Category: Inlet Inspiration

There’s something delicious about the solitude of drafting a piece of writing. Sitting alone at five a.m. before the sun comes up and the four-year-old gets out of bed, fueled by the steam of coffee and the mist of morning. Or drawing notebook from backpack and crawling onto a mossy boulder to describe a blue butterfly’s silence.

Hunkering down to carefully craft what you want to say—whether plotting a climatic sequence or artfully developing a metaphor—can feel quite intimate. Sometimes it seems all we want is to dwell there, in that quiet, creative place, and work and rework. While at other times all we want is to share what we find there with readers. To be read. Be heard. To “only connect,” as E.M. Forester writes.

That yearning has been with writers for millennium—to take private thoughts and through sheer artistry and grit, transform them into words crafted so well they link us inextricably with readers, like the stars connected by our ancestors into constellations that shine on forever with significance. Nodes of connection from one person’s solitude to another’s.

But the line drawn from writer to reader, that brings words from private drafts to public pages, isn’t as easy as connect-the-dots, and is much harder for us to control than what our pens produce on quiet coffee-fueled mornings. We can’t make that link by staying in the heady realm of solitude. We need to reach out to the public network—whether we work to entice editors or agents, or build our own platforms to entice readers, or a bit of both.

Convincing others that our work deserves a readership can be one of the most difficult things about the writer’s life. And the delicious ease of solitude may morph into the frustration of bitter alienation as our writing struggles to find its way in the world. We can feel shut out, unheard—apart, rather than connected.

That’s one reason Kimberly Behre Kenna, who talked with Writers’ Inlet this month, said if she had to give one piece of advice to our group of writers, it would be this: reach out to other writers. Become part of a community. (And as Jessica Vitalis talked about in October, you’ll likely find more than one community along the way.)

Kimberly Behre Kenna’s debut novel Artemis Sparke and the Sound Seekers Brigade, “the story of a twelve-year-old girl who conjures up help from deceased ecologists to save a Long Island Sound salt marsh from certain death,” is coming out in 2023. —Watch my interview with her below:

Community comes in all shapes and sizes—a weekend online class, a large online pitch forum, a thousand-plus-person conference, or a poetry reading you attend on a whim in a room with five other attendees.

A critique group may act as “first responders” and help revise everything from your first draft to final. A writerly book club may be there at a chosen touchstone on the path, to share war stories about separate journeys, reveling in the victories and commiserating in the defeats.

It’s not only a comfort to find company with other writers on the writer’s journey—it’s a marketing strategy. That act of reaching out again and again can be a catalyst for your author platform. In other words, hearing from others, and sharing your writing process with others, gives you ideas and opportunities for building an audience for your work—and those writers (and their readers) are also potential readers for your work.

That six-attendee poetry reading may lead you to a lit journal’s craft class, which may lead you to a peer recommendation of a writing coach, who may lead you through a finished memoir draft that may at some point lead you to a close-knit group of other writers launching books at your manuscript’s publishing house, like the new community Kimberly Behre Kenna found herself part of when her book got picked up by Regal House/Fitzroy Books.

Like Kimberly and so many other writers, as you keep connecting, you’ll find yourself amidst a flowing network of inlets and outlets supporting your writing life. And to enter the inlet into that network, all you need to do is simply start showing up to groups and reaching out—which in turn helps you show up more to the page. A day of satisfying connections may be as simple as writing in a room of your own for one hour, and the next hour, logging onto Zoom and raising a glass of chardonnay to a peer’s publication—or your own.

I’m here at Writers’ Inlet to help you write your way to destinations intended or discovered as you go—and support you as you carry your craft forward from one body of work to the next. In fact, that’s what we’ll be talking about at the Inlet next trimester: Carrying Your Craft: How to Sustain Your Writing Practice for the Long Haul. All writers of any genre can join my upcoming “Carrying Your Craft” Monthly Craft Intensive this coming winter/spring, and apply to my new nine week “Carrying Your Craft” class. Applications are currently open to newsletter subscribers or Inlet course writers. Contact me for details: angelarydell@gmail.com.  

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Have you ever tried so hard to make your writing right you snuffed the creative spark that got you going in the first place? Maybe reworking a dull dialogue exchange twenty times made you want to clean your closet, then bookshelf, then attic, rather than return to your novel. Or that comment you got about character arc in a critique session last month made you feel like an impostor and wouldn’t it be better to bake another batch of cookies for your nieces because they always say thank you even if the bottoms are a tad overdone?

There are a lot of writers and aspiring authors with whom Samuel Becket’s quote resonates: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Why? Because when we let failures get us down, sometimes we stay down, and don’t get back up again—and that means our writing gets pushed away for months, years, maybe even decades.

Writers who get stuck in a mistake-shy mentality often believe setting their writing aside is the best answer, because why take another risk when they fear they know what’s about to happen next? (More failure.)

Why try again? Because you don’t know what’s about to happen next. Because each time you fall, you learn how to get up. Because each restart means you get to see what you did before in a new light. Or try a new approach. Because the next mistake you make—or facing the mistake you just made—may be the next step you need in a series of steps you must take to solve a creative problem. Because avoiding mistakes can stifle your creativity and keep you from taking necessary risks. Because failure is normal—and without it, you’d get too big of a head anyway.

Writer Jessica Vitalis, whose debut novel, The Wolf’s Curse, came out this past September, wrote five unpublished novels over thirteen years before her sixth book landed her a publishing contract with Harper Collins. I asked her if she felt that starting new work again and again over all those years—rather than sticking with one novel and working to perfect it—was a mistake.

“I don’t regret anything about that. I’m so glad that my first five novels didn’t get published… If something’s not working, do your best with it. Learn what you can from it, and move on… There’s no quota on words. It’s okay. Write more. Because there will be more stories. There will be more words… So don’t be afraid of just writing more.”

(This fall at the Inlet, we’ve been talking revision in the Monthly Craft Intensive. An edited version of that conversation can be found on the website [link coming soon]. You can still join the Inlet Craft Intensive and watch the unedited conversation, with a Power Point craft talk—and participate in upcoming interviews, too. Contact me for details: angelarydell@gmail.com.)

So ask yourself, have you ever written anything that came out exactly as you wanted it to on the first try, from title to final word? Ever revised something so it was exactly as you wanted—and still felt that way after publication? Most writers will answer no to all those questions.

To succeed at writing, you need to give up on the dream of attaining perfection.

And that’s actually a good thing.

This summer, I woke to loon song on the shores of a freshwater lake, tried grilling a panini over an open fire (almost successfully), reconnected with old college friends, got stung by a bee, met a man who shot a giant fish between the eyes, and survived a hiking encounter with a skinny black bear barely fifty feet from our group. “Does skinny mean hungry?” someone asked when my brother and I returned. Fortunately the bear was only hungry for corn in the field near our hiking trail, the bee sting itched but didn’t swell, and I learned a life hack: if you want to eat a panini grilled in a grilling basket be sure to secure the basket tightly.

I also sharpened my storytelling skills. As I retold the stories of my summer, they got taller. I didn’t just wake to loon song, I swam alongside loons. The big fish shot by the man I met wasn’t just big but a shark. And my brother says the bear was normal-bear-sized, but I remember it towered over us, especially when it paused in its slow amble away along the westward ridge and rose up on its hind legs, taller, skinnier and hungrier.

It’s a well-known truism that the secret to good storytelling is embellishment. But would you believe that when we returned from our bear encounter, shaken, and my brother brought out a bottle of whisky he’d meant to give our dad as a gift, the bottle read, “When facing a great bear, don’t play dead, or try to outrun it. Rather, make light of the situation, keep eye contact, and pour a drink for two.” Believe me, I couldn’t make that part up.

Let’s face it, sometimes true stories are too unlikely to sound true, and sometimes a story’s fantastical hyperbole makes it feel more true—whether true to life or not.

The truth itself can sound stretched or too on-the-nose, manufactured or too coincidental, while fictionalized embellishments—overstatement or understatement, metaphor, allegory, exaggerations of facts—may make the story resonate more fully, even if it’s not more factual. The best “embellishments” don’t obscure but enhance. The more I tell the tale, the more colorful that bear story gets, and the more real the bear encounter becomes—for the audience, I hope, but even me. Though I’m calibrating as I retell it, testing to see if another detail, and yet another, makes the bear story too tall, so tall it topples over. That happens when ornamentation or wordplay or excess details or unnecessary digressions—factual or not—detract from the truth at the core of the story. (FYI, seriously, that whiskey bottle detail is true, I swear.)

As writers, what matters the most is the ring of truth that comes from the whole, that makes our writing true to life. Whether turning fact into fiction.  creative nonfiction, or poetry, when you write bearing detail to help uphold the truth, you’ve got to be selective, even at times leave out some facts to serve the greater truth—or incorporate the narrator’s incredulity so the interpretation of what’s hard to believe is true true gets massaged into the tale-teller’s greater themes.

So, how do you strike the right balance? You get to be choosy. Use good details as a guide, a kind of beacon that focuses what matters. As Michael Ondaatje said, “Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumors and tall tales were a kind of charting.” Choose facts and details that work like marks on a map and that bring you closer and closer to your true destination—a true story well told.

Summer’s in full bloom here in Madison, Wisconsin, and there’s no better time to relish productivity than in the midst of much flourishing. Yes, relish it. Appreciate the plenty. Have you indulged?

The cliché is “stop to smell the flowers.” But have the flowers ever stopped you in your tracks—their fragrance so strong you can’t help but notice? I entreat you to treat yourself while you’re deep in constructive creative work, too.

You’ve probably relished a sentence or line until it’s just the right intoxicating mix of melody and meaning. Or appreciated the tension in a scene you’ve revised so the pages are packed to bursting like the skin of ripened fruit.

Keep relishing.

Galway Kinnell describes the deliciousness of creative burgeoning in his poem Blackberry Eating:

lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths and squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well

Ah, yes. The splurging. Word to word, sentence to sentence. Plot point to plot point. Are you splurging well?

When we splurge well, we’re appreciating not only the fruits of our labors, but the process behind those labors.

I’m not talking about heady jolts of brainstorming’s lightning, quick thrills of first draft revelations, or boons of insight that come from a benevolent muse’s fickle offerings. I’m talking about your slow nurturing, from seed to stalk, from bud to blossom to fruit, over time. Because you, dear writer, have nourished that work into form.

Don’t shirk the chance to appreciate that burgeoning. Reflect on its harvest, the way you might reflect on the sun that ripened grapes into wine—the presses that pressed, the barrel that held, the people that processed and the seasons and minutes that ticked down until the wine now poured into your glass touches your tongue.

And as you appreciate, don’t be surprised if you chuckle to yourself, recalling a faux pas or series of failures before your work reached its peak ripeness. You probably spent a week slogging through abstract phrasing that fell flat until you gave it dimension through sensory imagery. Or when a reader winced at wooden dialogue during critique, you worked harder until you unearthed the true subtext of the scene. Maybe a secondary character fell into a plot hole, and rescuing her opened up a new direction for your plot. Or perhaps you left her behind, a sacrifice that sealed up a structural gap.

It may have felt cruel. But we know the entreaty to kill our darlings rings true. After all, plants flourish in compost, and so can our creations. To grow and ripen our writing takes not only time and nurturing, but innovation and humility. Our successes only reach their peak because we plow through bad choices—often embarrassingly bad. Which is actually a good thing.

Some days we know this. Others days we’re so enamored with the popular myth of the perfect draft that reworking feels like a slap in the face of creative prowess. But the reality is that good writing— what’s good, plump, and packed to bursting—requires good work. And a little savoring of that good work.

May you splurge well, in this season of ripening.