Writing Idols Revived: Midnight in Paris

Once upon a time a bunch of clever people settled near the Seine seeking new ways to write, draw, and explain the world. Their work earned them big prizes and a perpetual glow that still enchants aspiring artists. Books like The Great Gatsby and The Sun also Rises ensured that hordes of college students would dream of writing in French cafes. Then, just when you think the magic of Jazz Age literature had been dispelled by reality (and Reality TV), Woody Allen leaps in to revive it with his film Midnight in Paris.

Seeing this film sent me back to books that have launched a million writing careers. Though Fitzgerald always charmed me most, it was Gertrude Stein who brought Picasso, Hemingway, and the rest of that creative gang together. It takes work to find the core of her stories, and the rewards have not always seemed to justify the effort. But Midnight in Paris reminded me that the enigmatic quality of her writing was a reflection of her strong, quirky personality -- and that's what drew genius artists to Stein's salons.

This paragraph from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas illustrates the oblique charm of her writing: "As I was saying, Fernande, who was then living wih Picasso and had been with him a long time that is to say they were all twenty-four years olds at that time but they had been together a long time, Fernande was the first wife of a genius I sat with and she was not the least amusing. We talked hats. Fernande had two subjects hats and perfumes. This first days we talked hats. She liked hats, she had the true french feeling about a hat, if a hat did nto provoke some witticism from a man on the street the hat was not a success. Later on once in Montmartre she and I were walking together. She had on a large yellow hat and I had on a much smaller blue one. As we were walking along a workman stopped and called out, there go the sun and the moon shining together. Ah, said Fernande to me with a radiant smile, you see our hats are a success."

That's a heap of words. Yet, when you get to the end, there is a sense that the phrases describe more than a moment. It's a long paragraph leading a tour of cultural history. Nevertheless, you may not want to eat that many words at each meal.

It good to go back to read those authors who were your first idols. It makes you recall what you love about writing -- whether it's content or style or just the rhythm that propels great stories. I think I may also go back to see that Woody Allen movie again. He has put a new coat of paint on a cherished illusion.

Advice from Masters

All around me, the garden is in some ecstatic state that makes things grow fast. But gray skies make me feel lazy. The late John Leonard, my beloved college writing teacher, told me that laziness is a writer's biggest problem. Starting pieces you never finish, he warned, is the scourge of the profession. Since he'd published a few novels and been editor of the New York Times Book Review, he knew a thing or two about the rewards of perseverance.

Persistence is clearly a trait that drives success in this business. It may even matter more than talent, since many talented people give up before they get published -- and lots of mediocre writers end up in print. A recent computer crash taught me something about the limits of my own ability to persevere. One afternoon the laptop I'd been using for two years went dead -- just dead -- without warning. I was in the middle of a high profile assignment with a no-nonsense deadline. The project had to be finished, so I went to work on an old, injured IBM. It was once a great machine but had developed electrical problems that allowed me to type only when I held down the left corner of the keyboard. It's not a very comfortable arrangement, but I managed to complete the work on time.

Later when I had a chance to scroll through files on the old laptop, I found a couple of stories I'd written two years earlier but never edited. One had a special place in my heart because it was written in honor of a friend who'd lost his life. The discovery made me think about John Leonard's advice and the many great pieces I'd seen friends write but never finish.

It's really never too late to go back to a story you care about. Like certain books, some can lose their appeal when you hit a wall. But if you go back to them, it's possible to rediscover the magic that drew you to the tale in the first place. When I need inspiration for writing, my garden at Pennsyl Pointe always helps me find it. Last fall I put a leafless hibiscus in the ground without expecting much. The winter was cruel and I wrapped the roots of the plant to protect it. All through March and April it just looked like the grey stick you see in the background of this photo. Then suddenly, in early May, it pushed out a green shoot. For the past week it's been growing at least an inch every 48 hours. Now it's got real Jack-in-the-Beanstalk propulsion. It's quite possible that those old abandoned stories conceal the same kind of surprising potential.

The Vision Thing

Some people look at a field of rubble and see the end of civilization, while others say, "Hmm, nice spot for a garden." One of the perks of my writing business is that I often work with visionary people. It's exciting to help someone massage an idea until it's got the right shape and dimensions. My job is getting that vision on paper so we can transform it into reality.

The "visionary" trait is not universally distributed. People who have it are often very creative and most are a bit headstrong. Stubbornness is an important quality when you're trying to launch a new project -- whether it's a book or a skyscraper. Many obstacles can arise when moving an idea from the stage of foggy inception to real life. The architect of a good idea has to be at least a little pushy to move things from phase to phase.

A few weeks ago I had a chance to chat over coffee with a long-time client who has founded several organizations and created some gorgeous city parks and buildings. We both agreed that you can usually sense when some innovative idea will work or not. If your vision has true value, pieces start to come together in ways you hadn't anticipated to make it even more interesting than you originally thought. Doomed ideas seem to keep getting hung up on the rapids. No matter how hard you work to solve problems, no amount of effort can revive them. This guideline is one I use to help decide whether to keep writing something or look for a new angle that finds traction in my imagination and allies in the real world.

This week, while working on a new book project, even the research process really fascinated me. As lists of facts coalesced, I began to see more value and complexity in the concept. When momentum grows, so does commitment. This is what makes writing a true adventure. It's like living in an Eden of ideas.

The photo here, by the way, is not a picture of our Pocono garden. It's a shot of the Libertylands garden in Philadelphia. Those gorgeous flowers were planted on the site of an abandoned tannery where roses were once just a dream. Moral of the story is: plant a paragraph today if you want a bouquet of chapters tomorrow.

War and Memory

Even in the tiny hamlet of Albrightsville, we have an annual ceremony of rifles and Taps to honor deceased local veterans. The cemetery at the top of our hill is half the size of a soccer field but it serves as the final resting place for veterans from every war from Abe Lincoln's to Vietnam. There are no graves for soldiers who fought in Afghanistan or Iraq, but the solemn gunshots force you remember the people still fighting wars for which there is no true end in sight.

It's a mistake to believe that wars ever end. So many soldiers bring home harrowing memories that haunt them their entire lives. My dad was a Korean War veteran and, although he would never admit it, it scarred him in ways that undermined his efforts to be a good husband and father. He spent a lot of time celebrating his military experience but never took the time to disarm the ticking bomb of distress inside him. He suffered from endless nightmares and recurring heart problems. When Marines fresh from active duty would visit him at our house, we always had to leave the room. He did not want us to know the gory details of wartime, preferring to wrap them in a flag.

A few weeks ago, I also lost a long time friend who received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and two Purple Heart medals after extensive tours of duty in Vietnam. Luis Munoz, Sr., was my advocate and protector when I first started working in a dangerous North Philly neighborhood. He helped me run programs that sent young Latinos go to college and he personally raised many scholarship dollars for kids who often couldn't afford to buy their college textbooks. Lots of the students who won those scholarships were from Edison High School which, at that time, was the high school that had produced the greatest number of veterans who had been killed in the Vietnam war. He never mentioned any connection between his own battle scars and his efforts to help young people find a path away from military service. But on many occasions, he shared heartbreaking stories of things he'd seen and done in the war. Despite the wounds he carried, he was a friend and hero to many, many people.

Writers from Ernie Pyle to James Jones and Tim O'Brien have used the printed page to make us examine the truth of war and its human costs. If you have a war memory or are a second hand veteran, like so many children of soldiers, today is a good day to put some of that truth on paper and make those memories count in new ways.

Did the French Invent Everything?

Shrinks have lots of theories about how and why we create, but anthropologists now think they've dug up the roots of modern creativity. One-upping psychologists and poets, the rock hounds excavating Chauvet Cave in Southern France, have uncovered stone rooms filled with detailed paintings made more than 31,000 years ago.

Werner Herzog, one of the world's great storytellers, has made the Chauvet cave paintings the focus of his documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which was a big hit at the Toronto Film Festival. Last week in Philadelphia, I had a chance to watch the film and reflect on its message in the context of Philly's lush creative community. While the city is known for great baseball (GO PHILS!) and cheesesteaks, for me it's always been a hive of creative communities, bursting with artistic expression.

Philly is dense with gorgeous murals, hidden gardens, and every form of poetry known to man and thug. The city also has links to France -- Ben Franklin's gang loved Paris! -- that help me accept the Chauvet anthropologists' theory that their cave paintings may be the first art that used modern techniques of shading and perspective. It's okay with me if the French take credit for inventing modern art since they've done so much to refine it during the intervening centuries.

For a writer, however, the most interesting part of Herzog's story comes at the end of his film during a discussion of how aboriginal people explain the source of their creative impulse. When the Chauvet scientists talked about worldwide cave art discoveries, one man mentioned a story about an aboriginal cave artist in Australia. An ethnographer asked the aboriginal man to explain why he would go the caves to touch up ancient paintings. The aboriginal artist protested that he did not paint -- it was the Great Spirit doing the painting. For me, this explanation also describes the most profound writing experiences. It is not Ego Me that writes good stuff. It is that strange visitor who steps in from the underground cave to leave inspired work on my page.

They have yet to discover any books in Chauvet Cave. But I feel certain that one day they will stumble into the cavern library which is surely located just behind the cave's central fireplace. Unfortunately, the reading chair is made of stalagmites.

Good Mothers Publish their Children

Merriam-Webster offers this two-bit definition of the word "mother": a female parent. But if you have a mother, or are a mother, or have ever had the privilege of knowing one, you'll note the number of details this definition omits. Apart from the million tasks that go into caring for families, mothers are awfully creative people. Some have also been exceptional writers in their "spare" time.

Toni Morrison, for example, earned a master's degree, gave birth to two sons, and got divorced before she ever wrote her first book. She accomplished this while holding down a full time job and raising her kids, who have never written tell-alls to gripe about her parenting skills. In fact, one of her sons (Slade) has even collaborated with her on several children's books.

Somehow in the process of raising children, teaching, and writing books, Toni Morrison managed to win the following awards:

1977 National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon
1977 American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award
1987-88 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award
1988 American Book Award for Beloved
1988 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Beloved
1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved
1989 MLA Commonwealth Award in Literature
1993 Nobel Prize for Literature
1993 Commander of the Arts and Letters, Paris
1994 Condorcet Medal, Paris
1994 Pearl Buck Award
1994 Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature
1996 Jefferson Lecture
1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
2000 National Humanities Medal

Just pondering all that may lead to exhaustion. But her example also shows us that it is possible to be a good mother and a successful writer. Sometimes I think of my neglected manuscripts as abandoned children. I know in my heart that they deserve a better fate, yet I put off taking care of them. Today is a good day to revise the to-do list and become a better mother to works I still love.

Country Characters, City Plots

This week the first hummingbird arrived at Pennsyl Pointe and dandelions erupted across the lawn. Instead of sitting around admiring the spring, I propelled myself across the state into the roiling energy of New York City where I met with many writers and picked up a few urban plot points.

Life in the woods is full of beauty and quiet charm. But when I throw myself into the arms of a big city like New York, I always come home with a head full of new projects and hot ideas to nourish my writing. Fortunately, the big city stories I just added to my agenda are neatly tied to my blissful life in the woods. In the Big Apple, I had a chance to see the Oscar-nominated film Gasland. Anyone living in the Pennsylvania counties that sit upon Marcellus Shale must see this movie. It's time for people to educate themselves about the unpublicized environmental threats associated with the fracking process. At the screening, I had a chance to meet Josh Fox, the film's director, and talk with people in the publicity crew for his movie. Now I'm actively plotting to bring the film to Carbon County for a public screening and discussion. If you're interested in working with me on this project, please get in touch.

A second writing project grew out of the fun I had meeting writers at the annual conference of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA). Over the years, I've had the privilege of working with so many writers in different parts of the country. My Philly crew is very dear to me and I've enjoyed getting to know members of the Black Diamond Writers Network. Now, through my growing involvement with Gotham Ghostwriters and ASJA, I think it's time for ... a city-to-woods writers party at Pennsyl Pointe. Wanna help me plan it? Send me a note and let's talk before the dandelions take over the lawn in earnest.