Poetica Magazine

Like many authors, I get e-mails through my website from aspiring writers requesting advice on how to get published. The question, “What advice would you give aspiring children’s writers?” is also frequently asked in media interviews. What is my answer? In the past, I have offered the following responses. Read! Read! Read! A strong knowledge of literature and the market is important. Find a critique group. Revise! Revise! Revise! Don’t give up! Persistence is key.

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But recently, I read a book that I would like to add to my list of advice to aspiring authors. It is How I Came To Be a Writer, an autobiography by the Newbery award-winning author Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. I read this book because it is part of the gifted curriculum at the elementary school where I teach. But the entire time I read it, I kept saying to myself, “This book should be recommended to all writers.” Naylor is the author of over 80 books for young people. While she did have enviable success from an early age at her efforts to publish, she also devoted the hours necessary to earn her success. In How I Came to be a Writer, Naylor explains that she wrote as a young child--not just the occasional story or poem most children produce, but hundreds of stories. She says she enjoyed rainy or snowy nights as a teenager because she knew she could write undisturbed.

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Last August, I posted a Poetica guest blog about another book I would recommend to writers--Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. Outliers provides a convincing argument for the “ten thousand hour rule,” saying it takes about ten thousand hours of practice to excel at something. In How I Came to Be a Writer, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor clearly explains how she followed the “ten thousand hour rule.” She didn’t (and still doesn’t) write just when inspiration hits. She writes everyday for a considerable number of hours. Naylor discusses how she struggled with plot and character development in many of her books. She even admits she had to re-write one of her books EIGHTEEN times. A particularly helpful chapter discusses why an author must be able to look at his or her work through the eyes of an editor. Naylor gives many examples of what she learned from editors and how this knowledge helped her grow as a writer. But most important, How I Came to Be a Writer describes how much work and dedication it takes to become a prolific author. One needs to be willing to spend hour upon hour learning the craft, marketing work, and revising with an editor. The next e-mail I answer with “Request for Advice” subject heading will contain a book recommendation: How I Came to Be a Writer by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.

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Thank you for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Jacqueline Jules, Guest Blogger

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Jacqueline Jules is the author of fifteen children's books including Sarah Laughs, a 2009 Sydney Taylor Honor Award book and Unite or Die: How Thirteen States Became a Nation, a New York Public Library Recommended Reading List book. Please visit her at www.jacquelinejules.com/

There is no getting around it – a writer’s backbone is not a natural physiological trait. Definitely not. The ability to sit by yourself and put on paper an imagined world, people it with imaginary characters, then launch it to its final fate, is an acquired attribute. The long and weary passage leading to a writer’s maturity is marked by two guideposts: revision and rejection. Note I did not say publication. Beware - seeing your work in print can delude you into thinking that the next story or book, whatever comes after your debut, will receive automatic acceptance. Absolutely not – publishing is a business beset by all the vagaries of the market, as unpredictable as the credit crunch, e-books, and the fusing of conglomerates. That is why these few words are about the development of a writer and not a contract.

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When a writer can admit that the words on the page need to be tossed out, polished, shortened, lengthened or demand more thought, then the writer is truly grappling with craft and not ego. Eventually, the revision process is over. Finally all the elements of plot, character, and theme are in place. The writer is satisfied and the finished manuscript goes out on its own or is shepherded by an agent. Either way the writer must be prepared to confront rejection. The reasons given (if stated) very often have nothing to do with craft, but more with editorial taste or market timing. Once more the writer is tested, the passage must be crossed – to the other side where there’s a new idea, another book, an untold story.

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If the writer can persist, can make that crossing, can continue to create despite being overlooked, tossed aside, or receiving only occasional mild praise, then that writer can truly view himself as a professional. The journey can be long. On this passage we take as writers, we carry very little, only the basics, words and imagination. Like anything basic, there are endless variations.

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Pnina Moed Kass, Guest Blogger

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Pnina Moed Kass is the author of REAL TIME (Clarion/Houghton Mifflin, National Jewish Book Award, Sydney Taylor), BERALE series (Keter, Israel), eight Hebrew picture books, short stories and television series.

February and March are not pleasant months. They straddle the fence between real winter and impending spring. I can't recall any songs dedicated to either of these two months - the rhymes for February or March are either non-existent or juvenile. But neither weather, nor the lack of music hamper the writer. Once that poem, short story, or article is accepted for publication, it disappears into the black hole of editing and proofreading. What exactly do these mysterious people do to the glorious combination of words the writer has submitted? I can give you some insights because when I'm not writing, when I'm waiting for an idea or acceptance or rejection, I mold, meld and excise the words of others.

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Specifically, a proofreader and editor like myself, waits to hear the sound of that gunshot that starts the race. From the minute I receive the material for either editing or proofreading (or both) I am in a race against time. Publication date is holy, the printer strictly adheres to the deadline and so must all of us preening and pruning the articles.

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My mother's dream had been a hi-tech, hi-speed, high everything daughter and here I am pushing a pen across an A4 page. Somewhere in heaven she must be sighing, "After all I gave you, you're making scribbles on someone else's work." Hey mom, I want to shout up to the heavens, I'm not scribbling, I'm working. I vehemently deny making chicken tracks on anyone's work. Those are "inserts" and "deletes," spelling corrections, manipulations of grammar, in short, the stage designer making the play look good. To wax even more poetic about a proofreader and editor's task - it is the midwife slapping the text into life. As an editor, I read the comment written by a colleague - "good but too personal" and taking that as an instruction change the piece to give it a more objective viewpoint. Another essay might have "too long" as a comment. I work hard to keep the mood and tone while still consolidating it into a brief, concise, and enjoyable read.

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Magazines have specific audiences, sometimes the issue will have a theme, in short, there are many reasons why a submission may not be accepted. A topic may be of burning interest to the writer but if it doesn't suit the magazine's audience then chances for acceptance are slight. Before sending material, be aware of the readership, scan the length of the average article and most of all, be prepared to accept changes. You may read the opening paragraph of your article when it appears and not even recognize it but if the article conveys the message and information, then relax and enjoy seeing your name in print.

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What's the daily grind for a freelance wordsmith? Well, believe it or not, I do a lot of work for restaurants. Israel's cities and large towns are typical of any metropolis around the world where restaurants open and close like accordions playing at a Russian song festival. I meet the owners of these eateries at their hopeful beginning when they want a classy, elegant and correctly written English menu. I have days when my desk is piled high with virtual food; noki, lazahnyah, manakotee, let-us - all waiting not to be eaten, just corrected.

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And after five course meals come the underwriters and market analysts. Would you believe that even a lowly scribbler like yours truly gets the financiers beating a path to her desk? What was it they were singing in "Cabaret" ? about money making the world go 'round? In the windy, rainy days of February and March, I labor over the wild prose of venture capital proposals, rosy dreams ready to be sent out to overseas investors in the heady optimism of spring. Mine is not to question the figures, only to weave the optimistic prose around the numbers and statistics . . . and then send the bill quick - a minute before NASDAQ has a chance to say "No."

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If you have ever groaned at the street and road signs in Israel then you know that proofreading is not only an honorable profession, but one that can save the vacation day of a hapless tourist - is it Quasaria, Casarea, Caesarea, Kaysariya? And afraid to take that turn they end up in Nahariya, oi, mama mia! If only the Ministry of Transportation would give me the road sign job!

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I haven't mentioned the proofreading (easy but dull) and editing (interesting but nerve wracking) of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Here one scales the very heights of literature and enters the inner sanctum of the writer. A well-known personality (obviously the person shall remain nameless as my mother wouldn't want me being sued) wrote a guidebook to Israel and the publisher assigned me the weighty task of editing the manuscript. I combined chapters, excised repetitive sections, and made much of the humorous portions. The author was furious, my book has disappeared, he ranted and pages I struggled years to write have been dumped in the editor's wastepaper basket, he raged. He fumed, he shouted, he threatened, all to no avail. The publisher steadfastly stood behind this editor's work. When the book was published, the author drew up a list of all the publisher's employees and invited one and all to a weekend in Eilat, airplane tickets gratis. The book was well received but alas my name was not on the hotel guest list. The author had removed my name; indeed, one could say he had finally learned the art of editing.

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Interested in writing for a magazine? Understand that the editor is your partner. Look at the changes made and use them as a lesson when writing your next article. My mother once defined my profession to me - the right word says everything, many words say nothing.

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Thank you for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Pnina Moed Kass, Guest Blogger

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Pnina Moed Kass is the author of REAL TIME (Clarion/Houghton Mifflin, National Jewish Book Award, Sydney Taylor), BERALE series (Keter, Israel), eight Hebrew picture books, short stories and television series.

It was 2001 and I was in my first writing workshop ever.  I turned in my first piece, called Poker Party, gave copies to the whole class, read it out loud and received my critiques, which were good.  I had finally lived through the process that I had always been afraid of:  sharing my work and having other people comment on it. 

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We only had three pieces due for the class because there were twenty students and all of our pieces had to be workshopped.  This took a lot of class time.  In the time period between my due dates I took Poker Party, originally three pages long, and expanded it, and expanded it, until it took over my life.  I added all the elements that we were discussing in class:  dialogue and action and description and backstory, and anything else I could think of, until it was a behemoth of a story. 

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To me, Poker Party embodied all of my young life in Skokie.  In it, my parents and uncles and aunts - all Holocaust Survivors - were having a poker party at our house and my six sisters and I were hiding in the basement watching TV trying not to be noticed by them.  We didn't want to be interrogated about our favorite subjects in school and we didn't want to be forced to kiss the whole group of them goodnight.  There wasn't really a plot or an arc of a narrative in the story - it was like a photograph of my young life, a still life.  Yet I continued working on it.

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One day a bunch of students, including me, were tagging along with our professor after class as she rushed back to her office and I had her ear for a moment.  I told her of my present pressing torment about Poker Party, whatever the problem was.  What should I do?  How should I solve the dilemma I was in?  How could I make the story better?  Would it ever be published?

For that she stopped walking.

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She looked at me and she said, "What do you think, Linda?  That you only have this one piece inside of you?  That there's only Poker Party?"

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And I froze because, of course, I kind of did think that.  So I said, "Um..."

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She said, "Wrong.  This is just the first piece you've written.  Now move on."

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And she whirled and continued walking, some other student now talking to her.

I put Poker Party away and wrote many better stories.  Eventually, when I was putting together my manuscript about Skokie and growing up with my Holocaust survivor relatives - the work that Poker Party would have fit in - I put it in and then took it out.  Turns out that as some of my first writing it was also some of my weakest and most self-conscious.  I couldn't use it.

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And so, when I find myself getting caught up in something, committed to some idea that just isn't working out anymore, I think of my professor's words - do I think this is the only piece I have inside of me?  Is this my only Poker Party?  The answer is always no.  

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Thank you for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

Last February I began taking a local writers workshop called Mothers Who Write, taught by two editors of local newspapers.  Much to my surprise, in our first class meeting, they asked us all if we had blogs.

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I did have a blog at that time, though I had allowed it to become inactive.  While I had been planning my son's Bar Mitzvah, caught up in the insanity of all the minute details of the service and the party, I needed an outlet, so I started my blog.  Also, my son had become a little high-maintenance on me, becoming the Bar Mitzvah version of a Bridezilla - a Bar Mitzvahzilla, which is how the blog got its name.

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But my blog was my own little secret.  I wrote it, didn't post it anywhere, didn't share it with anyone, didn't tell anyone about it.  A few weeks after the big event, I wrote the final entries and then stopped writing.  I missed it, but I thought with a name like that, it was just too event-specific to continue.

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My instructors, however, had a different idea.  They told us in no uncertain terms that a serious writer nowadays has to have a blog and an Internet presence.  You can't hide in your house writing and expect the world to find you somehow.  They pretty much shook us down that day to admit which of us had blogs and then they sent the links to our classmates.  I was out of the closet and back in the blog business.

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I now consider this the turning point in my writing.  Having some kind of schedule for writing, both for this blog and my personal blog, having my writing out in the world without absolutely being certain of its reception, this was a big leap for me. 

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Start a blog.  Link to other writer's blogs in your blog.  Promote your work.  Amazing things may happen. 

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Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

A few years ago I graduated from an MFA in Memoir program. I was an older student and a working writer, and had already put in a great deal of time culling through my past. But I wanted that degree along with the discipline of enforced deadlines to finish my memoir.

Two years went by with an extraordinary amount of time--or at least what felt like it-- discussing trauma, abuse, abandonment, any and all suffering for childhoods lost. As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, I held my own...for a time. After a few months, lethargy set in. I was ready to wrap up the past, send it off to Addressee Unknown and begin something fresh, alive.

And so, not surprisingly when the two years were up, thesis completed, I did not have a finished book. Nor did I hunker down to the task of turning that thesis into a book. Instead, I made bows.

Really. My friend's daughter turned two, and I reached into my bag of creativity--a bag (as opposed to baggage) that contains my love of writing only as an addendum to numerous other talents comprising my life. For two-year old, Maude, I took black velvet fabric from the back of the linen closet, folded here, poufed there, added feathers, beads, and voila--two hours had gone by, while I was wondrously consumed by the present moment. And...Maude had a bow! 

I carried on, making bows in tulle, organza, satin, silk, you name it; I purchased polka dot and striped ribbons to sew around them, purple feathers for here and there, and crazy clips. My bow mania went on for months. What gratification, remembering the thrill of making products I could touch, not only read.  I forget my myriad creative loves too often, especially when caught up in the business side of writing, or the compare side. As in: someone I know will have a book, or two; someone else (from my MFA program!) an essay in a highly regarded journal. I get envious and forget that I'm a fabulous knitter, cut my own hair, bake supremely delicious banana muffins.

As writers--as mere mortals--we ask so much of ourselves. At least, I do. I love the days when my creative process is the true reward, the gift that sucks each moment dry. Woven into those moments is my greatest life.  

Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, The Poetica Magazine Blog

Sandra Hurtes, Guest Blogger

Sandra Hurtes' essay collection, On My Way to Someplace Else, is forthcoming this fall from Poetica Publishing.

While my kids are away at camp, my husband and I escaped the heat of Phoenix and spent a few days in Flagstaff, in the northern part of the state. 

One of my favorite things to do there is visit a used bookstore called Bookman's.

There are a couple other Bookman's in the greater Phoenix area that are satisfying in a pinch, but there's just something about that Bookman's that makes it special.  Maybe it's the proximity to the university up there, the books that the professor's assign on their reading lists, and the students' subsequent desire to dump all those great books in this great bookstore.  This leaves me with a multi-day experience.

It took me three separate visits this time just to get through the section they call "Biography" but which actually contains Biography, Autobiography and Memoir.  There were three twenty-foot rows of books to get through.  I came away with about 20 new books to read - all memoir - and I was being very selective and moving pretty quickly.  I knew my husband, a non-reader, would never put up with what I really wanted to do:  just stay at Bookman's while we were in Flagstaff, except for meals.  Why don't they put in a bed and breakfast?  After all, I never even had a chance to get to my other areas of interest, like Judaica, Fiction and Poetry.

One thing I learned when I was working on my Master's degree is that half of learning how to write occurred in reading other authors.  When I taught Freshman English it was amazing to me that I could lecture my students all day about the things that had them mystified, like paragraph use and punctuation, but if I gave them enough wonderful stories to read, they got it right away. 

Since I'm apparently never too old to start again, and never too smart to not have something I need to learn, I've been taking online classes this year, lately taking one in Memoir.  I now know that I have to restructure the memoir that I've written.  So when I read these books that I bought after spending hours in Bookman's I'm not just going to be reading them for enjoyment.  I'm going to be a student again, studying their structure, studying their use of tenses, studying beginnings and endings and realizing that each books is the final form that made it through the publishing house, through multiple editings.  This thing that I hold in my hands probably doesn't look like the thing the author first completed, but it got there somehow.  

Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

I did it again today.  I was at the pediatrician's office with my daughter and they were having me fill out some updated parental forms.  I got to the area for "occupation" and stopped.  Was I supposed to fill in the word "Writer?" Because I don't normally.  Normally I have a list of kind of boring other occupations I fill in there, all true, but all which don't really get to the heart of this issue.  Why do I hesitate at declaring myself a writer?

What is it about standing up and declaring ourselves as writers or artists to the world?  Are we afraid that we're going to be cross-examined by every person we say that to; that they'll want to know what books we've had published and how well they sold?  Or if we're artists, have we had a showing at the Guggenheim?  Have our works sold for millions?  And if they find out that this person, this "writer"  hasn't actually published a book yet, well, then, what exactly separates us from them, the wannabe writer, the person who has an idea that will make a really great book one day and when they find the time they'll put pen to paper and this magnificent best-selling book will come pouring out?

I was reading an literary agent blog recently and the agent wrote a post that said that until you get paid for something, it's just a hobby.  I guess to him writing without pay must be the same as assembling  model cars or building doll houses.  Let's put it this way:  if this agent was my agent, a remark like this would make me wonder how he could ever represent the written word.  

My first writing professor was a poet who did not have a published book of poetry at that time, though she now has two.  She cleared up this obsession with defining ourselves by our pay scale on our first day of class.  She said that poets don't write for money because normally there is no money in poetry.  They write to express ideas or because they have a thought that can't be expressed any other way.  They write because they love words.  And they write because words are sometimes the only immortality there is.  

I don't get to decide who's a writer and who's not, but I'm pretty sure that the difference between a someone who writes at home for fun or writes a journal and the kind of writer I aspire to be is that a writer's work will be read by someone else.  A writer is ready to press that button, to share his or her work, to take that microphone, to send out those queries and not hide any longer. 

Not yet paid, but nonetheless rich.

Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

I sit at the computer we have in our kitchen or the one in my office and I'm working on a piece, writing pretty fast.  When inspiration hits me I have to write it down or it's gone forever.  Invariably, right at that time is exactly when someone in the house will decide I'm interruptable.  Apparently, I don't look like I'm working.

What does writing look like?  Does it look like work?  In my house, sitting at a computer working looks a lot like sitting at a computer goofing off.  I could be checking email, or on eBay, or Facebook.  Just to be sure, my family members come over and, like they're frisking me, they'll take a quick glance at my screen to see what website I'm on, to see if I'm lying.  This is because writing doesn't look like work, and yet it's some of the toughest work I've ever done.

When I had my old job, my work was easy to define:  someone would hand me a file with certain tasks to perform.  I had to call people, I had to write letters; I had to review certain issues that would arise.  This made for convincing work when I brought files home - my kids knew this work had to get done.  They didn't peek at my files to make sure they were real and they never acted like maybe the work was optional.

Now my work is much more ambiguous and, yet, it's much bigger.  I'm only trying to translate the world that I see and the world inside my thoughts into something on a blank screen. I'm just trying to take that world in through my eyes and have it come out of my hands looking differently, to maybe change the way others see it; and to communicate the way I see it. That's all.  And to do this I sit at a computer and sometimes I write in a notebook.  I look off into space, I search my memory, I remember things and I remember people.  I search for the right words.  When I find them, I have to write, right then.  I can't be interrupted.  

I don't do this for fame or fortune and, even though I love it, I don't do it because it's fun.  I do it because it's important work -  that someone has to put things into words.  So I write mine up and send them out there.  A day's work done.

Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

I entered my first creative writing class at age forty-one.

Well, that's not completely true. I had taken one class in high school in which my teacher had marveled that the voice in my writer's journal, where I was allowed to use first person, disappeared in the official class pieces, which had to be in third. It turns out I can't write fiction and neither he nor I had never heard of creative nonfiction. At forty-one, I finally heard of it.

I went on to take about seven classes with the professor of that later class, all of which had some workshop element. She always protected her student writers. She admonished all of us quite firmly before we ever workshopped any pieces to  be kind when critiquing, to always find something nice to say, and that when we had suggestions for the improvement of one of our classmate's pieces we had better use kind language to state them. In other words, kindness ruled the day. 

The result? In each of the classes I took with her, all the students ended up close, connected - especially surprising since she taught students ranging in age eighteen to eighty at a community college.  We also ended up better writers than how we had started.

The few times I've taken art classes there hasn't been such a protected atmosphere, which is probably why there have only been a few times I've taken art classes. In the last class I took, as I was learning the rudiments of oil painting and how to paint still lifes - a very basic class - two older women students, sisters, wandered through the room looking at everyone's artwork and talking loudly. They hovered behind the artwork they liked and complimented it, gushing over it, but fell dead silent at those that they didn't like and walked quickly past. Of course, there was dead silence when they got to mine.

I'm the first to admit that I can't paint.  If wanting to paint led to ability, I'd be Chagall.  In this particular class, there was a definite disconnect between what I was looking at - a three dimenstional apple - and what was on my canvas - a cartoon apple.  

Afterwards, I wondered why the instructor hadn't done the same thing that my writing teacher had done so many times, protected the students from criticism, both spoken and unspoken.  Why weren't we safe to try out painting without worrying about a lack of talent, in my case, or a lack of experience or training?  Wasn't there supposed to be a learning curve?

And this makes me wonder how many of us have stopped doing something we want to do by premature criticism.

Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, The Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor