Guest post on Susan Campbell’s “Still Small Voice” blog

http://courantblogs.com/susan-campbell/

Guest Post by Adele Annesi: Debunking the ‘Idea’ in Novel Writing: Dreamstorming and ‘From Where You Dream’

Writers of short and long fiction often say, “I’ve got an idea for a novel.” To advance your writing from craft to art, consider nixing the idea of the idea in favor of the dreamstorming technique pioneered by Pulitzer prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler and described in From Where You Dream.

Dreamstorming means taking time, not so much to think as to dream, to open yourself to your unconscious — that deep and hidden place where, Olen says, “what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.” This approach casts aside the myth of writing as including abstraction, generalization, summary, analysis and interpretation. It’s meant to get beyond craft, especially for writers of long fiction, to art.

Learning to dreamstorm takes time. You need to get alone. Get quiet. Unplug. To familiarize yourself with the technique, consider this exercise in selecting details. Writers often ask editors how they can tell which details to include in a story and how extensive those details should be. The key is to avoid the superficial, and Butler’s dreamstorming approach is the perfection solution. So, try this exercise. Bring a pen and pad of paper (not your laptop or other e-device) to a quiet place — it could be a room in your home or someone else’s, or a local park. Quiet, in this sense, is more about being away from technology and those likely to interrupt than it is about sound. Close your eyes for a few moments. Give yourself time, then jot down what comes to mind. But jot, don’t expound.

Once you’ve jotted a few things down, go back over the list and replace the ambiguous words. Next to each word or phrase, add a phrase describing your emotional response to the sensory perception. Emotions, Butler says, are experienced and expressed in fiction in five basic ways: a sensual reaction inside the body, a sensual response outside the body, flashes of the past, flashes of the future and, most important, sensual selectivity. In this last lies the key to how to select and use details. Now go back over your list, and arrange the phrases in an order — it could be from less intense to most intense emotion, or from the top to the bottom of your field of vision. Craft a flash fiction or creative nonfiction piece using what you’ve written.

Dreamstorming, though a time-intensive technique to learn and practice, is worth the effort and can move the writeter from craft to art through the doorway of the dream.

Adele Annesi is an award-winning writer and editor. A former Scholastic editor, Adele is a freelance book editor and writer for newspapers, magazines, blogs and literary journals. Her short fiction appeared in an anthology for Fairfield University, where she is studying for a Master’s in Fine Arts in fiction. Her flash fiction “Days of Obligation” was adapted for the stage by playwright and director Joanne Hudson. Adele also teaches writing and editing workshops, and she is currently writing a novel and a series of short stories set in Italy. Visit her at Adele M. Annesi and Word for Words.

The New Intolerance

There is an email going around showing side-by-side images of 1) hundreds of Muslims at prayer on a city street, foreheads to touching their prayer mats, and 2) Tim Tebow “tebowing” on the sidelines, genuflecting in prayer. The caption under Image 1 is: “Why is this OK?” The caption under Image 2 is: “And this isn’t?”

I think the originator of this email must have reversed the images.
Author/journalist Reza Aslan, interviewed on PBS News Hour on Sept. 10, 2010, cited a Washington Post poll showing that half of Americans have a negative view towards Islam, a more than 7 percent jump from the months right after 9/11. An ABC News poll released about the same time showed that 55 percent of Americans don’t have a good understanding of Islam, 31 percent of Americans believe that mainstream Islam encourages violence against non-Muslims, and 49 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Islam.
A year later — just a few months ago — a “What It Means to Be American” poll found that 8 in 10 Americans believe that self-proclaimed Christians who commit violence in the name of Christianity are not really Christians; but only 48 percent say that self-proclaimed Muslims who commit acts of violence in the name of Islam are not really Muslims. Why the double standard?
Overwhelmingly, Americans believe that “America was founded on the idea of religious freedom for everyone, including religious groups that are unpopular.” But 47 percent believe that Islam is at odds with American values, versus 48 percent disagreeing.
It all adds up to a general distrust of Islam.
The answer to the two questions is, “They’re both OK — praying to Allah and tebowing.” But that’s just the surface question. The implied sub-question is, “Why is it OK for these terrorists to pray in public on our city streets after they killed 3,000 of our citizens?”
The implication to the implied question is that most people want to permit Muslim terrorists to mock us by practicing their religion openly, but that it’s wrong for an American football player to do so. As the polls cited above show, that’s not how most Americans think. Most Americans think like the originator of the email. And that’s pretty scary.

Clichés of clichés

When you want to avoid using a cliché, just do what millions do. Use two for the price of one. Maybe people will actually think you’re being brilliantly original.
We’ve all heard variations of this abbreviated anecdote: “Jim and Jane met at a party, got talking, left early together, and the rest is history.” Those last four words are a shortcut for saying, “and everyone knows what happened after that so there’s no point in going on and on about it.” But it’s been so overused that it’s a tiresome cliché, and so we’ve inserted an equally clichéd qualifier smack in the middle of it: “as they say.”
For example, maybe “the rest” of the previous anecdote might go something like this: “Jim and Jane got married but he cheated on her, they separated, got divorced, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
“As they say” is defined in wordnik.com as “A vague invocation of popular convention when introducing a phrase or expression, which may be accompanied by attribution to a source or locale in which the phrase or expression is used.” Curiously, this is the exact definition also found in Wiktionary.org, and that fact perfectly illustrates my topic – the overuse of a phrase for the intent of minimizing the overuse of another phrase; or, as they say, clichés of clichés.
Apparently, not everyone has heard or read the original four-word cliché. In answers.yahoo.com a few years ago, someone asked about the expression “and the rest, as they say, is history”: “I’ve googled this to no end and I have found no original saying, ‘The rest is history.’ How can they say that [‘as they say’] if no one has said it? And who are these crazy they people anyway?”
It’s not clear why the questioner couldn’t find “The rest is history.” But his question unwittingly makes an amazing point: the new and expanded cliché now seems to be more of a cliché than the original cliché – if you’ll pardon an obvious oxymoron.
And anyway, reducing history to four words or seven words treats readers or listeners badly. We want the Paul Harvey version, the rest of the story. Jim and Jane seemed like a nice couple. What happened?

The Days of the Empty Skies

News of the attack hit me hard enough to knock me down, but somehow I remained standing for a while. Like the Twin Towers, I didn’t collapse until later.
In the days after the attack, I listened to a thousand stories from people who could not scare away their fright. Some people I know had dined at Windows on the World, and a cousin had recently trained with a financial firm in the south tower. A couple from my home town lost a daughter in the attack.
My Tuesday began quietly at the catalog company where I worked as a copywriter, with a meeting between Creative and Marketing. The catalog, Marketing said, will be 180 pages. Give the price charts a white background. Some prices will increase.
A man from Purchasing stuck his head in the door. “Have you heard the news?”
I heard the words “terrorists” and “World Trade Center” and “eighteen minutes later” and “hijacked planes” and “Pentagon” and “still burning,” but I can’t remember how he constructed his sentence.
The five of us at the meeting all said “Oh my God” at the same time. We inhaled all the air in the room at once, and kept it in. One of the women from Marketing finally said, “I have a son in the military.”
For the rest of us, it wasn’t real yet. The meeting went on another twenty minutes.
In the corridors, knots of three and five people stood gazing at the ceiling. They were listening to radio news from speakers recessed into drop ceiling panels. A report said that a third of one tower had collapsed. People were jumping out of windows a quarter mile up. Another report said the whole building had fallen. The Pentagon was on fire. A plane had crashed in Pennsylvania.
Then the other tower fell down.
I called my wife. Everyone we knew was all right. She described the smoke she was seeing on the television, and the cloud of dust when each building collapsed. “I tried to call you,” she said.
“I was stuck in a meeting. I have another one at one o’clock.”
“Are you OK?”
“Yeah. It’s busy here. And I’m supposed to pick up my new car tonight, after I pick up the check from the credit union.”
I stayed on the job, writing sell copy for Post-it Notes and Peel ‘N Seal Kraft Envelopes. I took papers from my In box, did things to them, and then put them in other people’s In boxes.
I ate lunch alone, a cup of soup and a salad under a ceiling speaker in the cafeteria. President Bush was zigzagging across the country, the radio said. The World Trade Center could hold 50,000 workers. No commercial planes were allowed to fly until further notice.
Management allowed workers to leave at 1 p.m., but I stayed for the second meeting anyway. It broke up around 2 p.m., when I called my wife again.
“I tried to call you,” she said. “The credit union is closed. You’ll have to get the check and the car tomorrow.”
At 2:15 p.m. the sky was bright blue, with no vapor trails. The road home had light traffic, but each car I met I felt a sort of kinship with, as though I knew each driver’s thoughts and he or she knew mine.
As my little blue Tercel pulled into the driveway, I noticed the American flag I had forgotten to take down after Labor Day. I looked at it for a few extra seconds and decided it should stay. The pumpkin flag could wait.
At 3:45 p.m. I saw my first television image of the south tower crumbling to powder. I couldn’t look, and I couldn’t stop looking. It was dust and blood.
Wednesday, September 12, 2001, I drove to my usual place of work, but I saw it differently. All the plant and office operations could have fit onto one floor of one of the two 110-story World Trade Center buildings. This big operation where I work was less than one half of one percent the size of what was lost in that single calamity.
And the day before, in each cubicle and meeting room of each World Trade Center building, business had been going on as usual on one of the ten most beautiful mornings of the year. Sales and Marketing may have been meeting. Stockbrokers were preparing to phone Wall Street a few blocks away. Men and women may have been betting on the Yankees in the office pool. A high-pitched whine may have been heard over the air conditioning, then a loud roar, and the sound of voices from people by the north windows who were screaming, “Oh my God! Oh my —”
There were still no vapor trails overhead when I left work on Wednesday. My check was waiting for me at the credit union, and my new car was waiting for me at the dealership. Both transactions went smoothly but without the excitement that usually accompanies a new car purchase. It was simply one more thing I had to get done this day.
I have no story to tell about September 11, 2001. I went to work and did what people do who go to work. But, unlike thousands of victims, I drove home after work. And on the third day, I drove a new car home from work.
The first plane I saw since September 10 was on Saturday the 15th. It was majestic, climbing into the morning, and I watched it all the way to the horizon. When I brought my eyes back to earth I noticed that people were standing in their yards gazing at the plane, as though it were some terrible but beautiful new god we should revere — and fear.

Judeo-Christian values?

More rebuttals to the conservative secessionists:

9. We’ll keep the hot Alaskan hockey moms, greedy CEO’s and rednecks.

Um, okay. But why?

10. We’ll keep the Bibles and give you NBC and Hollywood.

What on earth are you going to do with Bibles? See number 13, below.

11. You can make nice with Iran and Palestine and we’ll retain the right to invade and hammer places that threaten us.

Who’s making nice with Iran? As for Palestine, just give them a country. Heck, you’re insisting on your own, right?

12. You can have the peace-niks and war protesters. When our allies or our way of life are under assault, we’ll help provide them security.

Huh? Not sure of your meaning. You’ll help protect the peace-niks and war protesters that stay in our country? Or you’ll help provide security to your allies and your way of life? Look, most reasonable people will defend themselves when threatened, even – what’s your term? – “peace-niks.” (That is so 1968.) Serious war protesters do so only when the war serves no good purpose. If you believe all wars are worth fighting, we have nothing to talk about.

13. We’ll keep our Judeo-Christian values.

Wow. Guns; war; cops; military; low or no taxes; wasting God’s resources; greed; hating poor people, addicts, foreigners, pacifists, non-Judeo-Christians and anyone who disagrees with you; hockey moms; rednecks; gas-guzzling vehicles; depriving people of health care; and total intolerance of other cultures. Amen.

Douse that lamp by the golden door!

8. You can have your beloved lifelong welfare dwellers, food stamps, homeless homeboys, hippies, druggies, and illegal aliens.

Dr. LaDonna Pavetti joined the Urban Institute after completing her Ph.D. in public policy at Harvard University. On May 23, 1996, she submitted “Time on Welfare and Welfare Dependency: Testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, Subcommittee on Human Resources,” which states in part: “My research shows that, on average, women who ever use welfare will receive assistance for about six years and current recipients will receive assistance for about thirteen years. While accurate, taken by themselves, these figures are misleading because they give undo weight to the experiences of the extremely small number of recipients who spend very long periods of time (as much as 25 years) receiving welfare. These very long-term recipients do, in fact, exist, but they are the exception, not the rule. Thus, it is not accurate to describe the ‘typical’ length of stay on welfare as 13 years.”

So, are you giving us the exceptions to the rule and keeping the others? We can deal with that. Take good care of the six-year clients. I’m sorry, you’ll have to give them food stamps yourself, since they’re staying with you.

Homeless homeboys? That sounds vaguely racist, since “homeboy” is originally an African-American term. In general, a homeboy is a street kid or a gang member. So, you have no objection to homeboys who are not homeless? Or homeless people who are not homeboys? But if they’re both, we get to deal with them?

You want to get rid of hippies? Hey, if there are any left, they probably have their own commune/country now anyway, so they don’t have to live in either of ours. But if one wanders into yours, by all means send him/her our way.

Druggies? Look, we don’t want them either. So where does that leave them? Strung out to dry? Do you think that by foisting off all the people you don’t want on others, that you can just wash your hands of them? Suppose no one wants them? I guess all you can do then is hope they OD, right?

Illegal aliens: Here’s a better solution for you: Make them legal and let them work in your Wal-Marts. Win-win.