camping by a river. But it isn’t the human drama that captures us here.

 

Signaling to them by dipping his wings, he made another circuit, now flying so low that he could see their faces, but at this moment his attention was distracted by a gigantic pillar of spume soaring high in the air. The ice plugs which had held the three lakes captive during the past ten months had exploded, and the long-imprisoned waters were now roaring free. LeRoy in his plane, his sister and Nate from in front of their tent, watched in awe as this titanic force broke loose, for as the waters struck the face of the glacier they carved away massive icebergs, which began their tortuous way down the tempestuous river, gouging out smaller icebergs as they ground and jostled and carved their way along. It was the most violent manifestation of nature any of the three had ever seen, and LeRoy circled over the cascading waters and the crumbling icebergs for half an hour, after which he buzzed the tent once more, dipping his wings to the lovers and their excited dog.

 

A number of things attract me to this description, but I will only mention two of them. The first is the use of the three Ts in the third sentence—titanic, tortuous, and tempestuous—to convey the turbulence in the scene. I also like the end of that sentence because the vivid language helps me see the icebergs as they gouge, ground, jostle, and carve their way along.

 

Or consider the beauty of this much shorter passage from the same book (again viewed from the air):

 

It was a bright day, with the sun glistening off the glaciers and the manifold little islands shining in the Pacific like drops of crystal resting on blue satin.

 

Simple but riveting.

 

Children’s authors know that secret. In this passage from By the Shores of Silver Lake, Laura Ingalls Wilder describes early morning on a lake in South Dakota.

 

The sun had not yet risen next morning when Laura let down the pail into the shallow well by Silver Lake. Beyond the lake’s eastern shore the pale sky was bordered with bands of crimson and gold. Their brightness stretched around the south shore and shone on the high bank that stood up from the water in the east and the north.

 

Night was still shadowy in the northwest, but Silver Lake lay like a sheet of silver in its setting of tall wild grasses.

 

Ducks quacked among the thick grasses to the southwest, where the Big Slough began. Screaming gulls flew over the lake, beating against the dawn wind. A wild goose rose from the water with a ringing call, and one after another the birds of his flock answered him as they rose and followed. The great triangle of wild geese flew with a beating of strong wings into the glory of the sunrise.

 

Shafts of golden light shot higher and higher in the eastern sky, until their brightness touched the water and was reflected there.

 

Then the sun, a golden ball, rolled over the eastern edge of the world.

 

The words and images are simple, yet I can see the scene. It doesn’t take flowery language to describe a locale.

 

Here’s another example that takes a different approach to travel writing. Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain’s memoir based on his career as a riverboat pilot. Here are two passages describing his days as a pilot in training. In the first one, he has been taking notes all along the river so that he knows what is coming up around the bend.

 

When I returned to the pilothouse St. Louis was gone and I was lost. Here was a piece of river which was all down in my book, but I could make neither head nor tail of it; you understand, it was turned around. I had seen it when coming upstream, but I had never faced about to see how it looked when it was behind me. My heart broke again, for it was plain that I had got to learn this troublesome river both ways. (Emphasis in original.)

 

Then there was the time his trainer left him alone (so Twain thought), and this happened:

 

He was still below when I rounded [the next bend] and entered upon a piece of river which I had some misgivings about. I did not know that he was hiding behind a chimney to see how I would perform. I went gaily along, getting prouder and prouder, for he had never left the boat in my sole charge such a length of time before. I even got to “setting” her and letting the wheel go, entirely, while I vaingloriously turned my back and inspected the stern marks and hummed a tune, a sort of easy indifference which I had prodigiously admired in Bixby and other great pilots. Once I inspected rather long, and when I faced to the front again my heart flew into my mouth so suddenly that if I hadn’t clapped my teeth together I should have lost it. One of those frightful bluff reefs was stretching its deadly length right across our bows! My head was gone in a moment; I did not know which end I stood on; I gasped and could not get my breath; I spun the wheel down with such rapidity that it wove itself together like a spider’s web; the boat answered and turned square away from the reef, but the reef followed her! I fled, and still it followed, still it kept—right across my bows! I never looked to see where I was going, I only fled. The awful crash was imminent—why didn’t that villain come!

 

Several paragraphs later we discover, with Twain, that the reef wasn’t a reef at all. The darker water signified only a change in the wind.

 

What makes these passages work? The interplay between Twain’s folksy descriptions and his dry sense of humor.

 

Every writer has his or her own style, and you shouldn’t try to write like Michener or Wilder or Twain. But we can all benefit from studying the masters.

 

__________

 

Kathryn Page Camp is a licensed attorney and full-time writer. Her most recent book, Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal (KP/PK Publishing 2013), is a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month Selection. Kathryn is also the author of In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion (FaithWalk Publishing 2006) and numerous articles. You can learn more about Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.



No Travel Logs, Please

by

Kathryn Page Camp

 

www.kathrynpagecamp.com

 

 

 



In March, I attended IWC’s Paper Fields workshop and took two sessions on travel writing from Kenneth Tressler. One of the points he made was that travel magazines don’t want travel logs.

 

Consider these two opening paragraphs.

 

Our trip to Utah began on September 2, 2014 with a flight into McCarran International Airport at Las Vegas, Nevada.

 

or

 

As I stood in the middle of the Sevier Desert, I drowned in the bleakness and isolation of the parched terrain. How could 8,000 Japanese Americans live crammed together in this one square mile of desolate landscape without losing their sanity? Yet, somehow, they did just that.

 

Both openings are true, but I’d rather read—and write—the second one. Good travel writing is creative non-fiction and should tell a story. Yes, give pertinent information about the trip, including your favorite places to eat and stay along the route. But don’t bore your audience. Write the story you would want to read if it were written by someone else.

 

Good travel writing also proves the cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words. Consider this picture, which I took through the windshield while driving along U.S. 89 in Utah. (No, I wasn’t behind the wheel.)

 

 

I could have said that the blue sky accentuated the red rock formations striated with tans and browns. Or I could have used many more words in an attempt to describe the landscape. But the picture says it better than I ever could.

 

Travel magazines want photos to go along with the story. So if you want to sell an article about your trip, take along a good camera. For use on the Internet, a cell phone might do. But if you want to submit a feature article to a print magazine, you need a camera with high resolution and interchangeable lenses.

 

As you vacation this summer, go ahead and take the logbook along. It’s good for notes that aid your memory.

 

But it makes a terrible travel article.

 

__________

 

Kathryn Page Camp is a licensed attorney and full-time writer. Her most recent book, Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal (KP/PK Publishing 2013), is a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month Selection. Kathryn is also the author of In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion (FaithWalk Publishing 2006) and numerous articles. You can learn more about Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.