Why I Always Migrate Back to Bird by Bird.

Just as the swallows return to San Juan Capistrano, I return to a perennial nesting place, a book Anne Lamott wrote about writing called Bird by Bird.

Whenever I see birds thriving in difficult and unlikely locations, among craggy cliffs, atop flagpoles or in lonesome pines along wind swept bluffs, I think about writers. Like our fine-feathered friends, some of us are irrepressible songbirds who somehow manage to thrive under harsh and unforgiving conditions.

An article about Laura Hilldebrand in last week's New York Times magazine describes the health hardships that the author endured while writing her best-sellers Seabiscuit and Unbroken. But isn't that the point? She has endured. Could it have been the challenges that helped her rise to the occasion and produce works of steely purpose and unbroken spirit? That is the question posed by the article's author Wil S. Hylton.

Saying it's difficult to be a writer is true but it's also trite. However, if becoming a writer is your goal and if you are looking for a fine book about how to write and lead the writing life, you can't land on a better one than Bird by Bird.

No writer should go without reading this work at least once.

Here are six reasons why:

1. Anne Lamott writes from of a wealth of experience derived from many years of teaching writing. She doesn't lecture. She tells stories. She knows what we, her readers, want to know and what our monkey-mind is prattling on about as we read her book. For example, at one point she takes time out from a discussion of writing craft to indicate that right now we, the readers, want to ask, ''But do you need an agent to get published?'' She's right, of course. That is what most readers want to know right off the bat. And we don't want a discussion about craft to get in the way of knowing. The beauty of Anne Lamott's writing: She is willing to skip around, which, to my way of thinking is a great way to cover the subject of writing.

2. She can be comic and downright hilarious. For example, she starts by stating, ''…good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do no seem to share this longing.'' Thus, she introduces us to her delightfully zany, readable and lively style. But then a few sentences later, she gives up on the truth by writing, ''But after a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.''

The question she asks, without asking, is this: Who would ever want to read a book about writing written in a ponderous style? ''No one'' is our answer.

3. She encourages us to write about the bad stuff, the really bad stuff, in our lives. If you have had horrific experiences, she insists (rightly) that ''you own them.'' She encourages all of us to rise to the challenge of writing about the bad stuff and not avoid it in favor of writing about light and airy stuff. I know from experience, if you try to avoid writing about it, the bad stuff will only show up in your writing in other weird ways. Far better to confront it head on.

4. She has a wonderful way of letting us access the fun of writing. For example, her metaphors: In a section on ''Polaroids,'' she tells us ''You're not going to know how your shitty first draft turns out until it does. She gives us permission to write shitty first drafts by calling them exactly that. She calls the process of writing similar to ''School Lunches'' by writing, ''It only looked like a bunch of kids eating lunch. It was really about opening our insides in front of everyone.'' She is able to raise her work to being instructions on life itself. That makes it very valuable.

5. She has a wonderful way of letting us access the terror of writing. She makes it clear that if you wish to be a writer, you must find a way of face up to your demons. ''Then your mental illnesses arrived at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives. And they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer; and they try to be quiet but you know they are there with their weird coppery breath, leering at you behind your back.'' By describing what we are afraid of and making it real, she enables us to laugh at the terror. She gives us strategies to deal with it, how to not yield to it. This alone makes Bird by Bird a very valuable writing companion. We come to writing well armed with Anne Lamott's humor.

6. She is a marvelous teacher of writing. She helps us focus on what is attainable, on what we can write about successfully today, right now, this very second. One of the more memorable and truthful things she writes has to do with publication. In her words: ''Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy…''

By being a marvelous writer herself, she models how an excellent teacher of writing can and should proceed.

Yes, writing can be hard. Writing can be difficult. Yes, it takes courage to keep the demons at bay knowing you may never be able to destroy them. But there are compensatory givebacks and remunerative grace notes to being a writer, as well. The call of Bird by Bird that keeps me coming back for more is simple: It puts me in touch, lovingly in touch, with the beauty that living a writer's life makes possible.

This is my work process: Wear old clothes because it's messy.

I have been ''stuck'' on one section of my novel for more than a month. It wasn't as though I couldn't move. I could move plenty. I could generate new ideas, options and versions I thought might help me get unstuck, but nothing worked. Like a car on ice spinning its wheels, I was unable to move forward, in this case, move forward in the story. Generating new approaches dug ruts that only made it more difficult to get unstuck. Yet, even as I knew I was doing that, I was obsessed. I couldn't stop spinning my wheels.

I analyzed why I was stuck. There was a simple, logical reason. In order to understand it, I'll have to tell you a little bit about my novel: It's the story of a chase. One team of two people, a CIA agent and a Colombian Intelligence officer, is chasing a second team of two people (what I will call our ''hero team'') consisting of a Peace Corps Volunteer, Jake, and Jesus, a revolutionary FARC soldier who is under cover, pretending to be a Colombian businessman. Jake meets Jesus after Jake is wounded in a FARC attack on the bus he's riding on. Team two doesn't know that team one is following them. They don't overtly know, but they sense something is up. The two teams are having lunch one table apart at a restaurant. Team number one has been overhearing everything team number two has been saying.

As our hero team gets up to leave the restaurant, the two agents (team number one) want to identify them yet, at the same time, not let on that they are persons of interest, so team number one dreams up this plan that makes the two teams of two into one team of four, just as a beautiful woman, Lolita, arrives on the scene. Who is Lolita? She's a puta, a prostitute. We haven't seen her since the FARC attack on the bus about 30 pages earlier. Handling the complexity of this scene is the simple, logical reason why I got stuck. I had a scene with five people, seemingly all talking and acting at once, with three of the five people pretending to be something they are not. Actually, it was my insistence on handling this scene gracefully that got me stuck. That is what has kept me hacking away at a solution for more than a month. I have been frustrated at various times, but I never felt I wasn't going to find the solution.

A writer must understand all his characters to the core, but he must not try to control their behavior; he must let their needs play out against their individual strengths and weaknesses and observe very closely what happens. Readers of last month's EWA will recognize a strong tie-in here, a proclivity against controlling one's characters, or even attempting to control them.

Here is what I did in an effort to break the logjam: This was my process. Wear old clothes because it's messy. I came up with lots of different solutions because I don't know which one would be best. My characters took on slightly different attitudes. I wound up with what seemed like a thousand different ways to go. In truth, what I had were a ton of fragments. I printed them all out. I made notes on those pages, putting yes, no, great and horrible next to certain paragraphs, and writing comments as well. Then I sat with the printed section as one would sit with a sick friend. Slowly a solution began to emerge. I took the best approaches. I found the heart of the novel, or what I thought was the heart. Then I started piecing it together. What came out was a tremendously energetic kind of writing. In every sentence something new happened. Each sentence was a paragraph. Each paragraph was a chapter. I don't think I had ever written like that before.

Sounds fresh, new and brilliant, right? Well, after I finished it and marveled at it, I admitted to myself that it was contrived, artificial, self-conscious and pretty bad. Still I didn't lose hope. Maybe I should have, but I didn't. I was determined that the effort was worth the prize, the result. As my teacher Lee Abbott said, We writers do all the work so that our readers may have all the pleasure.

I started cogitating, meditating, etc., on what was bothering me about this scene and why I couldn't get past it. I sat down three days ago and wrote a long letter to myself which I entitled Letter to Self. In the letter, I leveled with myself about a host of story elements that I was feeling uncomfortable about. I had what I call a come-to-Moses meeting with myself. It took me all day to write this letter, and when I finished, I was able to begin to write the scene. It was very simple now because I had taken all the pretense out of the story elements. I recanted a number of decisions I had previously made that now seemed implausible to me. I analyzed why sometimes I was drawn to idiosyncratic or warped characterizations.

It's very important that you understand: In order for a reader to identify with a principal protagonist, he or she must see character traits in the protagonist that he or she can identify with. The more idiosyncratic or warped those characterizations are, the harder it is for readers to relate. Readers who can't relate stop reading.

In writing my Letter to Self, I set a new pattern. I felt a great deal of relief. I had made a number of poor choices. I saw them for what they were, poor choices. In my Letter to Self, I freed myself of those choices and adopted better ones.

Here's what I know today, Thanksgiving Day, 2014: When we are stuck there comes a time when we must stop spinning our wheels. There comes a time when we must sit down, shut up and listen. Listen to ourselves. Dive deep and figure out why nothing's working.

With me, it's usually a deep-seated need to ruin or destroy the project. It sounds self-desctructive, doesn't it? It is. Through self-analysis I detected what I was doing. I made myself stop and accept a number of much better choices. I chose new terms of story that made it far easier for readers to identify with the story, the heroes in the story as well as the other characters.

Actually, these things that changed: They weren't that crucially important to the story. It wasn't as though I had to throw away large chunks of the story; rather, the changes I made were relatively minor; however, they were crucial to me.

And now, when the five characters are all together in the scene, I can handle it with aplomb because I'm not being distracted by these crazy details that I told myself were cool, but really were not cool at all. They only served to make it difficult to keep readers reading.

Now is that not something to be thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day? I hope you have a happy one.

"Why can't I write about whatever I feel like writing about?"

Isn't the appeal of becoming an artistic writer the notion that you will be as free as the breeze, free to write about whatever you please? (Even to make it rhyme? On time? Like Aunt Jamime?)

That may be the appeal of writing novels, short stories or poems, but like so many glam pursuits in life, as a writer in transition from copywriter to novelist, I can attest that the reality does not always match up to what it says in the press release. (They pay copywriters to write those.)

The dirty little secret I've never heard anyone express or write about is this: Artistic writers are not nearly as free as some might assume to take on any subject they wish. Sometimes they are forced (and I hate to use that word but it is the only one that seems appropriate) by circumstances to make strategic decisions that lead them to write the books they write in the order that they write them.

First and foremost, never underestimate the power of obsession to lead writers down rabbit holes that cause us, the reading public, to never hear from them again. As a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, I knew extremely talented writers in their 20s I was convinced would become world famous novelists who never did. In rare cases you will see difficult writers of the caliber of Mark Twain, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon or John Foster Wallace miraculously emerge from their rabbit-hole obsessions with literary masterpieces that make them famous writers.

I've learned the hard way that there is another way a writer can consign him or herself to obscurity: By choosing to write about a subject he or she cares too deeply about and is therefore too close to write about effectively.

Of course, every writer wants to write about important subjects. That is only human. We all believe we have the most meaningful things to say on subjects we are passionate about. But there may come a point in any writing career where writers become wiser and smarter, where they give up trying to write what they feel most passionate about, and, instead, go with a subject they might feel a little less passionate and more circumspect about because doing so allows them to write about it more effectively. They break the obsession they have with their subject matter and try writing about something else.

All I have written to this point is prompted by this story I am about to tell you. Every word is true.

I had been writing short stories, not very successfully, for about a year. I was having a one-on-one meeting with my writing coach, Matthew Limpede, when he told me, ''You can't keep writing like this. It doesn't work.''

He knew I had been writing what I call memorized stories, stories where I knew the outcome, in fact, knew every aspect of the story before I began writing it.

He was right: I had vested interests in certain characters in my stories. I had people I was trying to protect in my stories and people I was willing to throw under the bus. Matt knew I had been doing this. He was telling me to stop.

''But how do you know I memorized them?'' I asked.

''I just know,'' he said. Non-verbally, he gave me the impression that it was extremely easy for him to know. In fact, he was telling me that he could smell the control in my stories. It was a big turn off to him; probably to others as well.

I said, ''I feel like you're giving me a choice, Matt. I can continue on like this and be a mediocre writer at best, or I can choose to abandon my control thing. If I do that, I still might wind up being mediocre, but at least it won't be because I'm a story control freak.''

He laughed and agreed with me.

Since then I've written stories where I'm open to whatever is happening in the story. Sure, I know what the story is about, and in the most general way what happens, but I no longer have a vested interest in how the story turns out, who wins and who loses.

Some things don't happen until they happen on the page as the writer is in the midst of writing the story. They cannot be thought up in advance. When they happen, they lend authenticity and rivet interest. When that happens to me as I am writing, that's when I know things are going in a positive direction.

Lately, I've been willing to let my principal characters look bad or do evil things if it furthers the story, and if it builds character and makes the writing more interesting.

Moses said: Let my people go. Since I had that conversation with Matt, I say: Let my people break bad, if that is what they would like to do.

On Weaving a Yarn.

This is what I know about telling a story:

To tell a story, you must first create a world.

Worlds are comprised of objects, people (called characters) and circumstances.

When we read a story filled with characters who manipulate objects, and who both manipulate and are manipulated by circumstances, we sit up. We take notice. We might identify. If it is well written, we might create a connection with the characters. We might see them differently than they see themselves. We might develop X-ray vision and see through the bullshit they clothe themselves in. And we might see them as complicated people with foibles, strengths and weaknesses, hurts, fears and desires all of us share to some degree. If all those things jell what we get as readers is the sense that these characters are people. As readers, we might identify with them as we do with real people. That doesn't mean we always like them. We might sympathize with them even while they repel us or even terrify us. Skillful writers can bring us to sympathize with monsters. We might also sympathize with innocents, yet still believe they are fools for being innocent, given their circumstances and past experiences. We might pity fools and innocents in the end because they protect themselves from seeing the world as it actually is.

How we feel as readers about all these characters, their objects and the circumstances they face: It's a little like rifling through our own closet for something to wear. We try on how we feel about the characters in the story. We might travel back in our memories of people we have known. If we find something to wonder at and identify and connect with in our character clothes closet, we have become (what they call in the publishing industry) hooked.

Getting-hooked: This is when we sense we are in the hands of a gifted writer. We know we are powerless to resist. We, the readers become willing, but possibly, at the same time, unwilling riders on a roller coaster car being dragged up a very steep hill. As this happens, we might have vague impressions and premonitions. We fantasize bad outcomes. We fear for our characters. (By this point they are our characters.) We cannot turn off the fear. We're hooked and worse: We're obsessed. We cannot bear to stop reading because if we did, we would not know what happens when this set of characters, with this set of objects are forced to deal with these circumstances.

Circumstances don't stay the same. They change. They often change as the story progresses. Like some dreaded disease, as soon as they make themselves known, they may mutate. They often get worse. They always get worse. Much worse. Chaos is a talented writer's best friend.

Neither do people stay the same. (In fact, one reliable rule of thumb I often use to determine if I have a story: If your character or characters don't change during the course of a story, you don't have a story. You have a profile, a portrait or a character sketch, but not a story.) A skillful writer might not let you know right away that your principal character is changing right before your eyes. She might take you down a path that lets you believe in your character's goodness and strength to overcome all odds, until suddenly she might reveal how totally outclassed your character is by the circumstances, given the objects the character has at his disposal to deal with the circumstances. Only then will you know the truth and be swept away by the awesome realization of how far your character has fallen from the position she once occupied.

The climax of the story is analogous to the rush of the rollercoaster racing down the other side of the hill at breakneck speed. There will be blood. After all, this is no country for old men. The ending is sad, indeed. Or bittersweet. It could entail enlightenment, great happiness or horrible tragedy. The roller coaster pulls into the station and everybody gets out of their car changed in some small way, remarking and agreeing a great ride was had by all.

So, there it is: What I know about telling a story. I was reminded of this as I read Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton, one of the most important novels in the literary history of South Africa. It was originally published in 1948. In the late 40s and early 50s, it was an international best seller. I grew up with a copy of that book in my home, although I never read it.

Cry, the Beloved Country tells the story of what happened in South Africa when the land was unable to support the people and their tribal way of life, when people were forced to leave the land and move to Johannesburg where everything went wrong for them. (In that way the story is identical to John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath)

Here are a few things I learned about writing stories by reading Alan Paton's novel:

Don't waste words on character's thoughts (interior monologue). Only imagine what they do. Report to the reader what they do. It is a little like what a magician might recommend if he wanted us to figure out how he does tricks. Of course no magician would ever want us to figure out his tricks. But if Alan Paton were that magician, he might tell us: Watch my characters hands and feet. Focus on my characters behaviors. Focus on what happens. Put what happens into simple words.

This gives Cry, the Beloved Country restraint that has the affect of drawing the reader into the work rather than distancing the reader.

Don't waste words on backstory and exposition. Let the story happen between the people it's happening to. There are so many scenes, wonderful scenes, where Alan Paton lets the main character (who plays the role of a detective in a mystery) question other characters about why certain things happened when they left the land and arrived in Johannesburg, and why nothing went right for them. We find out the answers to the main character's questions at the same time as the main character does. Tremendous immediacy, authenticity, poignancy and reader-interest is generated. We as readers feel as though we are witness to real and important events. Drama results.

You want to create characters that readers fall in love with, identify with and are obsessed about? Leave out more than you put in. Call it spare prose, if you like, but, please spare us the details. Why? Because we the readers will supply the details. By not supplying us with all the details you help us to enjoy the writing all the more because we, as your faithful readers, fill in what you, the writer, chooses not to. In so doing, we become more involved, not less. The work becomes partly the creation of your readers. What happens in the novel happens in the readers' minds even more than it happens in the writer's mind.

More next month…

My Lunch at The Paranormal Table

(This ExcitingWriting Advisory includes my review of Stephen King's On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft, Pocket Books, New York, 2000.)

On the second day of the DFW Writer's Conference last June I was late for lunch, which triggered within me a writer-identity crisis of galactic proportions.

The planners of the conference, no doubt trying to promote interesting lunchtime conversations, had designated various tables by literary genres. But as I looked around at the nearly five hundred people eating lunch while I stood holding my tray in my hands… As my head twisted to the right and then to the left (if I were a horror writer a la The Exorcist, my head might have rotated entirely around), it dawned on me that the only empty seats were at the paranormal table.

The literary fiction table (my preference) was filled. So were the western table, the historic fiction table, the sci-fi table, the fantasy table, the horror table and the romance table. Even the religious fiction table had no room (at the inn.) There were plenty of undesignated tables, too, but not one had an empty chair.

If I were a sci-fi writer, I might have received a telepathic message from a distant black hole telling me I was about to sit down at (gulp!) the paranormal table.

I'm not a sci-fi writer. There was no telepathic message. My tray was getting heavy. My lunch was getting cold. I had to sit down somewhere. And the paranormal table had openings. Just sit down over there and stop making a big fuss, I told myself.

But you don't understand, I argued back (with myself). For my whole life, I have only identified with one genre: Literary fiction. I never chose it because I had fantasies about it being superior. I knew it was superior. Regardless there were no openings at the literary fiction table.

Dejected, finding myself in the throws of a profound literary crisis, I began my long walk toward the paranormal table.

The people already sitting there seemed normal enough. Actually, they seemed very nice. Maybe that was the point: Maybe they traveled on light waves to this conference directly from an alien planet where they were given earthling clothes from T.J.Maxx designed to make me think they were nice people.

Finally, I just admitted it: I was weird-ed out by the notion of sitting at the paranormal table, not even knowing what paranormal literature was. In the spirit of the genre, I decided that I should feel paranormal as I sit down to eat my lunch with these nice, normal people.

Perhaps I could choose to believe that they are perfectly normal (like me) but that they simply choose to write about paranormal phenomenon. And like a Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, I may not be able to put into words exactly what paranormal is, but I sure as hell know paranormal when I see it. I just hoped none of my literary fiction friends were watching as I placed my tray in front of one of the empty chairs at the paranormal table.

''Hi. My name is Charles. Do y'all write paranormal.'' That was my brilliant opening line as I sat down. A number of them, in the middle of chewing on their food, simply nodded.

One of them twitched her nose and said, ''Well, sometimes I write erotic fantasy.''

''No kidding,'' I said. Suddenly things were looking up.

Despite all my trepidation, I had a marvelous time exploring the ins and outs of paranormal literature. One writer told me she enjoyed creating a world that varied from our known world in only one or two ways. She enjoyed controlling that world. She gave me a way to understand the delicate intertwining between paranormal and fantasy.

I found myself telling everyone that currently I was writing a novel entitled, Charging the Jaguar in which, I, too, am playing with a world where one or two things are slightly askew from the normal. Because my novel takes place in the late 1960s in Colombia, South America, and because the principal character is a Peace Corps Volunteer who's high on dope most of the time, and because all the other major characters are Colombian, some weird things do happen, and one could argue that my entire novel is a paranormal-historic-literary-fiction. I like to call it adventure-literary fiction, so, trust me, it's that, too. And here's what was really amazing to me: When I finished explaining all this, everybody at the paranormal yable seemed to grasp what I had said; they even seemed to take it in stride, which, as far as I was concerned, had to be the most paranormal moment in my life.

I had occasion to recall my lunch at the paranormal table as I was reading Stephen King's memoir On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft.

Here's a guy who grew up on pulp fiction, sci-fi, true detective and comic books and naturally wrote what he liked to read: High school horror, fantasy and paranormal. Stephen King certainly never felt inferior for having written his great novels; nor has he ever claimed to feel superior.

Stephen King, with his tremendous ability to tell a story as well as his relentless desire to find the perfect literary form to fit the story, has turned out exciting page-turners over his career spanning more than thirty years.

The story he tells in the first part of his book roped me in. His writing education covers the portion of his career when he was an unknown novelist, up until his first novel, Carrie, was published. He shows tremendous determination to write while teaching school. King's wife truly did fish pages of Carrie from the wastepaper basket in his writing room because Stephen had grown so discouraged with his writing, he had given up on himself. That's something of which I have first-hand knowledge. By the time Carrie was accepted for publication, his editor had to send Stephen a telegram because by then the author and his wife could not afford to pay for a telephone.

Because Stephen King approached the business of writing novels through time-honored genres such as horror and fantasy, but did it so much better than most journeymen working in the fieldhis work actually gained higher profile faster. And then of course, Hollywood came calling and his career soared into the stratosphere. Can you imagine if Stephen King was, like me, stuck at the literary fiction table? His career might never have taken flight.

I admire Stephen King's tenacity and courage tremendously: As successful and well known as he has become, he has never stopped taking chances in his writing.

I admire his resourcefulness, his ability to find a solution even while thoroughly stuck (while writing The Stand). He was only able to push through it by dint of will , by exerting brute force. He shows a tenacious will that finally caused him to break through and find a way to finish the novel in a satisfying way.

I admire him also for his habit of writing one thousand words every day. Following in his footsteps I will be writing my novel at the identical word-rate.

The most important thing I got from reading Stephen King's book? Because he's been having so much fun sitting at various tables (the horror table, the sci-fi table, the fantasy table, the paranormal table) his book has been to me an engraved invitation to try sitting at other tables other than my old standby.

Whisper a little prayer: Please, God, I'm happy to sit at any table you like, really I am, as long as I never have to sit at The Boring Table.

The Healing Power of Writing

Got troubles? Tension? Stress? Are childhood trauma issues weighing you down?

Take the miracle cure. Write about what is bothering you. Not only will you start to feel better emotionally, but physically, too.

According to University of Texas psychologist James W. Pennebaker, in his landmark work, The Secret Life of Pronouns, hundreds of writing studies conducted around the world over the last twenty-five years have conclusively proved that writing is powerful healing medicine.

Have you ever kept a journal or a diary? Then you may already know the power of writing to, yes, heal, but at the same time to help you find practical solutions to problems whether they are interpersonal, financial or work-related in nature.

The number of creative nonfiction writing courses being offered today is at an all-time high. Why is that? People are drawn to writing about their real-life traumatic events because doing so often empowers them. They find this kind of writing can even help them break free of the lingering negative undertow of traumas. This, too, is the power of writing to heal.

Early in his career, Pennebaker learned that ''people who reported having a terrible traumatic experience and who kept the experience a secret had far more health problems than people who openly talked about their traumas.''

The author writes: ''We [then] began running experiments where people were asked to write about traumatic experiences for fifteen or twenty minutes a day for three or four consecutive days. Compared to people who were told to write about non-emotional topics, those who wrote about trauma evidenced improved physical health. Later studies found that emotional writing boosted immune function, brought drops in blood pressure, and reduced feelings of depression and elevated daily moods.''

The question of why writing works is another matter. Pennebaker again: ''I am now convinced that when people write about traumatic events, several healthy changes occur simultaneously, including changes in people's thinking patterns, emotional responses, brain activity; sleep and health behaviors, and so forth.''

The Writer's Garret puts into real-world practice the same powerful, healing process Pennebaker found in his writing experiments. Each year it provides creative writing programs to about 2,500 school-age children and at-risk youth as well as to families and educators through its Writers in Neighborhoods & Schools (WINS) program.

In WINS classes, students learn that they can use words to sort out their emotions and build a sense of identity and accomplishment. They learn that writing can ease the frustrations of daily life and bring much-needed healing. The Writer's Garret has also had great success helping women with newly diagnosed breast cancer, using creative nonfiction writing to cope and begin to find ways to spiritually heal.

It would mean a great deal to me if you were to donate now to The Writer's Garret ongoing DonorLanding campaign. (I'm a Writer's Garret trustee.)

• A $26 donation will fund an hour of one-on-one reading and writing instruction for a child or classroom instruction for up to six children in an after-school enrichment program
• A $260 donation will provide a class of homeless pre-teens and teens with about a week of creative writing instruction.

Right now the Writer's Garret is matching every dollar contributed on a one-for-one basis, which means that if you donate just $13, your contribution will cause The Writer's Garret to receive $26; if you donate $130, your contribution will cause The Writer's Garret to receive $260.

But the matching period ends at midnight on June 25, 2014.

Please make your contribution to The Writer's Garret here today. The children and young adults that The Writer's Garret helps need your help now.

My Paean to Mrs. Rasmussen.

Mrs. Rasmussen was my seventh-grade English teacher who taught me some essentials of writing.

She had short, blond hair and wore white, button-down shirts and pretty, colorfully patterned skirts. She was a graduate of Cornell University, which seemed like a special place of learning to me because my brother was planning on attending Cornell starting that coming fall.

Mrs. Rasmussen had us write one theme a week. No other teacher did that. Just being in her class felt special. Without thinking about it, I inculcated the first and most important lesson about writing. If you want to write, write often. Write every day, if possible.

She had us fold our theme papers in half along the vertical axis so that when we handed them in they appeared tall and skinny with our name, class period and Mrs. Rasmussen's name in the upper-right hand corner. This folding thing was obviously superficial, but I remember thinking it was important. I remember being impressed with it. Did she say that this was the way students folded their papers at Cornell University? I have a vague recollection of that. Perhaps I made it up. To this day I don't know for sure.

I became very caught up with how foreign yet special the writing and the folding felt, and somehow that got involved with a fantasy I had that in secret Mrs. Rasmussen was teaching our seventh-grade English class as a university class that only we were being allowed to take. There's a lesson there: Always go into a writing session, if possible, feeling that what you're doing is very special. This increases the likelihood that what you'll wind up with will also be very special. One can certainly hope for that outcome. It's good to hope. In a way, Mrs. Rasmussen taught me that, too, that it's good to hope.

One day Mrs. Rasmussen taught us how to write a description. She had us make a list of four or five things, bullet points that we wanted to include in the description. Then she wrote out in her beautiful handwriting on the blackboard (it was a blackboard in those day) the description based on the bullet points. She taught me this programmatic approach to creativity: First come up with the bullet points. Then turn them into nicely crafted sentences. That was the technique I used when composing the description of Mrs. Rasmussen in the first paragraph.

Today as I remember Mrs. Rasmussen I also remember the beginnings of my desire to be a writer. All I knew for sure at the time was that when I was writing for Mrs. Rasmussen it felt as special as the way I folded my papers. No wonder my memory of her is so special to me now.

Want to Become a Better Writer? Fail More Frequently.

After a grueling critique session, a fellow writer asked me, How can you take all that criticism and not let it get to you?

The first thing I told him is that sometimes it does get to me, but I’m better able to throw it off than I was earlier in my career. I’m more resilient. Maybe some of that comes with age, some of it with wisdom.

The most important thing I said: I expect my writing to be criticized. Why? Not because my writing is that bad, but because that was the nature of the meeting we just wrapped up, a critique session. (This happened when I was an advertising writer, but this conversation could have just as easily happened after a short story or novel of mine had been critiqued.) I went into the meeting asking for constructive criticism, and that is what I got. Why should I feel down about getting what I wanted? If anything I should be happy.

But don’t you get that sickly feeling in your stomach? The feeling that you seem to be nowhere on this project yet it’s due to be completed and approved by the client in just a few days, my colleague asked me.

I tried to broaden the perspective, and said: I am always trying out new ideas, new approaches, and most times they don’t work out. That is just the way it is with ideas. Most seem brilliant from afar (because I thought of them). Up close, it is another story.

That is why it is important to continually harvest new ideas to try out. The more abundant your harvest, the less valuable any one idea is. The less wedded you are to any one idea, the more nimble you can be in your thinking.

My fellow writer then moaned, I wish I could develop a thick skin like you so I could be insulated from that sickly feeling I get.

I said, Whatever you do, do not grow a thick skin! A thick skin will keep you from listening. The only way we can improve as writers is to listen to what others say when they critique our writing.

For all the years I have been writing, I said, I have been praying that I would go into a critique session with first-pass copy and my client, editor, agent, ultimately the customer who was critiquing the writing, would say to me: Chuck, I have looked and looked and thought about this, and I think every word of this writing is perfect the way it is. I see no way this can be made better!

Sometimes that has happened, but usually after a few drafts. Once it happened on first-draft copy, but in that case, the meeting was called off because there was nothing to meet about.

So thought number one is this: These people doing the critiquing, they are here to help you. They are not your enemy; they are your friend. Sure, they may have an axe to grind, a grudge to play out. That is possible. For the most part, keep your ears and eyes open when they speak to you about your work. Show them respect. They are giving you exactly what you asked for. Smile. Be happy.

Second, and most importantly, develop a sense of conviction about your work, and a belief in the inevitability of your writing. What do I mean by that? Develop a belief in your ability as a writer such that deep down you know that you are on a journey that will take you places. You will be highly successful. Your success is inevitable. Your success could happen today, or it could happen next week. It almost doesn’t matter when it happens because your success is coming. It is on the way. It is only a matter of time, because you believe in your work just as you believe in yourself. So all you must do is take another stab at it and get it right in the next draft.

How does one develop this sense of conviction? I have only one piece of advice. It is the most important advice I can give to you or to any writer. If you want to become a better writer: fail more frequently.

Permit me a baseball analogy. Just one, I promise: In baseball, if you want to become a better batter, you must get up to bat more frequently. Sure, you have to get instruction at the same time. You have to get a new concept in your head of what you have not been doing and what you must start doing. But getting instruction and applying it are two different things. Applying the instruction is as important. If you want to improve your batting, chances are that you will strike out more often at first, as you try to change up your game. Eventually, if you hang in there, you will improve your batting average.

When trying new things out in your writing, you have at least two choices: 1) Play it safe and follow the rules with the belief that in doing so you will receive a minimum of criticism; 2) Try to hit it out of the park. Follow your heart, take chances, and try new and hairy-audacious ideas.

Go the way you feel more comfortable. I suggest: Get up at the plate and strike out more often even if that is what it takes to start hitting the ball out of the park.

Part of getting up at the plate more often is writing every day. The more writing problems you can work through and resolve efficiently, the more experience you have under your belt. And the more resilient you become.

Finally, realize it is not about you; it is about your work. It is about making your work better.

So here’s my recipe for becoming a better writer: Take chances. Follow your heart. Continually try new things. Ask people you respect to critique your work. Listen to what they say. Try out more ideas faster. Fail more often.

Realize that when those you asked to critique find ways your work could be improved, they are acting in a friendly way. They are most likely doing what you asked them to do.

There really is no reason to get down in the dumps about how critical some people can be.

Do not be afraid of failure. Cry if you must, but remember the critique process is not personal, whether you are in advertising or the literary biz.

Follow my advice. You will be better for it, and, more importantly, so will your writing.

How to Write a Bestselling Novel

According to many, ''If it were that easy, everyone would do it.'' I do not mean to suggest that writing a bestseller is easy, only that I have some insights that tilt the odds in your favor. Here are some things to think about as you either write your own novel or read one written by someone else.

Bestsellers set off whisper campaigns.

What creates a bestseller? It's a novel that compels readers to recommend it enthusiastically (actually, compulsively) to their friends and relatives. What motivates someone to do that? It happens when readers encounter an intensely enjoyable and satisfying entertainment, a story that moves them to identify and bond with the principal character of the novel (or more specifically, the situations in which the principal character finds him or herself and the ways the character responds to those situations).

My thesis is simple: A bestseller hooks a reader in precisely the same way as any one of us might become hooked when we meet a stranger in real life, begin talking to the person and realize we want to find out more about him or her. We find the person fascinating, or (to use the word I find more telling in these cases) intriguing. We don't necessarily wish to become friends with the person. In the case of menacing or dangerous characters, we're grateful we're meeting them in the pages of a book and not in real life.

Here are the essential preconditions for a bestseller:

1. Empathy.For starters, we identify with the main character. We quickly find ourselves developing empathy because we find it easy to put ourselves in that person's shoes. A good example: Catness in The Hunger Games. Look at the qualities she demonstrates: competitiveness, coolness-under-pressure, selflessness and competence. These qualities elevate her to heroine status. (I'm using movies as touchstones for the sake of convenience.)

We know the narrator can't possibly tell us the entire truth, no one point of view can, but we don't care. We like the voice telling us the story. We like the main character. In a way, we don't want to know the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We want to know the entire story from beginning to end. No, it's not the complete truth, but do we really care? Not until the story goes against the main character and threatens his life. Then we really care.

2. Misfortune. Chaos is a writer's best friend. If a character does not overcome bad things, how can we know for sure that he or she is made of sterner stuff? The worse the bad things are, the sweeter the redemption we can hope for at the end of the story. Not that we always get redemption at the end, rather we're sometimes like the owner of a used car that keeps breaking down. We're overly invested in a character who can't get a break, and then the story ends. For we, the readers, that's the worse break of all, and it's the basis of a lot of noir fiction, yes, very dark indeed.

3. Conundrum. Bestsellers have a mystery, a dilemma or a riddle at the heart of them that attracts readers and draws them in. A good example is Donna Tartt's novel The Goldfinch, which I recently read. Although her writing is contemporary, her novel (which is truly a great one!) reminded me of what I love about many of Charles Dickens's works. No one could create mystery and intrigue at the heart of a character better than Dickens.

4. Trust. When a novel is effective, we perceive the main character to be a person. That is quite a trick for any writer to pull off in itself because, obviously, the character on the page is comprised of wordspure fiction or fantasy. When it's done well, for example, in The Silver Lining Playbook, (the novel) we marvel at how the complexity of the characters we meet on the page resembles real people we've known in our lives with impulses, both rational and irrational, and with familiar flaws, fears and obsessions. In the case of Silver Lining the two principal characters, Pat, Jr. and Tiffany, could not come together with less likelihood of reaching each other, yet, impossibly, they wind up saving each other. With all their flaws, we are rooting for them from the first page to the last. I read Matthew Quick's novel that the movie is based on, and I recommend it. It's better than the movie. And the movie was excellent.

The sad truth is that a bestseller ropes us in by revealing flaws in a character. As readers we may use those flaws as reasons to trust the character and believe he's trustworthy. The mantra we say to ourselves as we read about one horrible disclosure after another: Well, if he is admitting to us that he is a drunk, a cheat and a scoundrel, then can he be all bad? At least he's telling us the truth, right? Trust me, he's not telling the whole truth, but if we like the main character, we don't let that bother us.

5. Story. A bestseller tells a story that has legs (it goes places) and depth (it reflects the human condition). What the characters do in the story, their actions (the plot) give us insight into their character and a sense of who they are. When it's done right, they have complexity that allows their personalities to take shape in our minds.

What do I mean by a story that has legs? It's a story that takes us places. One example: A story that is not about what at first it seems to be about. For example, The Dallas Buyers Club might seem to be about an HIV infected man, who devises a scheme to acquire the medicines to keep him and others in similar circumstances alive. What it actually is: The story of a man who goes from being a homophobe to accepting and helping the GLBT community. That's a story with legs.

In my opinion a story that lacks depth is 12 Years a Slave because the principal protagonist, Solomon Northup, does very little to free himself. Yes, he finds a white man willing to help him, but that is all. The film does a brilliant job of portraying the horrors of slavery. Imagine how much better the story would have been if the last third of the film had been devoted to Northup escaping the plantation and embarking on a journey along the underground railway north. We would have seen Solomon Northup's actions building character. Or what if the story ended with Solomon going on to work in the underground railway, which, by the way, he actually did in fact. Why didn't the movie let us be inspired at the end? If it had, the ending would have been far more effective and redemptive.

6. Dark, evil shadows. This is why I prefer using the word intrigue over the word fascination when it comes to characters coming to life on the page. Consider all the darker meanings of the word intrigue. It is defined as, ''secret plan, plotting, plot, conspiracy, collusion, conniving, scheme, scheming, stratagem, machination, trick, double-dealing, underhandedness or subterfuge…'' The best novels give us the sense that evil lurks all around the principal character, or has infected and corrupted him or her. A good example is Bram Stoker'sDracula where the evil is intimated in effective ways rather than ever being spelled out to the reader.

7. Imagination. I think readers want to have their imaginations stretched, to be placed in situations they've never thought of or considered before. Consider The Life of Pi. We're given semi-plausible explanations of a series of circumstances that taken together are extremely unlikely. We believe in the story because it's presented to us in a very matter-of-fact way, a little a time so we're forced to admit to ourselves, Well, people do own zoos. Sometimes a zoo has to be transported halfway around the world, I suppose. Ship do sink on occasion. Tigers can get loose. The ending dares us to reconstruct the story in a new way, which counteracts our belief that we've built up in the story and causes us to feel in the end as though we don't know what we believe. It may be a bit over the top, but, without doubt, it definitely challenges us to stretch our imagination.