Hello! Thank you for being here. There are now over 100 subscribers to Read Minnesota Books! If I invited you all over to my house I wouldn’t have enough chairs for you to sit in.
I hope you are having a decent summer. Here in Minneapolis we had a lovely and mild June, perfect for bike rides, picnics, outdoor concerts, and ice cream cones at the Lake Harriet Bandshell. Then in July the air turned wildfire sooty, heat dome hot, and spongy humid. My father-in-law died. The Boundary Waters burned. My kids’ Youtube streams filled up with primary election attack ads. It wasn’t great. August has been better. My family took an epic road trip out West and I read a bunch of books, including some forthcoming novels from Minnesota writers I’m really excited to interview. I know that a lot of the country is back to school already, but here in Minneapolis, the State Fair’s barnyard births and deep-fried curds and all-you-can-drink udder juice rule our city’s school calendar, so we still have three solid weeks until the first bell rings.
I’m planning a fantastic season 2 of the Read Minnesota Books podcast. Besides reading, I’ve been preparing by listening again to the first season. My number one change? I’m dumping the favorite Minnesota writer question because making authors pick their fave isn’t fair. There are too many to choose from, and authors who live here have too many friends to offend by omission. I’m thinking about asking, instead, “What’s the last Minnesota book you’ve read?” But I’m open to suggestions. If you have another Minnesota book question that’s better than that, comment below or send me a direct message.
I started the podcast as a service to readers, to offer an expansive view of what qualifies as a Minnesota book and to recommend new things to read. But in my re-listening, I realized that I’ve also been collecting writing advice. Below, I’ve compiled some of the best writing lessons from the first twenty episodes of Read Minnesota Books.
To write, read widely
You can’t be a writer without first being a reader. Read widely, and outside of the genre in which you write. When I asked my first poet guest, Mark Nowak, “Who’s your favorite Minnesota writer?” I expected him to name another poet. Instead, he introduced me to Meridel LeSeuer, a novelist and essayist who wrote in a completely different style from him, but with some of the same themes about labor and dignity and fairness.
Reading work that’s different from yours can also help you find effective and surprising structures. Duluth musician and memoirist Gaelynn Lea talked about reading memoirs when she was working on her own. She was smart and didn’t stick to music memoirs. Instead, she found the right structure for her book through analyzing the format of Russian spy Alexei Navalnei’s autobiography. Navalnei began his memoir with his poisoning, the thing everyone knows about him, which inspired Lea to begin her memoir with winning the NPR Tiny Desk Concert, her most well-known achievement.
The pen (or pencil) is stronger than the blank page
How do you feel about an empty document? Is your first sentence the hardest? If the blank screen stumps you, try writing by hand. Jill Swenson doesn’t start on a computer. Instead, she begins by “opening my blank composition book and pulling out my sharp pencil.” She told me that she writes by hand because, “For me, that’s much more efficient. I’m getting raw stuff down on the page. There’s nothing more exciting than that fresh take, dropping into a scene from a memory that you nearly forgot, or figuring out a plot point.”
Swenson also keeps a notepad on the passenger seat of her car for scribbling down ideas when inspiration strikes. Minneapolis poet Anthony Ceballos does the same, but with ink. He begins with an open notebook, “a couple of good pens, and just sitting.”
Forcing yourself to begin a new project can also help get you out of an emotional funk. For novelist Katherine Packert Burke, beginning All Us Saints while promoting her first novel helped her to deal with a grueling book tour and debut author anxiety.
Starting a brand new draft might just become your new, most enjoyable part of the writing process, what Kao Kalia Yang describes as, “That first spark of inspiration, the thing that puts me to the page, when the stories are there and I feel them and I can connect with the emotional truth of that first experience, writing it out, that is my favorite.”
I wonder if writers like Yang, who love to write first drafts, enjoy generating because the initial work they produce is close to done. For the rest of us? We have to get words down on the page, even if they’re bad. Andrew Elfenbein, by way of advice from his University of Minnesota colleague Julie Schumacher, says that the key to drafting a novel is filling sixty pages without worrying about the quality of the writing. Sixty pages gives you a skeleton of a plot. Elfenbein said, “I could feel comfortable knowing that it was okay if my draft wasn’t 300 pages. It was fine if it was more of a seed than a complete draft, but it was useful to have a beginning, a middle, and ending.” Once you have the start of something—some craft advice crudely calls it a vomit or garbage draft—then you can clean it up.
True story: I once submitted a first draft to a writing instructor that was so bad, so upchucky, so dirty overflowing dumpster-worthy, that she called me to ask if I was okay. She thought I had had a stroke! LOL?
For children’s author Margi Preus, first drafts feels like work, but she gets them done because she knows that once she has something to work with, the fun begins. There’s really no shortcut around writing a first (probably bad!) draft. You have to get it down on the page. Angela Pelster, author of The Evolution of Fire, and director of the creative writing program at Hamline University, teaches writing students and undergraduates in different programs of study. She says the best way to become a better writer is “just to write and write and read and read and write and read. And then you’re going to figure it out.”
Revise relentlessly
Revision isn’t fun for everyone. Whether they like revising or not, every writer I’ve interviewed on Read Minnesota Books acknowledges that good writing requires multiple drafts. As Swenson said, “I know, as an editor, good writing becomes really good through rewriting and revision and editing.”
Children’s author Mary Casanova also spoke about this crucial part of the writing process, saying, “You can transform your writing if you revise enough.” For novelist Stacy Carlson, revision lets her “consider the elements of craft that I want to utilize, develop the themes and the story—that all happens more fully in revision.”
Revision lets you experiment and try different techniques. If your draft is dragging, play with the perspective. Tell the story from a different angle. Switch tenses. Carlson spoke about how present tense can “close the distance between the reader and the heart of the book.” Or, play with point of view. When Swenson writes historical scenes, she said, “I sometimes change point of view. I will go into first person and write it from one character’s point of view. It helps me understand what’s happening in that scene, in that historical moment. Switching those perspectives helps me reconstruct the scene.”
Elfenbein, with his sixty page draft, said that revision lets him notice opportunities for humor and “connections between earlier and later parts of the book that may not have been visible to me when I was drafting.”
After all of that experimentation, how do you know when you’re done? For Schumacher, when she spoke with me about her short story collection Patient, Female, she acknowledged the difficulty of knowing when to end a story. She said, “Honestly, writing is terribly hard. It never gets easier. But that’s why it’s interesting--because you can work and work on something and think, ‘Am I done? What does done even mean? Because there is no such thing as perfection.” As you revise your draft, Schumacher suggests that arriving at the most specific description possible is the way to complete each detail in a story. “You can’t get to any sense of the universal except through the specific,” is her advice to fiction MFA students.
Cultivate your community
I heard from many writers that community was key to their success and mental health. Christopher Johnston, author of the novel Where You Come From Is Gone, found his writing cohort in a year-long class at The Loft Literary Center. Mary Casanova and her writing group have been meeting for thirty years. For children’s author Margi Preus, her family is a part of her writing community. Her adult children even helped name the playful character in her Shrew Detective series!
Can your heroes be part of your community? For sure. Take memoirist Courtney Kocak: she was very influenced by Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild. Kocak wrote Strayed an email of thanks and even included Strayed in the Acknowledgement section of Girl Gone Wild. “I don’t ever anticipate receiving a response,” Kocak said. “She already gave me enough. She doesn’t need to give me anything else.”
If you’re a classic introvert type of writer, maybe your community is right here! Podcasts can form a satisfying, asynchronous type of writing community.
Don’t quit, submit!
Be patient. Publishing can be excruciatingly slow. Keep in mind these inspiring words from author and Minneapolis College writing professor Shannon Gibney: “Your superpower, as a writer, is the ability to think and write your way to the emotional truth of a situation.” Writing takes time. According to Gibney, you sometimes have to put things away for a while until you have more insight.
“What every writer wants is somebody to read their stuff,” Rashad Shabazz told me. When he wrote Prince’s Minneapolis, he worked extra hard, as someone comfortable with a naturally academic voice, to make the writing accessible for a general audience. He took care to make sure his book reached the right people.
Keep working on your essays, articles, and stories. Keep those submissions circulating. Mary Casanova, who has published scores of books, accumulated over two hundred rejections before her first publication.
What’s the best thing to do when you’re waiting on your submissions, queries, or pitches? Start a new project. Got the empty doc blues? Scroll back up to the top of this advice article and review how to approach the blank page.
Christopher Johnston, not Johnson 😉
grateful for this